This land is your land / This land is my land...
Jordan Peele: Meet Eve Martin, loving mother, devoted wife, active in her community. Eve was raised to view the world from a bubble of comfort, safety and privilege. But that bubble is about to burst and when it does, she will find herself within the strange and unfamiliar borders of The Twilight Zone.
A well-off suburban housewife (Ginnifer Goodwin) runs afoul of government officials, and is soon caught in a struggle to return home — wherever that is.
Tropes for this episode include:
- All for Nothing: Eve's escape.
- Allegory: For immigrants and refugees seeking escape to a better land, specifically the United States. To further highlight the parallels, Anna is also an illegal immigrant from Guatemala."...thirty years ago, a caravan from that dimension had crossed over into ours. These pilgrims risked everything in the hopes of finding a better dimension. A better future."
- Another Dimension: Eve and Anna are originally from an adjoining dimension.
- Arc Number: The passcode that allows Eve and Anna to escape is 1015.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Anna gives one to Eve that shows just how little Eve truly treats her maid "like family."Anna: "I have been with your family for almost eleven years. I wiped the shit and snot from your children. Your children, they speak Spanish to me, a language you don't understand. I sat with Jackie and Isabelle when they had fevers. Held them when they fell...
Tell me, what are the names of MY children?" - Author Filibuster: An immigrant leader delivers one while trying to revive Eve's memories.Aidia: "The people here want to send us back. But this is our home now. We love our home, we add to our home. We can't go back home, we're already here. This place is ours now, too — not just theirs."
- Bait-and-Switch:
- The beginning of the episode makes it seem like Anna is being deported, but she is actually sent to the facility that Eve ends up at.
- Eve apparently has a seizure from the machine and is told her tests come back negative, but as she confesses what she felt to her husband, his face turns into that of the director of the facility and she realizes she was tricked into revealing her secrets.
- Body Horror: Otto invokes this when one of the security guards is preparing to inspect Eve's fake corpse and uncover the ruse."Hey, if you need to do that, at least put gloves on. They all died shitting blood. Go on."
- Bystander Syndrome: Anna accuses Eve of this when she feigns ignorance about the horrors of being deported.Eve: "Anna, I am so sorry. I had no idea they would take you to a place like this."
Anna: "Yes, you did. You knew. Where did you think they would take us, to the Four Seasons? When it was just on the TV, you could turn it off or change the channel." - Chekhov's Gun: The ice cream truck, which is part of a secret network the immigrants use to move around.
- Dystopia: The immigration facility is a concrete prison with no lighting, apathetic guards, sadistic interrogators, and ever-present spotlights.
- Downer Ending: Eve finally escapes from the detention facility, but she is rejected by her family, then is recaptured by immigration agents and dragged away in front of her neighbors.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The doors in the facility have the word "DOOR" on them, and a sign above a sink reads "SINK" but leads to a hidden hallway.
- Faking the Dead: Anna and Eve escape the facility by pretending to be contaminated corpses to be taken away for quarantine.
- Fantastic Racism: The authorities are out to capture everyone from Eve's dimension because it's somehow "lesser" than their own."Now we learned that this other dimension was a lesser dimension; that these pilgrims were diluting the natural evolution of our lives as we know it."
- Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Eve and Anna are peaceful, law-abiding and productive members in their communities, but the powers that be want to imprison and deport them just because they're from somewhere else.
- Great Escape: Eve and Anna's escape from the holding center.
- The Homeward Journey: Eve just wants to go home.
- Identity Amnesia: The interdimensional immigrants initially don't remember their original homeworld.
- Idle Rich: Eve is a classic example — she solves her problems by throwing money at them, can't be bothered to park her car properly, and is befuddled at how to buy groceries at the supermarket.
- The Illegal: Anna, the maid from Guatemala, at first seems to be an obvious demonstration of this trope. However, as the episode proceeds, Eve discovers that she is one as well.
- In Another Man's Shoes: Eve's tribulations give her a firsthand understanding of Anna's plight.
- Innocently Insensitive: A lot of emphasis is placed in the beginning on Eve’s thoughtless privileged viewpoint, which can be plenty hurtful on its own despite her not being a stereotypical raging bigot. Anna notes that although she was called "part of the family," Eve never knew anything much about her, or Anna's actual family.
- Mythology Gag:
- The ice cream truck reads "Mr. Dingle's Ice Cream", Mr. Dingle is the main character from "Mr. Dingle, The Strong".
- The Gremlin toy (last seen in "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet") can be seen in the window of the dollhouse.
- The breakfast cereal is "Frosted Kanamunch", named after the the aliens from "To Serve Man". The cereal's tagline is "To Serve Humans" and the aliens from the episode is seen on the box.
- The mask used to get to Eve's memories is similar to the pig faces from "Eye of the Beholder".
- The rack that Eve is strapped into is made by Whipple.
- "Matheson Charter School" is named after prolific The Twilight Zone (1959) writer Richard Matheson.
- Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: The government agency hunting immigrants from another dimension is overall presented as vicious bigots, who despite all the immigrants we see being peaceful, honest, productive members who have long acclimatised to the new society are fixated on detaining then deporting them back overall for no other reason than they are technically different, justifying it with accusations of them being a "lesser dimension" and their presence "diluting the natural evolution of our lives". Their detainment facility is concrete prison with no lighting, staffed by apathetic guards who don't care in the slightest about the prisoners well being, and their interrogators are merciless sadists who regularly utilise torture in ascertaining whether the accused is from another dimension.
- Police Brutality: The dimensional immigration officials interrogate Eve about her origins by strapping her to a metal rack, placing a garish mask with various hoses on her face, then stabbing a thick cable with metal spikes into the small of her back.
- Retraux: There are smartphones, bank cards, mentions of GrubHub and very modern vehicles, but people dress like they live in the 1950's. The "Family" sticker on the back of Eve's car is a cartoon rendition of a 50s family.
- Rich Bitch: Eve's fellow privileged housewives, who view their servants' woes with barely-disguised disdain."Lete wanted to pay taxes. I said, 'If you want to be a real American, you try to get out of paying taxes.'"
"Right? They just don't know how things like that are not helping them." - Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Eve is used to solving her problems with money, whether it's bluntly hinting at a bribe to the first bureaucrat she sees or offering a sympathetic janitor whatever he wants to help her escape the facility.Eve: "So whatever we need to do to make things right, we'll do it. A 'donation' to Matheson, or wherever, we'll do that."
- The Unreveal:
- It's unclear if either dimension was actually a parallel Earth.
- Anna's fate isn't revealed after she and Eve escape but it's possible that she gets sent back to the facility just like Eve did.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Anna's fate is not known after she escapes with Eve (as she doesn't get in the ice cream truck because she didn't trust the driver), but considering Eve gets sent back to the facility in the end, it's assumed she did as well.
Jordan Peele: As a child, Eve Martin escaped to what should have been a better world. A world where the skies are blue. But now those skies have darkened and the land below them is a place she is no longer welcome. For Eve Martin there's no passport to be stamped for passage out of the Twilight Zone.
