The Twilight Zone Season 2 Finale: You Might Also Like Explained

The Twilight Zone "You Might Also Like" explained

Jane Warren is stuck in a tree. One of her legs is tied to a medicine ball, which is tied to a big chair from her bedroom, and a tractor beam from a flying saucer above her house cannot pull all three through the window. The aliens below are pointing at one another and blaming each other, and they mention, a little sadly, that they are very hungry. When Jane shouts for help, they tell her they only work here, and she does what any suburban customer would do and demands to see a supervisor.

That is the opening image of "You Might Also Like," the tenth and final episode of the second season of Jordan Peele's The Twilight Zone, written and directed by Osgood Perkins. All ten episodes of the season were released at once on June 25, 2020, on CBS All Access, which later became Paramount+. The finale is a deadpan satire of consumer culture, and it is the strangest episode of the season by some distance.

Gretchen Mol plays Jane, a housewife in a 1950s-style suburb who is offered the chance to pick up a brand-new Egg. Nobody knows what the Egg is or what it does, yet everybody in the neighborhood wants one. Her neighbor Mrs. Jones, played by Greta Lee, will collect hers in a couple of hours, while Jane's is not available until 4 p.m. Jane keeps blacking out and waking up in bed, and between the blackouts she sees commercials that tell her what she needs to feel complete, with the Egg as the thing that will make everything OK again, this time forever.

When she tries to cancel, she lands in a phone maze that ends with a supervisor who is genuinely surprised at the request. The voice says that her request is being processed and hangs up on her. Jane's next move is to ask for the supervisor in person, which is how she ends up in the saucer.

The twist: what the Egg is

The Egg is a Kanamit invention. The Kanamits are the alien race from the classic Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man," and they come back here looking as if nothing has changed. The Egg is designed to hatch and end the human race, presumably by killing and eating the people who buy one.

The Kanamits built it after reading Jane's mind following the birth of her stillborn daughter. All she wanted was for everything to be OK again, forever. The aliens, who share one mind, projected that need into every living person on the planet, and humanity, as gullible as ever, never asked what it was buying. After a talk with the Kanamit Supervisor, Jane realizes that she wants an Egg because it is hers and she wants to hold it, even for a little while. She is dropped back at her house, and at 4 p.m. she goes to collect it while saucers hover over the UServe Fulfillment Center and parts of the city burn.

The commercials turn out to be the key. Looking back, they are fragments of Jane's own life, edited so that her memories sell her products. The Kanamits are using her inner thoughts as slogans, and that is what makes the repeat viewing so sad.

Where the episode sits in the Zone's history

The first season ended on May 30, 2019, with "Blurryman," directed by Simon Kinberg and written by Alex Rubens, a self-referential ode to the show's past. The second-season finale is less meta, but it is just as devoted to the original series, and it has more to say about who people are as a species. The tone of straight-faced deadpan recalls the best of Darin Morgan's X-Files scripts, including "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat."

Like "Blurryman," it divides viewers. A cynical reader might call it Perkins being self-indulgent, a case of odd for the sake of odd. That reading misses what the episode is doing. It studies how disconnected people have become, how robotic and alone, especially when they are dealing with depression the way Jane is, and how corporations pull on exactly those feelings for profit. The Twilight Zone has always been a show about the fears of its time, and a world of one-click deliveries and algorithmic recommendations is the one it was always going to reach.

There is a Black Mirror comparison available, and the episode seems to invite it, as if saying here is how that kind of story is done. Black Mirror does owe its existence to The Twilight Zone, so the swagger is earned.

The classic episodes the finale borrows from

Easter eggs and references in the finale

• IWideShut: a product named after Eyes Wide Shut, with a commercial that gives the password "Fidelio," the password to the orgy in Stanley Kubrick's film.
• The baby monitor: it looks like the HAL 9000 computer from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The cookbook on Jane's counter: titled To Serve Man, in a nod to the Kanamits' original episode, in which a book given to humanity turns out to be a cookbook.
• Kanamitese: the alien language on the Egg Fulfillment Card.
• Maple Street: the address on the card, a reference to "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."
• Whipple: the company behind the Eggs, a nod to "The Brain Center at Whipple's."
• The cast: Osgood Perkins plays the second Kanamit, George Takei plays another and Kirk Thornton plays the third.

You Might Also Like review: is the season 2 finale worth watching?

Perkins is an interesting choice for the job. He is the writer and director of Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, two horror films that lean on mood and a slow build, and he brings both habits here. The Twilight Zone usually hands its half-hour stories to directors who can make a single room feel dangerous, and Perkins does it with a kitchen, a tree and a saucer interior.

It is worth watching. The episode builds dread by never delivering the jump that the viewer expects. Something should leap out of Jane's house and drag her away, and it never does, and the dread grows because of that. The commercials, especially the ones set in a forest, add to the unease, and the writing gives the Kanamits some of the funniest lines of the season. When the Kanamit Supervisor recites human history, she lines up the end of World War II and the Beatles in the same breath, and gets the details gleefully wrong; when Jane objects that the aliens have unbelievable technology and are using it only to watch television, the joke lands cleanly.

The Egg works on several levels. In the opening conversation, Jane's friend Ellen is thrilled at the prospect of having an Egg, while Jane, who has just woken up to the role of baby machine in a 1950s-style household, is not. A later commercial shows her husband bonding with their two sons while she sits at the breakfast table sobbing, having lost her baby, and the contrast makes the point without a line of dialogue.

The only fair complaint is that the episode asks for patience. The satire is broad, the middle section repeats itself and the viewer who wants a conventional twist may feel cheated. For everyone else, it is one of the strongest hours the revived series produced. Season 3 never came: on February 24, 2021, CBS All Access announced that the show would end after two seasons, with the producers saying they had told the stories they wanted to tell.

Sources

• The Twilight Zone (2019 TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: episode list, cast and crew, and release dates.