Twilight Zone Ovation Review: Season 2, Episode 4 Explained

Twilight Zone Ovation review: what happens in the episode

Everyone has wondered what fame would feel like, and whether it would be worth the price. “Ovation” asks the question with a modicum of cynicism. The episode belongs to the revival that Jordan Peele hosts and narrates, which began on CBS All Access in 2019, and it arrived with the other nine episodes of season two on June 25, 2020. Ana Lily Amirpour directed it from a story by David Weil, with a teleplay by Emily C. Chang and Sara Amini.

The series opens on a singer called Fiji, played by Sky Ferreira, in what sounds like a David Lynch fever dream: ambient noise, muffled vocals, a director who tells her to imagine devouring her audience and to think about whom she will devour next. When he calls cut, the applause starts the moment she leaves the stage and keeps going until she sits down. She tells her handler that she is taking a walk, and in the city square she finds Jasmine (Jurnee Smollett), a street busker who sings and plays guitar. Jasmine recognizes her, but she does not applaud.

Fiji asks what Jasmine wants, and Jasmine answers that she wants what Fiji has. Fiji tosses a strange coin into Jasmine’s guitar case, walks off while fans swarm her, looks back, salutes Jasmine and steps in front of a moving bus. The sequence is shocking, and it is the most striking thing in the hour.

A revival with an anthology habit

The Twilight Zone has always been a show of morality plays, and the revival keeps the habit. Each episode is a self-contained fable with a twist, a new cast and a closing narration from Peele. Season two runs ten episodes, and this one sits near the start of the run, after “Meet in the Middle,” “Downtime” and “The Who of You.”

In structure, “Ovation” follows the classic template: an ordinary person receives a gift that seems like a blessing, the gift reveals a cost, and an ironic final beat completes the punishment. The format can be wonderful when the rules of the gift are crisp and the cost feels earned. It stumbles when the rules are vague, as they are here.

The coin and the rise

Fiji’s fans are devastated, and Jasmine sings at her makeshift memorial. Everyone who hears her applauds, and the applause does not stop. A producer named J.J. (Thomas Lennon), the host of a famous talent show called “Ovation!”, approaches her, and things accelerate. Suits applaud, J.J. applauds, fans applaud. Jasmine’s sister (Tawny Newsome) watches with surprise and admiration, but she never claps.

When fans begin camping outside her house, Jasmine senses something is wrong, though her sister puts it down to winning the show. Then Jasmine botches an appearance and still gets applause. She goes to visit her sister, a surgeon who is in the middle of an operation, and the doctors in the operating room clap madly. The patient on the table does too.

The cast

Casting is the strongest asset in the Twilight Zone Ovation episode. Sky Ferreira, a musician with a fittingly enigmatic presence, makes Fiji unnerving in only a few minutes, and the muffled sound design in her scenes puts the audience inside her head. Jurnee Smollett, familiar from True Blood, Friday Night Lights and the 2020 film Birds of Prey, carries the rest, and she makes the leap from sidewalk performer to star credible. Thomas Lennon, best known from Reno 911, brings quick comic energy as the talent-show host, and Tawny Newsome gives the sister a believable mix of pride and unease.

These are good performances in service of a thin script, and the contrast is part of what makes the episode frustrating. With a stronger final act, the same cast could have carried a memorable hour.

Where it falls apart

The best thing about the episode is its performances. Smollett plays the street hustler convincingly, and when Jasmine becomes a little snobbish about her success, that works too. Lennon is a pleasure, although he does not stay long. Past the cast, there is not much to the story beyond the gimmick of a secret coin that makes everyone go wild, and the idea wears out around the halfway mark. The episode feels long. It is heavy-handed, and the ending can be seen from miles away.

A late sequence shows where the logic gives way. Jasmine decides to throw the lucky coin into a lake to end her success, and her sister does it for her, almost as if she is attached to it. Jasmine then retreats to a cabin in the woods and seems to lose her mind. Why? She got rid of the coin. The only problem is people clapping, and she could go back to playing on the street. Nothing in the character work explains why a month of applause would leave her this broken.

The twist, explained

In seclusion Jasmine receives mail, including a subscription to her favorite music magazine. The first issue covers her rise and fall, which irritates her. The next month’s issue features a rising singer named MYNX. This somehow drives Jasmine insane, and she tracks down MYNX and murders her at an event. MYNX is revealed to be Jasmine’s sister, who has somehow retrieved the coin from the lake. The audience claps and claps to end the show.

How the sister got the coin is never explained, nor is why Jasmine would turn violent over a magazine. The twist feels tacked on, like something a teenager would write for a short-story assignment in order to seem edgy. It is the kind of ending that reaches for irony without earning it.

Peele’s closing moment

There is no spoken outro narration this time. Instead, Peele picks up the coin, puts it in his coat pocket and joins the audience in clapping as he walks off screen. The narrator interacting with the story is not unheard of in the series’ history, since Rod Serling occasionally did, and the moment is clever, better than the episode that precedes it.

Easter eggs and connections in “Ovation”

• The director tells Fiji to picture an octopus devouring its prey and to think about who it wants to devour next, a reference to “8,” a later episode this season.
• The talent show “Ovation!” is sponsored by Mr. Dingle’s Ice Cream, with the slogan “ice cream so good, you’ll die for it.” Mr. Dingle’s ice cream truck appeared last season in “Point of Origin,” and the name nods to the classic episode “Mr. Dingle, the Strong.”
• The radio in the operating room is made by Whipple Technologies, a nod to the classic episode “The Brain Center at Whipple’s.”

Twilight Zone season 2 episode guide

Verdict: the first dud of season two

At best, “Ovation” is a mundane cautionary tale about the price of fame. At worst it becomes so convoluted that it nearly turns into a bad parody of the show it belongs to. The viewer never quite believes what is on screen, even as satire, or the directions the characters take.

The script is credited to the same writing pair who wrote the opener of the season, “Meet in the Middle,” which makes the half-baked quality here more disappointing. It is the first dud of the second season, and a clear example of a high-concept premise that is not developed.

A fair counterargument is that anthology episodes are allowed to be broad. A cautionary tale about the price of applause does not need to be subtle. But the best entries in the original series found specific details that made the allegory feel lived in, and this one leans on a single idea, applause as a curse, and repeats it. Once the viewer understands it, the remaining time is spent waiting for the story to catch up.

Still, the best moments are worth the watch: Ferreira’s eerie opening, Smollett’s grounded performance and Peele’s closing gesture. Everything between them is an hour of waiting for the twist. Anyone sampling the season should start with the stronger entries and come back to this one only if the cast is the draw.

Sources

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