The mildly disappointing Jordan Peele reboot used this episode to revisit the adolescent experience with a tale with a twist, but no real moral
It was inevitable that Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot (Sky One) would get around to enrolling in high school at some point. As Peele’s narrator says in his introduction to this mid-season episode, “It’s a period that for most of us already feels like a waking nightmare”. Add to that the rich genre tradition of dark dormitory corridors and suspicious substitute teachers for TZ’s writers to draw on. Watching Among the Untrodden often felt like a leisurely ride on the Hogwarts Express, sandwiched between your old school bullies.
The company only accounts for so much on these journeys to another dimension. That is one of the mostly unheeded lessons of the last series, when Peele’s on-screen collaborators included the eminently likable, if not universally adored, Tracy Morgan, Chris O’Dowd and Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn. Even so, their performances sometimes felt thrown away on lacklustre plots and half-hearted conceits. Season two hasn’t given up this ploy of borrowing from the goodwill audiences feel for its guest stars – Christopher Meloni, Gretchen Mol and George Takei are still to come – but this episode, at least, featured mostly unknown actors.
