Introduction: A Chamber Piece About an Invasion
The fourth episode of the 2019 Twilight Zone, developed for CBS All Access by Simon Kinberg, Jordan Peele, and Marco Ramirez, was written by Glen Morgan — a writer-producer of the series whose earlier television credits include The X-Files — and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, whose feature debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night had established a taste for genre atmospherics detached from genre reassurance. It was photographed by Mathias Herndl, cut by Scott Turner, and scored by Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts. It was released in April 2019. Steven Yeun plays a stranger who has legally adopted the name A. Traveler; Marika Sila, an Inuvialuk performer whose family originates in Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories, plays Sergeant Yuka Mongoyak; Greg Kinnear plays Captain Lane Pendleton; Patrick Gallagher plays Jack Mongoyak, Yuka’s brother. The town of Iglaak, Alaska, is an invention, situated in the fiction above the Arctic Circle and photographed in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The episode belongs to a recognizable Serling-era subgenre: the closed-room paranoia parable, in which a small population under pressure is induced to destroy itself. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960) supplies the template — an unexplained failure of electricity, a neighbourhood that turns on itself, and a coda in which extraterrestrial observers explain the technique to one another and to the audience. “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (1961), written by Serling and directed by Montgomery Pittman, supplies the physical situation almost exactly: a blizzard, a small heated interior, state troopers counting bodies, and a headcount that will not resolve. Both of those episodes end by handing the viewer an explanation. Maple Street’s aliens articulate a method and a prognosis for the species. Pittman’s diner produces a third arm, then trumps it with a third eye, and the machinery of the twist is displayed with something close to vaudeville pleasure.
“A Traveler” ends with two figures eating pie in a basement.
That difference is the subject of what follows. The argument advanced here is that Morgan and Amirpour have relocated the flaw. The classic paranoia parable diagnoses a disposition: humans are suspicious, tribal, quick to scapegoat, and an intelligent adversary need only apply pressure. “A Traveler” is not interested in that diagnosis, and its town does not behave especially badly by the standards of the subgenre. What the episode examines instead is an arrangement — the specific institutional pathway by which, in this town, a belief becomes an action. Iglaak possesses exactly one such pathway, and it runs through a man whose authority is borrowed, ritualized, and structurally indifferent to evidence. The stranger does not defeat the town’s intelligence. He defeats its distribution of credence: its rules about who is entitled to be believed. The consequence, dramatized with unusual coldness, is that the one person who is right throughout the episode is right without effect.
Philosophical vocabulary is used sparingly in what follows, and only where the episode’s own procedures require a name for something. The work itself remains the evidence.
I. The Pardon Requires a Prisoner
The premise is announced in the first minutes and is easy to mistake for local colour. Every Christmas Eve, Captain Pendleton pardons one person held in the town’s cells. Yuka offers this to her handcuffed brother as consolation on the drive in: he will probably be the beneficiary this year, since nobody else is in custody.
That casual arithmetic is the episode’s first structural joke, and it is a serious one. A ritual of annual clemency requires an annual object. The mercy is parasitic on the arrest. Jack has been taken in for public drunkenness on the one night when a body in a cell acquires ceremonial value, and his sister — who made the arrest — presents his confinement to him as good news precisely because it qualifies him for release. Before the stranger appears, the town has already established that its central expression of decency is a closed loop that manufactures the condition it then relieves.
Note also what kind of power is being exercised. No American police captain possesses a pardon power; clemency in the United States rests with governors and the President. Pendleton’s tradition is a dramatic invention, and its invented character is doing analytic work rather than merely enabling a plot. What he has fashioned for himself is the one gesture of authority that consists entirely in suspending the ordinary operation of the rule — the decision that answers to nothing outside itself. Carl Schmitt’s formulation in Political Theology (1922), that sovereignty is defined by the capacity to decide on the exception, is worth invoking here not to dignify Pendleton but to specify his position with precision. He is a state trooper captain in a settlement of a few hundred people, ten miles from a federal air installation whose power demands brown out his own building; his authority in the surrounding world is entirely derivative. Once a year, in his own station, he performs a species of decision that no ordinary official ever gets to make.
The party is held inside that station, which is the second structural fact worth pausing over. The community’s Christmas is celebrated in the building where the community’s coercive power is kept, one floor above the cells. Pendleton’s speech to the room mixes self-congratulation with an appeal to ...
