‘Twilight Zone’ Episode 9 Recap: “The Blue Scorpion”

Narrator Jordan Peele ends the most recent installment of The Twilight Zone reboot, “The Blue Scorpion,” with these words: “Humans beings have a funny way of treating things like people. But today, you’ll learn that as long as objects are valued more than lives, tragedy will forever be manufactured, here in the Twilight Zone.”

It’s a valid and worthwhile lesson he’s dolling out here, but the use of the future tense with “you’ll learn” is telling. Because while the entire episode of The Twilight Zone we’ve just watched circles around and around this point like an ever-flushing toilet, it just never quite…flushes all the way down. Indeed, treating material things like people, and subsequently prioritizing the desire and necessity of those things over human life is bad. That is pretty clear-cut with something like America’s refusal to regulate guns. So it was an odd choice to make the stand-in for regular guns that people just love for no reason other than that they want to be allowed to own them without consequence…a magical gun that people love because of magic.

In the end, I found myself wishing that they had maybe skipped the fable aspect of this episode altogether and fully leaned into the spook, rather than riding the line all the way to not really nailing either. Because I will admit, I am intrigued by the overall mythology of a sexy gun that makes people fall in love with it and then kills them. Or just kills anyone with the same name as them—again, we could have used a little more time with the mythology to sort it all out.

Our story follows Professor Jeff Storck (Chris O’Dowd) who lets himself into his father’s house in the opening scene only to discover that his father has shot himself. The police arrive and find an ornate golden gun with a Blue Scorpion on the lacquer handle, but what no one sees except for us is Jeff’s father’s name disappearing from the bullet he used to shoot himself.

Jeff has no idea where his father, a “lifetime hippie” would have gotten the gun, and he doesn’t understand the note he left behind either. It reads, disturbingly: “I love him more than you.” Jeff only becomes more confused as he wanders around his father’s house taking in the things that made up his life. In his eulogy, Jeff says that his father was a former musician who had jammed with the likes of the Grateful Dead and Billy Joel. While talking about his father’s full life, he wonders aloud, “Did it not turn out as he wanted?” And to himself only: “Who did you love more than me?”

But lives are always more complicated behind closed doors. Inside his father’s house, Jeff finds a safe that contains an ornate heart-shaped box. Inside is a gun cartridge with one bullet inside. That bullet says simply: JEFF. After Jeff freaks out about the bullet a little, he stuffs the box back inside the safe, but soon, he’s hearing the name “Jeff” everywhere—including as the name of his wife Anne’s new lover. He thought they were working toward reconciliation, but she tells him she’s hired a divorce attorney…also named Jeff.

Anne also gives Jeff his father’s gun which the police dropped by the house, and he immediately tries to sell it to the excellently named GunSuperStore.com. When he tells the owner (named Bob Jeff, naturally), the serial number and describes the gun, Bob becomes very excitable. He thought the Blue Scorpion was a myth! He tells Jeff that it dates back to 1952 in Cuba when Che Guavara was looking for it. It was said to be made by a man named Eulogio Enfuegos and as the legend goes: “You don’t find it, it finds you.” It’s clearly valuable, and Jeff is ready to get it out of his life, but as he’s telling Bob this…

The gun goes off. The Blue Scorpion, it seems, is not ready to be out of Jeff’s life. Bob gives him one more tip: if he does ship the gun to him to sell, make sure to punch a few holes in the box because the Blue Scorpion is afraid of the dark.

In an extremely subtle next scene, one of Jeff’s students tells him that her research project on animism is getting in her head. Animism is the belief that there’s a soul in every single thing, but Jeff tells his student that she seems to be conflating the concept with anthropomorphism: “attributing human properties to inanimate objects.” It should be noted that neither thing is really what causes people to prioritize gun regulation over human life—that’s just good old fashioned power—but it could classify whatever the hell is happening with Jeff and his magic gun.

In a marijuana-induced vision, a Cuban ghost man claiming to be Eulogio Enfuegos tells Jeff from a dark corner of his father’s house: “The Blue Scorpion loves you more than anyone, he only asks one thing in return—light. It is afraid of the dark.” The Blue Scorpion isn’t meant to be hidden away, it seems, and Jeff becomes obsessed with the bullet with his name on it and what needs to be done with it. So he takes the gun and bullet to a shooting range, where he’s quite willing to open up to two random employees there about this whole ordeal: “Trust me, I’ll be much better when I get rid of this,” he says, holding up the bullet.

So Jeff takes the gun into the range, loads it with the Jeff-bullet, plus five more plain bullets, and starts shooting. And with each new shot, he gains a little confidence, trying out new angles and being, well, very silly…

But when he’s emptied the chamber and finds the Jeff-bullet still there and unharmed, something in Jeff has clearly changed. He seems to believe that the gun loves him. “You’d never hurt me,” Jeff whispers.

He starts carrying the gun and bullet in a backpack with him everywhere (with a flashlight inside for light, so the gun won’t be scared, of course). He brings it to the meeting to break down assets with Anne and her lawyer (Jeff) while her new boyfriend (Jeff) waits outside, and almost seems to pull the gun out when things get contentious. Instead, he storms out of the meeting and just before he gets on the elevator, he screams down the hall at Anne, “I love him more than I ever loved you!”

Yikes.

Bob Jeff from GunSuperStore.come continues to call, offering more and more money for the Blue Scorpion, but Jeff tells him to stop calling, “because I will never sell him.” And the next thing we know, he’s arriving outside Anne’s house, where he can see Other Jeff up in the window. Jeff is fuming, muttering things like, “You think you love her, but you’ll never know real love.” Presumably he’s there to see if the Jeff-bullet is Jeff-transferable. He brings the Blue Scorpion out, loads the chamber, and then—BOOM!

A masked man punches through his car window and tries to take the gun. The Blue Scorpion ends up on the dash as Jeff and the masked man fight, and then—BOOM!

The gun goes off. Just like it did earlier on the table, the gun shoots of its own accord, killing the masked man, who we soon find out was a burglar tied to a series of home invasions throughout Anne’s neighborhood. His name was Jeff.

And then we get what seems to be a Twilight Zone happy ending. Sure, a guy got killed by a magic gun, but our Jeff is a hailed a hero for bringing down the robber, and in thanks for protecting her from a burglary, Anne agrees to all of Jeff’s concessions in the dividing of their assets. He’s asked to be the chair of the department at his university, he moves into a new apartment, and basically, everything is turning up O.G. Jeff. And when the Blue Scorpion is sent back to his home by the police, he no longer seems compelled by it. He takes it out to the lake where he laid his father’s ashes, and hurls it into the deep waters…

Where two boys later find it washed up on shore, and begin playing with it. One of them finds a bullet in the sand. “Hey, it’s my name!” little Kyle says. And suddenly the lure of the Blue Scorpion feels a little less mythical, and a lot more like a literally-everyday kind of tragedy.

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream The Twilight Zone Episode 9 ("The Blue Scorpion") on CBS All Access