Summary
“The Who Of You” finds a struggling actor taking on more roles than he could possibly handle in a meditation on how far you’ll go to get what you think you deserve.
This recap of The Twilight Zone season 2, episode 3, “The Who Of You”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our full spoiler-free season review.
“The Who of You” opens with Harry Pine, a beardy actor, auditioning for a role — it doesn’t go well, and he takes his frustration out on his much more successful missus, Morena. Out of nowhere, the electric goes off. Harry didn’t pay the power bill. Immediately we have a struggling couple, with one of the pair feeling deeply inadequate. The root of the resentment seems to be Morena’s success.
Harry has a bright idea: to rob a bank. Just as it all starts going wrong, Harry seems to switch bodies with the cashier. Jordan Peele tells us he’s about to go on a journey of self-discovery, which seems like a bit of an understatement to me.
With Harry now embodying Jill, and Jill in Harry’s unconscious, newly arrested body, The Twilight Zone season 2, episode 3 gets complicated fast. Jill is prevented from taking the bag of cash by her colleague, Belinda, but when she touches the body of the cop that tries to intervene, Harry’s personality jumps into him instead. That puts Luntz’s personality in Harry’s body, much to the confusion of Detective Reece.
Harry as Luntz tries to call Morena, but she doesn’t recognize his voice so calls him a weirdo and hangs up. In a funny follow-up scene, Harry tries to rehearse identifying himself to Morena in Luntz’s body. How’s that for an audition?
Meanwhile, Reece interrogates Harry, who of course is really Luntz. He doesn’t know what to make of the fact that this nobody actor knows personal details about his friend and colleague’s life. Luntz says he knows something about Reece that Pine would never know — he knows his secret. Reece shuts the tape recorder off.
As Luntz, Harry starts to lose it a bit when he spots fellow patrolmen, so he jumps into the body of a barista and makes off with the cash once again. On the run, he switches to a jogger heading the other way and is able to shake his tail.
With the news of Luntz’s recovery, Reece goes to talk to Harry again, who is now the jogger, John. John’s body, meanwhile, is being piloted to an astrology store that a passerby insists is operated by a charlatan. Harry enters anyway, where he’s asked outright by the proprietor, “Do you know who you are?” Harry opens up. He thinks his girlfriend is going to leave him, she might be cheating on him, his career is in the toilet, and he robbed a bank. Oh, and when he locks eyes with people he transfers his personality into their body. That this confuses a psychic says quite a lot.
Keith, said psychic, seizes the opportunity to find out where the other personalities go when Harry is inside them by locking eyes with Harry. He joins Reece in the station, in Harry’s body. Just as Keith-as-Harry is about to give away where Harry-as-John is, John returns to Harry’s body and Keith returns to his own. He admits he’s a scam artist, but insists that Harry is way worse — he berates Harry about his entitlement and his decisions before throwing him out of the store. He leaves the bag of money inside.
Later, outside the store, Harry-as-John tries to get the police to allow him into the building to retrieve his bag. When the cops start to get suspicious, Harry starts jumping around from one bystander to the next, eventually hijacking an old man, Mr. Martinez. One of the old man’s neighbors has the apartment next to the psychic shop, so he hops into her instead, and then her kid, Miles.
In Reece’s patrol car, Miles’ personality jumps into Harry’s body, throwing Reece for a loop. He suggests the only thing you really can in this situation: ice cream.
Harry, meanwhile, in Miles’ body, tries to break into the psychic shop, but he’s confronted by Reece and Miles-as-Harry. Reece talks Harry into giving Miles his body back, but he does so by hopping into Reece instead. Harry-as-Reece holds Reece-as-Harry as gunpoint, but the detective is able to take his weapon away and turn it on him. At that moment the police arrive, and there’s a shootout; we see the muzzle flashes from outside.
As Reece, Harry goes to see Morena. But it’s twist time! Morena is indeed having an affair — with Reece. She says Harry has been missing all night and this is the last straw; no more secrets. “The Who of You” ends with Harry, as Reece, auditioning for the lead part he was turned away from at the top of the episode. He gets it. Jordan Peele lets us know that if we’re looking for Harry Pine, he’ll be playing the role of a lifetime in a show that goes on forever.
