The next two sections contain spoilers for “Home.”
“Home” remains positively Lynchian in the way it exposes the American dream’s dark underside. Generations of inbreeding have left the Peacock family subhuman, rotting their brains the way any modern political echo chamber might do. Maybe this is why they bury the run of their litter in a neighboring sandlot where kids gather to play pick-up baseball. Blood comes bubbling up from the ground like oil, right under home plate.
The setting is the town of Home, Pennsylvania, which FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) liken to Mayberry from “The Andy Griffith Show.” Home even has a same-named version of the “sheriff without a gun,” Andy Taylor, though he’s played by Tucker Smallwood, and technically he does have a service weapon that he keeps in a lock box at home.
This is a town where people do lock up their guns but don’t lock their doors, though they should maybe do the opposite of both. Faced with a murdered newborn on his watch, Sheriff Taylor stands arms akimbo, musing:
“I’ve seen and heard some of the sick and horrible things that go on outside my Home. At the same time, I knew we couldn’t stay hidden forever… that one day, the modern world would find us and my hometown would change forever.”
The backward Peacocks and horrifying modern world not only find Sheriff Taylor in his home; they beat him and his wife to death with clubs like cavemen, to the tune of “Wonderful! Wonderful!” (sung by a Johnny Mathis soundalike since the real Mathis disapproved). “We were starting to get a little concerned,” Glen Morgan told the NYT, “so I brought in our broadcast standards and practices executive when we edited [that] scene.”