During my teenage science fiction fan phase I learned of the existence of this fantastic 1960s TV show called "The Outer Limits." Over the years I read quite a bit about it. After "Star Trek" and "Twilight Zone" it was the most influential of the 1960s sci-fi shows. Indeed, one could argue that in some respects "The Outer Limits'" cultural influence may have been even greater in the long term. Like "Twilight Zone" it was an anthology series, but with one-hour episodes and all sci-fi, not a sci-fi/fantasy mix.

Yes, it sounded awesome. But over the years I only had the chance to watch a tiny handful of episodes. Now I have the chance to watch the whole series. So here goes....

Galaxy Being
A backyard inventor succeeds in transporting a dangerous creature from another galaxy to our world.

Cliff Robertson's protagonist at one point observes that big, bureaucratized scientific lab establishments make only gradual progress--the really radical advances are always the work of maverick researchers. He proves his case here. Where Carl Sagan's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program worked for decades with vast radio telescope arrays without ever finding a single alien message, our backyard inventor, with nothing more than a few thousand dollars' worth of gear and some transmission power stolen from his employer, actually transports a whole alien to Earth! Unfortunately the alien, though peacefully inclined, is just too powerful and advanced to be safe while at large in our world...

There's a lot here that's hard to swallow--the home-made universal translator, for example, and the alien's claim not to have concepts like "death" or "speech" (Maybe the universal translator just wasn't up to the job of explaining what stuff meant?). But by and large it works. The fine black-and-white cinematography helps a lot. At times the camera angles and high-contrast photography give the show a film-noir look. Much of this was probably lost on the grainy picture tubes of half a century ago. On a modern screen the picture looks great. Thanks for the great picture, Control Voice!

The Galaxy Being itself is also a great highlight. Essentially it's just an actor in a modified wet-suit. By printing the image as a negative, they turn the dark suit with highlights into a ghostly, glowing, unearthly white image shot with eerie dark motes. The Being is played by William O. Douglas Jr., son of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Douglas the younger went on to play several "Outer Limits" monsters.

All in all, not a bad way to start off a series.

This show is a classic - I recall the episode which was based on Asimov's I, Robot, and I can't recall an episode I disliked.

I have the complete DVD set. I also have Twilight Zone, and Boris Karloff's Thriller. I love the anthology format of the late 50's, early 60's. I will try to one day watch all of these, plus Alfred Hitchcock Presents, plus Route 66. Plus anything else and you can't stop me.

I have watched up to the first 4 episodes, I think. I may try to keep up with this thread.

If I had one complaint, it's that Outer Limits was pretty much a "Monster of the Week" show.

One Hundred Days of the Dragon
Foreign agents assassinate a leading presidential candidate, and replace him with a remarkably convincing lookalike.

This episode has not aged well. First, the Asian villains (very obviously from Red China, though China is never actually named) are somewhat problematic. They are never treated with any overt racism, but the fact that ALL of the Asians in the show are sneaky bad guys carries unfortunate implications. The thuddingly obvious chinoiserie of the episode's music has also dated badly. It's also hard to see viewers, even in the days before the Kennedy assassination, swallowing the idea that the leading presidential candidate, the President, and the Vice-President, would all be left virtually unguarded by the Secret Service.

Worst of all is the silly manner in which the doubles are created. In The Manchurian Candidate, the episode's presumed inspiration, the bad guys brainwashed the candidate into doing their bidding. Here the doubles are Reds who have been given a drug that makes their flesh malleable, then had their faces mashed into what amounts to cake molds of the faces they're trying to assume. It's especially egregious when the viewer observes that the b&w cinematography brings out every little detail of the characters' faces. Those would have to be some very detailed cake molds! I've read that even the show's creators were kind of embarrassed whenever they looked back on this one.


The Man With the Power
A special implant gives a scientist vast telekinetic powers.

Like "Forbidden Planet's" alien Krell, the protagonist forgets that even the most mild-mannered, intelligent, and well-intentioned of us harbor deep inside the Monster of the Id--those ugly impulses that we try to keep repressed. And that id-monster has a way of hijacking any psychic powers we might obtain! Donald Pleasance's scientist seems to be a decent fellow, but he's got a lot of hidden anger against people who haven't treated him well. After he gets "the power," bad things start happening to those people.... It's a good, old-fashioned comic book-type story, with passable special effects. The shots of certain individuals being zapped to ashes probably carried a real shock when the episode first came out.

The more the merrier!

Yes, I'm seeing that "monster of the week" deal. Each episode starts with a teaser that usually shows the monster-of-the-week looking sinister. Kind of like those old comic book stories where the splash page jumps ahead to the most startling moment of the story. Then the story actually starts, and progresses to that point. The show's guidelines actually called for each episode to have a monster, known to the crew as "the bear." It served the same attention-grabbing purpose as the dancing bear in some old-time circus and stage shows.

I watched the original series two years ago and enjoyed it very much. Both seasons are decidedly
different. I prefer the first, but the second season dropped the "teaser" openings, which I thought were
a good idea to get rid of, but the first season was stronger overall, even with the teasers.

I don't mind the concept of a teaser, but I'm just not much of a fan of watching the same footage again
later on in the same episode unless there's a slight change or an obvious story swerve or something.

The power of hoodoo?

Yoodoo.

What do I do?

Remind me of the man.

Architects of Fear
A cabal of concerned scientists transforms one of their number into a fake alien menace in an effort to impose unity on the world's nations.

If you've ever been tempted to land a UFO on the lawn of the United Nations, brandish a ray gun, and tell the world's leaders to get their act together or else, this episode shows why that would be a bad idea. The scheme ends up being such an epic fail that it makes the scientists who attempt it look rather hare-brained for even trying. Worst of all, of course, is the way this ended up inspiring Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt to try something similar two decades or so later, with far more disastrous consequences.

Two things partially redeem the episode. First, there's Robert Culp's performance as the protagonist. Most of the running time focuses on the long ordeal of his gradual transformation into an "alien." The combination of resolution and gallows humor with which he faces it is very believable. The other thing the episode has going for it is the final monster form. It's a man in a suit, but doesn't look as much like it as usual. You wonder, as you watch it shamble along, how in the world a human being could move around in it. I've seen production stills of stunt man Janos Prohaska in rehearsal that give hints as to how he did it.

There's also some more great b&w cinematography. The underlit scene at the beginning, where the plotters discuss their plans, is especially effective, in the contrast it strikes between their well-intentioned ideals and the thoroughly sinister vibe they give off.


The Man Who Was Never Born
A time traveler journeys two centuries back in time to prevent the marriage of the parents of the man he blames for ruining the world.

The plot may seem like very old hat to seasoned science fiction fans, but this episode must surely have been one of the first times a mass audience, beyond the confines of pulp sci-fi fandom, was ever exposed to such a concept. The time traveler is a grotesque mutant with the ability to disguise himself as actor Martin Landau. Landau's performance does a good job of conveying the man's ambivalence. On the one hand, he's desperately anxious to do whatever is necessary to prevent a bad future. On the other, he finds himself balking at the ruthless deeds his mission requires.

The third way he takes--eloping with the bride himself, to insure that she will never bear the scientist who will end up causing the apocalypse--is presented in sappy romantic terms as a triumph of true (but tragic) love, or something like that. And that's where the story falls apart. It's just not believable. The portrayal of the bride, who decides on the spur of the moment to run away in a spaceship with the guy who just tried to murder her groom, makes women look flighty to the point of being nuts. The closing shot, in which she finds herself caught in a time paradox, is memorable. But how they get there just doesn't pass muster.

I'll have to get these and watch them again, now.

I haven't seen that last one, but I thought he'd marry her, get her pregnant, and maybe get killed so the woman would go back to the first guy and he'd raise the kid as his own - the same kid who ruined the world. Turns out it's his own kid. But I guess they didn't do that.

No, that's not how it happens.

Of course that makes little sense.

The Sixth Finger
A rugged Welsh coal miner gains super intelligence through an experiment in forced evolution.

Although it has gotten worse in recent decades, science fiction writers have long tended to take a rather dim view of human nature. One example of this is the way super-evolved big brain characters--Marvel's MODOK and Leader come to mind--almost always turn out to be monstrous egotists. Here, once again, we see an early example of what was to become a very familiar science fiction trope. Actually there is a bit of optimism toward the end, with a suggestion that we will eventually evolve beyond our primitive emotions. It's just evidently going to take a long, long time.

I realized while watching "The Sixth Finger" that "Outer Limits" isn't so much science fiction in the strictest sense as science fantasy. The stories tend to be about workers of magic whose magic carries a thin veneer of technobabble and machinery. It's not just that the science is improbably far advanced. A lot of it isn't really science. Take this episode's evolution machine, with its absurd, carefully-marked "forward" and "backward" switch. Evolution as a scientific concept doesn't really have a "forward" or a "backward," and it certainly isn't understood as moving toward a given goal. It's simply a cumulative, and fundamentally amoral, mechanism that produces change. Rather like science and technology themselves. Which is why many of us, even those of us who respect what science can do and accept concepts like evolution, don't care to heed calls for us to abandon our religion and substitute science instead.

Once again, one of the best things about the episode is the lead's performance. In this case the lead is a pre-"Man From Uncle" (and much else) David McCallum. He does a great turn as a resentful product of an impoverished upbringing whose fundamental attitude toward life fails to improve as his intellect expands. He's a "monster" you can feel for, and yet his growing powers and inability to use them wisely still make him scary. The extent to which he and other members of the cast sound convincingly Welsh I'll leave to the judgment of others. I don't know enough about how to tell a Welsh accent to be sure. Kind of embarrassing, considering how many guys named Lloyd we have on both sides of our family....

The makeups representing different stages of McCallum's evolution are the episode's technical highlight. Note in particular his most advanced form, with its huge cranium and pointy ears. Does any of that look familiar? A LOT of images from future sci-fi screen and comic book stories owe a debt to elements of that look. The influence is not limited to fiction, either. Students of folklore who've studied the alien abduction phenomenon have pointed out that the earliest cases date from around the time of "Outer Limits'" original broadcast--and the early descriptions of alien abductors have a good deal in common with certain "Outer Limits" monsters. From there the cultural evolution of images of alien abductors kept evolving, until we came up with the notorious Greys. As noted above, "Outer Limits" may in some ways have had even more impact on our culture than "Star Trek."

You'd think, but I guess that's why they call them "time paradoxes." Makes me glad that time travel doesn't actually happen. It would make the world so much more confusing than it already is!

I've never understood why any religious type would confuse science for a competing religion. Science isn't a religion, or even a philosophy about how to live one's life, really, but a tool. I guess maybe if a person is nigh scientifically illiterate, it might seem like things scientists say are doctrine and disseminated by the high priest scientists and the masses have little choice but to take scientists at their word, but science isn't like that, and it still isn't a religion. And nor would "science" necessarily request or require of any one to abandon one's religious belief system, though it's true if one's interpretation of some point in some holy scripture said the sky was not blue and science could demonstrate otherwise, one might be obligated to either change their interpretation, at least on that point, or forever walk the earth with their head down, lest they catch a glimpse of sky. Usually, of course, one's belief system isn't so literally dependent on one matter of faith that one matter of fact could destroy the whole belief system, though I often suspect some religious people feel that way, as if it's all or nothing for them, and often think of science as the enemy of faith. But I dunno.

Fascinating.

Brilliant thread! I'm more familiar with the second volume from the 90's but the original run has some great episodes.