The Outer Limits (1963)

Counterweight, directed by Paul Stanley.

Volunteer explorers sign up for a 261 day simulated space flight. Anyone who can't take the stress: just push the "panic button" and the whole test is scrubbed.

(Note: if the test is successful they are going on the actual mission for another 261 days. Same for the return, I suppose. That's dedication).

There is a strange presence on board: a traveling light accompanied by an eerie music cue. It visits sleepers and reads their minds. It plays tricks on them, driving the passengers mad.

That's not a bad concept but it is developed so slowly, with so much TV psycho-drama and talk-talk that this becomes one of the duller episodes.

What are these people even doing on the mission? Especially the crude construction tycoon: he expects to make billions on another planet.

These "moral little tale" stories are always disappointing.

The cast:

• Jacqueline Scott returns from The Galaxy Being. I feel sorry for her: she has to do a ridiculous turn from sober scientist to attention-starved pearl-swinging sex bomb.
• Crahan Denton, the doctor who finds a doll belonging to his dead daughter in his bed, returns from The Children of Spider County. I remember him most distinctly as the nasty gang boss in The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959) with young Steve McQueen.
• Several other familiar faces, including Michael Constantine and Sandy Kenyon.

Directory Stanley returns from Second Chance and The Guests.

Notes:

• The alien light is similar to the concept used in Star Trek Day of the Dove where it hopes to have Federation and Klingon crews locked in eternal battle. That effect was some sort of composite; this is an actual Tinkerbell light.
• I thought The Zanti Misfits had the only stop motion animation in the series, but we have a bit more with hostile plants here.
• This may have caused a dream when I was nine: rolling over and finding a network of lights over my bed. "Got you!" I thought, as it faded away.

The Blu-ray commentary track is by Reba Wissner. As for previous episodes she identifies the Ondes Martenot as a keyboard instrument producing a sound much like the theremin.

The Premonition, directed by Gerd Oswald.

A test pilot flies so fast he creates a time warp. On crashing his plane he and his wife find themselves in a frozen world a few seconds before the crash. The time lines are going to sync up again, but they have another problem: how to save their little girl from being hit by a truck when they cannot move anything in the frozen world?

Another SF thriller plot with a long setup: it is 11 minutes until we reach the weirdness. Much stock footage. Instructions to the crew: just get it done in six days, hand in whatever you have then. That must have been disheartening to Gerd Oswald who put so much into the series.

It still has some Outer Limits touches: the mysterious "Limbo Being" who is caught in the warp just has they are. The notion that when time resumes they have forgotten their adventure in the frozen world and are left with the vague premonition that something just happened. Maybe this happens to us too...

Their solution to saving the little girl is a good one.

I remember Dewey Martin from The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Desperate Hours (1955).

Mary Murphy is the often overwrought wife, perhaps understandably so. Last seen in The Wild One (1953), The Mad Magician (1954) and also The Desperate Hours (1955).

Written by Ib Melchior, who wrote The Angry Red Planet (1959) (also directed), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and the original story of Death Race 2000 (1975).

On the Blu-ray commentary track Tim Lucas again compares this to the minimalism of French New Wave filmmaking, as he did for The Duplicate Man.

He has the details of the X-15 crash shown in this episode. Only three of these were built; I did not know that.

The Probe (1965), directed by Felix E. Feist.

Forced down in a hurricane, the crew of a cargo plane at first find themselves in a raft on stormy seas, but wake up the next day on a solid surface, inside a mysterious structure. They learn they are inside an automated alien surveyor probe and have to contend with its strange workings and a mutated giant germ picked up from some previous planet.

Is there anyway to communicate with the device, or the beings behind it?

And so we come to the end of the series. After a season and a half ABC pulled the plug on a show they never understood or appreciated.

This is not an auspicious ending: "Let's throw in a bunch of weird stuff to keep the kids happy. Look: a monster!" The plot reminds me of Heinlein's story Goldfish Bowl.

Peter Mark Richman returns from The Borderland.

Peggy Ann Garner was a child actress in Jane Eyre (1944):



...and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). I remember her as an adult in the soapy murder mystery Black Widow (1954).

The creeping monster was later developed into the "Horla" for Star Trek The Devil in the Dark. Both were designed and performed by Janos Prohaska.

The Blu-ray has no commentary track for this final episode. Previous second season tracks detailed the reduced budgets, change in creative talent, shifted time slot and network indifference.

The second season Control Voice narrations became consistently dull in their high-toned abstract vagueness.