The Outer Limits (1963)

[wmcclain]

The Outer Limits (1963)



I was eight years old when these programs were first broadcast and I remember seeing many of them then. Was I too young? Yes: nightmares. No: I had discovered horror-tinged science fiction and wanted more.

I've seen the series again in the decades since, first as rebroadcasts and then on a DVD collection. When Kino announced both seasons on Blu-ray I wasn't going to bother with the upgrade but was intrigued by the rich set of commentary tracks. Hearing more about these shows from film scholars and fellow fans: I couldn't resist.

And the upgrade in video quality is substantial. As always when looking at classic TV in modern high definition, I marvel that today we see them as they have never been seen before. My original viewing was on a small boxy TV with a blurry image. I never imagined that I would be able to revisit these programs presented in such quality.

We must be grateful that so much classic TV was filmed in 35mm, the same as theatrical releases. That always seemed odd: film records vastly more detail than could be broadcast at the time. The studio workflows must have been setup for 35mm and it was just easier to stick with it.

Episodes

Season one

• 01 The Galaxy Being (⁂)
• 02 The Hundred Days of the Dragon
• 03 The Architects of Fear (⁂)
• 04 The Man with the Power
• 05 The Sixth Finger
• 06 The Man Who Was Never Born (⁂)
• 07 O.B.I.T.
• 08 The Human Factor
• 09 Corpus Earthling (⁂)
• 10 Nightmare
• 11 It Crawled Out of the Woodwork
• 12 The Borderland
• 13 Tourist Attraction
• 14 The Zanti Misfits (⁂)
• 15 The Mice
• 16 Controlled Experiment
• 17 Don't Open Till Doomsday
• 18 ZZZZZ
• 19 The Invisibles (⁂)
• 20 The Bellero Shield (⁂)
• 21 The Children of Spider County
• 22 Specimen: Unknown
• 23 Second Chance
• 24 Moonstone
• 25 The Mutant
• 26 The Guests
• 27 Fun and Games
• 28 The Special One
• 29 A Feasibility Study
• 30 Production and Decay of Strange Particles
• 31 The Chameleon
• 32 The Forms of Things Unknown (⁂)

Season two

• 01 Soldier
• 02 Cold Hands, Warm Heart
• 03 Behold, Eck!
• 04 Expanding Human
• 05 Demon with a Glass Hand (⁂)
• 06 Cry of Silence
• 07 The Invisible Enemy
• 08 Wolf 359
• 09 I, Robot
• 10-11 The Inheritors (⁂)
• 12 Keeper of the Purple Twilight
• 13 The Duplicate Man
• 14 Counterweight
• 15 The Brain of Colonel Barham
• 16 The Premonition
• 17 The Probe

My attempt to categorize each episode

For now...

Personal favorites

• The Galaxy Being (visitor from Andromeda pulled in through radio transmissions)
• The Architects of Fear (building an alien for world peace)
• The Man Who Was Never Born (mutant from the future tries to prevent himself)
• Corpus Earthling (alien rock-crabs)
• The Zanti Misfits (insect prisoners expelled to Earth)
• The Invisibles (alien Puppet Master parasites taking over)
• The Bellero Shield (visitor from the realm of light)
• The Forms of Things Unknown (time-tilter messes with murderesses)
• Demon with a Glass Hand (saving the human race by escaping into the past)
• The Inheritors (surviving soldiers build spaceship, collect children)

Distinguished episodes, fan favorites

• The Sixth Finger (becoming the man of the future)
• O.B.I.T. (total surveillance)
• Nightmare (psychological war games for POWs)
• Don't Open Till Doomsday (little monster inside the wedding present)
• A Feasibility Study (neighborhood taken to another world)

Episodes I like more than I should

• The Borderland (inter-dimensional explorers)
• Controlled Experiment (comedy of Martian observation outpost)
• ZZZZZ (sexy queen bee comes to visit)
• Specimen: Unknown (killer flowers from space)
• Wolf 359 (evil spirit of replicated planet)
• The Duplicate Man (hunting the alien with a clone)

Tending to dullness

• The Hundred Days of the Dragon (face-off substitution of politicians)
• Tourist Attraction (gill-men creatures)
• The Children of Spider County (alien dad returns for his kids)
• The Special One (alien tutor)
• Expanding Human (mind-altering drugs)
• I, Robot (mechanical man on trial)
• Counterweight (test mission, who will press the panic button?)
• The Probe (plane crew trapped in an alien survey machine)

The rest, always worth a second look

• The Man with the Power (mind over matter)
• The Human Factor (arctic outpost)
• It Crawled Out of the Woodwork (trouble at the power plant)
• The Mice (alien prisoner swap)
• Second Chance (carnival spaceship is the real thing)
• Moonstone (moonbase trouble)
• The Mutant (planet of constant sun makes mind-reader)
• The Guests (old mansion: you can check in but not out)
• Fun and Games (combat sport for alien entertainment)
• Production and Decay of Strange Particles (more trouble at another power plant)
• The Chameleon (becoming an alien to infiltrate them)
• Soldier (he's not a terminator)
• Cold Hands, Warm Heart (explorer from Venus can't get warm)
• Behold, Eck! (2-dimensional visitor)
• Cry of Silence (menacing tumbleweeds)
• The Invisible Enemy (Martian sand shark)
• Keeper of the Purple Twilight (invader takes on human emotions)
• The Brain of Colonel Barham (brain in a jar)
• The Premonition (frozen time after a test pilot crashes)

[wmcclain]

The Galaxy Being, written and directed by Leslie Stevens.

A devoted radio engineer develops 3D television and tunes into microwave broadcasts from another galaxy. Inadvertently: it is also a matter transmitter. He has already cobbled together an automatic language translator. When an irresponsible DJ turns the power up too high, First Contact follows.

This is a fine pilot episode for the series. The alien effects are pretty simple superimposed negatives, but that nicely suggests a truly alien incompatible form of matter. The visitor looks like the surface of a star with sunspots.

As always, the sound and visual design of the program is superb. The music cues bring back so many memories, tying the whole series together.

The plot is a familiar one of obsessed scientist in tension with his wife and social obligations. See Altered States (1980) for another treatment. The clever bit this time is that the only like-minded friend our hero can find is a deathless "nitrogen-cycle" (?) being from Andromeda. Who is also a renegade, breaking the rules to contact other life.

The story pauses for a couple instances of TV drama-speak between husband and wife. We see the show is still rooted in the TV anthology genre of the 1950s, which itself had roots in radio serials of the decade before: often the same actors, same types of stories.

We have parallels to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): our fear of the alien, his healing powers, and his final lecture on the need for understanding.

Notes:

• We're ignoring the speed of light in this clever scenario.
• In a real-world parallel, early radio astronomy was indeed pioneered by amateur enthusiasts. Grote Reber built the first parabolic radio telescope in his backyard and did a complete sky survey. For ten years he was the only radio astronomer in the world.
• The alien says that electromagnetic waves are the ultimate reality. There is no death because the brain waves travel outward forever.
• The truly unbelievable part: army, police and mob disperse when dismissed by the alien.
• The radio station silhouetted against the sky became a scene in my dreams.
• I always loved the astronomical photos in the closing credits.

The commentary track is by Outer Limits expert and author David J Schow. He gives much background on Leslie Stevens and the origins of the series.

• He notes the similarities to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)...
• ...and also that our engineer has found a like-minded companion from across space.
• The brother's girlfriend is played by Allyson Ames, married to Leslie Stevens at the time.
• William O. Douglas Jr is the man in the alien suit. He was the son of the Supreme Court justice of that name.
• The suit was a neoprene wet-suit worn backwards and oiled to make it shine. The eyes were "crow's eyes", glass ones from a taxidermist, I presume.

[txfilmfan]

The Outer Limits (1963)




We must be grateful that so much classic TV was filmed in 35mm, the same as theatrical releases. That always seemed odd: film records vastly more detail than could be broadcast at the time. The studio workflows must have been setup for 35mm and it was just easier to stick with it.

As far as film goes, 35mm was by far the most common format available at the time in L.A., so it was going to be easier and cheaper to film, process and edit using 35mm. There were more people trained on it, more equipment available to exploit it and more labs to process it. Contrast that with the UK, where filmed television was often done on 16mm, to save money. The BBC and independent broadcasters in the UK (ITV) did not have the bigger budgets that the 3 major U.S. networks enjoyed. The main exceptions to the 16mm properties were the ones that were designed for export to the North American market. The UK even filmed some of these in color, even though they would still be broadcast in B&W at home on the BBC or ITV, as colour broadcasting didn't start there until 1967.

At the time The Outer Limits was first broadcast, videotape was just 6 years removed from its introduction to commercial TV, and The Twilight Zone's experiment with it a couple years prior was not successful. They hoped that it would save a great deal of money, but that turned out not to be the case. It was nearly as expensive to produce on videotape as 35mm film, and the technology still had many downsides w.r.t. quality of the video and audio. Videotape was also a hassle to edit in those days. It became easier in later years as editing bays were developed that helped automate the process a bit. In the end, they switched back to 35mm after producing just a handful of videotaped episodes.

[EP Millstone]

I was eight years old when these programs were first broadcast and I remember seeing many of them then . . .

I was the same age as you, wmcclain, when The Outer Limits premiered on September 16, 1963 (during the -- unbeknownst to Americans -- twilight days of "Camelot" and weeks away from the national horror of November 22). I remember it well.

'Twas a hot summer night, so hot that all of the house windows were wide open . . . a Monday night, probably the night of the first day of school (back when the school year sprawled from September to June). I sat glued to the family TV set, enthralled by the tranquil "Control Voice," which calmly -- soothingly -- instructed me:

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. YOU are about to participate in a great adventure. YOU are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to . . . The Outer Limits."

Unfortunately as the series progressed, that masterful introduction got truncated. As with every television series, the quality of the episodes varied and fluctuated. On the whole, however (for me), The Outer Limits was always interesting, entertaining, and addictive. With one exception
(Controlled Experiment), humor was blessedly eschewed -- unlike on The Twilight Zone, which was occasionally injected with atonal whimsy.

[Dargo]

Always felt that there was a similarity between Vic Perrin's voice who did the narration for this series and including of course the very memorable cold opening (well, "memorable" to those of us old enough to have watched this series when it was first run during our pre-teen years, anyway) and with that of Burgess Meredith's.

(...anyone else ever get this idea?)

[Intrepid37]

Whenever The Outer Limits is mentioned, the first image my mind conjures forth is The Zanti Misfits. For some reason I saw it several times - they must have re-run it in my area more than other episodes.

[wmcclain]

The Hundred Days of the Dragon, directed by Byron Haskin.

In a cunning plot to take over the United States, the Chinese develop a serum that plasticizes the skin, allowing them to murder a presidential candidate and substitute a look-alike. Those closest to him begin to suspect something is not right. Can they figure it out, prove it and defeat the insidious plan?

This second episode is a big decline from the sense of wonder of the rest of the series. Apart from the magic serum it could have been an entry in any other drama anthology.

A Cold War thriller somewhat like The Manchurian Candidate (1962), it was broadcast two months before the assassination of JFK. In those days having two Communist superpowers was somewhat balanced by the fact that they didn't get along. We're still in the inscrutable, insidious Orient era. The fake-President gets extra squinty-eyed under pressure.

Familiar faces: Richard Loo as a military honcho and James Hong as the would-be substitute for the vice president, played by Phillip Pine who I best remember from The Savage Curtain (1969), an episode of the original Star Trek.

Directed by the experienced Byron Haskin -- The War of the Worlds (1953), The Naked Jungle (1954), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). This is the first of his six episodes.

Photographed by Conrad Hall, the first of his fifteen episodes.

The commentary track is by Reba Wissner, who gives a meticulous analysis of the musical themes and cues, pointing out that even subtle changes in the chords communicates something to the audience. "Nothing in film or TV music is accidental".

[ziggy6708a]

Whenever The Outer Limits is mentioned, the first image my mind conjures forth is The Zanti Misfits. For some reason I saw it several times - they must have re-run it in my area more than other episodes.

[wmcclain]

The Architects of Fear, directed by Byron Haskin.

A science fiction tragedy in three acts:

• Fearing imminent nuclear war, a secret cabal of scientists plot to unite humanity by giving them a common enemy: an alien menace. Which will be faked but convincing, complete with spaceship and raygun.
  
  Ok, that's a plan. It might work.
• But who thought it was a good idea to turn one of their members into an actual alien through torturous transformations of mind and body, replacing all his organs and giving him new body chemistry and senses?
  
  Didn't anyone suspect that this new being might be actually alien with incomprehensible thoughts and emotions, no longer part of their cunning plan?
• Finally: a monster loose on Earth, his mission never to be accomplished, might our alien retain some core of his human past, love and yearning for his wife and unborn child?

This is one of the most memorable episodes. Maybe the effects worked better in the old days on small low-definition TVs where the horror of the monster-making procedures were less explicit, more suggested.

Robert Culp is our hero in the first of his three episodes. A prolific TV actor -- I Spy -- he also had a movie career -- Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Hannie Caulder (1971).

His wife is played by Geraldine Brooks who I best remember at age 22 in Cry Wolf (1947) with Errol Flynn and Barbara Stanwyck. When young she much resembled later actress Natalie Portman.



Second acting credit for Billy Green Bush as one of the hunters. His first credit was in Stoney Burke the same year, made by the same people.

Notes:

• According to the wikipedia some stations censored the alien "Thetan" as too horrific.
• His encounter with the duck hunters inevitably suggests a parallel but comic scene in the later The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984).
• Returning: director Byron Haskin and cinematographer Conrad Hall.
• This is the first of three episodes by prolific TV writer Meyer Dolinsky.

On the Blu-ray the light commentary track is by Gary Gerani, who laughs at everything.

[wmcclain]

The Man with the Power, directed by László Benedek.

We jump right into the story: a meek little professor, wanting to help the space program, has implanted a new device in his brain that allows him to control vast energies. He eventually realizes that his subconscious is using it to attack and kill others who irritate or frustrate him. By the time he discovers the truth he can no longer control the power.

I didn't remember much about this one but with a rewatch it has several interesting features:

• A reminder of how far back eco-catastrophe scenarios go, with worries about exhaustion of resources and peak-everything. Set a little time in the future, the episode's narration begins:
  

  In the course of centuries, Man has devoured the Earth itself. The Machine Age has dried up the seas of oil. Industry has consumed the heartlands of coal. The Atomic Age has plundered the rare elements — uranium, cobalt, plutonium — leaving behind worthless deposits of lead and ashes. Starvation is at hand. Only here, in the void of space, is there a new source of atomic power.

• Brief hints that mind and brain are not the same thing, still debated today.
• The recognition that everyone yearns to be of consequence, to achieve something that matters.
• A revival of the old notion of the Evil Eye, of projecting evil thoughts out into the world. For a while this has been a metaphor for envy, of poisoning the social environment with greedy regard, but with science fiction we can make the old superstition literal again.
• The familiar dilemma of every modern Prometheus: that we have access to powers without the skill or wisdom to control them.

Our conflicted hero is Donald Pleasence who often got these interesting combinations of the meek and weird. Before this I remember him as the wicked Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) TV series. This same year he would do The Great Escape (1963) for John Sturges, then Cul-De-Sac (1966) for Roman Polanski, Fantastic Voyage (1966) for Richard Fleischer and on and on. He became a regular for John Carpenter.

Notes:

• Many familiar faces, including Edward Platt (North by Northwest (1959), Get Smart) and John Marley (Cat Ballou (1965), The Godfather (1972)).
• The plot of external manifestation of subconscious desires had been used in Forbidden Planet (1956).
• The "boiling cloud with lightning" effect is really pretty good, like something from another dimension.
• The "transformation of the human" becomes a continuing theme in the series.
• Another episode photographed by Conrad Hall.

No Blu-ray commentary track for this one.

[wmcclain]

The Sixth Finger, directed by James Goldstone.

Experiments in accelerated evolution transform a test subject into a man of first 20,000 years in the future, then a million years. He displays powers of mind and mind over mater, becomes arrogant and aggressive, but finally moves past that, wanting to leave the body behind and become pure mind, like an angel.

In this scenario evolution means increased intelligence, prefigured by clear class distinctions: the Londoner lording over the Welsh, the clean over the dirty, intellectuals over laborers and servants.

This is early in David McCallum's US career, and he brings great sensitivity to a role that might have been ridiculous if played differently. He and the makeup artist conspired to retain the character's expressiveness of eyes and mouth:



Notes:

• Another "transformed man" plot.
• Jill Haworth is Gwyllm's girl, "Kathy". She was offered the lead in Lolita (1962) but Otto Preminger owned her contract and wouldn't let her out of it.
• We have a man in a chimp costume. He is a transformed chimp, so maybe that works.
• The plot owes something to Pygmalion (1938) and My Fair Lady (1964) with the Professor taking in the dirty urchin and telling the landlady "Clean him up." It is easy to imagine Edward Mulhare as Higgins and in fact he took over the part from Rex Harrison in the stage version of "My Fair Lady".
• When still a dissatisfied coal miner, Gwyllm says he wants "to get out from under, away from this dirt and stupidity". When he is a hyper-intelligent man of the future, Kathy says his hatred of the town is all he has left. Which is not quite true: he retains his fondness for her.
• The notion that the gross body tethers the pure mind is an ancient idea, still under discussion.
• Note that it is Kathy on the machine who brings him back and determines his "just right" level. Men propose, but women dispose.
• The evolution machine has a simple "Forward / Back" lever. Didn't the Time Traveler have a similar control?
• Gwyllm seems dazed at the end. Are we sure he came back?
• The idea of perilous increase in IQ was used in an early Star Trek episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before, coincidentally by the same director.
• Photographed by John M. Nickolaus Jr, the first of his nine episodes. He and Conrad Hall are jointly credited with the visual look of the series.
• Glenn Gould provides some keyboard Bach, his second IMDB credit.

The commentary track is another encyclopedic effort by David J Schow, series expert. He had a couple of Outer Limits books, now out of print and fabulously expensive on the used market.

In this track he reveals something I had not realized: the show was very much an ensemble effort. Director Byron ("Bunny") Haskins and cinematographer Conrad Hall are not credited for this episode, but they were there and contributing.

He also points out that McCallum grows taller during his transformations, and that this happens on camera. Everyone on set was scrambling around with planks and orange crates just out of frame.

[wmcclain]

The Man Who Was Never Born, directed by Leonard Horn.

An astronaut of 1963 slips through the time barrier and finds that Earth of 2148 is desolate with the mutated, horribly disfigured human race nearing extinction. Atomic war? No: an alien microbe altered with unwise genetic manipulation.

He decides to take the gentle if hideous future man Andro back in time to persuade humanity not to do that. Problem: it seems you can cross the time barrier only once and our astronaut doesn't make it. Andro must complete the mission alone: prevent the military scientist from causing the catastrophe. Kill him if necessary.

Andro has special hypnotic powers: he can appear as the exotically handsome Martin Landau, allowing him to mix with humans of the past. Terminator (1984)-like, he has arrived too early and falls in love with the mother of the man he has to stop. Andro is both Kyle Reese and the Terminator Model 101 in one!

The setup for an SF action plot turns into a love triangle. Love triumphs because Andro is not a killer. But love also changes the future, which ought to be a happy ending, except: you can cross the time barrier only once. Andro can't return to the future, leaving Noelle alone in the space capsule...

Which is a shocking finale: we shift to an obvious sound stage, and then pull back as she drifts alone in a star field, fading out, lost in space.

That's bleak.

Another reason they can't be together: having changed the future, Andro no longer exists. As explained by the title.

This is another of my favorite, most memorable episodes, although I did not recall so much love triangle. The dialogue sometimes has a lecturing tone, like Rod Serling would use in his Twilight Zone scripts.

Conrad Hall uses soft lenses for a dream-like, fairy tale effect on Earth of 1963.

Notes:

• It is a Beauty and the Beast story, with something of the Princess and the Frog. Shirley Knight as Noelle is a golden girl.
• Another Star Trek analogue: The City on the Edge of Forever.
• The groom sees his runaway bride blast off with a space alien on their wedding day. Did he and the groomsmen go down to the bar and talk it out afterwards?
• The lens filtering produces amazing eye reflections in our lovers; I've never seen anything like it. Screen grabs don't show the effect, but it is spectacular (literaly) on the Blu-ray.
• I want to mention William A. Fraker, who often operated the camera for Conrad Hall, and did this and 14 other episodes. Fraker was a cinematographer in his own right -- Rosemary's Baby (1968), Bullitt (1968), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), 1941 (1979), WarGames (1983) -- and a director -- Monte Walsh (1970).

The commentary track is by Gary Gerani, who gives good production detail but tends to narrate the plot.

[wmcclain]

O.B.I.T., directed by Gerd Oswald.

A secret base uses an eerie surveillance monitor -- something like the interocitor in This Island Earth (1955) -- to spy on anyone, anywhere, at any time. Sometimes you get glimpses of aliens, and sometimes you see yourself just before clawed hands reach in to throttle you.

It's a great premise. Unfortunately a lot of time is taken up in a sort of courtroom drama when a Senator -- why him? -- arrives to grill everyone on a murder. He wants to know more about the Outer Band Individuated Teletracer and is astounded to find everyone vague on where they come from, how they work or how many there are.

It's not much of a spoiler to reveal the truth: aliens. Early on we see they are disguised as humans with heavy glasses, hairy hands, and walk with a curious limp. Their plan is just to provide the O.B.I.T. machines and let the human race ruin itself by using them as intended.

The machines are addictive. The base commander says: "I can't not watch it! It's like a drug!" As the commentary track points out, it's as if writer Meyer Dolinsky had visited the 21st century and come back with a cautionary, prophetic tale of constant mass surveillance and the destruction of privacy.

The "watching as addiction" metaphor applies to TV itself, as well as to the internet and pornography.

Much of the story takes place in one room; maybe that helps present the claustrophobic paranoia of the staff at the base, knowing they are always watched. Like a "ghost town" they say. No one talks, no one trusts.

The O.B.I.T. screen is nice and eerie, a wavering inter-dimensional look. Keyed to a living organism it shows only the human being (and their clothes!) but not any other object.

Photographed by Conrad Hall. First of 14 episodes directed by Gerd Oswald.

Commentary by Craig Beam. He wants more Outer Limits collectibles and resents Twilight Zone fans for getting all the good swag.

He also says Gerd Oswald deserves credit along with the cinematographers for the look of the series.

[wmcclain]

The Human Factor, directed by Abner Biberman.

Isolated military bases in the arctic are natural locations for SF thrillers, and this one begins like a scene from The Thing from Another World (1951). But no, that's not a alien in ice they are hauling in from the storm, but an atom bomb. The major who is cracking up and seeing guilt-induced visions of a dead man really wants to know how it works.

Not a lot of Outer Limits material here, more like an episode of Science Fiction Theater. As a bonus wrinkle a base scientist is -- for some damn reason at a radar base in the arctic -- working on a mind-sharing rig. When this goes all the way to mind transfer the erratic major has a good chance of getting to his a-bomb.

Many familiar faces. Big star Gary Merrill and Sally Kellerman at age 26. With Harry Guardino and Ivan Dixon and a glimpse of James Sikking.

I did not know that Abner Biberman directed but he has a long list of credits. I remember him best as the comical tough guy Louie in His Girl Friday (1940) ("She ain't no albino. She was born right here in this country"):



Photographed by Conrad Hall.

No commentary track.

[wmcclain]

Corpus Earthling, directed by Gerd Oswald.

After a lab accident a doctor begins hearing voices discussing the invasion of Earth. A metal plate in his head allows him to eavesdrop on a conversation no one else can hear. When the aliens become aware of him his death becomes their priority.

The two invaders look like simple lumps of coal. They "breathe" when no one is watching and when attacking they turn into crab-like creatures, which are rudimentary rubber models but still horrific in effect.

It's a familiar dilemma from other paranoia stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): when faced with the impossible, do you doubt your own sanity or decide the universe is not what you supposed? Keep it to yourself or risk being sent to the psycho ward?

I remember this one! You can bet I scrutinized my rock collection carefully afterwards. "Fear of rocks" is a new one, but you can see how it can work: rocks are inconceivably ancient compared to human life. Who knows what mysteries the Earth has known during those millions of years?

I also started having the paranoia dream: finding that everyone had changed and I was the last one...

I did not remember the intimate TV drama moments between husband and wife, tending to ignore those segments when I was young. Now I study the dark, striking visual composition of the scenes.

Another intriguing plot point I had forgotten: our couple flees to a modest rental pueblo in Mexico. When danger appears the caretaker builds a circle of fires, claiming this is a defense against possession by evil forces, and that his people have known this evil many times.

It is a remarkably bleak episode. In a truly horrific segment the wife is captured and her face forced down onto the crab-alien while she screams and screams.

Robert Culp returns. His wife is played by Salome Jens who I remember having a good part in Seconds (1966); didn't she jump into the vat of grapes during the orgiastic wine festival?

Photographed by Conrad Hall.

The commentary track is by Craig Beam. He says that William A. Fraker was the camera operator on every one of the first season episodes.