INSIDE THE OUTER LIMITS

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.” 

For 49 episodes between September of 1963 and January of 1965 the Control Voice introduced ABC’s prime time anthology entry with one of the creepiest openings in television history. Series creator, Leslie Stevens originally christened the show Please Stand By, but ABC executives worried viewers tuning would see a Please Stand By screen and change the channel to NBC or CBS. The show was re-named The Outer Limits.

Josepf Stefano, who was the producer and wrote 12 of season one’s 32 scripts conceived of the idea of each show having a ‘bear’ or monster for shock value. This in itself made it different from the Twilight Zone which was often more conceptual in its jolts. Secondly, where as Twilight Zone was really based around speculative stories, the Outer Limits were straight up sci-fi. Each episode featured men in lab coats, military uniforms or space helmets. They were like Marvel comics come to life, all about Gamma rays, and radiation, and mutation, and then on cue – BOO! – Bear/Monster appears. Often they were (and are) quite effective, sometimes not so much. Sometimes a guy in a monster suit just looks like … a guy in a monster suit.

What I find remarkable about the original Outer Limits is the pure quality of the programs. As hour long episodes they are nearly as long as many of the genre feature films of the era and the actual production values exceed their cinema counterparts. The lighting in most episodes is atmospheric and unlike anything else in television until you get to Chris Carter’s shows The X-Files and Millennium in the 1990’s. The caliber of scripts and performances were always topnotch as well, even in the maligned second season after Stevens and Stefano left the show.

Of the 49 original shows I’ve compiled a list below of my favourite ten episodes of the Outer Limits:

#10 – Cold Hands, Warm Heart (Season 2) How can you not love Bill Shatner starring as an astronaut involved with a mission called Project Vulcan??? A pre-Star Fleet Kirk (not really, but it’s fun to pretend) returns to earth after one mission and begins to have his internal thermometer go out of whack. He can’t get warm, damn it. If … only … McCoy were there!

#9 – It Crawled Out of the Woodpile (Season 1) Well it came from the vacuum cleaner actually and the moral of the story for us men is, Don’t vacuum! Not ever. Bad things will happen. Edward Asner (with hair) stars as a military man who attempts to restrain the Energy Monster that escapes from the Electrolux. The control voice outro at the end of the episode tells us, “(Energy) must be lived with. It must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil … and somehow lived with peaceably.” The way I see it – vacuuming bad. Note: Master of the Macabre TM Stephen King claims this episode had his favourite ‘bear’.

#8 – The Galaxy  Beast (Season 1) Starring Cliff Robertson, this episode was the premiere episode of the series, airing September 16th 1963. Robertson plays a radio station engineer who inadvertently traps an alien from the Andromeda galaxy in a radio frequency. The Andromedan is later unintentionally released, and, damn it, doesn’t it go on a violent destructive spree in SoCal? There are some very nice POV shots from the Beast’s perspective, which predate their use in Black Christmas by a decade. This series opener totally sets the tone for what is to follow. Let loose the Bears!

#7 – The Forms of Things Unknown (Season 1) There’s a very good reason this is perhaps the most atypical episode of the Outer Limits. It was shot as the pilot for another ABC series altogether. When the network scrapped the proposed The Unknown, Stefano repackaged it slightly to become his final episode for the Outer Limits. It must be loved for it’s pure crazy-ass neo-gothic energy. The plot? Two women (Vera Miles and Barbara Rush) poison their douchy lover and throw his body in the trunk of a car. BUT, isn’t it a dark and stormy night? Doesn’t the car breakdown? Aren’t they forced to go to an old mansion occupied by an eccentric old man and a mad inventor who brings the douchy dead man back to life??? Of course, to ALL OF THE ABOVE! Delicious goodness. The episode is a no-holds-barred mix, of say, Dark Shadows, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bound, and every European art house film you’ve ever seen or could imagine ever seeing.

The Forms of Things Unknown

#6 – The Bellero Shield (Season 1) It’s so good, it’s almost Tennessee Williams with Laser Guns and Aliens. This is another of my favourite underrated episodes. Though it deals with aliens – it is the Outer Limits, after all – there is an attractive evenness and maturity to this episode, and it’s themes that draw me back to it for repeated viewings. The cast doesn’t hurt either. Martin Landau is always superb. The novelty of seeing Neil Hamilton, the Commissioner from Batman doing something other than reach for the Batphone is compelling, and the wonder of a stunning young Sally Kellerman riffing on Lady MacBeth certainly doesn’t hurt either.

#5 – The Zanti Misfits (Season 1) If The Bellero Shield is slightly more high-brow, then  the Zanti Misfits is all out Monster Movie fun for the 10 year-old in all of us. KILLER ALIEN ANTS!!! Earth is forced to let prisoners from the planet Zanti set up a penal colony in the town of Morgue, California. Unfortunately wildman Bruce Dern accidently let’s them lose resulting in the most action packed B-movie style climax to hit the boob tube … until Sharknado came along.

The Zanti Misfits

#4 – The Man Who Was Never Born (Season 1) An exceptional teleplay here manages to mix Beauty and the Beast with a classic time travel conundrum. Martin Landau plays, Andro, an Earthling from the future who travels back to present day earth to kill the parents of the man who will cause a catastrophic plague. Shirley Knight plays the woman who falls in love with Andro and alters the course of history.

Martin Landau & Shirley KnightThe Man Who Was Never Born

# 3 – Soldier (Season 2) Qarlo is an emotionless soldier who, while in battle, falls through a wormhole to a modern American city circa 1964, and commences to shoot the place up until he is arrested and detained for questioning. The episode was the first written by legendary writer Harlan Ellison and features powerful performances by Michael Ansara as Qarlo and veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan. Ellison’s scripts Soldier and Demon With A Glass Hand were eventually acknowledged to be the basis for James Cameron’s Terminator films.

#2 – The Architects of Fear (Season 1) Architects may be the perfect example of an Outer Limits episode. You’ve got scientists in lab coats, military men, and your creepy crawly monstrosities. You want Cold War fear? This one opens with missiles flying and a mushroom cloud. That’s the starting point! The premise to the episode is similar to the concept of mutually assured destruction. A deterrent to war will be created – one that will frighten the enemy into submission. Robert Culp gives an outstanding performance that reminded me of Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg’s The Fly. At the time of its original airing, some ABC affiliates deemed the Theta monster too frightening and cut to black whenever the monster appeared on screen.

Demon With A Glass Hand

#1 – Demon With A Glass Hand (Season 2) Another outstanding Culp performance and another classic Ellison script. Without Culp’s performance as Trent, the amnesiac android with the glass appendage, we don’t get Arny chasing Sarah Connor, saying things like “Hasta la vista, Baby.” You’ll also notice that this episode was shot in the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, the same building where Harrison Ford’s character Deckard is chased down by Rutger Hauer’s replicant in the climax of Blade Runner. Ellison’s original script called for a cross-country chase but ABC had already cut the budget of the show after the first season and producers were forced to keep the action of Demon in the one location. The script for Demon With A Glass Hand won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Script for Television Anthology of 1965. It  remains a classic.

But 1965 seemed to bring about the end of the golden age of anthology TV. Both the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits were done. Even the grandaddy of them all, The Alfred Hitchock Hour called it a day in 1965 after 10 years of murder and mayhem. Executives wanted cheaper programming. It was easier to go with a show that used the same sets week in and week out. Colour TV was about to go mainstream as well which meant happy, upbeat programming like The Monkees and Batman not brooding, nail-biters that fit the tone of B&W cold war paranoia.

It was time for horror/sci-fi anthology TV to bow out. At least for awhile. A few years down the road Kolchak would be stalking in the night, going after a new monster each week.

On January 16th, 1965 the last episode of the original Outer Limits aired and the Control Voice said for the final time, “We now return control of your television set to you. Until next week at the same time, when the control voice will take you to — The Outer Limits.”