We Will Control All That You See & Hear

Poll people familiar with its original 60s run and most will probably voice plenty of praise for The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling’s hour-long excursions into homiletic sci-fi and fantasy changed the face of television and influenced countless subsequent shows. I’m a huge fan myself and the fact that all of that program’s episodes are now available in DVD box sets is a boon that speaks to the great value of the medium. Still, for many these sets are prohibitively priced.

Poll the same sample as to their opinions on The Outer Limits and I’d conjecture the results as far less uniformly positive. As the skinny, bespectacled brother to The Twilight Zone the show has long been the holder of a second class status. Granted, no episode of The Outer Limits could touch Serling’s anthology at its best, but there were plenty of clunkers on the coveted side of the fence too. Part of the problem stemmed from The Outer Limits origins. Commissioned by ABC to compete with the already popular and critically-lauded Twilight Zone on CBS (then in its fourth season) the series suffered from a short-sightedness on the part of the corporate suits when it came to financing and support.

Talent wasn’t the problem. A stable of promising actors and writers including: Donald Pleasance, Robert Duvall, Bruce Dern, Warren Oates, Meyer Dolinsky and Harlan Ellison ensured fertility on the creative front. But the economic situation was often dire with slim funds stretched nearly to the snapping point. The bright side of the network’s ambivalent attitude was an increased measure of artistic latitude for the show’s production team. Directors were encouraged to try new things, to experiment both visually and thematically, devising stories that pushed the boundaries of the set-up/punch line narrative form, every so often with wildly inventive results.

The show quickly established an emblematic atmosphere and import. Chief among the earmarks was the opening transmission from an omniscient alien presence personified as the Control Voice. The spoken preamble presented a simple, but highly effective demonstration of his/its power:

“There is nothing wrong with your television set;
do not attempt to adjust the picture.
We are controlling transmission.
We will control the horizontal.
We will control the vertical.
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.
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…”

Without the intrusion of commercial breaks the illusion is even more palpable. Dime store budgets were the norm, but the directors and actors often made surprising do with the scant resources, taking risks in trying out temerarious new techniques. Source material tapped the mother lode of pre-Code sci-fi comics and pulp fiction magazines, mixing lurid psychological angst and skepticism with cosmic and even metaphysical concepts that spoke to the conflicting magnitude and insignificance of the human condition. The protagonists frequently found themselves embroiled in the thankless task of searching for some semblance of sense and worth in an immeasurably vast and lonely universe.

The third episode “The Architects of Fear” is a great case in point. Robert Culp (of later I Spy fame who would star in several more episodes including what some consider the series’ pinnacle hour “Demon with a Glass Hand” in Season Two) plays the part of a military man chosen through the drawing of straws to take part in a secret perilous experiment designed to compel humankind into a condition of world peace. The shadow and light effects used in several of the scenes are amazingly effective and Culp’s harrowing transformation from naïve patriot into gibbering monstrosity leaves legitimate chills.

Make-up and prosthetics rarely move beyond bargain basement, drive-in monster movie fare. Some are even laughably on par with the antiquated Cliffhanger serials from which stock footage is occasionally pilfered. Rubber-masked aliens & monsters represent the norm. But there’s a grotesque flair to a handful of the creatures, especially when rendered in the stark black & white cinematography that is sometimes genuinely creepy. “The Galaxy Being” employs clever negative-imaging & post-filming strategies to create the chimera of a glowing, radiation-spewing, pure energy interloper from Andromeda.

The stories span a spectrum from silly and preachy to ambitious, thought-provoking and surprisingly dark in tone and design. In the ominously-titled “A Feasibility Study” an entire suburban neighborhood finds itself transplanted to alien planet where the native populace, riddled with a deformative disease, seeks to dilute its tainted gene pool with unwilling conscripts. Atomic Age and Communist Threat fears of the era give unexpected gravitas to a lot of the tales. “The Invisibles” imagines a shadowy alien conspiracy and the neurotic government agent assigned to infiltrate and expose its nefarious schemes. “Corpus Earthling” posits a pair of rock-sized protoplasmic aliens that plot their own path to world domination from the storage shelf of a geology laboratory. Drug culture gets a nod in “Specimen: Unknown” when an unlucky crew of astronauts finds their bachelor-pad spaceship besieged by lethal fungal spores.

Regrettably, the series also borrows the creaky trope of pansophical pedantic narrator from its sister show on occasion. These preachy moralizing pronouncements always feel dated and distract from the ideas as they are explored more subtlety in the stories. Acting runs the gamut too, from Ralph Meeker’s wooden and hammy turn as a lovelorn mercenary in “Tourist Attraction,” a lame passion play where amphibian monsters unintentionally aid in a South American coup, to a convincing turn by Martin Landau in “The as a mind-controlling mutant who travels back in time to assassinate the inventor of future plague in the “Man Who Was Never Born”. The deliciously-pulpish titled “Don’t Open Till Doomsday” delivers perhaps the most demented mélange of material: a bats-in-the-belfry widow ensconced in a crumbling gothic mansion, an innocent newly-wed couple on the run from a domineering father, and a one-eyed, blob-shaped, world-eradicating alien trapped in a space-time defying metal breadbox all collide in a tale tall on melodrama and crazy camera angles.

I’ve owned the First Season set for nearly two years and have only managed to watch about half the 32 episodes. Memory dim to my initial screenings as a kid, the fun in revisiting these shows in piecemeal fashion is something I’ve come to savor. Season Two, came out about a year ago, but I’ve yet to pull the trigger. Aside from a handful of classics like the above mentioned and “Soldier,” another Harlan Ellison-penned potboiler that would decades later serve as the seed of The Terminator, many of these episodes purportedly wallow in formulaic tedium. Budget constraints and a newly invasive team of network analysts put the kibosh on much of the creativity, hoping to spoon-feed the show to a larger audience by stifling its more subversive elements. The agenda back-fired and the program imploded under the pressure after only half a season. The Twilight Zone may hold the crown, but in its prime The Outer Limits was certainly a contender. As a repository for generous doses of Cold War paranoia and technological trepidation that would drive luddites to cheer, all filtered through a vintage cathode ray tube conduit, this show is very nearly without peer.