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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
The most successful and memorable device used to throw "Outer Limits" viewers off balance, of course, was its monsters. For better or worse, the creatures that figured in many episodes remain the show's most enduring association, well beyond any of the series' ethical or artistic innovations.
It was more or less planned that way from the beginning. In the canons for "The Outer Limits" -- a set of guidelines written for prospective screenwriters at the behest of ABC -- Stefano specified that each episode include what he called a "bear" to "induce wonder or tolerable terror or even merely conversation and argument." In the best episodes, however, the bears were more than simple story requirements meant to attract sponsors or frighten preadolescents: They served as surrealistic, symbolic manifestations of key story points -- when, that is, they weren't the key points themselves. Grotesque, beautiful or both, the monsters were the longing, befuddlement and temporal joy of human experience made distorted flesh, and their shocking and occasionally extraneous presence was as essential to the series as Stevens and Stefano's radical ethos.
To accomplish this, the bears fell into several distinct but far from absolute categories, including horrifically altered humans who reveal just how monstrous humanity can be (the hydrocephalic Übermensch of "The Sixth Finger," a refined aesthete with a radiation-wracked visage in "The Man Who Was Never Born" and a bulb-eyed megalomaniac known as "The Mutant"); shapeless, antagonistic blobs who, although thoroughly unappealing themselves, somehow manage to expose our deepest appetites (the aforementioned psychosexual lump from "Don't Open Till Doomsday" and a featureless, gelatinous whatsit that appeared in both "The Mice" and "The Guests"); belligerent, imperialistic alien species who know an easy mark when they see one -- or so they think (a race of leprous, immobile super-intellectuals in "A Feasibility Study," smug, smirking Cyclopes intent on writing the human race's "O.B.I.T." and a pair of murderous rocks -- yes, rocks -- in "Corpus Earthling"); and, finally, benevolent alien rogues whose gentle curiosity or misguided compassion throw the notion of "humanity" into ambiguous relief (ethereal, luminescent pacifists in "The Galaxy Being" and "The Bellero Shield," and insectoid/avian waking nightmares in, respectively, "The Children of Spider County" and "Second Chance").
Such high-minded purpose may seem beyond the reach of actors in rubber monster suits, but it's worth considering that had the "Outer Limits" pantheon of twisted demons and saints carried on in the usual ghoulish fashion, all bloodlust and lurking, they most likely wouldn't be as indelibly etched as they are in the species memory of television viewers.
If the "Outer Limits" bonanza of shocks and symbolism sounds too good to last, it was. Halfway through the first season, network brass became jittery over the show's disappointing ratings and unprecedented material and began pressuring Stevens and Stefano to tailor the series to more conventional tastes (read: "Lost in Space"). Already faced with steadily shrinking budgets, they left the series rather than submit to a bastardization of its original conception. They had completed a meager, albeit unforgettable, 32 episodes.
Under replacement producer Ben Brady, ABC's then vice-president of programming and a longtime producer of the popular "Perry Mason" series, the show became all but unrecognizable. Brady had little experience with or interest in the fantastic, and his handling of "The Outer Limits" was predictably catastrophic. Gone were Frontiere's mournful, pensive symphonic score and Hall's dynamic lighting and camerawork, to say nothing of Stefano's thematic preoccupations. In their place were wailing theremins straight out of '50s sci-fi movies, washed-out static master shots, and an addlepated "man mustn't meddle in God's handiwork" philosophy.
There were a few gems buried in the second season, including novelist and short-story writer Harlan Ellison's spare, apocalyptic chase-through-time thriller "Demon With a Glass Hand" (one of the series' finest hours), and Robert C. Dennis' wonderfully ambiguous "The Duplicate Man," a near-perfect throwback to the high standards of the Stevens-Stefano era that features a morally drained biologist who sends a clone to do his dirty work. But it was largely TV as usual, moderately retooled for sci-fi purposes -- Brady even managed to sneak in a Mason-esque courtroom drama called "I, Robot" that's impossible to sit through with a straight face. After just 17 more episodes, the show ground to a sloppy, indifferent halt.
It was an unfortunate end for a series that had broken new ground so early and so memorably. But while it was nowhere near as long-lived as "The Twilight Zone" or as much of a fan fave as "Star Trek," "The Outer Limits" has nonetheless maintained a small, fiercely dedicated following since its cancellation. It has been in near-steady syndication (it currently haunts the wee hours of the Sci-Fi Channel's lineup), and even spawned an "update" on Showtime in the mid '90s (although the less said about that bland, misbegotten hack job the better). Most intriguing of all, its echoes can be detected in such disparate cinematic works as each of the four Alien movies, both Terminators, and arguably the paranoiac oeuvres of David Lynch and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Even more than these films, though, the series' use of pulp accoutrements as portals into complex intellectual and moral territory was its undeniable trump card. If, as Pauline Kael once wrote, pulp "can take a stronger hold on people's imaginations than art, because it doesn't affect the conscious imagination, the way a great novel does," the genius of "The Outer Limits" was in its ability to do, and to be, both.
