Re: [scifinoir2] "Outer Limits" Marathon on SyFy

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:17:21 -0700

That's one of those I've never seen all the way to the end. One forgets how good an actress Phillips can be, given the opportunity and sobriety.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Baxter" <martinbaxt...@gmail.com>
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 8, 2010 2:33:54 PM
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] "Outer Limits" Marathon on SyFy

 

Keith, that's exactly why I passed on that ep. Too vivid, even for my twisted brain.

The ep I wanted to see was the one at 1 pm Eastern, with MacKenzie Phillips and Colin Mochrie of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", about a UFO nut and a security guard who come into possession of what appears to be a fragment of a UFO that crashed. You can see the twist coming from light-years off (one of them is part of the cover-up), and it still gets you every time. I saw the ep that's on now, with the military droid on the run, last month, so I'm passing on it for Graham Kerr. (Ultra Old School, am I. )

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Keith Johnson <keithbjohn...@comcast.net> wrote:
 

There's an "Outer Limits" (the newer series) marathon on SyFy now. The good thing is, because the show's airing was so inconsistent back in the day, I can always find an ep or two I've never seen, seen only partially, or seen only one time. There were some really good shows in that series. The ep on now, however, is one I have trouble watching. It stars Joel Grey as a grief-stricken scientist whose only son died. He secrets funds and parts from the lab where he works to build a robotic son as a substitute, complete with true self-awareness.   The problem is, he has to hide this project, both from the lab whose resources he's pilfering, and of course from the world at large, which would treat his "son" as a freak--or menace. What makes this oft-used scifi trope effective in this show is the combination of touching sadness and faint fear the show engenders. For example, the robot boy is obviously not real: his movements are jerky, his eyes are two balls devoid of sockets or real lids, his mouth is just teeth with no lips. His overall skeleton--only the upper body at first--is metallic, with a small amount of skinlike material on his lower jaw. In short, he looks much like the Terminator skeleton with a bit more human characteristics added.  That alone wouldn't be disturbing, but the child actor who voices the robot is so genuine, so emotive, so "real", that hearing that voice come out of a near-expressionless face is quite disturbing. The "Uncanny Valley" effect is really working here. Adding to the growing sense of unease about the child is that when he's angry or hurt, one then sees it not just as a angry child, but a potentially deadly robot whose features are already frankly frightening. It's the Frankenstein's Monster effect again: he may be a child, and act like a child, but he's in a frightening body that can do harm, and his childlike tantrums can turn deadly.
The scene that always disturbs me the most is when the dad comes home to find his son with the family cat. "Shhh", the son says, "he feel asleep, and I'm petting him. He's so pretty...." The camera pans down to show the lifeless body of the cat, literally shredded to bloody ribbons by the unfeeling metallic hands of the son. He didn't mean to kill the cat, but had no concept of death, his strength, nor an ability to feel. There's something extremely creepy about this robot child have human innocence, but the body and face of a monster, which makes his anguished outburst over realizing he'd killed the cat both poignant and frightening at the same time. You actually feel for the child, but fear the thing in which he's house. Again, like Frankenstein's Monster. One of the better "Outer Limits" I've ever seen, but I can't sit through it more than once.




--
"If all the world's a stage and we are merely players, who the bloody hell wrote the script?" -- Charles E Grant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQUxw9aUVik

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