January 9, 2024: Our Outer Limits rewatch resumes with season 2, episodes 1-4!

Season 2, Episode 1 “Soldier”

This episode was first broadcast September 10, 1964

The helmet Quarlo wears in this episode would be reused in Mork & Mindy and worn by the alien Mork played by Robin Willians.

The R logo on the enemy soldier’s wrist device would later be used as the logo for Radio Shack.

This episode along with “Demon in a Glass Hand” were both written by author Harlan Ellison who accused James Cameron of ripping them off for his movie Terminator. He ended up suing Cameron and won.

This episode was based on Ellison’s own short story, “Soldier from Tomorrow” and marked his first science fiction teleplay for which he was paid the princely sum of $5,000. The short story included an anti-war speech that also appeared in the first draft of the script but was eventually cut.

The ever-combatative Ellison was not happy with the way this episode turned out: “In TV they don’t understand the subtleties of character. When a script runs long, or has production problems, the first things cut are the scenes that deepen characterization. Those changes tore the gut out of that show. That’s why, for me, it’s a less attractive or interesting show than Demon with a Glass Hand.”

Ellison’s first draft was markedly different. Quarlo ends up materializing in a subway station where he is overwhelmed by the surrounding noises. He is picked up by the police who assume him to be drunk and he ends up in jail where he is rescued by a Professor Charney. Quarlo falls into love with the professor’s young daughter and even gets a kiss from her before his final showdown with the enemy soldier (who downs a plane, destroys a radio tower, and killing an old man) enroute to their final encounter.

According to producer Ben Brady: ” Ellison got as close as a TV writer can get to having complete control over his material. He was truculent, and extremely difficult; he vanished all the time. It took him weeks and weeks to deliver a script, but once we got it, it would be pretty goddamned exciting. If we wanted to change it, he’d be dying to do it, and what are you going to do with such a talented writer – let someone else screw around with the dialogue?“

That said, story consultant Seeleg Lester added the gun shop scene in a bid to add more excitement to the episode, but the entire sequence is pointless and, ultimately, little more than a stage weight.

Big screen star Lloyd Nolan was paid $5,000 for his portrayal of Professor Tom Sagan. If his performance struck you as monotone and shouty, Ellison offered a possible explanation: “His lines sound stilted because he’s reading them. He was deaf. And no one knew it.“ Nolan’s last role was a guest spot on Murder She Wrote. At the time, he was terminally ill fighting lung cancer and the struggle affected his memory, causing him to struggle with his lines. Angela Lansbury apparently worked hard to help him through his scenes.

Michael Ansara, who played Quarlo, found it an overall positive experience: “I have a lot of fans who still love that show and think it’s one of the better episodes of The Outer Limits. Not because I’m in it but because it was well-written, well done and very unusual . . . I still get fan letters from that.“ Ansara, by the way, was married to Barbara Eden and played the role of the Klingon Kang in three iterations of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the original series.

Orangey, who played the family cat, was the only feline to win two Patsy Awards which are the animal equivalent to the Oscars. His storied career began with the 1951 movie Rhubarb in which he played the titular character, a cat who inherits a baseball team. Over the course of his near 20 year career, Orangey guest appeared in such esteemed productions as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) in addition to sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies, Batman, I Dream of Jeannie, and Mission: Impossible. If he looks familiar to you, that’s because he also made an appearance in The Twilight Zone episode “The Night of the Meek”.

Okay, season 2 is off to a promising start. I did like the story and the overall episode, but did find the prospect of the government allowing a professor to effectively adopt an alien to bring home to his family pretty ludicrous. It would have made a great premise for a t.v. sitcom. This was a solid outing but I can’t help but wonder how much better this episode would have been had they stuck with Ellison’s original script. I understand the need to lose certain elements if the episode was running long, but the fact that the production added that pointless gun shop sequence makes me side with Ellison here.

Season 2, Episode 2 “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”

This episode was first broadcast September 26, 1964

“Cold Hands, Warm Heart” was originally planned as the season 2 opener but it was eventually deemed too weak and the slot was given to the superior “Soldier”.

The military base exteriors and lab scenes were shot at TRW Space and Defense (now Northrop Grumman Space Technology). It would be used as a backdrop for the Star Trek episode “Operation – Annihilate!” as the planet Deneva.

The strange sounds we hear on the Venusian’s approach marked the first time digitally generated sounds were used in film or television.

According to story consultant Seeleg Lester: “The focal point of the astronaut’s physiological changes was his need for more heat. Later on, I had to rewrite it; that he became a monster with talons was just ABC wanting monsters.“

Actress Geraldine Brooks makes her second appearance on the show following “The Architects of Fear”, once again playing a distraught wife dealing with a mutating husband.

1st AD Robert Justman’s recollections of director Charles F. Haas were less than complimentary: “Haas was a nice man, but not a good director“

William Shatner, reflecting back on this episode: “I remember webbed hands, a kind of excitement and a weird kind of story . . . it was all a strange bent and everybody approached it weirdly. And I remember how wonderful Connie Hall was.“

Then, reflecting back on the show as a whole: “Science fiction attaches itself to our imagination. I think we were all influenced by The Outer Limit, by everything that came before, all those shows that dealt with the
extraterrestrial element of our imagination helped us
understand what works and what doesn’t.“

It’s interesting that the two episodes that kick off season 2 have more of a Twilight Zone feel than their predecessors. Had they fully embraced that feel in this episode by leaning more into the transformation and offering a more clever, less leaden ending, I may have liked it more. Shatner is, as always, terrific, but he really doesn’t get much to work with here.

Season 2, Episode 3 “Behold Eck!”

This episode was first broadcast October 3, 1964

The footage of the exploding radio transmitter tower was a reuse from “The Galaxy Being”.

Eck has the shape of some of the flashes of the energy monster featured in “It Crawled out of the Woodwork”.

According to David J. Schow in The Outer Limits Companion: “The two Eck suits were full-body affairs in black velvet, filmed against a black background. The first featured the white “lightning bolt” outline of Eck, and the second was decorated with glittering triangles of metal that imparted a sparkling effect to the creature
once he hits the TV and becomes visible. While unusual and eye-catching, these suits are nothing l ike the creature described in Mantley’s script: ‘There are long, overpoweringly muscular hands and arms attached to a short body. The head is huge, with four eyes. The face is rather sad-looking, set on a body with no neck. The legs and thighs are huge and muscular . . . and reach almost to the chest.'”

The idea of a two-dimensional being was inspired by the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott. The original treatment of the script by writer William Cox, titled “The Reluctant Monster”, was more light-hearted. It was handed of to writer John Mantley who wrote the script, doing a poor job of realizing the initial concept.

Director Byron Haskin reflected back on his Outer Limits experience: “The second season was panics-ville; everybody knew the show was croaking.” As for this episode: “I only did it because White and Ben Brady wouldn’t let me out of my Outer Limits contract. It was an alleged comedy that was just a bomb. They laid that script in my hands; I got one sniff of it and damn near fainted. Most of it I either rewrote or made up on the set. Peter Lind Hayes was able to do light comedy, but that script didn’t even give him a chance.”

Story consultant Seeleg Lester, on the other hand, felt Haskin deserved some of the blame for how the episode turned out: “As soon as Haskin started to direct, it looked bad. When I tried to straighten out something in
a script, he’d tell me, ‘What the hell: Take your money and run’ – that’s the kind of director he was.“

This one had the makings of passable comedic episode but never quite gets there. Not quite committed to its humor while, simultaneously, slight in its approach to the interdimensional threat, it results in an unsatisfying outing across the board. “Behold Eck!” feels like a charmless truncated B-movie. The one aspect I did like that really stood out for me was that the character of Elizabeth Dunn played by Joan Freeman demonstrated more intelligence, independence, and proactivity than any other female character in this series to date.

Season 2, Episode 4 “Expanding Human”

This episode was first broadcast October 10, 1964

This episode was obviously inspired by Dr. Timothy Leary’s experiments with hallucinogenics that saw him dismissed from Harvard University in 1963. It also clearly owes a little to “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.

Assistant to the Producer B. Ritchie Payne recalled working with director Gerd Oswald: “Gerd was a workhorse, always through at six o’clock. Then he’d come up, and we’d break out the J & B and discuss how the shooting went, and how things were going to govtomorrow. Gerd was always finished – by God – by the
last day of the shooting schedule .”

Sadly, Oswald didn’t have a lot to work with. Series producer Ben Brady admitted: “We’d grab whatever we could and throw it in front of the camera as cheaply as we could, and a lot of things looked ridiculous.” Boy, I understand being critical of the occasional misfire, but to make this kind of blanket statement about the production as a whole reflects poorly not just on the show but Brady himself.

B. Ritchie Payne would was similarly frank about this particular episode: “It’s one of those shows you would not want to spend a lonely evening looking at. Some shows you would sooner forget, because you knew
when you made it, it wasn’t right, and you just didn’t have the time or money to fix it , and so you let it go.
Those shows just pass my mind with, oh, my god! “

As nice as it was to see a young James Doohan, this episode was a talky snooze. Again, it’s an intriguing idea that is ultimately under-serviced by a weak script.

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