ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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This is an exceptionally well done episode with a great story and a frightening premise.

The cast is also impressive. Ed Asner is a police sergeant investigating the death of a scientist who was part of a team are studying an energy creature which kills people by absorbing the electrical energy from their bodies, giving them heart attacks.

Kent Smith (who plays a major role in The Invaders TV series) is the scientists in charge of the team, and he becomes obsessed with finding a way to control the energy creature.

The FX of the energy being are genuinely creepy — and impossible to describe. You have to see it to appreciate it.

WARNING! Both the beginning and end of this episode are puzzling and a bit disappointing — because the episode never really explains where the energy creature came from . . . or how it was sent by to its confinement in the end.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

"It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork" December 9, 1963. Written by Joseph Stefano.

Unconventionally structured and staffed with abstruse characters, "ICOOTW" nearly demands to be interpreted as allegory, since as a linear dramatic narrative it does very little.

It does present two typical Stefano touches: A bastille of scientific research presented in Old Dark House terms, and characters that illuminate their oddball backgrounds largely in terms of talkative asides not directly connected to the plot.

The show can easily be read for the obvious parable, a caution against the destructive potential of nuclear power, that annihilatory boogeyman of post-World War Two thinking, and the need for the technicians who toy with it to be governed by a human conscience.

But paradoxically, the show's basis, and perhaps its message, is the thing least accessible to the viewer, since it has to do with a theory Stefano holds about writing.

"We write or make films as a kind of exorcism," he says. "And what keeps us writing is the fact these things never really do get exorcised no matter how many films or scripts we do."

The soulless nature of Block's NORCO drones is an aspect of the show's indictment of atomic energy. The only use to which Block is able to put the energy cloud is murder.

Like real-life nuclear researchers, he is a slave to the power he is presumably investigating, and no matter what the rationalization for puttering with such power might be, the bottom line is always the struggle to keep it penned up and under control.

For Stefano, this unstable, insatiable, all-consuming vortex was The Outer Limits. "I was not unaware of that, and it's true of producing for television," said Stefano. "Am I in control of the show . . . or does it control me?"

~ The Outer Limits Official Companion.