Don't Open Till Doomsday
Directed by Gerd Oswald; written by Joseph Stefano. Cast: Miriam Hopkins (Mary Kry); Buck Taylor (Gard Hayden); Melinda Plowman (Vivia Hayden); John Hoyt (Emmett Balfour); Nellie Burt (Wife); David Frankham (Harvey Kry); Russell Collins (Justice of the Peace). Broadcast January 20, 1963. Story: On the run from a disapproving father, underage newlyweds Gard and Vivia take refuge in a remote house owned by eccentiric Mrs. Kry. The honeymoon is cut short, however, by a most unusual and unwelcome wedding present from their landlady.
In its own obscure fashion, The Outer Limits specialized in frank, often painfully honest explorations of subjects normally avoided by all but the most prolix of television programs. The spiritual dilemmas of "A Feasibility Study," for instance, or the harsh and awkward marital dynamics in "ZZZZZ," represent an honest attempt to wrestle with complex human values rather than base human sensations. It's a hallmark of the series. But even recognizing and appreciating the fruits of this brave approach leaves one ill-prepared for the unsavory sexual undercurrents at play in "Don't Open Till Doomsday." Joseph Stefano (in screenwriter mode) takes an unflinching and highly personal look at the horror of frustrated desire in "Doomsday," and chronicles its inevitable, explosive release. It's one of the series'—and television's—most sublimely disturbing hours, and its unpleasant effects linger long after the episode ends.
This is not to imply that "Doomsday" is in any way sexually graphic—on the contrary, Stefano's subtlety and skill as a symbolist and the tastes of the era dictated that the episode's themes take shape in less direct, and thereby more disquieting, forms. Yet an aura of impropriety still manages to hang over the episode. From the intrusive, near-lustful probing of the newlyweds by the wife of the justice of the peace to Mrs. Kry's embarrassingly flirtatious exchanges with Gard (and, ultimately, to the implicitly incestuous dominion Emmett Balfour has over his daughter), the film hinges on the suggestion of inappropriate sexual behavior. This atmosphere is borne out in a series of candid scenes designed to build an inexorable tension, the most prolonged and unnerving of which involve the featureless, strangely alluring box containing Harvey Kry and his alien captor. In the first of these scenes, as Vivia is helplessly absorbed into the box, her moaning is a plainly sexual mixture of pleasure and pain that is both shocking and uncomfortably erotic; significantly, we never experience her final teleportation into the box—the scene's "orgasm." Later, Mrs. Kry kneels before the cube as she implores the resolute Harvey to capitulate to the creature's plan for universal destruction; her shameless begging is brutal to witness, and actress Miriam Hopkins shows an uncommon willingness to expose the raw and troubling emotions behind Mrs. Kry's ranting.
For all its disturbing implications and loaded imagery, though, "Doomsday" isn't simply a fable of sexual repression. Rather, Stefano uses that repression as a vehicle to explore some of his most compelling pet themes: specifically, personal liberation and the insidious forces at work to inhibit such liberation. Here, it's opposed not just by the malevolent sterility of "uncreators" like the box creature and the daddies Kry and Balfour, but also by misguided good intentions and a kind of cosmic bad timing from which no one or no thing is immune. The accidental abduction of Harvey and, later, Vivia, result in two interminably forestalled consummations, and even the creature itself (one of the series' most despicably callous aliens, and one of its few genuine monsters) is trapped in a realm it cannot understand, let alone escape; it tells Balfour that is has "no experience with time and space." The ensuing frustration fails to hold off imminent release indefinitely, though—it only redirects it into something much more malign and apocalyptic. For Mrs. Kry this sad alternative is madness and stasis, while for Daddy Kry and the creature—but not Balfour, who finds a kind of salvation in self sacrifice—it's thoughtless and chaotic self-destruction, a kind of anti-orgasm that leaves only sorrow and rubble in its wake.
The human drive for salvation has little room for selfless motivation in "Doomsday," where Stefano seems to argue instead for the taking of some kind of decisive action—including petty, selfish action, and "action" in the sexual sense. He finds the passive nobility of Harvey Kry—the episode's ostensible hero—as suspect and fruitless in its way as the box creature's ruinous fervency. It is, after all, Balfour who angers the alien into its ultimate, suicidal tantrum, and through admittedly deceitful and plainly self-serving tactics rather than prolonged, stalwart refusal; that he does so in a matter of hours is ironic and sad, considering the decades-long imprisonment of Harvey and his pitiable bride. Kry's stand-off, Stefano suggests, is the sort of seemingly selfless act that, while well-intentioned, breeds only bitterness and resentment and leads as surely to barren, destructive repression and "uncreation" as does an insatiable appetite for destruction.
Stefano employs an appropriately symbolic palette in "Don't Open Till Doomsday," and makes use of some subtle doubling to underscore his themes. Always bold in his use of character names, the author is at his most pointedly suggestive here: from the morose "Krys," stalwart "Gard," and lively "Vivia" to the patently absurd "Dr. Spazman," Stefano daringly colors our perception of this group early on. Perhaps the only disappointment in this regard is that he lets the justice of the peace go unnamed (although the man's predatory wife is unpleasantly referred to as "mother"), and never supplies Mary Kry with a maiden name. Still, the names lend an appropriately surrealistic tone to the episode. The doubling employed in "Doomsday" is equally disorienting, and helps to reveal the cyclical, repetitive nature of the cosmic repression at hand. The unexplained box that houses the alien is reflected in the cavernous, hermetic Kry mansion—itself a barren box in which Mrs. Kry is the resident monster, as trapped as the creature is in its cube. The two honeymooning couples share similar fates, with Gard and Vivia very nearly stumbling into the same trap as Harvey and Vivia and with near-identical results; Daddy Kry and Emmett Balfour, too, provide similar motivations for the fleeing couples. Finally, the creature itself embodies the vague sexual dread of the various honeymooners, with its disturbingly malformed mixture of genitalia and fecal lumpishness; when Mrs. Kry accuses Harvey of being a "heartless mountain of good," she (and Stefano) deliberately aligns him with this shapeless, morally oblivious creature.
As mentioned earlier, Miriam Hopkins turns in a stellar performance as Mary Kry. Her forthrightness and keen perception of the character are wondrous and frightening to behold; hers is one of a handful of Outer Limits performances (Jeff Corey in "O.B.I.T" also leaps to mind) in which the actor appeared to be perfectly in tune with the nuances of the role. The supporting cast is just as good, with Nellie Burt and John Hoyt standing out as the sort of self-serving manipulators the box creature would no doubt have little trouble sharing an eternity with. Buck Taylor and Melinda Plowman, too, bring a convincing youthful awkwardness to the roles of Gard and Vivia, and seem perfectly game to deliver some of Stefano's most uproarious double entendres ever.
It's difficult to imagine how the daring and repugnant "Doomsday" played to mid-1960s television audiences (though TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory's misguided and simplistic review of the episode, reprinted in Schow and Frentzen's The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, provides a clue); it's harder still to picture contemporary audiences responding favorably to its overtly symbolic imagery, elliptical structure and deliberately unpleasant subtext. But because of its sly intelligence and emotional complexity, "Don't Open Till Doomsday" remains both resolutely ahead of it's time and wildly entertaining. If for no other episode, Joseph Stefano deserves recognition as a true television pioneer, unafraid to explore and expose his—and our—deepest, most troublesome longings somewhere between the sitcoms and horse operas of the day.
—MH
The Inheritors
Directed by James Goldstone; written by Seeleg Lester,
Sam Neuman, and Ed Adamson. Cast: Robert Duvall (Adam Ballard); Steve
Inhat (Lt. Phillip J. Minns); Ivan Dixon (Sgt. James Conover); James
Frawley (Pvt. Robert Renaldo); Dee Pollack (Pvt. Francis Hadley); Donald
Harron (Ray Harris); James Shigeta (Capt. Ngo Newa); Dabbs Greer (E.F.
Larkin); Ted DeCorsia (Randolph Branch). Broadcast November 21 and
November 28, 1964.
Story:
Four Vietnam combat soldiers miraculously survive bullets to the brain;
they subsequently embark on a shared mission which controls and confuses
them, and arouses the hostile suspicion of government agents.
To begin, a lengthy digression: it's
possible to classify the small array of certifiably bad episodes from
The Outer Limits first season according to the varying degrees
of interest they maintain and effort they evince despite their uniquely
substandard gestalt. There are the interesting failures, like
"Moonstone" (undone by a muddled script, and by classical director Robert
Florey's bland confusion at unfamiliar terrain), "The Man With the Power"
(flat and predictable, it is sustained by the perpetually interesting
Donald Pleasence), "Second Chance" (two hours worth of story crammed
into an hour, with the odd result of seeming twice as long as it should
be), and the altogether weird "ZZZZZ" (its nihilistic final act almost
counteracts the patently smarmy preceding forty minutes). There are
the quickie "bottle shows", rushed through production to fill the time
slot while something more involved (and involving) brewed—"Production
and Decay of Strange Particles", Leslie Stevens's authorial and directorial
meltdown, is the prime example here. And there is the unavoidable rot,
entries which just don't play, for virtually any reason you could name:
the torpid Black Lagoon rehash "Tourist Attraction", featuring nothing
less (and little more) than Ralph Meeker in a speedo; the aptly titled
"Specimen: Unknown", a painfully padded catalogue of cliches; the competing
redundancies of "The Special One" and "The Human Factor." Bad? Yes,
subjectively so; significantly, they exhibit lapses of one
sort or another—but they are not part of a self-defeating template
of mediocrity. That was reserved for the second season....
When The Outer Limits was renewed—barely—for a second
year, the braintrust of ABC network administration elected to switch
its time slot from the moderately successful 7:30 Monday evening spot
(this was an era before early primetime was crowded with syndicated
reruns) to Saturday night opposite the CBS powerhouse The Jackie
Gleason Show. Joe Stefano saw the writing on the wall, and left
the show (Dominic Frontiere, among others, followed him); he was replaced
by network honcho and former Perry Mason producer Ben Brady,
a man whose grasp of genre was (to understate) limited. Brady and Leslie
Stevens reportedly couldn't stand eachother, ultimately forcing the
show's other key creative force to depart for other projects. Brady's
Outer Limits was a different beast entirely: the budgets were
cut to the bone; scripts were solicited from "known" science fiction
writers and fitted to the new, tighter confines; network meddling was
no longer deflected. Replacing Stefano's and Stevens's transcendent
vision was, well, Perry Mason with rubber monsters; lousy episodes
became the norm, as evidenced by the maddeningly vague "Cold Hands,
Warm Heart", the all-too visible "The Invisible Enemy", another aptly
named hour—"Behold, Eck!" a would-be comedy torturously devoid
of humor, and perhaps the series nadir, the Al Adamson-esque "The Brain
of Colonel Barham". The list goes on; that any decent installments
issued from Brady's network toadying quagmire is surprising. That a
few truly resplendent entries emerged is testament to the series' good
name, and to a handful of people still dedicated to it. "The Inheritors",
due chiefly to 
Seeleg Lester and James Goldstone, is that rare gem,
and one with an altogether ironic subtext: a driven, visionary collective
of men attempt something risky and noble, while staunch proceduralists
hound and revile them, suspecting only the worst in their motives and
actions. In this story, unlike the reality played out behind the scenes
of The Outer Limits, the rigid autocrats are proven wrong (and
accept that fact humbly), while the sage idealists carry out their worthy
plan. Alas, fantasy.
Frustrating parallels aside, "The Inheritors" ranks as an exemplary Outer Limits and as exceptional, even daring television. Imagine: a roughly two-hour narrative in which the primary audience identifier—a government agent, no less—does everything by the book, elicits our support and arouses our fear, and turns out to be flatly, uncharitably wrong. Though we're never led to believe that the inspired Minns and associates are intentionally malicious (they are presented, and uniformly well-played, as likeable and sympathetic men), we don't really know what they're up to, and in a sense must tag along on Ballard's increasingly insupportable crusade. We do know that an alien presence guides the soldier's hazy, massively scaled project; eventually, we also know that children are involved, and so the nature of the plan becomes even darker for modern viewers than it was for audiences in the mid 1960s (no need to illuminate that dire fact).
There is a strong theme at work in Lester's tale, examining the sometimes terrifying vagaries of inspiration—from random source (here, four hand-crafted, alien-tinged bullets), through baffling process, and ultimately to the epiphany and vindication of fulfillment. Strength of theme flourished in Stefano's and Stevens's first season—it was, to some degree, required by Stefano's "canon" for the show's writers—but under Brady's production line approach, other components drew focus. Usually, this materialized as a roomful of men in business suits or lab coats talking endlessly, feigning intensity or even interest. While Lester's story was held under the same confining budgetary and creative strictures that produced such "talking head" episodes, his writing (the best he ever did, both in and out of The Outer Limits) is involving, moving, and at times unquestionably profound. Hired by Brady as series story editor and associate producer, Lester found his voice with "The Inheritors"; that voice was given vision by director Goldstone, who surmounted second-season malaise by imbuing the episode with a pace that simply rolls over any clear production deficits—this one moves. Goldstone, who directed the first-season classic episode "The Sixth Finger", presents a lean, remarkably edited combination of detective story (a common ploy under Brady, though here with the previously mentioned twist that the good guys blow it completely) and graceful enactment of Lester's inspiration theme.
The casting is astute, with Robert Duvall (another first-season holdover, from the excellent "The Chameleon") giving a balanced interpretation of the obliquely ferocious Ballard. Duvall gives ample evidence of the talent which ultimately brought him acclaim: Ballard's single-minded devotion to his assigned task—his own inspiration— may prove wrongheaded, but is never less than affecting. As Minns, the Czechoslovakian Inhat, usually cast in villainous roles (he overdid it madly in Star Trek's "Whom the Gods Destroy", most likely just to keep up with Shatner), is ideal as the advanced, beatific leader of the four changed men. He convincingly portrays a man being "fed" thoughts, words, and actions by an alien second brain scant moments before he expresses them; further, his interactions with the cast-off children at the heart of the alien mission are among the most tastefully poignant of the entire series (though Harry Lubin's unsubtle, syrup soaked score grates throughout). Dixon, Frawley, and Pollack are each given a showcase for their character's intimidating new talents and concurrent doubts, and each does a fine job eliciting a mix of awe, dread, and compassion. Bit parts are filled well, notably Dabbs Greer as an entrepreneurial scumbag, and a very young Morgan Brittany (one of thousands of 1980s primetime soap queens) as a blind girl. There are two unavoidable technical weaknesses slightly hampering "The Inheritors" (aside from Lubin's music, a fairly consistent drawback for the season): the alien spacecraft being built by our mysterious protagonists is presented impressively while still a collection of unconstructed components; once built, it looks like nothing more than a biggish pizza oven on stilts, entered by way of a hardware store stepladder. The money, as noted, was tight. Finally, Kenneth Peach's photography is frankly bad in many scenes, making the episode occasionally resemble poorly-stored archival footage; Peach could do fine work, but it seems as if a director with a keen design sense was needed to extract his best effort. Goldstone, for all his clear potency, wasn't that.
Inarguably, though, these minor gripes can't dampen the spirit and execution of "The Inheritors". The inspiration, of the characters and their creators, shines beacon-like in the morass of Ben Brady's half hearted filler show (the fate, sadly, of The Outer Limits in its second incarnation). Along with "Demon With a Glass Hand", "The Duplicate Man", perhaps "Soldier", "Wolf 359", and "Cry of Silence", this is the minutely thin layer of cream atop something distressingly, willfully spoiled. Seek it out—skim it off and savor it before dipping deeper into the rightly notorious second season.
—DCH
The Guests
Directed by Paul Stanley; written by Donald S. Sanford; based on a teleplay by Charles Beaumont. Cast: Geoffrey Horne (Wade Norton); Luana Anders (Tess Ames); Gloria Grahame (Florida Patton); Nellie Burt (Ethel Latimer); Vaughn Taylor (Randall Latimer). Broadcast March 23, 1964. Story: Restless, rootless Wade Norton is lured to a secluded mansion where time appears to have stood still. Soon after meeting his host, Wade determines that he and the house's other inhabitants may not be guests at all.
One of The Outer Limits' many assets was its facility with the bizarre. While its television contemporaries framed their more outlandish episodes in comfortable, not always inventive terms (like the creaky, juvenile gothic corn of Thriller, or the mawkish, heavy-handed social science fiction of The Twilight Zone), The Outer Limits rarely took its genre elements lightly—no matter how familiar they might've been. Instead, it allowed such elements to fuel the weightier issues almost always at hand, and fostered a creative atmosphere in which the blending of the intellectual with the fantastic was almost commonplace. It was inevitable, then, that a handful of episodes would eschew the explicable altogether, and effectively abandon realism—if not reality itself—for something genuinely surreal. Such episodes may be as close to the truly "experimental" as television will ever come, and perhaps the most fully realized of them is the odd, intensely off-kilter "The Guests."
"The Guests" is not just unusual television—it's unlike most other Outer Limits episodes as well. What makes it markedly different is not just the absence of series trademarks like the customary Control Voice bookends, but rather its sparse, interior milieu and plainly ritualistic tone. For its cardinal struggle takes place not just within the four (windowless) walls of the looming and convenient mansion at its center, but also—or perhaps primarily—deep within Wade Norton's mind and soul. The irrational, ethereal events that occur there comprise a test that will lead him, ultimately, to the responsibility and reason of adulthood, or the stagnate hell of a lifetime of puerile self-deception.
In this sense, the house is a spatial representation of Wade's inner conflict, and its other guests embodiments of the grave choice he faces; they are also worldly (and otherworldly) obstacles to his eventual salvation. The mansion's lower level is corporeal and seductive, with the gentle, pliable Tess the primary draw for Wade. But even the churlish, invariable bickering of the Latimers and Florida Patton's vacuous madness offer a degree of familiarity and comfort, particularly to someone already disposed to personal resignation and denial. The temptation here lies less in the boyish, idealistic love Wade envisions for he and Tess (itself a sort of indolent retreat that she comprehends at once), but with the complete abdication of emotional and spiritual progress. The current guests, Wade soon discovers, have given in so thoroughly to this temptation that they've become a group of twisted ascetics unable (or unwilling) to engineer their own individual escapes.
The temptations of the structure's upper level are, conversely, incessantly cerebral and dispassionately cruel. The inhabitant here—ostensibly the mansion's host, but in truth merely an uninvited guest itself—relies completely upon cold intellect, and is so bereft of a material framework as to be little more than a shapeless mass of tissue. This lumpish creature's lack of definition leaves it as physically featureless as the lower level's inhabitants are psychically malformed, and just as stranded as they are. Yet in spite of the upstairs creature's philosopher-scientist persona (it routinely spouts quasi-Buddhist parables like "Each [guest] has his own 
both levels can adjoin leaves them all suspicious and fearful, bitterly manipulating one another out of some uncomprehending need. It makes for a very fine line on which Wade has little choice but to tread.
The creature's merciless, arrogant probing of the other guests appeals to Wade's sense of superior detachment, and in many ways the idea of engaging its unyielding intellect illimitably is as alluring to him as an eternity with Tess. Yet his resistance to both the moral resignation downstairs and the mental rape upstairs represents something new to the house: a mature, far-sighted sense of hope that finally triggers the meeting of its two levels in an ultimate, inevitable collapse. In classic Stefano fashion, Wade's recognition of his own imperfectly human but heroically humane soul—spurred by Tess's selfless sacrifice, itself typically Stefanoesque—allows him to escape the confines of the sinister house, with its eternal netherworld of blind hallways and dead-end choices. The final image of the house dissolving first into a great, outsized brain and then into nothingness closes the episode on an ambiguous note: Wade's test is complete, and all guests—whether of the strange, secluded mansion or simply of his imagination—are evicted. Their purpose has been served, and his passage is complete.
Treating "The Guests" to such an intensely insular reading is a risky proposition, and focuses perhaps too narrowly on a single aspect of a uniquely layered script. But, thanks largely to the subtle talents of writer Donald Sanford and his inspiration, television legend Charles Beaumont, the episode holds up to such an explication as few others would. Director Paul Stanley, so spotty in his other Outer Limits work ("Second Chance" and the awkward second season episode "Counterweight"), also excels here, as does the rest of the creative team—so much so that it's surprising to realize that this film was only a few episodes away from the close of the first season and the end of the Stevens/Stefano reign. Despite the end-of-season austerity, "The Guests" works as beautifully as any of the series' earlier, better-known entries, and its eerie, dreamlike quality (due in part to Dominic Frontiere's haunting score and Kenneth Peach's hushed photography) and bravely introspective premise are sustained throughout. "The Guests" also takes it share of risks. As in "Don't Open Till Doomsday" (this episode's thematic cousin), the extraterrestrial origin of the creature upstairs is never fully explained or supported, and is daringly cast aside so that the film can concentrate on the more compelling, deeply psychological issues at hand. The creature's presence is warranted, yet its horror potential is never fully exploited; its immobility, in fact, precludes the sort of lurking one might expect in such a setting. The cast also rises to the challenging material, with Geoffrey Horne a particular stand out. The mercurial yet resilient Wade Norton is a difficult role to pull off, but Horne finds the perfect balance between intellectual curiosity and impetuousness, and makes Wade's struggle between lingering adolescence and impending adulthood palpable. Luana Anders brings similar conviction to the touchingly sweet-natured Tess, despite being several years too old for the role (though the age disparity is thematically consistent); and Nellie Burt displays perfect control as the sadistic Ethel Latimer, to the point that it's difficult to imagine her buckling under the intrusive scrutiny of the creature.
The most intriguing bit of casting here is, of course, Gloria Grahame as the vacant and deluded starlet manqué Florida Patton. Not unlike Miriam Hopkins (for whom Grahame had understudied at one point) in "Doomsday," there is an uncomfortable parity between the actress and the role: ingenue Grahame had flirted with breakout stardom throughout the '40s and '50s, but her brash manner and unconventional beauty (later distorted by a perplexing regimen of plastic surgery) managed to keep popular acclaim firmly at bay. As Florida, she seems distant and somehow unreal—altogether fitting for both the character and the circumstances, but genuinely unnerving and a little sad. Grahame did, however, manage to provide Stefano (who seemingly collected fine performances from fading actors in unusual roles) with a final casting coup of which he could be proud.
There was little in the way of consistent risk left in The Outer Limits following "The Guests," both in its initial season and as a series. With the exception of the gentle, elegiac "The Chameleon," this was the end of its classic period, and it's difficult not to feel a sense of loss upon viewing the episode. Yet the series couldn't have planned for a more praiseworthy swan song, and it proves unequivocally that the show was a work of daring and resolve.
—MH
Copyright © 1998–2001 Mark Holcomb & David C. Holcomb. All rights reserved.