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"The Form of Things Unknown" - The Outer Limits S01E32 Retro-Review

This one is an original retro-review, folks. So hang onto your hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

The original The Outer Limits is a weird anthology from the early 60s that tends to get confused with The Twilight Zone. Yes, both shows have an episode where time is frozen. And they're both the brainchilds of creative geniuses who got stiffed by the networks when the network execs ordered a format change that hurt the shows. And they're both anthologies. But that's where the similarities end.

The Twilight Zone runs endlessly on SyFy in the wee hours and on several retro channels like MeTV and Decades. Why? Because it's (mostly) a half hour, which fits well into syndication blocks when some network or another needs to fill some time. There are hour episodes from Season 4 when CBS told Rod Serling make the show twice as long on the theory that would get twice as many viewers. It didn't, and most of the hour episodes are overly padded.

Joseph Stefano

Outer Limits was created by Joseph Stefano, who was going through therapy at the time. And he sometimes used the show to express his mental issues. Not to mention, Stefano and his co-creator, Leslie Stevens, were looking to create their own production studio. Outer Limits was their major stab at that. When Stefano tried to create a spinoff Gothic horror series with himself as the creator, and writer, and producer, and director, ABC decided they didn't want him to have that much power. They shut him down, he quit, and the show was doing well enough the execs kept the show going for another season without the people who created it. It went downhill from there, and while there are a few good episodes, for the most part Outer Limits suffered from bog-standard s.f. stories, recycled sets and costumes, shallow characterizations, and romantic relationships, and went from Stefano's personal life to Harriet and Ozzie-style husbands and wives.

The first season of Outer Limits had problems as well. There was a lot of recycled footage from other movies, and some of the episodes were straight science fiction with boring clichés like meteor storms and spacewalks to heighten the "tension".

Outer Limits was primarily horror, while Twilight Zone focused more on fantasy. The shows tended to reflect the creators' outlooks. Serling was more of an idealist, while Stefano tended to poke at the dark side of the human psyche. Even the Outer Limits with relatively happy endings tended to have some kind of hook in them. The hapless Martians in "Controlled Experiment" save a human couple... but their son will destroy Earth in a few decades when he becomes a dictator.

That brings us to "The Forms of Things Unknown", which was Stefano's attempt to create the aforementioned spinoff series. Stefano went so far as to write two versions of the sorta-same episode: one with science fiction elements and one with them stripped out for the spinoff. Since 75% of the episodes were the same, he could use one for Outer Limits and sell the other to the ABC executives as the pilot for his spinoff.

"Forms" was such a weird show, the execs nixed Stefano's attempts at a spinoff. There are all kinds of political reasons for why they didn't want him doing another series. Stefano didn't like it and quit, but ABC owned the series so it went a second year. Meanwhile, they aired the s.f.-ish "Forms" as the first season finale of Outer Limits. And the audience was left with a very bizarre episode of a show that was already sometimes very bizarre.

Scott Marlowe, The Outer Limits, S01E32

The episode starts with Andre (Scott Marlowe) driving through what is supposedly the French countryside. In the car with him is Kassia Paine (Vera Miles), who pours him martinis and they kiss. Although we don't see her at first, along for the ride is Leonora Edmonds (Barbara Rush). Leonora is the daughter of a rich British man. Andre plans to travel to London with his two women and blackmail the father with some letters the guy wrote.

But first they stop off at a lake. Andre goes for a wade, and he's a big ole dick. He insists the women come out into the lake with their clothes on and serve him his martini. Little does he know, Kassia had Leonora pick a leaf from the "Thanatos tree" and soak it in Andre's martini. When he drinks it, he dies. Kassia loads his body in the trunk of the car and they drive off. After a weird scene where they pass three French peasants taking a coffin to a cemetery, Leonora starts to lose it and screams. For the first of what will be eight times throughout the episode. She imagines seeing the trunk open and when Kassia pulls over to show her co-conspirator Andre is still dead, the lightning from a storm makes it look like he's blinking.

Leonora runs off, screaming *sigh* and eventually comes to a manor. A blind butler, Colas (Cedric Hardwicke) lets her in and she meets Tone Hobart (David McCallum). McCallum had already been on one Outer Limits episode, "The Sixth Finger". Here he plays a puckish and insane young inventor who has created a "time tilter" which consists of clocks strung together with "rare magnetic wire". Tone can tilt the past into the present and vice versa, bringing the dead back to life.

Cedric Hardwicke, The Outer Limits, S01E32

Tone somehow reads Leonora's dreams and determines she and Kassia killed Andre. He goes out, gets Andre's body, and brings Andre back to life for no particular reason that is ever given. Kassia finds the house, and Colas eventually tells the women he's the master and he took Tone in. The creative team doesn't explain why he did that, either.

Andre eventually comes back to life, and Leonora screams some more. Kassia and Andre make out a little bit in a 60s kind of way, and she's apparently forgotten she killed him a few hours ago. Leonora finds a letter Tone wrote to his father saying he's dropping out of school to bring back his dead mother. Tone realizes bringing the sadistic Andre back to life is a "bad thing" and loads a gun, but Andre disarms him when Tone becomes obsessed with a little spinning ornament that all but has SYMBOLISM painted on it.

Andre and Kassia leave, but Andre decides to toss Kassia out of the car and tries to run her over. Why? Who knows? He misses because she has these things called "feet", and he crashes the car and dies. Kassia goes back to tell Leonora, and Tone figures with Andre dead, he can go back to his own past since he tilted time and brought himself back to life after he died. He steps into the web of clocks and wires and disappears. The end.

David McCallum, The Outer Limits, S01E32

As you might gather from the above, none of this makes much sense. Tone brings himself back to life before the episode begins. He brings Andre back, apparently just for shits and giggles. He somehow reads Leonora's dreams before bringing Andre back, but apparently missed everything where she "dreamed" they had good reason for killing Andre.

Kassia loves and hates and kills and loves and kills Andre so many times it will give you whiplash.

Colas may or may not really be blind: he could be faking it. Why he took Tone in and lets him freeload off of him is never made clear because Colas has no personality other than being ominous and foreboding. And saying lots of cryptic stuff.

Cryptic speeches are one of the two strengths of the episode. As you might gather from the title (it's a line from A Midsummer's Night Dream), the episode is Shakespearean. It's basically the kind of episode several critics noted is what Shakespeare would write if he were alive. Which, amusingly, is also the concept of one of the hour-long episodes of The Twilight Zone, "The Bard".

So, all the characters give high-falutin' speeches about dreams, and life, and death, and love, and sometimes all of them at once. The time tilter is metaphorical more than real and sounds goofy: Tone can "tilt" time by binding clocks with magnetic wire. All-righty.

John Hoyt, The Outer Limits, S01E20

The other strength is the cinematography. Gerd Oswald directs and it's okay. But the first season of The Outer Limits was known for its framing and its black-and-white filming. "Form" is no exception, and director of photography Conrad Hall throws everything he's got at the screen. Kassia wears white, Leonora wears black. And yet Kassia is the "evil" one, while Leonora more or less goes along for the ride and is the "good" one. Characters emerge in and out of shadows, are framed in doors, backlit by lightning, and Hall tosses in a Dutch tilt or two for good measure. And occasionally smears the camera lens with Vaseline. A technique director John Brahm did in "The Bellero Shield" earlier that season, and was done on shows like Doctor Who with aliens like the Zarbi to make them and/or their planet look more alien.

it all adds up to a lot of disorientation and surprises for the viewers. TZ had its cinematography and tricks: check out "Eye of the Beholder" sometime where director Douglas Hayes spends two-thirds of the episode hiding the nature of the doctors and nurses surrounding the patient using shadows and camera cuts. But Oswald and Hall aren't trying to "surprise" the audience. They're engaging in European-style film making. And they do an excellent job of it. On TZ you get the impression the directors are American directors doing what someone (probably Serling) saw a European director do. With OL the directors and directors of photography in the first season are doing what they've seen first-hand what European directors do.

A Zanti, The Outer Limits S01E14

The disorientation and surprises are a large part of why OL doesn't have quite have the memorability factor TZ does. Serling and his creative team could surprise the viewers, sure, but at the end of the day a lot of their stories were variations on "The Monkey's Paw" with the twist endings. Stefano never went for easy answers with OL. He often dwelt on the psychosexual aspects of some of his characters. "Don't Open Till Doomsday", for instance, had a weird alien creature from a harmonic dimension that looked like a mash-up of male and female genitalia. The Zanti in "The Zanti Misfits" are stop-action ants with human eyes. Compare to, say, the Kanamit in the TZ episode "To Serve Man". A tall alien with eye shadow and a bald cap. Whatever you think of Stefano, he never went for the easy answers. And viewers don't always remember the hard stuff.

Outer Limits is available on DVD and typically shows up on some retro channel or another. Don't confuse it with the 90s syndicated The Outer Limits remake, which had its own strengths and weaknesses. And David McCallum and Barbara Rush. It's an okay show, but it's nothing compared to the weirdness of first-season Outer Limits.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?

Written by Gislef on Feb 16, 2019

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