"Behold Eck" - "The Outer Limits S02E03 Retro Review

Behold Yeckk. Behold Yuck! Am I right?

Yes, I'm slowly working my way through the original The Outer Limits and I'm into the second season, which has a reputation as a bit of a stinker. I had read "Behold Eck!" was a comedy, the equivalent of the season 1 episode "Controlled Experiment".

No such luck. "Behold Eck" would have been better as a comedy. Instead it's so aggressively... nothing it's painful to watch. At the very least, it begs for a review. And who am I to resist begging?

The episode starts with an "optical scientist" in his combination office and workshop at his place of business. He puts on a pair of tinted spectacles, sees the cartoonish outline of a four-armed, four-eyed creature in the corner, and overreacts like crazy. It smashes him to the floor, and then we get a close-up of a notebook with three names and addresses written in it. The creature seemingly grabs the page, flips sideways, and exits stage right through the wall.

When the scientist wakes up, we find out his name is Dr. James Stone (Peter Lind Hayes). He has a loyal secretary or assistant or something, named Elizabeth Dunn (Joan Freeman). Through some handy exposition, we soon discover the spectacles are made out of meteoric quartz. Why the laboratory is going out and gathering meteoric quartz for lenses is one of the several questions not addressed in the episode.

Through a series of deductions worthy of Sherlock Holmes, James soon realizes the glasses and their special lenses are what let him see the creature, and the three names are of patients he prescribed the same glasses for. One of the men George Wilkerson (Sammy Reese) is in the hospital, the second is Rita Morgan, and the third is a welder named Kowalski.

Detectives Runyan (Douglas Henderson) and Jackson (Jack Wilson) arrive to investigate the devastation and exposit some more, noting other optical labs have been attacked the same way. James puts two and two together and gets... pi? He figures the creature is attacking anyone who can see it via the glasses, and came to his office/lab/workshop/whatever to get the list of the people he made the glasses for. Rita is dead, from what we'll find out later is a heart attack. Wilkerson is in the hospital, so apparently he was attacked before the creature attacked James. But the creature needed James' address on the man to find him, didn't it? And Wilkerson was out driving his car when the creature attacked him so he wasn't at home anyway. Added up, this doesn't make sense.

James goes to see his older brother, Bernard (Parley Baer), whose company works with the government. He lays out his theory the creature he saw is two-dimensional and somehow entered our three-dimensional world. Bernard thinks he's nutty and apparently James has a reputation of being a weirdo, so Bernard quickly dismisses him.

Back at the lab, James puts on the glasses and sees the creature when it returns there. It introduces itself as Eck (voice of Bob Johnson) after James beholds it (we have a title!), and for some reason the glasses let James hear it as well as see it. He has another pair of glasses, so Elizabeth can see it as well. Eck explains it somehow passed through a "time passage" (so we're talking time as well as dimensions?) and is stranded in our world. If something passes through the near-invisible passageway then it will disrupt Earth's dimension and destroy it. Something being a bird, or a plane (or Superman!), but not free-floating soot or ash or paper or even air molecules. Eck's perception is limited in the 3D world so it can't find the passageway.

James offers to make it a lens, and Eck obligingly plucks out one of the "eyes" it has created for itself. It then sees a television announcer on TV, thinks the man is 2D, and bumps into the TV. The electrical charge makes Eck visible and it flees. Meanwhile, James goes to work on a blackboard working out formula. This lets him make a lens for Eck.

Meanwhile, Bernard has gone to Runyan, who has realized James is somehow connected to the attacks on Rita and Wilkerson. Eck also attacked Kowalski, who drove it off with a welding torch. Eck has already sliced through a building by turning sideways, and goes through an electrical tower and then attacks a car. The car exploded, and the burning fuel tank drives Eck off. Runyan questions the driver, and works out fire can hurt Eck.

Bernard spills the beans and the police go to James' lab. He's given the lens to Eck which lets it see, but the police have brought a flamethrower. When they see the now-visible Eck glowing through the window into the lab, they flame the entire place and then leave without so much as a "We'll write you a receipt for destroying your business." Eck reveals its previously unknown ability to charge up a bust with energy so it glowed (Elizabeth says, "OH, Eck, you're wonderful!" like he charged up something besides a bust--or maybe it was her bust), and heads off to find the portal after profusely thanking James and Elizabeth. They hold each other and look at the damage, then go after Eck because they have to hand-carry the lens because Eck can't take it through a wall, and that's the end of that episode.

"Profusely" is a key word here. Eck is very profuse and apologetic about everything it does. This does make a change from the often-hostile aliens showing up on The Outer Limits. But we've seen apologetic and/or unintentionally harmful aliens on the show before. The premiere episode, "The Galaxy Being", featured a similar concept. Except there it was played straight. Here, the supposed humor is Eck is very apologetic and hapless. And it has four eyes, meaning the whole thing is apparently some kind of play on the nickname "four eyes". It's like writer William R. Cox was told to write a story about a marauding alien, knew the term "four eyes", and wrote the rest of the episode around the joke.

James is the clueless scientist, Elizabeth is the loyal Girl Friday who clearly has feelings for James and vice versa, and Bernard is the mildly conniving businessman. Everyone else fails to make any impression whatsoever. Except for Bernard's secretary, Miss Willet (Marcel Herbert), who seems smarter than her boss and actually asks several intelligent questions when James is expositing to Bernard.

As I noted, I'd heard "Behold Eck" described as a comedy. But it's not at all funny. It comes across as your typical 50s marauding alien monster plot. The punchline, such as it is, is Eck is so easygoing and apologetic and a victim of an accident that he's not so much an evil alien as just a schmuck. But Eck doesn't have enough screen presence to make much of an impression, as a schmuck, or an evil alien, or anything. Eck is more annoying than anything.

One problem is there are a lot of plotholes. There's the aforementioned confusion over whether Eck needs the addresses or not. He says his vision is obscured because of the dimensional differences, but he's able to read the addresses in James' notebook? How does Eck know those are the names of the three people with the special glasses, much less be able to read them if his vision is obscured? And how does he find them: does he have Mapquest?

Also, Eck takes the page out of the notebook. But later, it can't take the lens James gives it through the wall because the lens is 3D and Eck can't take 3D objects with it when it "turns" sideways in 2D. So how did it take the paper through the lab wall?

Also, a lot of what happens happens off-screen. Eck talks about the portal several times, but we never see it. The building it slices through partway up looks impressive, but we never see it except on a news broadcast. Eck looks so goofy and cartoony that the only impression the alien makes is... a goofy, cartoony one. It looks a little better when it becomes electrified, but then it loses what definition it has and just looks like a blob of sparkly lights.

Not to mention Eck is never on-screen with anyone. He's always a straight-up optical effect standing or floating in James' lab, or reflected in James' glasses, or drifting across a radio tower shot "borrowed" from the aforementioned "The Galaxy Being". He has no personality other than "apologetic", either. The Andromedan in "The Galaxy Being" was a rogue scientist who was going against his own people to make contact with an Earth scientist. Eck could be some pedestrian, or a garbageman, or a police officer, or a soldier, or a housewife.

There are good episodes in season 2 of The Outer Limits. "Soldier", "Demon with a Glass Hand", "The Inheritors", "Wolf 359". Heck, even "Cry of Silence" a few episodes later isn't bad. It has some creepiness and a "hapless" alien that actually comes across as alien. But "Behold Eck!" is not a good episode. It's not even a mediocre episode. It's probably one of the worst episodes of the series, because it doesn't try to do anything. It has no moral , no message, no substantive alien presence. There's no "awe" or "mystery", it's just a 50s TV/movie alien monster plot with enough holes to drive a truck through. "Behold Eck!" isn't just bad by early 60s standards: it's bad by any standards.

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