Detectives Renfro and Venable show up to the scene of  murder. Coroner Carolyn says the cause of death is cervical trauma which isn’t located where I thought it would be.  They explore a nearby warehouse.  Venable gets trapped and Renfro shoots the suspect.  Venable finds two strange things:  The woman is severely deformed, and is carrying a vial of green liquid.

Back at the police station, Carolyn tells the captain the woman is a victim of GRS — Genetic Rejection Syndrome, but based on the evidence, she was not the killer.  Ten years ago, underground labs began producing drugs to create super-kids.  Sometimes however, the kid got GRS and became violent and deformed.  The green stuff was a shot that could turn an adult into a super-adult or serve as a booster for someone who was already super.

The woman survived the shot.  She says her name is Melanie.  Her parents had wanted her to be tall so they gave her the shots and she got GRS.  Rather than be questioned, she breaks her own neck which will probably take about 8 inches off her height as her head flops around.

Carolyn goes into an elevator and a GRSer jumps in and kills her.  This was a shock in more than one way. Carolyn was a strong, beautiful, intelligent character.  Her death so early in the episode, or at all, was like Janet Leigh’s death in Psycho; except we didn’t get a shower scene.  C’mon, did this really air on Showtime?  I applaud their boldness, but I was also a little shocked by how the scene was directed.  Just seeing the GRSer, she collapsed in the corner screaming.  This woman would have put up a fight.

After leaving Carolyn dead in the elevator, her killer throws Venable against a column in the parking garage.  Turns out the deformed killer is Venable’s son Dylan.  That night, he pulls out the baby pictures.  Dylan is seen as a healthy baby, then tragically begins showing deformities as a young boy.  On the bright side, Pa Venable doesn’t seem to have aged a day in 10 years.  If this were Science Fiction Theatre, he’d be wearing the same shirt.

I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with this episode as I was with Unnatural Selection.  The whole “deformed kids” trope is just too heart-breaking.  Not to mention, deformed humans are getting a little too frequent on Outer Limits.  We’ve just had:  Feasibility Study — humans mutate in an effort to prevent colonization of earth by aliens, the Music of the Spheres — humans mutate to survive a solar event, and Double Helix — man mutates to reveal a map on his back.

Time to bail.

Some Other Stuff:

• Jill Teed (Carolyn) also played a coroner in The X-Files.
• No pics.  Just nothing I really wanted to show here.  I will say that the deformed Pa Venable reminded me a little of that Nick Nolte mug shot.