Derek and Nadia are making out on a sofa in an old abandoned house. Derek hears moaning upstairs. Since Nadia is not a ventriloquist, he goes to investigate. He screams for help and Nadia goes up to find him. We don’t see what she sees, but we hear it — the demonic laughter of something that pulls her to her death.
Outer Limits is getting out on the thin ice again. The forays into religion early in the season were not always successful, and the apparent entry into the haunted house genre had me worried.
Oh STFU, Outer Limits — this isn’t science-fiction, it’s economics-fiction.
Physicist turned professional skeptic Dwight Schultz is pecking away on a typewriter, watching himself on a TV talk show. He had appeared with Derek’s mother Alberta Watson to discuss her son’s disappearance in the old house.
His doorbell rings and Watson is there. She offers Schultz $5,000 to go to the old house with her. They drive out to the house and Schultz is able to offer plausible explanations for the mysterious sounds they hear. Soon, however, they both hear sounds that can’t be so easily explained.
That night, Watson has a few drinks and sees her dead son morphing out of the wall. In examining the wall, Schultz finds a hidden door and kicks his way in. Inside, they find a meteorite which apparently animates inanimate objects.
I’m not a stickler for defining science-fiction, but this is a pretty thin pretense for shoehorning a haunted house story into a science-fiction series. Like all meteorites in TV and media, the stone looks like a pomegranate with shiny metallic “seeds” on the hollow center.
She later sees Derek in the house again, or so she thinks. The entity has completely assumed Derek’s form and fully emerged into the hallway. He tries to lure her into the wall. Apparently having seen Spank the Monkey, the entity knows Watson will do anything for her son.
Schultz arrives to save the day by hosing the house down with alcohol which has a disorienting effect on the entity — ha, it thinks it’s people! As the alcohol takes effect, the house starts melting like a cross between House of Wax and Poltergeist.
Overall, very blah. I was immediately off-put by that idiotic T-Shirt. I didn’t come here for lefty propaganda by a bunch of Hollywood 1%ers (filming in Canada to dodge union rates), and I didn’t come here for a haunted house story.
Post-Post:
- Let’s hoist a flagon of house -melting alcohol for Nadia. Her disappearance is barely mentioned other than to say that her parents couldn’t have cared less. She seemed like a nice girl.
- Guess I’m a softy — I would have liked to see Derek and Nadia come out of this alive; and in Nadia’s case, naked.
- Alberta Watson was also briefly Jack Bauer’s boss on 24. Unfortunately, I think she was stuck in a doomed role that squandered her abilities.
- Hulu sucks.
If you can get past the narration dismissing the incident as a Science Fiction approach to a haunted house, then you can see something far more horrific and menacing. Many of the creature’s traits mimic John Carpenter’s The Thing, with a major exception of the creature being able to also assimilate inanimate matter. It isn’t clear that The Thing is sensitive to alcohol, since the movie never introduced it. And it also isn’t clear, if the creature is affected by cold, fire or acid. This Episode could be an almost “What if” scenario for The Thing, if it left the colder climate and went into a remote countryside.
I seriously wonder if the filmmakers had Dwight Schultz wear that shirt to play a trick on him. He’s an outspoken right-winger! (And whatever your politics, I think we can all agree he’s an excellent actor, too!)