A motorcade of black SUVs and limos with a massive carbon footprint rolls up to a secure building.  A diverse group of white men and white women file into a conference room. Rather than wait for Leonardo DiCaprio to arrive in his private jet, they start immediately.  “Dark Rain is now falling on every continent.”

95% – 97% of the earth’s population has been exposed to Teradoxyn. Paradoxically, it was first detected in the Middle East which you might think would get off easy on rain-related plagues. How did Seattle escape this fate?  Note to CDC: investigate immunity based on coffee and awful music.  “The birthrate of viables has already fallen to near-zero.”

Dr. Marissa Golding wants to spread the word that we brought this on ourselves.  It was caused by the use of chemical weapons which mutated.  I guess this was before the next Ice Age was a bigger threat than Global Warming, and the Hole in the Ozone was not fashionable yet.  Maybe this was during the Acid Rain / No Nukes hysteria nexus. Rest assured, though, the producers are quick to say that “both sides” were at fault.  C’mon, I expect that kind of America-bashing from Hollywood, but from Canadians?  Naturally, the administration wants to squash this data lest it hurt their chance of getting re-elected with 2 of the 3 remaining electoral votes.

Glen Campbell Glen Canyon High School has seen better days; as has Glen Campbell.  Someone has spray-painted School’s Out Forever on the front doors.  Although most of the classrooms are empty, Sherry McAllister teaches the last existing class of kids.  She reminds them it is time to report to the Federal Reproductive Board to “get tested for your fertility rating and become sexually active as soon as possible.” Holy crap, they look about 12 years old!  Their lack of enthusiasm for this plan is the best indication they might be too young.

Back at casa de McAllister, she and husband Tim are watching the news.  The NWA (New World Army) is pissing off the government by minding their own business.  Oh, they’re being accused of terrorism, but I suspect that is a smokescreen.  Even Tim says, “What is wrong with those people?”  He just can’t catch a break.  Even though there is zero population growth, Sherry is making him use a condom . . . mutations, you know.  A week later she is pregnant.  Weirdly played, but I assume this isn’t the first time they’ve had the sex.

At the hospital, Dr. Golding assures them there are no signs of mutation. Quickly, men with guns show up and say they are there for her protection (i.e. We’re from the government and we’re here to help).  Sherry accidentally witnesses another woman go into labor in a very well-done scene.  It is known that the baby will be a mutant, but there is still great energy and suspense as the medical team surrounds her.  The heightened stakes come through in the production, so kudos on that.  Sherry is understandably ready to bail after seeing that.

Some time later, however, Sherry gives birth to a healthy boy.  They are thrilled, but not thrilled that they are still prisoners.  To be fair, they hold the key to humanity’s survival.  I am in the unusual position of supporting Big Government on this one.  This is too important to keep all your fertilized eggs in one basket.  They are awakened one night by an NWA member in their room.  He offers to help them escape with their baby.  When the head doctor brings the brass in to see the miracle baby, all they see is NWA spray-painted on the wall.  As the McAllisters are African-American, this takes on a whole different unintended meaning.  No, the other one.

I should have stuck to my constitutionally-protected guns — they escape to the NWA’s compound and there is a happy, almost tear-jerking resolution.  It has finally struck me that this newer version of Outer Limits is softer on the Sci-Fi, and spends more time exploring humanity and emotion than the original series — just like the new Twilight Zone, but I always complain about that reboot.  Maybe it’s because I am not as familiar with the original Outer Limits, so I can’t be disappointed.  Or maybe Outer Limits is just a much better series.

Nothing extraordinary here, just another well-produced episode. Outer Limits stands with AHP as being reliable when the other series wear me down.

I rate it an 85% chance of dark precipitation.

Post-Post:

• Shades of Children of Men which came both earlier (book) and later (movie).  But it’s probably a common sci-fi trope.
• Sadly, the mutants reminded me of Unnatural Selection.  Very sadly.
• The head of the Federal Reproductive Board survived two episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater:  The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone and The Screaming Woman.
• Title Analysis:  Meh.  Complete McGuffin.  Could have been anything.

33-year old Ryan Unger is hitting the engineering books trying to figure out why he is one of the few humans who cannot suck on the titular Stream.  15-year old Nazi Mark helpfully reminds him that it is not a hardware limitation, he is defective. Mark orders him to get rid of shelves of books that are taking up space. This society has a networked stream that can wirelessly send and receive data directly into the brain, but the Kindle is still in beta, I guess.

Ryan sees Cheryl accessing the Stream and tries to strike up a conversation.  It is clear he is regarded as less than a man because he does not spend his life online. So Outer Limits is not exactly Nostradamus on that point.

There is an excellent exchange where Ryan asks Cheryl if she has read Ulysses by James Joyce.  She downloads it into her memory in five seconds and sincerely asks, “Is there something you didn’t understand?”  Kudos!  The trite reading would have been condescension, but they put a refreshing spin on it.

Ryan’s step-father Stanley helpfully tells us, “The Stream gives us instantaneous access to every fact and idea ever recorded.”  Cheryl finds Ryan in the basement reading. She tells him, the other 99% look at a page and it is translated and dumped into their memory.  She doesn’t even understand the concept of looking at words and reading.

That night, Stanley flips out.  He obsessively counts the number of hairs on his head, which would have been far easier for me.  He then frantically starts on his arm.  He collapses in a quivering heap but Ryan can’t call for help because he can’t call 911 with his brain.  Turns out, Stanley has contracted a computer virus.

Stanley goes into surgery because apparently these big-shots can’t fix the virus remotely.  During the operation, a nurse gets the virus and chaos ensues.  Stanley has a cerebral hemorrhage as random data floods into it, such as dates, numbers and how to spell hemorrhage.  The virus causes an insatiable, obsessive curiosity in people — it’s the V’ger Virus.

As other people become infected, Ryan realizes that the stream must be shut down.  When he starts whacking Stream routers with a baseball bat, Mark calls him the r-word (this episode is so old, the r-word was retarded, not racist).

As more and more people fall victim to the virus, Ryan decides the Stream must be stopped.  It really kind of feels like wish fulfillment for him, but his point is valid.  He finds a book with instructions on how to shut down the Stream and tricks Cheryl into scanning it.  This causes the program to upload to the stream and be executed.

The Stream stops and the citizens are a helpless bunch of illiterate dopes.  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  As in Idiocracy, an average dude is now the smartest guy on the planet.  He is seen teaching Cheryl and a little kid the alphabet using a chalkboard.  On a planet of billions, this does not seem to be the most efficient way to educate the masses.

One of my favorite episodes.  It feels ahead of its time even if it wasn’t.^[1]  I was consistently surprised at the writing and dialogue.  Sadly, this is David Shore’s only script for the series.

Any rating I give it (baud rate, kbps, mbps, etc) will just become outdated, so let’s just say it’s some good shit.

• ^[1] The same year this episode aired, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, so it isn’t as prescient as it might seem.
• This episode aired a few months before the similar Gattaca was released.
• In what is surely a slip-up and still humiliating to the producers 20 years later, one of Ryan’s books is Freedom to Choose by Milton Friedman.  [UPDATE] Friedman’s book was Free to Choose — I should have known better.

“Ethernet doesn’t have a valid IP configuration.” What the hell?

From the intro:  “Events in our past seem to slip further away with time.”  Well, duh.

Star athlete Danny Martin brings his new girlfriend home to meet his parents.  She is named Jade as are all mysterious Chinese women on TV.  This is also a coincidence of Lou Gehrigian proportions as she has freakishly green eyes.

Awkward:  Danny’s father Frank immediately recognizes her as a girl he tortured 20 years earlier when he was in the army.  He remembers her screaming in pain while strapped to a chair.  I took an immediate dislike to Frank (Peter Onorati) because he has one of them butt-chins. ^[1]  Also for torturing a cute girl, but mostly the chin thing.

Rather than try to avoid being recognized, Frank begins making the usual small dinner-table talk about where she is from, if she has ever been to Virginia, if she ever had a car battery clamped to her nipples.  While Danny and Jade go upstairs to fool around, Frank has another flashback.  Turns out, he was merely a witness to the torture.  He was standing guard as Doctor Sinclair injected her with chemicals to test her blood.

Shockingly, eight minutes into the episode when they are alone, Jade tells him his memory is correct.  Quite reasonably, however, he assumes she is the daughter of the girl who was experimented on.  At that very minute, in a nearby town, a scarred Dr. Sinclair sees her in a news clip with Danny as he has just been MVP of whatever sport he plays.  Sinclair thought he was the only survivor of that explosion at the lab.

Not a good night for the Martin men.  Frank’s past has come back to haunt him.  Then after dinner, Danny’s mother — let’s call her Carol — tells him that he and Jade will not be sleeping together under her roof.

Frank again flashes back to that night.  When Sinclair and his staff take a torture break, he enters the operating room to see the screaming girl.  She begs him to let her go.  Frank is caught by Sinclair as he is carrying Jade to safety.   Through a freak accident, a gunshot sets off a gas tank ^[2] and explodes Frank and Jade right out the 2nd floor window like Darkman.

When Frank and Jade are alone again, he asks her if he is her father.  Poor Danny is cock-blocked for the second time as Frank says she can’t be with his son because he would be her step-brother!  OK, maybe he isn’t quite as prudish as Carol since “step-sibling porn” is decades in the future.^[3]  She finally tells him that she is the girl he saved in the lab.

She says she is centuries old.  When she was a teenager, the Black Plague swept through her village in northern Spain.  Wait, were there Chinese people in 14th century Spain?  Did they live in Chinapueblo?  Is that why there were no cats around to catch the disease-ridden rats?  OK, settle down.  Jade even shows him her portrait in a book of paintings from the 18th century English Romantic Period, reasonably thinking the Cubist book would offer little proof of her identity.

After she goes up to bed, Frank again thinks back to that rainy night night long ago, when he rescued the beautiful girl from sadistic doctors . . . when, scared and alone, they found comfort in each other’s arms . . . where they hid out in an abandoned warehouse . . . and how he banged the shit out of his future daughter-in-law.  Carol asks if he is coming up to bed.  He fortuitously has the art book in his lap, and says he’ll be along soon.

He goes upstairs alright, but takes a detour to Jade’s room — they sure seem to end up alone a lot.  This time, she takes the opportunity to show him a crescent wrench shaped birthmark that he would surely remember 20 years later.  She drops her top and he touches it, just below her bare breasts.  And . . . in walks Danny.  No, now this is awkward!

Frank tries to explain, but Danny punches him out.  When Carol comes down to see what is going on, Danny immediately rats his father out.  Jade comes downstairs and pleads for everyone to listen to her and Frank’s story.

Dr. Sinclair breaks in and ties everyone up at gunpoint.  He hooks an IV up to Jade to get some of that magic blood.  The blood does clear up his complexion, but it goes further, transforming into a younger man, a boy, a baby — I guess a fetus would have been a little too pro-life, so the baby just devolves directly into a puddle of goo.

At least this proves to Carol and Danny that Frank’s and Jade’s story was true.  The next morning, Jade goes out to wait for a cab.  As his parents watch from a window, Danny goes out and kisses her.  So I guess everything is alright, but these are going to be some tense-ass Thanksgivings.

There was very little science-fiction to be had here.  In fact, it seemed more like one of the recent melodramatic 1980s Twilight Zones.  Somehow, it works though.  Maybe it was Sandrine Holt’s performance as Jade and some solid directorial choices.

I rate it a medium well-done.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Seriously, I can tolerate only about five people on this list.  It would have been six, butt they somehow left off the most famous butt-chin in motion picture history.
• ^[2] Just as in Halloween II.
• ^[3] I read somewhere recently that the most searched term in porn is now “step-sister”.  Of course, trying to find the original article just returned a million porn sites in Google.  Two hours later . . .
• Title Analysis:  I think I get it.  This was literally the last supper this family would have before their relationship was changed forever.  But is the dinner itself really that important?
• Well-directed by Helen Shaver, previously seen in The Sandkings.