At Horton University, Dr. Sam Stein (Mark Hamill) is giving a demon-stration of his Computer Aided Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. He is assisted by Dr. Sarrazin and Dr. Rachel Carter (Debrah Farentino).  The subject is a paranoid schizophrenic who has visions of his dead father telling him to kill his girlfriend.

Stein and the patient are hooked into the CAVE which basically puts them in The Matrix. Together, they occupy a virtual setting which can also be televised to observers. The virtual space is a nightmarish construct of roaring hell-fire.  It is later revealed that Stein can control the environment, for instance, to be a tranquil lake setting.  Maybe this would have been a better setting for therapy of the homicidal maniac.

There is a strange series of hiccups in logic in the next scene:  1) Dr. Sarrazin interprets a 78% chance of recovery as meaning the patient can “absolutely” be cured.  2) The CAVE system asks for more input on the emotions of fear and love, yet we were just told “everything written on human psychology is cataloged in the CAVE’s RAM.”  And 3) Stein comments on skiing:  “Call me crazy, but sliding down an icy hill on two planks of wood just seems to challenge the laws of gravity.”  Well, that’s more a demonstration of gravity than a challenge of it.

Stein is hot for Dr. Carter, but too shy to make his move.  Once he finally approaches her, she is run down by a car and put into a coma.  Luckily, he has an app for that.

Stein is able to meet with the comatose Dr. Carter in the CAVE. But they are not alone  — there is another entity.

There is a great story here, but it is somewhat undermined by Mark Hamill who is just a terrible actor.  I never once got the feeling he was the character or had any idea of the meaning of the medical jargon he was using.  On the other hand, Debrah Farentino is going to be awesome anywhere she appears.

Post-Post:

• Peter Breck gets a strange “Special Cameo Appearance By” credit.  And is it technically a cameo if you are in two scenes?
• Jonathan Glassner also wrote Valerie 23.  His stories are good, but the casting is awesome.
• Debrah Farentino is the daughter of James Farentino from Since Aunt Ida Came to Stay.
• Can it be just coincidence that there is a Dr. Sarrazin in this episode and Michael Sarrazin starred in the previous week’s episode?
• Is it just my imagination, or were Dr. Carter’s breasts about 50% bigger in the CAVE?  It could have actually been justified by the denouement.  Now that’s good writing!
• Hulu sucks.

Carter Jones (Ally Sheedy) is a reporter, one of the few like Sheryl Attkisson who will actually do something other than put on the knee pads and suck up to power.  While stuck in traffic, her cell phone picks up a call from a nearby car and she hears “Krieger is scheduled for removal this afternoon.  There will be no witnesses.”

She looks around and stares eye-to-violet-eye with Michael Sarrazin.  Rather than go home to prepare for a cocktail party at the home of some cabinet official, she shockingly pursues the story.

Her editor is old school, though, and wants her to cover the garbage strike.  He says Joeseph Krieger’s name gets “thrown around a lot.  He’s this country’s Salmon Rushdie.”

I kinda think of Salmon Rushdie as this country’s Salmon Rushdie (even if he is a British citizen).  Nothing to see here, move along.

She goes to Krieger’s house and sees the police taking photos of man-shaped purple ash residue on the driveway.  They throw her off the scene.  In her SUV, she gets a call from Sarrazin who says he knows her name, her address and warns her that she could suffer the same fate as Krieger.

In the archives, she finds a story from 2 weeks ago about a hiker that disappeared from a boat trip.  Purple ashes in the shape of a man were found on the dock.  She gets the world’s most intrusive email notification that tells here, “Do not pursue this.”

She goes to the dock, to speak to the captain of the boat, but learns that he hasn’t been heard from in 2 weeks.  The dockmaster tells her that Krieger was also on that boat. There was also a married couple on that boat.  Jones goes to their house and sees Sarrazin reduce them to purple ashes.

Since Sarrazin knows where she lives, she goes to her father’s house.  They don’t get along because, like Samantha Marsh, she has exposed environmental problems at her father’s employer that resulted in the loss of jobs.  Even if she did the right thing, she is really an asshole about the lives she disrupted.

She goes back to see the dockmaster, but he is now missing.  His sister is there also looking for him.  She says another odd-looking man was just there looking for her brother.  Jones is able to track him to a hotel  Sarrazin has followed her and also reduces him to purple ashes.

Turns out, Sarrazin is an alien.  One of his scouts had a virus which infected the people whom he has been eliminated.  He was merely preventing a massive outbreak on Earth. The last infected person: Carter Jones.

The good news is the people he zapped to purple ashes did not actually die, they were just transported to Sarrazin’s planet where the the virus is not a danger.  Which sounds suspiciously like my dog Skippy “going to live on a farm” when he got old.

Good episode and nice twist on the killer aliens.

Post-Post:

• This would have been a much better title for the episode starring Marlee Matlin which had the blah title The Message.  It barely makes sense for this episode.
• Hulu Sucks.  However, their beautiful IHOP commercials are mouth-watering. New: Caramel Bon-Bon Pancakes.

A very sad episode in more than one way — and made nearly intolerable by the use of a young actor playing a deformed kid.  OK, nothing is off the table in genre fiction; I’m even enjoying American Horror Story this season.  But their “freaks” are at least presented as human and in service of a good story (well, at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far; I’m not hearing good things).

I’m even kind of ticked off at the summary on IMDb:

Howard and Joanne Sharp are pregnant and are considering the possibility of black-market genetic enhancement which will result in a perfect baby or a 1 in 10,000 of creating a monster.

First of all, Howard isn’t pregnant.  Second, later in the episode we see one of the unlucky .01%’ers.  Yes, he has severe problems, but let’s reserve the “m-word” talk for It’s Alive or Basket Case scenarios.

Also, I think they meant to have the word “chance” after “10,000.”  Even with that, the sentence isn’t quite right, but going on would be a waste of good pedantry on a bad episode.

To be fair, my disdain for the execution taints some good aspects of the episode.  The acting was fine with pros like Alan Ruck and Catherine Mary Stewart.  There was some interesting misdirection involving spousal abuse, and I’m always up for a good genetic engineering story i.e. Gattaca, or even previous Outer Limits episodes.  But if you’re going to have a monster, make him a monster.

Post-Post:

• It was nice to see Mary Beth Rubens again, sadly in her 2nd to last IMDb credit ever.
• IMDb is full of strange resumes.  Writer Eric Morris seemed to burn pretty bright, selling a lot of scripts in a 5 year run — then nothing after 2002.  IMDb values writers about as much as Hollywood does, so no idea if he is still alive.  OK, probably the union won’t give up the info.

Why hire Heather Graham, then make her up as a plain, emotionless robot?  Hollywood has learned nothing since 1996, now burying Elizabeth Banks under make-up for The Hunger Games.  Homely girls need acting jobs, too.  Why not give them the jobs that required cakes of make-up or bags over the head?  Everyone wins.

Alicia (Heather Graham) and Martin are working in a lab developing a large gelatinous blob.  There is a power surge and the blob goes into labor pooping out a human being.  Congratulations, it’s a man!  The adult man, covered in viscous goo is flailing about and scratches Martin’s face.  Alicia removes his face-plate revealing him to be a robot.

Well, thank the Old Testament God they did not use the cliche and name the human Adam.  The forbidden apple didn’t fall far from the tree, though — they named him Cain.  After mankind’s first murderer.

Alicia begins home-schooling Cain.  He is curled up by the fire as she teaches him about emotions.  She says, “Hate is intense hostility or dislike.  It is a manifestation of one’s insecurities.  It is rooted in a perceived threat to one’s status or power.”

Cain concludes, “Then I suppose the price of hating others is loving one’s self less.”

Amazing — he is the only human on earth and he is already poisoned with PC group-think.  He literally is a cult of one.

Cain then rhapsodizes about love and plants a kiss on Heather, although where he learned that behavior is a mystery.  She explains that she is a robot and does not feel such emotions.  This is a shame since her maker — Innobotics — was also responsible for the sex-bot Valerie 23.  Innobotics must be Outer Limit’s version of Cyberdyne Systems.

The robot security force has discovered cans and deduced that there is a human still alive somewhere who must be exterminated for not recycling.

Faced with the prospect of having to read Dante’s Inferno, Cain gets cabin fever and runs away.  He finds a marker commemorating the death of humans on July 27, 1997. The marker is dated August 8, 0001 AH (presumably After Humans).  C’mon it took you 12 days to bury them in the middle of summer?  They must have gotten pretty ripe.

Cain returns to the cabin where Alicia explains how humans died in a bio-chemical war. He is to be the John Connor of the story leading “the second coming of mankind.”

For creating a human, Martin is crucified in the public square outside the Innobotics building.  Luckily, inside the building there is literally a giant on/off switch that can disable all of the robots on earth.  You might think they would destroy or at least guard such a dangerous device.

Nick Mancuso is excellent as the robot Martin.  Neither he nor Heather Graham play their parts like Data or the earlier model Valerie (who, after all, would be several generations out of date).  Their performances consist mostly of a lack of emotion and speaking very flatly.  It doesn’t scream “robot”, but that works to the episode’s benefit.

It often reminded me of Planet of the Apes.  The Defense Minister, spoke of humans much like Dr. Zaius or General Ursa.  There were also classes of robots just as there were different species of monkeys.  And some were more equal than others.

Another good episode.  It’s just sad Heather Graham couldn’t download some fashion tips from Valerie 23.

Post-Post:

• Chris Brancato wrote the excellent Eve episode of The X-Files.
• It is very distracting that the lead robot enforcer sounds just like Lt. Worf.
• Hulu sucks.