Tom Bartin has been piloting Emergency Dispatch Ships for five years.  The computer tells him that there is a “computational error” due to an “unauthorized payload”.  This unexpected extra 100 pounds is enough to put the precisely calculated mission in jeopardy.

He searches the ship and finds a teenage girl who presumably weighs 100 pounds, 20 of which is pure exposition — she spews out names and dates like a fire-hose: she was going to Mimir to the linguistics academy, but then heard this ship was going to Groden, so she stowed away to see her brother Jerry who works on a government survey team, and who she has not seen for five years, and it was just the two of them growing up, and she just couldn’t wait another year to see him, but she’s not a freeloader, she has a class-B computer license and a background in linguistics, and her name is Marilyn Lee Cross.  Whew!

She stops the data dump to ask if they are going faster.  Tom says that he cut the engines that were decelerating the ship to save fuel; although, wouldn’t that require even more fuel later to stop the ship in a shorter remaining distance?  He calls Commandeer Delhart for instructions on how to handle the stowaway.  He asks whether there are any other ships that Marilyn could transfer to but, like every Star Trek movie, there is not another ship within a zillion light years.

Marilyn can tell from the base’s questions that something might be wrong.  When Tom is asked for the “time of execution”, she is pretty sure.  She is told that she must be ejected into space.  There are 35 sick men on Groden who will die without the serum that Tom is transporting, and the ship does not carry an ounce of extra fuel.

They try to find 100 pounds of junk in the ship to jettison, but can only find half of that amount.  If she were a Victoria’s Secret model, they would have made it.

Of course, this is based on the classic, widely-read short-story.  That puts the producers in tricky spot.  They must either change the brutal ending which is the main reason it is a classic, or plod inexorably toward the ending everyone already knows.  It’s a tough call when the best option is to plod.

There is a certain amount of tension baked into the mathematically beautiful premise, so it is still a good episode.  Our sense of fairness tells us there has got to be a way for her to survive, but the laws of physics just won’t permit it.  In a way, kudos to the producers for being faithful to the short story.  However, making that decision seems to be where they stopped the heavy lifting.

I seem to make this comparison constantly, but it is no Trial by Fire.  In that Outer Limit episode, the countdown is filled with dread and tension even though the doomsday ending is less pre-determined than in this episode.  Here, the ending just sort of plays out.  Christianne Hirt does a fine job as Marilyn.  Terence Knox as Bartin, however, brings nothing to the role.  It is almost as if the producers were making a deliberate effort to keep everything minimalist.

Bartin is not much of a character.   Marilyn’s whole character is thrown at us in 30 seconds.  The effort to strip the ship lacks urgency.  No effort was made to present the ship as 100 efficient — there’s junk everywhere.  Marilyn is good on a video call to her brother, but her bro is pretty stoic considering her imminent death.  The score is merely adequate.  Even the scene of her being sacrificed to the laws of physics, at first, seems squandered.

She silently walks into the airlock with a few tears running down her cheeks.  But this is actually pretty effective as it seems like an authentic reaction of someone who is in shock and powerless to change her fate.  There are no last words or begging or hysterics.  The door just closes over her face.  We get antsy for her — scream, do something!  There is no window and we get no exterior shot of her zooming through space like Leia in SW:VII.  The minimalism works here, but might have been better if it were more of a contrast with what preceded it.

Bartin pulls the switch to open the airlock into space with the emotion of a dude flushing a toilet.  He does start crying when he gets back in the pilot seat, but it doesn’t come off well.

Once again, I am in the position constantly bitching and moaning about an episode I kind of liked.  There was no question that Christianne Hirt was effective, and the story is deservedly a classic.  It just seems like it could have been so much more.

Other Stuff:

• Another site says that CBS found this ending too much of a downer.  One of their suggested alternatives was for Marilyn to have her arms and legs amputated.  That’s less of a downer?  That would have been awesome.