It’s 19 days left on this blog, I need 3 episodes of Outer Limits, there’s 1 episode left on the DVD, it’s dark and I’m wearing sunglasses.  God, I hope I can squeeze them out of the free Hulu trial period.

Niles Crane has invented a device which will be “the future of our penal system.”  Fittingly, he tests it out on a Senator in the pre-credit scene.

He also has a real criminal, well a 2nd real criminal, who has been hooked up to the new machine for only a few hours, but in his mind, he has experienced the passage of 25 years of his life sentence.  Soon, the prisoner is awakened and is disoriented.  As usual, an “emotive outburst” occurs after waking when the crook discovers he has a second chance at life.  He is still young and vigorous enough to continue raping and murdering innocent people.

They bring in another prisoner, Cory.  Because he was truly innocent, the machine induces seizures in him.  Niles goes into the virtual prison to rescue him.  Despite his effort, Cory dies.  Niles is sentenced to manslaughter.

At his trial, a previous test subject claims that he now has trouble at work and can’t sleep.  Niles’ lawyer asks if it isn’t true that without Niles’ procedure, he would be in jail!  He says he would rather be dead.  So Niles really did Cory favor; you know, except for the part about being innocent.

The senators can’t wait to call a press conference to denounce this new invention.  After all, while it might save billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of lives, it would also eliminate the opportunity for millions in graft, bribes, union jobs, earmarks, and no-bid contracts for relatives in the military-industrial-incarceration complex.

Niles is hustled off to a real jail, the kind Harry Reid or Hillary Clinton will never see the inside of.  He enters cell 14653 and is immediately set upon by his cellmate.  “I hear you like to torture cons,” he screams in between kicks.

Dana finally comes to see Niles in prison, and tells him his appeal has been rejected. Not only that, she married one of the scumbag Senators.  He attempts an escape, but is stymied by an electrified floor that is far too efficient and amusing to use in real prisons.  He serves out his full sentence.

Then wakes up in his lab, having only been in the chair a few hours.

Once in the virtual prison, he rescued Cory, but was unable to get out in time so his trial and incarceration were not real.  Hearing that his device will be rolled out nationally, he flips out and has to be hauled away screaming.

Post-Post:

• Canadian DVD Title: La Condamnation, which I like better than the English version.
• Niles is directed to cell 16453, and that is the number on his shirt.   He is identified later as prisoner 63994 which I would expect to be on his shirt.
• Why would season 2 cost $17 and season 3 cost $35?  The 3rd season even had 4 fewer episodes.  Might have to hold my breath and get Hulu.
• Hulu sucks.

Trevor McPhee (John Cryer) shuts off the radio after the DJ says farewell to the old year.  Trevor  also says good riddance to 1949 despite have a decent home, a cute wife, and a radio the size of a refrigerator.

He feels they are in a rut, going nowhere and can’t even afford a bottle of New Year’s champagne despite Trevor drinking from a bottle of hooch at the time.  Full of rot-gut and self-loathing, he says the hell with it and goes out to get a bottle of bubbly anyway.

On the way to the store, he encounters a bright light and runs off the road.  When he regains consciousness, he stumbles to the road and hitches a ride from Ray Carter. Ray is a fan of comics like Zantarg, Master of Time and Space.

1960:  Ray drops Trevor off at his house, but he finds the locks have been changed.  When his wife Theresa (Jessica Lundy) answers the door she damns him for having disappeared for 10 years.  He swears to remember nothing of the last decade.  They go to a doctor who is no help.  His wife finally accepts that he didn’t run out on her and they go to bed, but he disappears again.  Trevor wakes up in a swampy cave, then reappears 10 years later

1970:  The furniture has been rearranged so he reappears on the bedroom floor. Technically, he should have reappeared in mid-air and dropped to the floor.  He finds his clothes vacuum-packed in the closet and changes into them.  Downstairs, he finds that Theresa has given up waiting.  Ray, the guy who gave Trevor a ride in 1950 is now giving Trevor’s wife a ride — they are married.  This time, Theresa finally realizes that Trevor hasn’t aged at all; because, really, would he have kept that mustache for 20 years?  He also finds out he has a son, which should have aged him 10 years on the spot.

He storms out and sees the devolution of the country in 1969. There are drugs, hippies, war protests with inanely repetitive chants — can you really hear All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance go around more than twice without actually wanting to start a war?  He goes to a bar and is soon joined by Ray.  Trevor starts feeling sick and goes into the bathroom for 10 years [insert lame Mexican food gag here].  Again, he awakens in the swampy cave.

1980:  He reappears on the floor of the bathroom stall, luckily unoccupied.  The bar is now a disco (but not for Lola) complete with cokeheads, glittering disco balls, and The Hustle.  His son and Theresa are waiting for him.  This time Ray sets up a camera to catch him disappearing on Super-8.  Which he does.

1990:  Trevor reappears on VHS, skipping right over the Betamax years.  Ray is dead, but Theresa hypnotizes Trevor, and is able to talk to the alien who has possessed him. It says that his species explores the universe by possessing people and periodically bringing them back to their planet to share their knowledge.

Despite using wormhole technology, Theresa learns they have no concept of the passage of time. She explains how the aliens have wrecked their lives and talks the parasite (who prefers to be called a Symbiote-American) into releasing Trevor’s body.  He disappears from 1990, sadly, having never reached the distant decade where his mustache would be accepted by society.

On the other hand, the aliens are pretty hoopy froods and plop Trevor back in 1950; where he was miserable.  Once again, lottery-number-free.

I suspect the concept is not original, but that never bothers me; I really liked the idea.  It didn’t hook me for some reason though.  Maybe it was seeing Jon Cryer in a drama (although I’ve never seen him in a comedy, either).

I still rate it 8 out of 10 years.

Post-Post:

• Jessica Lundy was the girl with the funny laugh on Seinfeld.
• Of course, Jon Cryer was 40% of Two and a Half Men.

Dr. Rebecca Warfield (hey, it’s TV’s Roz from Frasier!) has been in a fatal car accident and is having an out-of-body experience; also an out-of-focus experience.

Her really sketchy (by today’s standards, but I kinda dig it) ghost hovers above the street and looks down at her bloody carcass.  Turns out it was just her recurring nightmare, but this time it was different as she actually died in the dream.

Roz is trying to get funding for her research on the human soul.  She is showing the committee a film of a chimp named Duncan in the hyperspace chamber.  This puts  him into a near-hibernation state, but resembling REM sleep in a human. Somehow this is supposed to show that the chimp is having an out-of-body experience and part of his soul is going to another dimension.  I don’t get the connection, but I wasn’t a call-screener for a shrink for 10 years.

One committee member asks when she is going to put a human in the chamber (hmmmm, I wonder who the first one will be).  Another member (Hey, it’s TV’s Cigarette-Smoking Man (aka CGB Spender) from The X-Files!) wants to know on what moral grounds she is conducting these experiments.  He accuses her of presuming to know God’s will and questions how such sacrilegious research come to be sanctioned.

Back at the lab, she asks her assistant Amy if she believes she has a soul.  Not surprisingly, since he is wearing a cross necklace, she sheepishly says yes.  That night she gets a visit from CGB and tells him about Roz’s research.  She tells him Roz believes we are made of sub-atomic vibrating loops; basically the silly-String Theory.  CGB doesn’t care about the details, he just knows that such sacrilege must be stopped.

After losing her funding, sure enough, she goes into the chamber herself.  The computer goes berserk, as they are wont to do, and takes the session to Level 5.  This could all have been prevented by making four the highest number.  As it shuts down, Roz runs to Amy’s station to see what when wrong, but Amy can’t see her —  her body is still in the chamber.

She finds she can walk through walls and people, and instantly zip from place to place.  She overhears a phone conversation telling her husband Ben that she has been taken to the hospital.  Roz and Ben get to the hospital at the same time despite her ability to instantly teleport anywhere.  Corporeal Roz is still unconscious.

She drops in at Amy’s apartment and CGB stops by by.  They are clearly in cahoots — she admits to him that the power went out of control and she froze before she could find a way to stop it.

Roz starts swinging her hand through the phone, the TV, all of Amy’s electrical appliances trying to make herself heard — same trick Geordi and Ro tried on ST:TNG. She later tries the same trick at the hospital.

Back at the lab, Amy turns on the light and says she can feel Roz.  She commands her to make the light flicker like she did at the hospital.  We can’t see Roz, but we do see the light flicker.  Just when we expect logic to prevail, Amy screams, “This is the devil’s work!  Man’s arrogance must be stopped!”

Jesus Christ, we’re back at the hospital again.  The doctor starts using a heart defibrillator on her, but she dies, and ghost-Roz fades out.

When another patient who just had a near-death experience tells her husband that he talked to Roz, her husband rushes back to the lab.  A flickering light tells him she is there. Her husband gets in the machine, but Amy takes an axe to it, and it blows up.

So they are together again.

Post-Post:

• Canadian DVD Title:  Voyage Astral.
• That was some bizarre wreck.  The other car is completely upside down, but Roz’s is right beside it and right-side-up.  So how did the other one flip in place like a rotisserie?
• They have GOT to find a way to get that black-lunged son-of-a-bitch on the X-Files sequel.  A clone?  Was Jeremiah Smith still alive by that point?

Sheena Easton is a once popular singer who has experienced a major decline in her career.  Ditto for her character in this episode.

After playing to an appreciative crowd in a small club, she refuses to come back for an encore.  In her dressing room, she dumps a pile of pills in her hand.  Before she can gulp them down, a strange blob charges through the wall and convulses her.

After she wakes up, she sees someone else in the mirror.  It only lasts a second, though. She is inspired to start writing some new songs, but is brought down again when she sees her manager / husband banging a roadie.  She breaks a glass and is thinking about slashing her wrists when the other person appears in the mirror again.

This is Rachel, from the future.  She claims that in her timeline Sheena had died from an overdose that night at the small club.  Rachel’s appearance has prevented that from happening again.

Her husband is once again banging the roadie when two blobs from the future possess their bodies.  The one possessing the girl is understandably intrigued, feeling himself up.  The one possessing the man is bafflingly uninterested in the hot naked blonde. Yeah, it’s a dude on the inside, but that candy coating is pretty sweet.

They go to see Sheena and tell her they are from the same future as Rachel.  They plan to kill Sheena to restore the timeline.  Inexplicably, they don’t just kill her then.

They go back to the room where the husband was banging the roadie and get back in the same exact position so the couple won’t notice that their bodies had been possessed.  This is should be kinda awkward since the time travelers were both men.  Fortunately, this was not shown — kind of like how in Ghost, when Patrick Swayze was kissing Dinty Moore, they wisely did not show her actually swapping spit with the psychic Whoopi Goldberg as she channeled Swayze.

Actually, I find this couple of scenes more interesting than the main story, and not just because of the swell newdity.  The possession of the bodies at such an intimate time, a man inhabiting the woman’s body, the two dudes getting back into the same intimate position to cover their actions, the husband thinking he had lasted a record time.  The opportunity to explore this for laughs, homophobia, gratuitous nudity, anything was HUGELY squandered.

Kudos for them at least taking a second to have the dude look at his watch and think they had been going at it for 30 minutes.  Good brief gag as it acknowledged the lost time and was funny.  Poorly executed, but excellent idea.

Another couple of goons from the future come to her room, but Sheena manages to fight them off.  Her friend Janet ends up accidentally getting killed.  Yada yada, Sheena’s life force is transferred into Janet’s dead body.  Sheena-in-Janet becomes a star again.

Sheena Easton is no great thespian, but she isn’t really the problem here.  The tone is so leaden that it is sleep-inducing; it literally induced me to sleep.  There are a couple of fun moments, but they are mostly squandered.  And you’re always on thin ice using mediocre stock music for a band on TV, especially if it is supposed to be world-changing.

Post-Post:

• Canadian DVD Title: Letoile Filante.
• Surprisingly, for such a slog, the director went on to helm 2 episodes of 24.  He was also the director of a better, earlier episode of Outer Limits.
• I’m cool with the goons from the future seeing their real selves in the mirror rather than the people they possessed.  But WTH would they be seeing their future clothes?

The spacecraft Light Brigade has just made a jump into enemy space where, according to the captain, they are going to unleash the “most powerful weapon ever built by man, a sub-atomic warhead.”  Sub-Atomic doesn’t really sound like the “ultimate weapon” as it is, by definition, sub.

To be fair, the label seems to have acquired a different meaning in the future.  It is a bomb which breaks down the forces holding together individual atoms.  It just seems like they could have used this opportunity to come up with a cool, new. less confusing name.

Six hundred humans on nine ships are taking this doomsday device to the enemy’s homeworld.  Just as the captain is about to read the crew the poem the ship was named for, they are attacked.  And what a coincidence, the poem is about the valor of 600 soldiers.

By their radiation badges they can see that they’ve taken a lethal dose of radiation during the attack.  This just continues the unlucky streak of Major Skokes as he had been captured by the aliens in the excellent Quality of Mercy.  It is strange that the previous episode is barely referenced and there are no clips from it.

On the other hand, Skokes did escape with the help of one of his Light Brigade crewmates, and he got a swell new mechanical Terminatoresque hand; ironic, as he is played by T-1000 Robert Patrick.

A small band of doomed survivors makes their way through radiated chambers and a long series of access tubes to get to the the bridge to activate the bomb.

There are a couple of twists and turns, and it is a pretty good episode.  Robert Patrick and Graham Greene are both excellent in their portrayals.  Sadly, Wil Wheaton just doesn’t pull off his character.  I was never a Wesley Crusher hater, but he was just miscast here, or maybe just has too much TNG baggage for another space opera. Michael Dorn managed to make the leap and make a good performance in an earlier Outer Limits episode, but he had the benefit of having a completely different face than in TNG.

Post-Post:

• Canadian DVD title:  La Brigade Stellaire
• Naturally, the US can’t be identified as heroes, so the mission is run by the United Nations.  Although the way it turns out sounds like a UN mission after all.