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.

Sometimes I wish I had an editor.  The downside, of course, is that I would be fired immediately.  But it would be nice to be able to ask someone, “C’mon this is a clip-show, do I really have to do a post?”  I would happily skip it with permission, but my completist philosophy forces me to watch it.

For the very observant, there is a clue in the first few seconds that Dr. Strong, titular Voice of Reason, is screwed.  The brown swirly globe representing the alien home world in Birthright is sitting on the conference table.

Strong is escorted into the room and begins setting up his material. An elite panel from the government enters including Captain Furillo from Hill Street Blues and the poor man’s Dean Norris, Don S. Davis.  The cunning tease of the brown globe is ruined as it is in the prominently displayed right in front of Furillo.  Nice work, guys.

Dr. Strong says the United States, and possibly the world, is being overrun by aliens. Just before the government team immediately grants them amnesty, he  specifies — extraterrestrials.  He tells the panel he is scared to death.

Exhibit A is the aliens from The Sandkings which not-Dean Norris dismisses as a hoax. Furillo tries to dismiss the meeting, but the newest member on the committee says he would like to hear more.

Exhibit B is the doomed Mars mission from The Voyage Home which is dismissed as an accident.

Exhibit C is the space dildo from Caught in the Act, looking a lot more pointy than I realized when I first called it that.  Furillo doesn’t dismiss this one, he just calls it absurd.

One of the committee members compares that incident to the events in If These Walls Could Talk, despite there being no real similarity.  But it does set the clip up as Exhibit D.

Furillo asks for a break to put in some eye drops and slams the brown globe down on the table — a double-shot reference to Birthright.

The committee offers up a counter argument that logically proves nothing and is a waste of time.  They suggest that not all strange events are alien based, for instance the nanobots created in The New Breed.  So what?  That’s the kind of logic we get every Sunday on news shows where the guests are too stupid or biased or cowardly to point out real flaws in each others’ logic.

Exhibit E is the mysterious healing in Corner of the Eye.

Finally we get to Exhibit F, Birthright. Strong says Senator Adams was an alien, and that other aliens are poisoning the atmosphere for human in order to make it hospitable for their race, naturally using the 95 corrupt bastards in congress to unwittingly further their plot.

After the committee votes not to forward Strong’s data to the President, he suddenly remembers the importance of the eye-drops.  This leads to a conclusion that actually surprised me.

This episode doesn’t get much respect, but I enjoyed it.  I’m a sucker for seeing the old characters again whether in clip shows like this, or the unfairly criticized Seinfeld finale.

Post-Post:

• I just learned that “completest” is a word — that seems unnecessary, like “most unique.”  On the other hand, the perfectly reasonable word “completist” is not recognized by spell-check.
• Don S. Davis was actually in a Season 1 episode, but it did not involve aliens, so things did not get awkward in this episode.
• Sadly, Valerie 23 also did not involve aliens.
• Hulu sucks.

After a press conference hyping his energy bill, Senator Richard Adams from Idaho is in a car being driven by his aide.  Adams puts some eye-drops in his eye, and the aide says he could use some too.

So the Senator gives the aide the bottle — while he’s driving.

And the aide leans his head back and takes a few drops — while he’s driving.

These guys are too stupid to be in poli . . . . er, never-mind.

The human gene-pool is strengthened by the death of the aide, but Adams wakes up in the hospital.  Maybe his doctor is not so sharp either as she seems surprised to find that Adams has strange organs and four lobes in his brain instead of two.  Frontal, occipital, parietal and temporal lobes are pretty much standard issue on humans.  Oh, we could throw in the limbic, but don’t start your cerebellum crap.

Adams’ security detail swarms his hospital room and hustles him out of the room.  When it is clear he does not realize who he is or what “the mission” is, the men decide he has to be killed.  He is able to escape and make his way back to the only person he can trust, the doctor.

He begins falling apart.  He is cold, fatigued, losing his hair, fingernails peeling off.  This is a result of his not taking a supplement that had kept him looking human and being able to breathe earth’s air.

He discovers that his energy bill, rather than being good for the atmosphere, will actually destroy it, making it poison to humans, but hospitable to his alien race.  We’re on to you, Al Gore!

He decides to rat his people out to the press.  Things don’t work out.

At the end, he is wearing the doctor’s Redskins cap.  So not only is he an alien, he’s a raaaaacist.

Post-Post:

• The US Senators from Idaho when this episode aired were Larry Craig and Dick Kempthorne.  Craig resigned after some suspicious shenanigans in an airport restroom.  Kempthorne managed to hold on to his job after being accused of spending $222,000 on renovations to his bathroom at the Dept. of the Interior.
• Them Idaho senators sure loves their shitters.  Kempthorne was even succeeded by a guy named Mike Crapo.
• Hulu sucks.

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.