It does not bode well that the story is set in history’s dullest era, Elizabethan England.  The opening shot is a dull matte painting which dissolves into a dull soiree with formally dressed, jaded stiffs lounging about, just the kind of lethargic gathering that — hey boobies!

I guess this is more of a ho house.  Dr. Jack — in an episode called “Ripper” — York seems particularly uncomfortable.  He is reading a Jules Verne novel in the lobby rather than taking a girl upstairs.  He is apparently a regular so is not bounced out for his impudence.  No, I said impudence.  One girl does catch his eye.  When she leaves, Jack follows.  He finds her nearby making out with another women, so naturally he watches them; as one does.  Improbably, this is not the highpoint of his evening.  A ghostly green snake-like entity bursts from the chest of the girl, and zooms down the throat of her lover.  Jack runs.

Back at his house, his fiancee demands, “You must promise me that you will never go back to that place again.”  But when he begins kissing her neck, she says, “Not until after we’re married!”  Well, which is it, baby?  If that is not bad enough, Jack is in a deep depression over a grievous error he made with a patient who died before her insurance had run out.  Like Oscar Wilde, he has become addicted to Absinthe, and is getting no action from the ladies; but for different reasons.

The next day, he does take a girl upstairs.  However, he notices a green slime around her mouth like the monster he saw earlier.  Jack recoils even though he had not previously coiled.  Wait, they were kissing, how did that slime suddenly appear on her mouth?  They begin fighting, then Jack grabs his cane in which a knife is hidden.  The woman tries to seduce him saying, “I’m old, Jack.  Older than you.  Older than London.”  She might be an ancient spirit, but boy has she not learned what to say to a man.  He stabs her in the gut just as the madam and some of her girls come in and witness the bloody attack.  The girl runs outside to the alley where she snakes into another woman.  So at least somebody’s getting some action.

Jack escapes and runs home.  As he his polishing his shillelagh, his fiancee catches him.  Awkward.  She is furious that he missed a scheduled lunch with her mother.  So his afternoon could have been even worse.  It does go downhill, though, as Police Detective Langford shows up and arrests him.

The next day, his fiancee humiliates herself by saying Jack could not have killed the woman because they were fornicating at the time of the murder.  I guess the eyewitness testimony of the five professional fornicators who saw the murder was less believable.

Well, then things get personal for Jack, then personal for his fiancee.

The production design was excellent.  The settings and costumes seemed very authentic.  The Britishness was further enhanced by Cary Elwes as Jack looking very much like Malcolm McDowell in Time after Time, and David Warner from the same film playing the Detective.  Although, thank God the cast’s teeth were not era-appropriate. ^[1]

Maybe it was those darn British accents, but the performances in this episode were just incredible.  Cary Elwes had to convey everything from ennui to insanity, and pulled it off magnificently.  Clare Sims as his fiancee was equally excellent.  Frances Fisher and David Warner are old hands and are as solid as ever.  The alien was a little hammy at times, borderline Dr. Frankenfurteresque, but not a dealbreaker.

Overall, excellent.

Notes

• [1]  Seriously, check out the trailer for They Shall Not Grow Old.
• It is goddam impossible to verbally ask Google to spell fiancee without getting a bio of Beyonce (if you just say the word, don’t phrase it as a question).

Mary and Joseph, er . . . Marie and Justin have not been able to make a baby, so they go to the shady Tilford Institute for help (shady = TV-speak for anything having a Christian affiliation).

They put Marie on the table and insert the embryo.  Thankfully Showtime is not playing the cable-card for this scene.  Dr. Cowlings then goes back to the lab.  She assures Reverend Tilford that the baby will be a perfect clone.  It is then revealed that it is a clone of Jesus using DNA from the Shroud of Turin.  But it doesn’t even look like the Shroud of Turin.  Is that thing copyrighted?  And how did this huckster end up with it in his church?

Tilford makes no secret of his plan.  He tells his congregation that DNA has been identified on the Shroud, although it could have been the 1st century mortician banging his assistant and needed a place to cometh.  He plans to create a clone of the Son of God.  True believers Marie and Justin are attending the service, but don’t know she is carrying the clone.  She has an attack of cramps and goes to the hospital.  While there, she sees on her chart that their baby is AB-negative which is impossible for their blood types to have produced.

Marie freaks out, and Justin admits he is not the father of the baby.  The clinic determined he was unable to father a child, so they scraped some DNA off the Shroud.  They go to see Tilford.  He tells Marie she is part of the prophecy of a second coming; third if you count the mortician.

And so on.  It is a great premise, but it seems like more could have been done with it.  Marie and Justin run from Tilford’s compound while Fetus Jesus explodes lamps and flings paper around.  Oh no, the exit door is blocked!  Whew, a sympathetic henchman appears from nowhere and pushes a button to release the mag-lock.  No top secret high-tech key-card, combination, or fingerprint recognition — he just presses a button.

Marie and Justin make it to their car, but Marie goes into labor.  Hmmm, there is no time to reach a hospital.  Where should they go?  No shit, they go to a pretty manger-ish barn.  What parents wouldn’t want their baby born in a firetrap with spiders, livestock, fecal matter, and no running water?  Doesn’t a barn suggest there is a farmhouse nearby?  Tilford turns up, but slimy baby Jesus blasts the new family out of danger and then they really take their lives in their hands by hitchhiking.  The end.

It is stated that this is not Tilford’s first attempt at cloning Jesus, but nothing is made of that.  There is an intriguing mention that this is not the Son of God but just a kid with a freak telekinetic mutation; that also  goes nowhere.  Luckily, this is the kind of cornball, on-the-nose entertainment that I like.

Samantha Mathis is always welcome.  David Ogden Stiers is great here, but was so memorable on MASH, that he comes across a little bland when he doesn’t have the Boston accent.

Other Stuff:

• How are the User Reviews selected at IMBd?  This episode is 20 years old and has only two reviews posted.  This at a time when every dumbbell thinks his opinion matters . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4.  The Episode Rating is a not-bad 6.6/10 but the two User Reviews average 1.5/10.  The 6.6 seems about right, but if you penalize for wasted potential, that 1.5 starts to sound reasonable.
• Oh, come on! . . . I mean, I love it! :

Well they roped me from the first second.  There is a jaunty little piano tune in the background and a young woman begins a voice-over.  It is so refreshing and unlike the usual Outer Limits opening that I fear the episode will not back it up.

Mona tells us she has lived in the Clarkson Arms all her life.  She admits it has seen better days, but thinks it still has charm.  Her husband Ned is pumped because he was offered his dream job managing Crazy Moe’s Electronics Superstore.  Mona refuses to move out of the Clarkson Arms, though, so he folds like Crazy Eddie’s.

Mona goes to the condo board meeting to discuss who has been buying up units as residents have been abandoning the old building.  The remaining owners are violently opposed to selling out cheap.  The cutting-off of heads is mentioned.  Uh, here’s a less radical solution:  just don’t sell.

Mona now has a cause — you know, other than crushing her husband’s dreams —  to get excited about.  She thinks maybe the mysterious buyers will not want the building if it is full of Radon, so she buys a Radon-Detection Kit.  Although, maybe she should have just bought some Radon.  While she is testing the basement, she catches her married (not to each other) neighbors Shirley and Dom banging ^[1] on top of the washer.  Mona backs her wheelchair into the shadows and is electrocuted.  Yeah, so I didn’t mention she was in a wheelchair.  You think that defines her?  What’s wrong with you?  Anyway, she falls out of the chair, but on the way down hears the naughty thoughts of her fornicating ^[2] neighbors.

She wriggles on her stomach all the way to their 3rd floor unit.  I guess she took the stairs, because how would she reach the elevator button?  Ned picks her up and carries her inside.  At the next owner’s meeting, she is able to hear everyone’s thoughts and discovers they are a bunch of neurotic, unfaithful, insecure, hateful dolts.  Concerned that their unhappiness might cause them to sell out and move out, Mona tries to help with the problems only she knows about.

Everything is easier with cash, so she asks to get in on Dom’s poker game.  The other players are resistant, but she demonstrates her knowledge of poker by reciting the winning hands in order and, after all, brought her own chair.  Heyooooo!

With her new psychic ability, she cleans the men out, but the game also exhausts the viewer.  Her reading of minds is demonstrated on-screen by filming the actors with a fish-eye lens, overlighting them, and having them speak maniacally directly to the camera.  It became tedious at the owner’s meeting, but unbearable at the poker game.  The device might have worked if used judiciously, but in some scenes the grotesque over-emoting occupies over half of the screen time.

Mona tries to set everyone’s lives on the right track.  This leads to a scene of escalating mayhem which shows signs of greatness on a Night at the Opera stateroom level.  Unfortunately, it is undermined by these repulsive characters.  Toward the end, their grotesque inner-selves are indistinguishable from their live personalities.  I just didn’t care what happened to these clowns.

That is not the end though.  There is an utterly unnecessary twist which makes no sense.

Jane Adams was perfectly cast and gives a great performance as Mona.  Every other character is so relentlessly over-the-top that they are repulsive.  The lone exception is her husband.  He is relatively normal, but I have no idea what his character is.  He appears to be unemployed, yet sits around all day in a suit.  He wants a job managing a store, but seems to be a real estate mogul.  He seems to love Mona, but has a long-existing plot to kill her.

It really is too bad the episode went off the rails.  It was fun, well-scored, and artfully directed.  It was just a chore being around these people.

Footnotes:

• [1] Really, they named him Dom Pardo?
• [2] I used the nice word there in honor of Outer Limits’ restraint.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard an F-bomb used in this series.  They do, however, show occasional nudity so I’m happy with the trade-off.

A guy is running down an alley, being chased by two guys in trench coats.  In a great visual, he hides out among a bunch of mannequins like ____(actor)____ in ______(TV Show)______ .

Sorry for the Mad Libs.  I wish I knew a reference to insert there, but TV has become unwatchable for just that reason.  Does every f***’in’ guy on TV have to be uniformly perfect mannequin?  They are indistinguishable with their perfect salon haircuts, 3 days perfect stubble, blinding teeth, perfectly flat stomach, 3% body fat, still somehow too-small jackets, and wooden personalities.  I have bailed on the last few series I attempted because the guys are indistinguishable.  Arrow: just creepy.  Hey Manifest, I tried; I could not keep the male characters straight even when they were literally different races.  Designated Survivor, ditto. ^[2]  Timeless, you’re trying my patience (although that guy does seem to have talent beyond his looks).

But I digress.  It is a fun shot of him hiding behind the bin of mannequins, with their smooth white limbs pointing in all directions.  Kudos to Lou Diamond Phillips who directed this episode.

Tom Cooper stumbles into a homeless shelter.  He is carrying a box that he says contains all his memories.  His credibility on that point is pretty iffy as he immediately has a flashback about escaping from a facility.  He opens the box and takes out a fabulously-designed injector.  He plunges it in into his neck which either leaves a scar or gives him impetigo; it’s a nasty mark.

Memories come flooding back to him, mostly from his childhood.  Social worker Hope Wilson drives him to his childhood home.  When gets there, the house is gone and there is a sign announcing 6 luxury condos being built, so that must have been some house.

Cooper forgets to zip up after taking a whiz, so he injects another vial of memory juice.  The first one hurt, but this one inflicts immense pain.  He screams in agony and Hope freaks out that she can’t help.  This is another great scene which, unfortunately, highlights how blah the rest of the episode is.  Two more guys in trench coats show up, so Cooper and Hope beat it back to her place and have the sex.

After the 3rd injection in the episode, 4th if you count the sex, Cooper remembers he is a doctor — Chist, there’ll be no living with him now.  And is, oh yeah, married.  The shelter calls ^[1] and tells Hope the trench coat guys came by and said Cooper was psychotic.  They trace the call and go to her house.

After a 4th injection, Hope and Cooper go to the facility he escaped from.  He realizes that he invented the memory-wiping procedure.  It started honorably enough as he was looking for a way to forget the rape and murder of his wife.  Then they started testing it on homeless people.

Cooper destroys the final vial so that he will not return in full to the asshole he was before all this.  Accepting himself at only 80% restored so that he will be a better man is pretty clever; however, the episode doesn’t end there.  It is arguable whether the final scene is necessary.  In mulling over which ending was better, I decided that adding the final twist gave the episode a darker, more ironic feel.  Not including it would have resulted in a 1980s Twilight Zone feel-good ending.  So that settled, as they say, that.

An OK episode elevated by great performances, fine direction and those very cool injectors.

Footnotes:

• [1] Technically, a guy from the shelter. It is the same dude who showed Mulder the bleeping dead alien.
• [2] Except Keifer Sutherland.  But even he insists on wearing a suit a size too small to show off his zero-fat bod.  He comes off looking more like Tobias when dressed in Maebe’s suit.
• Robbie Chong (Hope) is Rae Dawn Chong’s sister.  Why didn’t Outer Limits just cast Rae again?  That’s not a criticism of Robbie, who was very good here. I would also say to anyone who cast Meryl Streep in the 80s: “Hey you should have gotten Rae Dawn Chong!”
• Hope’s cute answering machine greeting:  “If you’re looking for Hope, you’re not alone.”

Well this is just great!  I don’t say that in sarcastic exasperation, as might be expected.  This was a legitimately great episode.

Man — no names in this one — is kept as a prisoner on a ship which travels endlessly through the universe.  Like his father before him, he is the sole passenger and is kept alive only to perform repairs on the ship.

This is another Outer Limits episode like Trial by Fire or Quality of Mercy.  It is so good I am uncomfortable mocking it.  The story is great, the script is great, the performances are great, it looks great.  It probably even smells good.

Just watch the damn thing.