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!”
J
esus 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?
