C’mon, who doesn’t love Joe Pantoliano?  Cypher! Ralphie Cifaretto!  Guido the Killer Pimp!  Cosmo!  Who doesn’t love Cynthia Nixon?   Oh, everybody.

However your mileage varies, ya better really like both of them because this is a close-up-palooza.

Stan Harbinger is the latest in a long line of radio people on TV that no one would ever listen to.  He is the anti-Art Bell in that he does not believe in conspiracies and UFOs; also, he is breathing.  There is a certain entertainment value in a maniac who buys into all that baloney (I’m lookin’ at you, Alex Jones; but not on You-Tube).  However, a skeptic as abusive and abrasive as Stan just comes off as a bully.

Stan wraps up tonight’s show by talking to a regular caller who is having a breakdown.  The man is distraught over his body being occupied by a parasitic alien.  Stan advises the caller to put himself out of his misery.  The man misunderstands and temporarily puts himself in more misery as he pulls out a lighter and goes up like a Vietnamese monk in the radio station parking lot.  As he dies, Stan witnesses a glowing alien emerge from the body and zoom off.

Fans of Stan’s show complain that he should have intervened.  He seeks a little self-medication in a bar and a woman buys him a drink.  He ends up having sex with Teri Bauer, which can have disastrous consequences.

When Stan invites a couple of “believers” onto his show to pacify the haters, it turns out that Teri is one of them (the other is a dude with an almost alien look).  They accuse Stan of knowing the truth — having witnessed it first-hand — yet refusing to warn the listeners of his show.  BTW, Stan describes Teri as the other guest’s cohort.  Cohort doesn’t mean an individual.  C’mon dude, you’re a professional — you use words for a living!  Your words go out to millions of people! ^[1]

Sloppy camerawork actually got some shoulder in this one.

Stan begins civilly, but quickly devolves to his nasty, abusive self.  His producer Trudy does her part by adding a laugh-track to his guests’ warning of a literal alien colonization; I mean, literally in the colon.

The man warns that humans could be acting as hosts for the aliens without even knowing it or preparing amuse-bouches.  The man who torched himself became aware of the parasite and freaked out.  Stan gets fed up with their insistence that he stop spreading fake news.  He physically attacks them and is fired — or de-platformed as the kids fascists say today.

Stan sees so much more evidence of the aliens that he eventually becomes a believer and wants to warn others.  He recruits Trudy to produce a new show that would be the worthy successor that Art Bell never had.  He even wants Teri Bauer and her “cohort” to be on the new show.  Unfortunately, they now think he’s a pariah and Trudy thinks he’s nuts.  And then some other stuff happens.

Not a lot going on here.  OK, some humans are possessed by aliens.  Where’s the suspense like in The Thing?  Where is the mystery like Invasion of the Body Snatchers?  Where is the futile chase like The Invaders?  It just feels like they kept add scenes until they had enough to syndicate the episode.

Stan discovers the truth before the titles.  He sleeps with a woman in the bar.  Why — what plot or character point does that advance?  Then she is one of his guests the next day.  Again, what does this revelation do for either character?

Luckily, Joe Pantoliano is such a great presence, he can make anything interesting.  And, to be fair, I unfairly pre-judged Cynthia Nixon.  She wasn’t given much to do, but she was competent and charming.  Just, for the love of God, stay out of politics.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Talking to the writer of the episode there, not Stan.
• But seriously, what was with all the close-ups?

Oh Outer Limits, you sly fox.  You want to dump a clip show on us, so you schedule it right after an episode with the odious Ron Perlman.  What would have been merely a decent outing becomes, relatively, a classic on the order of Trial by Fire. ^[1]

OL shamelessly tries to have it both ways from the first second.  Even before the picture comes up, over the dark screen we hear, “It’s gone crazy!”  Then we hear, “What did you do to him?”  The patient shows robotic gestures, but then it is referred to as him again.  After a security guard shoots him with no injury, it is clear we are dealing with a robot. ^[2]  The robot breaks out of the lab and jumps into a car with a woman just pulling into the parking lot.

The Mac 27 forces Cecilia Fairman to drive to an industrial area that is deserted because in 1998 America had not yet been made great again; not even the part in Vancouver.  He drags her into an old building and kudos all around for the head-smack she gives him with a crowbar.  It sounds like a small thing, but it was staged beautifully, following through to Celia’s astonished reaction that it did not harm Mac 27.

He chains Celia by the ankle and tells her she will have to repair him.  Very coolly and fortuitously, he has a repair kit in a secret compartment like the tinker toys they give you to fix a spare tire now.  His repair kit includes a headset that allows him to project visions into her noggin.  It apparently shows the future too — the first vision he shows her is a clip from an episode set hundreds of years in the future.

He exposes his chest, which is more than Celia has done for us.  Four panels slide away to reveal his damaged “flesh” and mechanical innards.  The headset shows her schematics to make the repair, but she says she is just a secretary; although if she used that crazy-ass DOS WordPerfect back then, she had to be sporting a 150 IQ.  Celia accidentally crosses some wires which causes Mac 27 to have a flashback.  Unlike previous clip shows, there is no effort made to fit the clip organically into the narrative.  They literally could have pulled any 2 minutes out of the series.

Back at Innobotics, a pair of incredibly unlikable actors — playing a lab geek and a security thug — detect a signal they can use to locate Mac 27.  It would have been nice if this signal were the result of Celia’s “error”, but there just doesn’t seem to be that much effort put into this last episode of the season.

Celia continues her repair job.  Mac 27 shows hints of emotion, and so does she.  She asks him to show her clips of a simulation where a sexy Virtual Reality companion became emotionally attached to the programmer.  OK, they did make an attempt to justify this one and it has the beautiful Natasha Henstridge in it, so objection overruled.

The security thug and a couple of goons show up.  In no time, Celia grabs the thug’s gun and blows away all three men!  I did not see that coming!  There is a lot of talk about emotions, what is life, and slavery.  Good stuff, though.

Yada Yada, things get twisty from here, and there is a lot more philosophizing.  It is very well done, though.  However, the commenters at IMDb are right — this would have been a better episode without the clips.  But that would have defeated the purpose.  They wanted to fill 42 minutes at a discount, and that’s what they got; in addition to the budget, the quality was discounted..

Despite an excellent performance from Nana Visitor as Celia ^[3], your time would be better spent watching the episodes the clips were taken from.  Valerie 23 and The Camp were very good.  Bits of Love and Identity Crisis were also stand-outs.  But none of them were Trial by Fire.

PS: I can’t get Nana Visitor’s amazing performance out of my head.  I’m anxious to see her in other projects now.  But not enough to watch Deep Space 9; let’s not get crazy.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Not really — the episode is sadly undermined by its form.
• [2] When the cops show up it is an it again.
• [3] Her name is Cecilia, but I know a Cecilia that I always call Celia.  I never asked her if she liked it either.
• C’mon, in 1998 you named a computer Mac?

At the Free Alliance Base on Mars, some space flunkies are loading tri-radium and nearly drop a canister.  That would be, as they say, bad.  A teaspoon of the stuff can power a ship to earth and back, or vaporize the ship if dropped.

Major Dara Talif belongs to a rival faction.  It seems to be some sort of exchange program that has put her on this base.  This is A-OK with Major Bowen who flirts relentlessly with her.  Their witty banter is interrupted by a message from earth.  Peace talks have broken down between the Free Alliance and the Coalition.  Both sides accuse the other of making a tri-radium bomb.  Bowen’s and Colonel Samantha Elliot’s mission, if they decide to accept it, is to see if any tri-radium is missing from Mars.  They find the missing tri-radium very quickly when they see the freakin’ Earth suddenly and completely engulfed in flames.

Elliot can’t reach anyone on earth, but it might be because she uses Sprint.  Bowen ludacrisly suggests maybe a local radiation leak gave the illusion of earth exploding.  Elliot says they must assume the Coalition launched a pre-emptive strike that destroyed the earth.  Wait, why would they do that?  Doesn’t the Coalition also come from earth?  Major Talif is Chinese.  Unless this show is reaalllly racist, she ain’t no alien.

Like the Alliance, the Coalition ^[1] has a Mars base.  If they see any signs the Coalition is behind the destruction, Elliot intends to destroy them.  She makes an astute deduction that the Coalition attacked the earth — if it had been the Alliance, she believes she would have been warned.  Also, the Coalition has a history of sneak attacks on a Moonbase and on Sagan-5.  Wait, where?  Humanity seems to have only made it as far as Mars.  WTF is Sagan-5? ^[2]

The rest is just an exercise; but I keep telling myself exercise is good.  Yeah, there are red herrings, explosions, drones.  But nothing really seems to matter.  The set-up is in place for a great suspenseful episode like Trial by Fire, but they just can’t put the pieces together.

The last half is just ploddingly going through the motions.  And if that is the best you can do with 1) the earth being destroyed, 2) the only survivors stuck on Mars,  3) paranoid rival factions that could destroy the remaining humans,  4) rogue drones, 5) a military coup, and 6) a rival maybe-spy embedded in your camp . . . just give up.

The production design, performances and script were fine.  I felt like the scoring and direction just didn’t build suspense or a sense of urgency.  Meh.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Their full name is The Coalition of Middle-Eastern and Pacific States.  It is beautiful that the Alliance refers to their camp, CMPS on the radar, as the Chumps.  Bravo!
• [2] This is a two-fer for them.  They get to use the old Star Trek trick of establishing credibility by dropping an alien name into our history (“remember Napoleon, Hitler . . . and Parnu of Sirius IV”), plus name-checking Carl Sagan.
• Dara Talif has got to be a reference to Dejah Thoris. However, this would imply that she has more of a claim to Mars which is not implied or true.
• The only IMDb credit for writer Garth Wilson.  But that’s one more than you have.

Note:  This is Part 2 of Double Helix, an Outer Limits episode that aired 20 months earlier.  So this writer has about the same work ethic as me.

We start with a recap of Part 1.  Professor Martin Nodel recruited a group of college girls for an experiment that required them to get naked.  His effort worked better than mine, maybe because he also recruited some dudes as cover.  The group met at a cave in which a spacecraft had been hidden for millions of years.  The aliens left a message that they wanted humans to pay them a visit to see how we turned out.  Faced with the choice of abandoning Earth or trying to get a job with their “studies” degrees, the students boarded the ship with Nodel.

And now on with the story . . .

The “action” moves to the interior of the ship and it is as narratively underwhelming as it was in Close Encounters.  At least the CE3K ship looked great (if thoroughly inefficient) and had the John Williams score going for it.  Here, it is just transportation with some padded scenes to get us to a couple of twists at the end.

Dr. Nodel jacks in to the ship again and channels its builders, “Four score and seven eons ago, the ancestors of our race foresaw a great danger . . .”  However, before he gets to the good part, and I’m being optimistic there, he begins to glow and disappears.  His son Paul tries to help him and disappears also.  This leaves behind several students and Paul’s girlfriend Hope.  To head off any weirdness, I must point out that Paul and his girlfriend joined the group after the naked examinations.  Although, that does make me question their scientific value.

The walls begin to twist, but ship does not lose structural integrity, like that Star Trek episode that bugged me so much that I can’t remember whether it was TNG or Voyager.  Another passageway opens up, but it leads — literally, figuratively, and narratively — nowhere.  The shifting walls do split the group up, but not much is done with this.

Eventually, they all get back together somehow.  They can feel the ship decelerating.  One of the guys says, “Get back to launch positions, now!” which is probably the same as “landing positions” but why not just say that?  They land, and a hatch opens.

SPOILERS

They exit the ship to a very earth-like environment.  One of them wonders why the aliens were not there to greet them.  This ship is supposed to be 65 million years old.  Would anyone rally remember this ship was out there?

They climb a nearby hill to determine the lay of the land, although it is clearly the girl who looks like Nancy Allen.  It is a pretty nice series of shots that shows their reaction to the unseen sight before them.  Then we see the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Hope says, “Oh my God, we’re home.” ^[1]  

They fortuitously find a food wrapper that has an expiration date of May 2267.  So, unless it was a Twinkie, they merely went about 269 years into the future. ^[2]  There are no people here, though.  They find a massive graveyard with a marker blaming their vanity in “trying to control nature.”  So, trying to stop Global Warming was the cause, I guess.

They conclude they were sent here to repopulate the planet.  Someone says, “There’s only seven of us.  We don’t have enough genetic diversity to repopulate” even though one of them is a brunette.  They go back to the ship and a nursery full of babies is revealed.  The ship somehow tweaked their DNA to provide the diversity needed to safely repopulate.

Dr. Nodel and son reappear as a hologram.  They explain that the aliens were humans million of years in the future that left the ship on Earth to give the planet another chance.  That raises more questions, but that might just be because it is 2:15 am.

The big grave-site and the low disk space message that pops up every 5 goddamn minutes.

There are a few cheats and padding — clearly, there was never supposed to be a Part 2.  The characters are pretty generic.  I can only name Hope and a guy whose name I don’t know; so just Hope, I guess.

Still, I’m a sucker for such derivative, high-concept stories.  Plus, it has the benefit of following Science Fiction Theater and Tales of Tomorrow.  I would never watch it again, but it gets an OK.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Suspiciously close to “Oh my God, I’m back, I’m home” from Planet of the Apes.  However, Hope does not start name-calling and blaspheming.
• ^[2] Joe Miller Jokebook, circa 1739.