Season 2, Episode 14 (46 overall)
Originally aired 12/26/1964
WEBLOR ONE PASSENGER ROLL CALL!
Top row, from left:
Alicia "Hands Off" Hendrix (sexually-repressed anthropologist)
Alicia "Hands Off" Hendrix (sexually-repressed anthropologist)
Joe "Six-Pack" Dix (working class engineer)
Keith "Horse Teeth" Ellis (roving reporter/default hero-type)
Bottom row, from left:
Bottom row, from left:
Henry “The Mole” Craif (ecologist/really good listener)
Michael "Green Thumb" Lint (plant-obsessed botanist)
Matthew "Dr. Feelbad" James (physician/grieving widower/bed-wetter)
This
wildly disparate group is participating in a 261-day isolation test to
determine whether or not they can withstand the rigors of an extended trip to
the planet Antheon. Coexisting in a mock-up of the actual space craft, they are
waited on by Maggie, a glorified stewardess, and supervised via remote camera
by Captain Branson. There’s a panic button on board that, if pressed, ends the
experiment and makes all six ineligible for the real trip. Tensions start up
almost immediately, thanks mostly to the loud, boorish behavior of construction
man Joe Dix, who plans to strike it rich by monopolizing the construction of human cities on the alien planet.
While
the passengers sleep on the second night, a squiggly lightning streak entity
visits their compartments and reads their minds. It attempts to strangle Dix, prompting him to suspect his fellow passengers of trying to kill him. Doctor James, who recently lost his family under tragic circumstances, discovers his late daughter’s doll in his
bed, which sends him over the edge.
Several months later, the passengers are treading heavily on one another’s last remaining nerves. Ellis and Dix nearly come to blows, but are interrupted by a chance oxygen failure which temporarily knocks everyone unconscious. Botanist Lint goes to check on his plants, and is horrified to watch one of them come to life and strangle its closest neighbor. He drops dead of shock, prompting Craif to make a play for the panic button. Dix stops him, threatening death to anyone who pushes it. Captain Branson intercedes with a revolver, at which point Craif tries to diffuse the situation by confessing that he is in fact the experiment’s control person. He shows the group a hidden panel of buttons that he’s been using to cause artificial meteor showers, power fluctuations, and other annoyances designed to test the participants' ability to deal with the unexpected.
Dix
wrestles the gun from Branson and jealously protects the panic button. Lint’s
plant climbs out of the botany compartment and, after the lightning streak
entity enters it, grows to over six feet tall. A terrified Dix empties the
revolver into it, which has no effect. The plant creature addresses the group as a
representative from Antheon and demands that Earth keeps its grubby mitts off
their planet… or face dire consequences. Lint wakes up, apparently having been
misdiagnosed as dead, and heads for the panic button at Craif’s prodding. Dix
moves to intercept him, but is stopped by the Antheon Creature… who forces him to push the button.
.
RANDOMONIUM
“Counterweight,”
which turns 50 years old tonight, began life as a 1959 short story by Jerry Sohl (who also wrote the base
story for “The Invisible Enemy”), first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction Magazine and later anthologized in 2003 in Filet of Sohl, a posthumous short story
collection (which I bought for research purposes in preparation for this very
entry; it also contains “The Invisible Enemy,” so I probably should’ve bought
it sooner). The brief tale centers on a large-scale (1,000 passengers plus
crew) flight to Antheon, during which a terrorist called Red Mask stirs up
trouble in order to give the passengers a common enemy, which successfully
prevents the group from coming completely unglued and massacring one another during the long voyage. Milton Krims adapted it for The Outer Limits (as he did with Stephen
Lord’s “Keeper of the Purple Twilight”), retaining a few basic story elements
but narrowing the focus considerably and boiling the group down to six (eight
counting the crew). In all honesty, the two are so different that direct comparison
isn’t terribly useful. Perhaps it’s
better to ask, simply, which is better? We’ll come back to that question.
“Counterweight”
is directed by Paul Stanley and
lensed by Director of Photography Kenneth
Peach, both of whom served in the same capacity in “Second Chance” and “The Guests” in season one. The whole thing
takes place on one set; consequently, there’s nothing terribly interesting as
far as staging goes. It feels a bit like a stage play at times. Peach does
provide a couple of interesting shots (discussed below), but the real star is
the stop-motion animated Antheon Creature which, happily, gets adequate screen
time once it joins the cast late in act three.
I
should mention that I hadn’t seen “Counterweight” in well over twenty years
before just a few days ago, so my memory of it was slight at best. As I watched in alternating stunned silence
and chuckling disbelief, I recorded my thoughts on my iPhone for later
transcribing. I’m a big fan of stream of consciousness narratives, so I’m going
to present said thoughts with as little editing as possible, which means I’ll
be hitting things more or less chronologically with the episode. It also means
my thoughts will likely be even more scattered than usual (blame it on my ADD).
That
little montage that opens the episode, with all those celestial bodies, is just
gorgeous. The series tends to reuse its space shots, but I don’t remember
seeing this one before. The stock shot of a spaceship in flight is a bit
misleading, since we naturally assume that this is the ship that our characters
are aboard (before we discover that they’re only in a simulation). Like the ship
that book-ended season one’s “Controlled Experiment,” it’s completely
superfluous and contradicts the actual events that unfold.
So we
have a group of people stuck together in a confined faux spaceship, which
“Second Chance” already gave us in season one, meaning that this is basically
another rehash of Twelve Angry Men. People
forced to exist with one another in close quarters reveals humanity’s baser
nature, blah blah blah. The “Second Chance” ship was an amusement park ride
retrofitted to actually travel in space; this ship is a fake from start to
finish. Both contain alien presences with opposing missions: the Empyrian wants
humans to leave Earth to provide assistance, while the Antheon just wants them
to stay on Earth where they belong. In any case, the "Second Chance" fake ship is way cooler than the cramped, unimaginative simulated ship here. We don't really need more examples of season two's inferiority to season one, but should we ever find ourselves wanting more... well, look here:
.
.
Our first look at the odd plant in
Lint’s botany cabinet is accompanied by an ominous musical stab, which of
course will make sense later. In retrospect, it’s a bit heavy handed. But that's not all that's wrong.... the very first shot we see of the curly-Q critter is more slender and angled than it is in every other shot of it throughout the episode. Continuity be damned!
And hell, we might as well just throw out racial sensitivity along with it. While Dix is regaling the group with his plans to exploit Antheon, Dr. Hendrix brings up the possibility of "Injuns" getting in his way (swear to god, that's what she calls them*), Dix replies with the following colorful (no pun intended) sentiment: "They go! You can't let savages stop the progress of civilization." Cringe. The only saving grace of this bit is the sight of Maggie just straight up glaring at the back of his head (below). A bit later, when Dix wonders if his snoring is a legitimate reason for someone to murder him, everyone walks away from him without saying a word. Priceless.
And hell, we might as well just throw out racial sensitivity along with it. While Dix is regaling the group with his plans to exploit Antheon, Dr. Hendrix brings up the possibility of "Injuns" getting in his way (swear to god, that's what she calls them*), Dix replies with the following colorful (no pun intended) sentiment: "They go! You can't let savages stop the progress of civilization." Cringe. The only saving grace of this bit is the sight of Maggie just straight up glaring at the back of his head (below). A bit later, when Dix wonders if his snoring is a legitimate reason for someone to murder him, everyone walks away from him without saying a word. Priceless.
Despite his obvious racism and overall crudeness, Dix reels off some pretty fascinating meta-ish thoughts mere moments later. He explains that movie heroes aren’t afraid of danger because they’re aware that “it’s just a movie”; a few moments later, act one fades out on him looking straight at the camera and muttering “Oh, what an act.” Now of course he means the captain’s behavior, but it also feels like a backdoor subliminal reference to the eleven minutes we’ve just watched. It’s like he knows it sucks.
Act
two opens with a surprising bit of camera work: we pan across the characters
from underneath the glass table at which they are seated. This is highly
reminiscent of a similar shot in the 1960 Twilight
Zone episode “Third from the Sun” and, while I appreciate the effort, it
doesn’t really match anything else in the episode.
As
the passengers sleep, the lightning streak entity enters into their heads and
reads their minds (a simple but neat effect in which light is projected through
a cut-out and moved around; you can easily replicate this at home should you
want to reenact this episode… but God, why would you?). Rather than employing
simple voiceovers, however, the characters speak their thoughts aloud… an odd
choice. The thin burn around Dix’s neck is exactly what you’d get with a
garrote, not a jagged lightning streak. It disappears while Doc James traces it
with his finger, which gives the impression that he’s somehow erasing it. Talk
about a healing touch! I want this guy next time I burn myself taking something
out of the goddamned oven.
Immediately
after asking Doc Hendricks to leave his room, presumably because she’s just
given the grieving widower his first post-funeral boner, Doc James finds his
late daughter’s doll in his bed. It was precisely at this point that I asked
that ageless question, aloud for all to hear: WHAT THE FUCK? That doll looks
seriously pissed (is it maybe a knockoff Talky Tina?). And why is its face
smooshed in? Doc James lost his family under unclarified circumstances in which
he was unable to save them, and his daughter had the doll in her possession
when it happened... so maybe it was a car accident, and he was the driver?
Shit, was the doll’s face crushed in the wreck? We’re never told. We’re also
never told how the doll got on board at all, unless the Antheon lightning
streak can create or transmute matter. I guess it’s also possible that Doc James
is even more deranged over losing his family than we’re led to believe, and his
Tyler Durden personality brought the doll just to screw with him.
The
impossible doll incident happens on day two of the simulated flight. Fast
forward to day 169, and Doc James is still wandering around in a stupor holding
the goddamned doll. Almost six months later.
Professor Craif advises him against depression, which represents some
seriously lacking diagnosing skills on his part. The good doctor is clearly
veering dangerously close to Crazytown.
Oooh,
groovy hi-fi. This is probably the only space ship--- real or, as in this case,
simulated--- ever seen in film and TV with a built-in turntable… at least that
I’m aware of. I imagine y’all will let me know if there are other
vinyl-friendly rockets that have escaped my notice. I’m a bit of a record
junkie, truth be told. My office is equipped with a record player, but the
closest I get to space is spinning Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon by candlelight.
Doc
Hendricks has experienced a sexual awakening and now demands to be referred to as Alicia, The Hot And Bothered. Doc James isn’t interested since he’s a chronic sufferer of MED
(Mourner’s Erectile Dysfunction), but what about the other guys? 169 days in
confinement, and none of ‘em jumps at the chance to get all up in Alicia’s lady
business? I call bullshit. Yeah, her desperate behavior is awkward as hell and unintentionally hularious, and
she’s nowhere near as hot as Maggie, but I’d probably still hit that. Yeah, I
said it, and I’m not even worried about potential fallout from my wife, since
she never reads my blogs.
.
Ray Harryhausen fans rejoice! The Antheon Creature represents the second and final time stop motion animation was used on The Outer Limits (those wonderful “Zanti Misfits” were the first)… and despite its brevity, it’s glorious to behold. However, its appearance just confuses matters: once it grows larger and leaves the botany closet, the lightning streak shows up and enters it, causing it to grow even larger and start talking. So… what made it grow larger to begin with? And what prompted it to attack the plant next to it? I get that the Antheon hates humans, but what did that poor thing ever do to it? What a dick.
Plant lover Mike Lint
spies the newly-anthropomorphized plant strangling its neighbor and promptly drops dead of
fright, his face a frozen mask of terror (remember Stu’s postmortem mug in “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork”?). It’s interesting to note that the actor playing Lint, Charles Radilac, had a bit part in William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus just a few years earlier,
a film about a man whose face is similarly frozen.
.
Okay, so shit’s clearly going to hell at this point. There’s a gun changing hands, the bomb gets dropped that the trip is fucking rigged, humanity gets another slap on the wrist from a cranky, superior alien, and the panic button finally gets pressed. Oh, and Lint isn’t dead after all, which suggests that Doc James isn’t the know-it-all physician he’s assumed to be (I dunno, he’s probably a podiatrist or some shit). There’s nothing here even approximating a satisfying resolution, unless you find the act of ending this train wreck satisfying enough… which you certainly can’t be faulted for. But goddamn, despite all the lousy writing and unlikable, half-baked characters the episode subjects us to, that Antheon is just plain wonderful: a beautiful creature design, unlike anything we’ve seen before, with glowering, glowing eyes (and fangs!) and that booming authoritative voice… pure awesomeness, baby. I don’t imagine the full-size puppet (used after it outgrows the botany closet) still exists, but it would look awfully cool occupying a corner in my office. It would also make one helluva Halloween costume…
Okay, so shit’s clearly going to hell at this point. There’s a gun changing hands, the bomb gets dropped that the trip is fucking rigged, humanity gets another slap on the wrist from a cranky, superior alien, and the panic button finally gets pressed. Oh, and Lint isn’t dead after all, which suggests that Doc James isn’t the know-it-all physician he’s assumed to be (I dunno, he’s probably a podiatrist or some shit). There’s nothing here even approximating a satisfying resolution, unless you find the act of ending this train wreck satisfying enough… which you certainly can’t be faulted for. But goddamn, despite all the lousy writing and unlikable, half-baked characters the episode subjects us to, that Antheon is just plain wonderful: a beautiful creature design, unlike anything we’ve seen before, with glowering, glowing eyes (and fangs!) and that booming authoritative voice… pure awesomeness, baby. I don’t imagine the full-size puppet (used after it outgrows the botany closet) still exists, but it would look awfully cool occupying a corner in my office. It would also make one helluva Halloween costume…
.
The
holographic chess game between Chewbacca and R2-D2 in 1977’s Star Wars features a veritable menagerie
of creatures, all stop-motion animated. One in particular looks quite a bit
like our Antheon, wouldn’t you say?
.
AURAL PLEASURE
As
with all season two episodes, Harry
Lubin dips into his extensive library of stock music from One Step Beyond to provide the
underscore for “Counterweight.” We’ve heard much of this music in previous
episodes, including “Celestial Bodies” (used in “Wolf 359”) and “Supernatural
Planet” (used in “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”). Another cue, “Haunted Cry,” seems
very familiar, but I can’t place it.
.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Now
this is odd. Each of the players receives an individual credit at the end of
the episode, right before the actual end titles commence. The credits (which
are comprised of two cards for each; the character name and the
actor’s name) are superimposed over a scene in which each passenger checks in with
stewardess Maggie, who dutifully marks them off on her clipboard (this was
presumably originally intended as the opening scene of the episode). Their
mouths are almost constantly moving, so there’s clearly lots of dialogue
happening, but the only audio heard is a Lubin cue (any professional lip-readers
out there willing to transcribe this scene for me?).
Jacqueline Scott (Dr. Alicia Hendrix) is a TOL vet from the very beginning: she
played Allen Maxwell’s bitchy wife Carol in “The Galaxy Being” (she wasn’t quite
a ball-buster, though; maybe ball-squeezer?). Daystar Production first utilized
her services in “The Wanderer” on their pre-TOL
series Stoney Burke. Genre fans are
sure to recognize her from her work on The
Twilight Zone (“The Parallel”), The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“Terror at Northfield”), Mission: Impossible (“Homecoming”), and TV’s Planet of the Apes (“The Good Seeds” and “Kira”). She also enjoyed
a recurring role as Donna Kimble Taft, The
Fugitive’s sister, throughout that series’ four-year run. On the big
screen, she can be found in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) and Empire of the
Ants (1977). She doesn’t look particularly alluring here, but she’s still a
TOL Babe based on her other work.
* * *
Michael Constantine (Joe Dix) has quite an impressive set of
genre credits to his name. He appeared on The
Twilight Zone (“I Am the Night – Color Me Black”), The Fugitive (“Everybody Gets Hit in the Mouth Sometimes,” “A Taste
of Tomorrow,” and “The Judgment, Part 1”), The
Invaders (“The Possessed”), Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (“The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes”), and the
short-lived 80’s series Darkroom
(“Guillotine”). He also appeared twice on I
Spy (“A Gift from Alexander” and “Sparrowhawk”), landing him a double
Robert Culp connection.
* * *
Larry Ward (Keith Ellis) also enjoys a Robert Culp
connection on his résumé due to his participation in the I Spy episode “A Day Called 4 Jaguar.” Ward can also be spotted on The Fugitive (“When the Wind Blows”), The Invaders (“The Condemned”), Lost in Space (“All that Glitters”), The Time Tunnel (“One Way to the Moon”)
and Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century (“Flight of the War Witch”). And no, before you ask, I don’t really
consider Lost in Space to be
legitimate sci-fi (it’s more like a space adventure comedy, which isn’t a blend
I find particularly appealing).
* * *
Not
to be outdone, Sandy Kenyon
(Professor Henry Craif) has a Robert Culp connection as well, thanks to his
appearance on I Spy (“Casanova from
Canarsie”). He’s also a Twilight Zone three-timer
(“The Odyssey of Flight 33,” “The Shelter” and “Valley of the Shadow”) and a
twice-decorated Fugitive veteran
(“Angels Travel on Lonely Roads, Parts 1 and 2” and “Corner of Hell”); his
one-offs include The Invaders (“The
Saucer”), Boris Karloff’s Thriller
(“The Hollow Watcher”) and Alcoa
Presents: One Step Beyond (“Front Runner”)
* * *
Botanist
Michael Lint is played by Charles Radilac
(Michael Lint), whose limited genre work includes appearances on The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. (“The THRUSH Roulette Affair”) and Mission: Impossible (“The
Phoenix”). Also as mentioned earlier, he appeared in 1961’s Mr. Sardonicus (1961).
* * *
Crahan Denton (Dr. Matthew James) returns for his second Outer Limits (he played the crunchy
Sheriff in season one’s “The Children of Spider County”). Denton can also be
found in most of the shows we cross-connect with in these pages: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“Incident in
a Small Jail” and “Coming Home”), The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“The Star Juror”), Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (“The Executioner”), and Boris
Karloff’s Thriller (“Pigeons from
Hell”). He also appeared in a whopping five episodes of The Fugitive: “The Witch,” “Dark Corner,” “End of the Line,”
“Second Sight” and, finally, “The Devil’s Disciples” (his last credited role
before passing away in 1966).
* * *
The
stiff ‘n stoic Captain Harvey Branson is played by Stephen Joyce. His only other true sci-fi credit is the 1997 TV
miniseries Invasion, but our wider
cross-genre net reveals a single appearance on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“The Young One”). It’s not a series that
we usually brush up against, but he also did a Peter Gunn (“Spell of Murder”); I’m allowing it because of my deep
affinity for film noir, which the show sorta qualifies as.
* * *
Finally,
stewardess Maggie O’Hara is played by the lovely Shary Marshall, who also crossed paths with Sandy Kenyon in “Angels
Travel on Lonely Roads, Part 1” on The
Fugitive. Her only other genre credit is a bit part in 1962’s Panic in Year Zero! She certainly
qualifies as a TOL Babe.
* * *
The
sequence ends with the standard “characters and events” disclaimer, and
completely negates the need to list the players in the end credits. Said credits still run the usual 51 seconds, however, so the names of the production staff end up with a few extra seconds of screen time.
.
HOME VIDEO RELEASES
“Counterweight,”
like much of season two, didn’t show up on home video until 1991, the tail end
of the five-year release cycle. Members of Columbia House’s Collectors Series
Club found the episode paired with next week’s “The Brain of Colonel Barham.”
The
episode wasn’t released on LaserDisc (along with twenty others), but it was of
course included when MGM started cranking out all-inclusive DVD sets. Season
two was first released in 2003, then re-released in 2007 (as “Volume Three”),
then again in 2008 in a 45th-anniversary set of all 49 episodes. I’m
something of a completist, but even I never bothered with the ’07 and ’08 releases,
because they contain the exact same double-sided prone-to-failure discs from
the initial ’03 effort.
Things
have changed on the Hulu front since last week (thanks to David J. Schow for
alerting me to this). Only the first three episodes of season one (“The Galaxy Being,” “The Hundred Days of the Dragon” and “The Architects of Fear”)
are still available for free streaming on your PC; if you want the whole
49-episode enchilada, you’ll have to pony up $7.99 per month and become a
member of Hulu Plus. This will allow you to watch any episode you want on both
your home computer and your mobile devices. I’ve been a paying member for quite
a while because of their giant library of Criterion Collection films, and I’m
happy to recommend it. Being able to access TOL
on my phone during my lunch breaks is just icing on the cake.
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MERCHANDISE SPOTLIGHT
A
cool alien like the Antheon Creature certainly deserves to be immortalized in
collectible form, right? Well, sadly, the only game in town is the Dimensional Designs 1/8-scale resin model kit (DD/OL/AC-14), sculpted by Takeshi Yoneda. I couldn’t find a single
assembled/painted specimen online, so if you want to see it in its completed
form, you’ll have to shell out $49.95 plus shipping and go the DYI route. I did stumble across a picture of what you'll find inside the box, however (left).
Happily,
the Antheon has been artfully rendered in two dimensions by several talented
folks. First up we have the late John
Fasano’s gloriously green effort, done at the tender age of nineteen (above
left). Famed horror comic artist Bernie
Wrightson chose a quite compelling action pose for his stab at it (above
right). Both were displayed at the Creature Features gallery show in March. Finally,
friend of this blog Woody Welch
checks in with his own delightful take on the leafy critter (right).
Desperate
for a taste of the art spotlight, I raided the appetizer platter during Christmas
dinner yesterday at my parents’ house to put together my own edible version. Je suis un artiste!
.
THE WRAP-UP
So is
the Outer Limits adaptation better
than Jerry Sohl’s original story? I’m inclined to say no, but the episode is kinda
fun in that “so bad it’s good” vein (it’s certainly good heckling fodder; I’d
love to see the Mystery Science Theater
3000 crew get ahold of it). And the Antheon Creature, which isn’t in the Sohl story at all, gives the story a huge boost. But is a good episode? Nay, I say,
nay. As with the Venusian in “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” and Ikar in “Keeper of the Purple Twilight,” we have an awesome monster trapped in unworthy
surroundings. “Counterweight” may be frustrating from a dramatic standpoint and
difficult to watch, but that big beautiful plant almost makes it worthwhile.
Almost.
* Someone hiding behind the "Anonymous" moniker posted the following in the comments section: "You might want to listen Dr. Hendrix's question again.....She says,,,"What if there are (pause)..INDIANS"....Not INJUNS as you had stated....." (typos retained for posterity).
Since not everybody reads the comments, I'll copy my response here for future readers with the same question:
If it's "Indians," her D is so soft as to be more or less inaudible. I always heard it as "Injuns" with the J pronounced as a Y, as it is in Swedish, Finnish, and Spanish (among other languages). And I'm sorry, is "Injuns" somehow more offensive than "Indians"? It's a slang mispronunciation that you'll arrive at if you speak quickly and slur a bit. Frankly, even if she does say "Indians," the whole bit is no less uncomfortable.
* Someone hiding behind the "Anonymous" moniker posted the following in the comments section: "You might want to listen Dr. Hendrix's question again.....She says,,,"What if there are (pause)..INDIANS"....Not INJUNS as you had stated....." (typos retained for posterity).
Since not everybody reads the comments, I'll copy my response here for future readers with the same question:
If it's "Indians," her D is so soft as to be more or less inaudible. I always heard it as "Injuns" with the J pronounced as a Y, as it is in Swedish, Finnish, and Spanish (among other languages). And I'm sorry, is "Injuns" somehow more offensive than "Indians"? It's a slang mispronunciation that you'll arrive at if you speak quickly and slur a bit. Frankly, even if she does say "Indians," the whole bit is no less uncomfortable.
I refuse to re-watch this episode only because I loved it when I was eight years old, and I know it would be a disappointment to me now. It really scared me as a kid, in a way that I quite enjoyed. We had a lot of spiral ferns in the back yard that looked almost identical to the Antheon, and the sight of them made me uneasy for years afterwards. (I will add, however, that even as an eight-year-old I knew Jacqueline Scott's character was just plain silly and uninteresting.)
ReplyDeleteCraig...Your Shock-Zoom.gif of Mike Lint is one for the animated gif Hall-of-fame. So f'ing funny!
ReplyDeleteI really don't know what the hell to make of "Counterweight". The six people chosen for the trip are so dysfunctional, I don't know how any of them survive a trip to the local grocery, much less a planet that is a 261-day flight away.
ReplyDeleteThe whole episode borders on disastrous and is boring not to mention confusing. Again, the characters are so uninteresting and laughable I really had a hard time watching it to the end.
"Counterweight" includes some poor special effects, primarily the alien light projected on the spaceship walls with all the technical splendor of a five-year old playing with a flashlight. I did take a liking to the plant creature in its early stages. Good thing we get the one brief, shining moment when it attacks a neighboring plant in the full glory that is stop-motion animation. As the plant matures into a full-fledged Antheon, it takes on the silly appearance of a Chinese dragon with glowing eyes.
I think Jacqueline Scott would have been okay had she just not twirled the pearls.
So her name is Hendrix and she wants to be a "Foxy Lady". (Am I the one one who made that connection?)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, it's been a long time since I saw "Counterweight", but I remember thinking that with all its faults, at least it's better than Milton Krims' other OL scripts. Also, I like the confrontation between the alien and the humans.
You might want to listen Dr. Hendrix's question again.....She says,,,"What if there are (pause)..INDIANS"....Not INJUNS as you had stated.....
ReplyDeleteIf it's "Indians," her D is so soft as to be more or less inaudible. I always heard it as "Injuns" with the J pronounced as a Y, as it is in Swedish, Finnish, and Spanish (among other languages). Is "Injuns" somehow more offensive than "Indians"? It's a slang mispronunciation that you'll arrive at if you speak quickly and slur a bit. Frankly, even if she does say "Indians," the whole bit is no less uncomfortable.
DeleteYes, "Injuns" (when pronounced by someone perfectly capable of pronouncing "Indians") is, indeed, offensive. But if the female character pronounced it "Injuns," then certainly in scare-quotes, i.e., ironically, in order to attack Dix, by implying that that is the sort of term he would prefer using.
DeleteI just wanted to let you know how much I've been enjoying your blog, which I discovered only a couple of weeks ago--your comments are insightful, amusing, and a nice balance (might we say counterweight?) to "The Outer Limits Companion." The photo captions are hilarious. Great work here. Best, Chris Conlon
ReplyDeleteThis episode is, for me, far more enjoyable than it deserves to be. In addition to all the faults you listed, I think the bit about strange phenomena occurring almost immediately and then _months_ of "flight" going by uneventfully doesn't make sense. I'd have months go by with a couple of the engineered problems occurring, and only _then_, when the humans appear to be enduring these okay, does the alien step in to provide the extra push over the edge.
ReplyDeleteAh, well.
Lurker111
Oh man, is this a BAD episode. One of season two's WORST shows. I've been binge-watching both seasons for almost a year, and I've only seen this one twice, that's how much I dislike it. (Some episodes I've watched over 8 or 10 times now). But this one? Really bad....
ReplyDeleteJust watched this for the first time in decades. The whole "I'm not a SCIENTIST, I'm a WOMAN and a WOMAN needs a MAN" thing is laughably cringeworthy to our modern sensibilities (as is when she calls the stewardess a 'robot' and says "I'm more of a woman than you are"). But the stop-motion fern monster is still cool. Btw, *season one* of Lost in Space is sci-fi, no doubt about it. The other two seasons are just farce.
ReplyDeleteA different Anonymous here, and I agree completely with the earlier Anon. The first year of LOST IN SPACE is beautifully written, acted, and directed. And yes, it IS good science fiction. Sadly, a lot of people are prejudiced against it, condemning even the first year without giving it a fair and open viewing. IMNSHO, it's far better TV than any of the various seasons of STAR TREK, regardless of generation. And methinks Harlan Ellison was quite right that the second season of OUTER LIMITS is better science fiction (with thankfully fewer big dumb "bears") than the first.
ReplyDelete>>Captain Branson: You're now travelling at the speed of 25,000 miles per hour. You will not hear the rockets again until we fire the retro-rockets for the Antheon landing [261 days, 11 hrs later]. For your information, we will be passing the planet Mercury. Mercury's day is exactly equal to its year: 88 days.<< So, traveling via Mercury, Antheon is approx. 157 million miles away from Earth. Interesting! That would put it about 90-100 million miles away from the Sun - i.e., at about Earth's orbit (assuming a straight-line trajectory, which is unheard of). Seriously: What would it have cost to mention something about superluminal velocity, and a destination in a different star system?
ReplyDeleteThe whole business about Indians/Injuns is kind of ludicrous.
ReplyDelete1. The adults in 1964 who made this could only operate by the standards of 1964, not those of the 21st century.
2. The standards of the 21st century are not as enlightened as you fancy them to be. By indulging every SORRGA* SIG's** demands about word prohibition, all we've done is Balkanize our society and encourage people to form their identities via race/blood/geography instead of (philosophical & political) ideas. And for what? It's completely arbitrary whether we call an Indian an Indian or Injun or Native American (there is no such thing; even the Indians' ancestors came here from Asia when the Bering Straits were more land than water). The claim that one word/term is better than another is unprovable and is done strictly so that a minority group can yank the chain of American society as a whole. i.e., Nietzsche's Will to Power
* sexual orientation, race, religion, gender, age
** special interest group
"The holographic chess game between Chewbacca and R2-D2 in 1977’s Star Wars features a veritable menagerie of creatures, all stop-motion animated. One in particular looks quite a bit like our Antheon, wouldn't you say?"
ReplyDeleteThe next time you watch James Cameron's 2009 movie Avatar, see if you don't agree with me that one of the indigenous plants on the moon Pandora looks remarkably like Counterweight's Antheon plant creature. Also, Avatar's entire story seems terribly similar to Robert Towne's TOL episode The Chameleon.
Read Poul Anderson's CALL ME JOE with Cameron's AVATAR in mind, and you will forget all about THE CHAMELEON, believe me. Because CALL ME JOE stars a paraplegic who uses a device that transfers his consciousness into a big blue synthetic alien on another world... ultimately he becomes that alien and leaves his crippled body behind, but you guessed that, didn't you?
Deleteand demands that Earth keeps its grubby mitts off
ReplyDeletes/b
and demands that Earth keep its grubby mitts off
It looks like plant tries to uproot another plant i guess that's how they reproduce on their planet they plant the seed water it and add some Miricle Grow and SHAZAM plant alien creatures
ReplyDeleteI detest MST3K. Talentless fools childishly mocking old movies. This episode ought to have adhered to Jerry Sohl's story. Its far superior. Best wishes, Zooko.
ReplyDeleteGot two more genre credit for Michael Constantine: he was in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "The Indestructible Man" and the Friday the 13th: The Series episode "Pipe Dream".
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