There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust it. We are in control - what? We're not in control? Form 1775A? What form 1775A? Listen mate, I'm a fucking Controller, right? I don't have time for your bureaucratic red tape and bloody forms - what? Until I fill in the appropriate form I am not authorised to take control of anyone's television? Since when? Now just you look here a - hello? HEL-LO?
Note: I see that there's talk of a second reboot being made this year. When/if that makes its debut I'll factor in those new episodes, but as my TARDIS is in the shop - again! - I have to wait until it's actually screened before I can talk about them.
Anyway...
Title: “Beyond the Veil”
Series: The Outer Limits
Season: 2 (Reboot)
Year: 1996
Writer(s): Chris Brancato
Storyline: Eddie Wexler has had enough of being abducted by aliens, so he decides to end it all, but is rescued by paramedics when he makes a 911 call. Taken to a psychiatric facility, the only one set up to deal specifically and solely with alien abductees, he meets another man there, who is called Quasgo and tells him that he too has been regularly abducted. He says there is a “traitor” in the place, an alien in human guise. Eddie becomes friendly with another abductee, a girl called Courtney. Eddie begins therapy; he’s told by the doctor in charge, Sherrick, that he will experience “hallucinations”, and he starts seeing aliens conducting experiments on him. But are these just hallucinations, or is something more sinister going on?
Well, it’s T
he Outer Limits: of course something more sinister is going on!
Dr. Sherrick is very brusque and unfeeling, seems to be pushing everyone and when he pushes Courtney Eddie stands up for her. Suddenly he sees the doctor as an alien. Nobody else seems to, though, and he’s quickly sedated.
(Let me just throw my hat into the ring here: they’re ALL aliens, and he’s on a spaceship, maybe the last human left alive? Meh, probably wrong but there’s my guess. Or maybe he’s an alien and they’re trying to deprogramme him?)
Anyway Courtney visits him and gives him a piece of paper she has taken from Sherrick’s office, which seems to have alien writing on it. Quasgo tells him he’s not mad, despite what Sherrick says; there
are aliens here, and they must expose them. Eddie decides to escape and take Courtney with him, but when they go to find Quasgo he seems to have killed himself. When Courtney is prevented from leaving due to the hold Sherrick has on her through her family, she ends up being killed in one of the sessions, and Eddie, furious, desperate and bereft, kills Sherrick, throwing him down a flight of stairs.
Then it turns out it wasn’t Sherrick who was the alien, but some other doctor guy who hasn’t featured in the programme in any way so far, and Eddie ends up in a loony bin. Jesus Christ.
Comments: Fu
cking awful. I thought I had it worked out (as I said above) but man was I wrong. The ending was terrible; a guy who hasn’t featured in the episode up to now is suddenly unmasked at the end, like a character shoe-horned in at the last minute in a bad mystery novel, and he’s the alien. What the actual blue jumping fu
ck was that about? How Chris Brancato, who wrote and created
Narcos, Godfather of Harlem and
First Wave could pen this drivel is beyond me. The cinematography was great, the atmosphere evoked, the tension built up but in the end it all fizzled into less than a damp squib and left me feeling completely betrayed and pissed off that I wasted my time watching this. I could have written four better endings, and in fact now I have an idea for a story based around a similar theme.
Rating: C (if I could do a C- I would, but I don’t do those. This was a turd).
Luckily for you, no video available.
