ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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All Sci-Fi member Pow has contributed quite a few excellent posts in the original five-page thread for The Outer Limits which focused on specific episodes.

I've pasted his text below to start a thread for this one. Here's what Pow posted.
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From The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, "A Feasibility Study" April 13, 1964 ~ Written by Joseph Stefano.

Synopsis: Residents of a six-block section of Midgard Drive in Beverly Hills have been transported to the planet Luminos.The alien known as the Authority explains to the humans that they are going to test the Earthlings' hardiness as potential slave labor, since a "hot organism in the genes" has rendered the Luminoids "doomed and immobile."

The Authority reasons that the "vain flesh-men" of Earth would prefer slavery to being infected by the touch of the Luminoids and become ugly, motionless rocks like the aliens.

If this test case can work, the Luminoids will then kidnap the remainder of Earth's population.

This is a thinly-veiled antislavery diatribe and the most humanitarian script of the series.

Sidebar: I always found this episode to be deeply poignant and powerful and one of TOL finest hours.

It is so good that when TOL was rebooted for television in 1995 they selected 4 episodes from the original series to redo and this was one of them.
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TOL had quite a number of wonderful scripts written by highly talented writers.

So I always found it curious that when Star Trek: TOS premiered only a year after TOL's cancellation that Gene Roddenberry used few writers from TOL for ST:TOS.

Harlan Ellison wrote two for TOL, which are now considered classic scripts, He wrote one script for Trek, also considered a classic.

There may have been a couple of other writers who wrote for TOL that also wrote for Trek. But not many.

TOL creators & writers Leslie Stevens & Joseph Stefano never wrote for Trek.

I would have thought that given the quality that TOL stories had that Roddenberry would have sought out the script writers for TOL for Star Trek. I think the same applies to few Twilight Zone writers ever writing for Trek. Richard Matheson who wrote for Zone did one script for Trek.

Rod Serling never wrote for Trek, but perhaps his fee was more than the Trek budget allowed at the time.

And of course, perhaps for reasons unknown to us these writers for Zone & Limits did not want to write for Trek. Maybe Gene didn't want them either for his own reasons.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)