Bud Brewster Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)
Joined: 14 Dec 2013 Posts: 17168 Location: North Carolina
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Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2024 10:35 am Post subject: S1.E6 ∙ The Man Who Was Never Born |
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All Sci-Fi member Pow is the author of the fine post below, which I copied from the five-page thread for The Outer Limits and pasted below to start a new thread for this one.
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The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.
"The Man Who Never Was Born" was also Outer Limits' first sheer fantasy, if for no other reason than the broad impossibilities in story logic.
Astronaut Joseph Reardon's convenient disintegration is never explained.
Several fantastic coincidences push the tale irretrievably into the realm of make-believe: that Andro could pilot Reardon's spaceship at all (think of flying one of those nice, familiar 737 jetliners all by your lonesome); that Andro, who says he has "memorized every detail of his life," would fail to instantly recognize Noelle (Shirley Knight) as Cabot. Jr's mother; that Andro's lucky fall to Earth lands him practically in Noelle's backyard at not only the right place, but the right time for his purpose.
Sidebar: Even though I enjoyed this episode of TOL, all of those plot points do indeed lack credibility in regards to the interior logic of the script.
The Outer Limits: The Official Companion: The Andro mask supplied by Project Unlimited was so imperfect that most of the Outer Limits crew recalls its ill fit.
"Martin Landau couldn't breathe," said art director Jack Poplin.
Sidebar: I find the visage for mutant-Andro frightening. He appears like a human who has suffered tragically from leprosy. It is only due to the fact that his psychic powers (a side-effect of the Cabot symbiote) allow him to look like a normal human allow him to move in a normal manner among the humans of 1963.
The first draft of the script was titled "Cry of the Unborn," but was later altered to "The Man Who Was Never Born" as the episodes' title. _________________ ____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958) |
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