ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

All Sci-Fi member Pow has made some remarkable contributions to this board, often sharing information from his own library of reference books devoted to science fiction movies and TV series.

Here's yet another review from Pow which I copied from the five-page thread on this forum and pasted here to start a new thread for this specific episode.
______________________________________________

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 becoming ugly, motionless rocks, like the aliens have.

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.
_____________________________________________________________

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.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

Prologue, The planet Luminos: A minor planet, sultry and shimmering. Incapacitated. Earth scientists have concluded that there could be no life on Luminos, that it is too close to its own sun, and that its inhabitants would be victimized by their own blighting atmosphere. But there is life on Luminos --- life that should resemble ours, but doesn't. Desperate life, suffering a great and terrible need. The Luminoids have begun to search the universe in an effort to satisfy that need. They seek a planet on which life is healthy, vibrant, strong, and mobile. They need such people to do their work, to labor and slave for them, to manufacture their splendored dreams. The Luminoids need slaves, and they have chosen the planet off which their slaves will be abducted. Not too many at first, a neighborhood-full, perhaps. A neighborhood like mine or yours. Those who will be abducted sleep in dreamy ignorance, unaware that they are about to become the subjects of a grotesque and sophisticated experiment . . . a feasibility study.

Epilogue, "Do not enter upon or cross this area. Do not touch or remove possibly radioactive dirt or rocks. If you have any knowledge concerning this disappearance, please contact your nearest police department. It could have happened to any neighborhood. Had those who lived in this one been less human, less brave, it would have happened to all the neighborhoods of the earth. Feasibility study ended. Abduction of human race: Infeasible.

The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.

[scotpens]

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

I gather you're not very familiar with this episode, Scot.

Actually, I don't remember the episode from the 1960s, but I am familiar with the remake from the more recent Outer Limits series.

If the ending is the same in both, after the humans are taken to the other planet, neither the people (nor the story) returns to Earth. So, the audience never finds out what sort of reaction the people on Earth have to the mysterious disappearance of the humans or the chunk of land.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

I stand corrected, sir! My apologies.

And I agree that the government would have been in charge of such a monumental investigation — not the local fuZZ!

Since the episode is on YouTube, I should have watched it first before I acted like a know-it-all. "roll:.

______________________ A Feasibility Study


___________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

Oops! I accidentally started two threads for this episode, and WadeVC added a reply.

The only way i can correst my mistake is to paste Wade's message below and include his avatar to identify the author. Then I pasted by reply below his post.

Now I can delete the duplicate thread I created.
________________________________________________

The Feasibility Study is/was another episode that gave me the creeps back in the day, and is an episode I still watch on occasion for some good, fun enjoyment.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

______________________________________________

Indeed yes, this episodes is not a story with a happy ending — but that, of course, is the point of the narrative. A story that deals with the concept of slavery can't have a happy ending.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[WadeVC]