ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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This is an exceptionally well done episode with a great story and a frightening premise.

The cast is also impressive. Ed Asner is a police sergeant investigating the death of a scientist who was part of a team who are studying an energy creature which kills people by absorbing the electrical energy from their bodies, giving them heart attacks.

Kent Smith (who plays a major role in The Invaders TV series) is the scientists in charge of the team, and he becomes obsessed with finding a way to control the energy creature.

The FX of the energy being are genuinely creepy — and impossible to describe. You have to see it to appreciate it.

WARNING! Both the beginning and end of this episode are puzzling and a bit disappointing — because the episode never really explains where the energy creature came from . . . or how it was sent back to its confinement in the end.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

"It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork" December 9, 1963. Written by Joseph Stefano.

Unconventionally structured and staffed with abstruse characters, "ICOOTW" nearly demands to be interpreted as allegory, since as a linear dramatic narrative it does very little.

It does present two typical Stefano touches: A bastille of scientific research presented in Old Dark House terms, and characters that illuminate their oddball backgrounds largely in terms of talkative asides not directly connected to the plot.

The show can easily be read for the obvious parable, a caution against the destructive potential of nuclear power, that annihilatory boogeyman of post-World War Two thinking, and the need for the technicians who toy with it to be governed by a human conscience.

But paradoxically, the show's basis, and perhaps its message, is the thing least accessible to the viewer, since it has to do with a theory Stefano holds about writing.

"We write or make films as a kind of exorcism," he says. "And what keeps us writing is the fact these things never really do get exorcised no matter how many films or scripts we do."

The soulless nature of Block's NORCO drones is an aspect of the show's indictment of atomic energy. The only use to which Block is able to put the energy cloud is murder.

Like real-life nuclear researchers, he is a slave to the power he is presumably investigating, and no matter what the rationalization for puttering with such power might be, the bottom line is always the struggle to keep it penned up and under control.

For Stefano, this unstable, insatiable, all-consuming vortex was The Outer Limits. "I was not unaware of that, and it's true of producing for television," said Stefano. "Am I in control of the show . . . or does it control me?"

~ The Outer Limits Official Companion.

[telegonus]

Excellent episode and review.

It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork is one of my favorite TOL episodes. The story, non-linear as it is, unfolds in a manner that must have confused 1963 viewers, and even today it would likely not so much draw in intelligent viewers as attract many curious younger ones for being cool and out of the ordinary.

The acting, aside from Ed Asner, is mostly outstanding. Asner is competent, but just doesn't rise to the occasion; or maybe he didn't have much to work with. The actors who played the brothers were quite good, with Michael Forest really shining; and Scott Marlowe, heartfelt. I thought that Kent Smith pulled off his seemingly mad, or maybe just sinister scientist quite well. Joan Camden's performance as a free thinking woman doctor working in a police state of an organization, was wonderful. Her empathy drew me in. Also good, in a smaller role, Ted De Corsia, as the towering, sinister looking security guard who yet has a spark of humanity to him.

The f/x were dazzling for the time the episode was made, and I can't see it having been done better in those black and white days of 60's television. Like so many of the best episodes of TOL the story is deeply rooted in the humanity of its characters, and how they interact with one another. That this episode is from an era well before AI took off, its by today's a standards cautionary tale aspects require some pondering, and while I take its meaning, such as it can be called, with some grains of salt, as it strikes me as a still valid story, and food for thought in our 21st century world.

[Bud Brewster]

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Telegonus, on behalf of Pow and myself I'd like to thank you for contributing such a well-written review.

Most folks on message boards aren't very interested in writing detailed analyses of movies and TV series. So, the members of All Sci-Fi really appreciate it when we get a contribution like yours.

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

[Pow]

"The trick of the show is to put the unreal in the midst of the real," said Joe Stefano. "I try to invent convincing people and put them into real houses, to build reality into other areas of the show so the audience can sit back and be scared in comfort. The terror must always be unreal."

"Woodwork" 's problematic characters are complex enough to seem real, but are trapped in a dramatic chaos only slightly less controlled than the madly strobing energy cloud that dispatches many of them by the final curtain.

The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.