ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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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.
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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 Outer Limits: The Official Companion

"I wanted to do a romantic fairytale," said screenwriter Anthony Lawrence of "The Man Who Was Never Born." "I wanted to touch people emotionally, with a kind of lyrical, poetic thing that not too many people were doing in TV." In this case the fairytale is Beauty and the Beast, and Joseph Stefano noted, "Leslie Stevens had this saying---'giving a story a haircut'---which meant altering a classic plot to fit your own devices." Lawrence's resultant teleplay is delicate and dreamlike, and lends the tale a resonance worthy of a vintage fable. Though it is the Mobius-strip twist of plot and the bravura performances that make this a perennial favorite among Outer Limits fans, it is also an ideal anthology script, a peak point for the series both musically and photographically, and a good story, well told --- one dense with subtexts, and satisfying on many levels.

Andro is one of The Outer Limits' most tragic heroes. Like the series' more "humane" aliens, he is warm and sympathetic, but also imbued with a sad romanticism that cripples his outlook just as much as it makes him unique and poetical. The "safe and dear upholstered memories" of his 2148 library make him as much an inhabitant of the nineteenth century as the twenty-second. He finds himself a fairytale princess in Noelle, who is herself anachronistic and totally ill-suited for a lock-jawed war hound like Cabot.

In a bit of dialogue cut from the original script, she tells Andro, "You don't seem like a professor. You're more like a prince --- a cheated nobleman who has been imprisoned for a long time on a desert island somewhere."

But in loving, Andro speeds his own destruction , and to save the future Earth he dooms them both. His nobly-motivated mission is actually a suicide run. These literally star-crossed lovers are allowed only a few moments to be together before oblivion enfolds them both.