Last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of three Mars-themed episodes of the 1990’s reboot of the classic early-1960’s science-fiction anthology series The Outer Limits. I had never seen any of the second Outer Limits and am startled that this one lasted considerably longer (seven seasons) than the original (two). The screening opened with the show’s premiere, a two-part episode called “Sandkings” that was an interesting variation on the plot premise of Frankenstein: Dr. Simon Kress (Beau Bridges) has spent nine years on a project for NASA involving finding eggs of an insect-like life form from Mars in the samples of Martian soil brought to Earth from one of the Mars probes. He’s succeeded in hatching the eggs and getting the Martian bugs to breed, only when one of them escapes from the secure containment room and finds it way to another floor of the lab installation, the government orders them destroyed. Dr. Kress is allowed to freeze them in cryogenic storage indefinitely, but being a mad scientist with visions of grandeur and a penchant for practicing his putative Nobel Prize acceptance speech in front of his bathroom mirror, he steals some of the Martian soil with the eggs in it, takes it home and continues his experiments in the barn of his country property. Dr. Kress has a wife, Cathy (Helen Shaver), and a 10-year-old son, Josh (played by Beau Bridges’ real-life son, Dylan, who was 10 years old when this movie was made and had a few other credits as a child actor but hasn’t pursued it as an adult career), who not surprisingly get upset at his pursuit of his experiment and his use of their barn to breed deadly Mars bugs. Simon tries to feed the bugs a protein supplement in a cube, but they’re carnivores and will only eat live animals — including a lab mouse he feeds them and later the family dog, Cowboy, a present from Simon’s father, Col. Kress (played by Beau Bridges’ father, Lloyd Bridges — so not only are three generations of the Bridges family involved in this film, they’re playing the grandfather, father and son they actually were!), who sneaks out of the house, enters the barn, goes into the giant sandbox where Simon is keeping his “pets” and is devoured alive. (Director Stuart Gillard and writer Melissa M. Snodgrass — adapting a novel by, of all people, George R. R. Martin; I hadn’t realized he’d written anything other than the Game of Thrones series — are decorous enough not to show us the creatures actually devouring the animal, though I think a few more graphic scenes might have made this horror film even more terrifying.)
Simon manages to save his wife from a similar fate by pulling her out of the big sandbox in the nick of time, but the experience convinces her to leave him and take her son to stay with granddad. Simon is visited by Dave Stockley (Kim Coates), a former co-worker from the lab that fired him when they shut down his experiment, and Dave threatens to report him to the authorities — but Simon won’t have that and, in a terrifying scene reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he mounts the frightened Dave onto a rope held by a pulley, slowly releases the pulley so Dave gradually descends into the sandkings’ realm, and … Eventually Simon realizes what he hath wrought and seals himself in the barn, releases some sort of gas and is apparently able to kill off the bugs as well as himself — but Josh hid one of the creatures in his lunch box and the final scene shows the sandkings burrowing into the Earth, with potentially lethal consequences for the human race and the entire animal part of the biosphere. “Sandkings” went on a bit too long for its content, and Beau Bridges is hardly at the level of Colin Clive in depicting the driven scientist meddling in things man was meant to leave alone (though in some ways Bridges’ sheer ordinariness in all other aspects of his life makes the character even more chilling), but on the whole it was a nice, grim little frisson of a story that shows George R. R. Martin can write a compelling tale set in modern reality and isn’t just a faux-medievalist.
The other two episodes screened last night were hardly at
the level of “Sandkings” but were good tales in their own way, if a bit too
derivative. “The Voyage Home” is a story of a human-staffed mission to Mars
with three astronauts — Alan Wells (Matt Craven), Ed Barkley (Jay O. Sanders)
and Pete Claridge (Michael Dorn) — who stumble on an odd bit of Martian
graffiti during their last day on the Red Planet before they have to take
advantage of the “launch window” — the closest Earth and Mars come to each
other in space — to make it home. I joked that the graffito read, “For a good
time, call … ”, but oddly this plot point is dropped and nothing is made of it thereafter. The show then cuts from
day 364 of the Mars mission to day 512 (most of the extended time of the
mission was taken up merely with getting to Mars and back!), and one of the
crew members notices a bit of exotic-looking goop that has attached itself to a
wall on the spacecraft’s interior. When examined under a microscope, the goop
turns out to be a culture of alien micro-organisms that reproduce themselves
into space. Later the astronauts start to go crazy and one of them, Wells,
actually transforms into your standard-issue space alien, a monster who looks
like a cross between a lizard and a crab.
Barkley decides he’s an imminent threat
and ejects him into space via one of the ship’s air locks, and then Claridge
explains that both he and the now-deceased Wells were taken over by spores from
a planet outside our solar system, which was dying and sent out samples of its
life form to take over the bodies of other beings and find a planet where they
could replace the native population, survive and propagate. The parallels to Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and to Walter
Miller’s marvelous novella “Dark Benediction” (one of the greatest, and undeservedly
little-known, science-fiction stories ever written) are obvious, and the ending
is pretty much a rip-off of the original Alien (or at least how I read the original Alien when I first saw it, before the studio and its
writers invented increasingly complicated and unbelievable explanations for how
Sigourney Weaver’s character continued to exist in each new sequel), in which
the human character deliberately maneuvers the spacecraft off-course so it will
explode in space instead of landing on earth and allowing the aliens to take
over and replace Earth’s entire human population. It was nicely done, though it
also got a bit claustrophobic; whenever one of the astronauts complained about
being confined in that dinky little spacecraft so long, I couldn’t help
thinking that that’s what the writer (Grant Rosenberg) and director (Tibor
Takács) were doing to the audience as well.
Because of a glitchy DVD we only
got to see about half of the third episode, “Phobos Rising,” ironically the
only one of the three actually set
on Mars, in which there are two Earth colonies on Mars, one run by something
called the Alliance and one by something called the Federation — and Star
Trek fans will be jarred that the
“Federation” are referred to as the bad guys. The central character is Col.
Samantha Elliott (Barbara Eve Harris), a short, wiry, compactly built
African-American woman with ultra-short hair and a belligerent attitude that totally mistrusts every peace overture from the Federation.
Midway through this — or at least the part we saw — we hear in a piece of
passing dialogue that for some unexplained reason Earth has been annihilated
and all life on it destroyed, something that one would think would affect the
characters and traumatize them a lot more than it does. The Federation sends a
drone aircraft over the Alliance base and Elliott mistakes it for an attack and
orders an all-out missile attack on the Federation base. Her second-in-command,
Major James Bowen (Alec Baldwin, top-billed), questions this decision and refuses
to input the launch code needed to fire the missiles. Elliott questions his
loyalty, especially since he’s been having an affair with a captured Federation
officer, Dara Talif (Joan Chen), and orders him arrested. She also assigns
another crew member, Stadetski (Gordon Currie), to hack the ship’s computers so
the missiles can be launched without Elliott’s password. Elliott is also
convinced the Federation is stealing tri-radium, the atomic material that
powers everything in the human colonies on Mars, but it turns out the allegedly
stolen canister is actually a decoy, filled with sand, the Federation was using
to test their security protocols.
Alas, all this is discovered too late as the Alliance missiles are already on
their way to Federation territory, the damage the base has already sustained
makes it impossible either to recall or self-destruct the missiles, the
Federation launches an all-out response attack and everyone is killed except
Bowen and Dara — so, depending on how you read the ending, either the entire
human race is destroyed or Bowen and Dara will have to be the new Adam and Eve.
I might have liked this one better if we’d been able to see the whole thing,
but as it is it seems like little more than a rather simple-minded and obvious
parable about the folly of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine by
which the U.S. and the Soviet Union managed to avoid World War III during the
Cold War (ya remember the Cold War?)
and one misses the sense of tragedy Ray Bradbury brought to essentially the
same situation — Earthlings land on Mars to find a thriving Martian
civilization, only they inadvertently kill it off with Earth germs (an obvious
ripoff by Bradbury of the ending of H. G. Wells’ The War of the
Worlds), Earthlings build a thriving colony
on Mars (back before we actually landed probes on Mars and found that its air
is unbreathable by Earth people without spacesuits) but then get recalled to
Earth en masse because Earth’s
own conflicts are erupting into all-out war, and the book ends with the
destruction of both planets — in The Martian Chronicles.
