Customer Reviews

Outer Limits: Controlled Experiment [VHS]

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"Who has not seen the dark corners of great cities, whose small and shabby creatures wander without purpose in the secret corners of the night ? Without purpose ? There are those whose purpose reaches far beyond our wildest dreams..." Two human-like aliens study the very nature of a crime passionnel with the help of a time machine in order to save human kind from final destruction. Barry Morse ("The Fugitive/Space 1999") is naive Inspector Phobos One who analyzes human behaviour patterns and discovers Earthman way of life (coffee & cigarettes). Pre-"Point Blank" Carroll O'Connor plays Diemos : retired person-like Earth Caretaker. Pre-"Star Trek" Grace Lee Whitney plays killing beauty Carla Duveen (a kind of angry Marilyn Monroe) who guns down with grace ("two-faced, no good, black-hearted two-timer") her husband. Pre-"Incubus" Robert Fortier, from "Production and decay of strange particles" and "Demon with a glass hand", plays skirt-chasing Burt Hamil. It's tongue-in-cheek all the way but it's still amusing. An old fashion actors episode with effective and low-budget special effects. This one looks like an average Twilight Zone episode. "Who knows ? Perhaps the alteration of one small event may someday bring the end of the world. But that someday is a long way off, and until then there is a good life to be lived in the here and now."

This is one of my all time favorite episodes, produced almost entirely in the cutting room through such editing tricks as reverse action, slow motion, and polarity reversal. The Outer Limits only comedic episode works quite well, as alien agents "Phobos" and "Diemos" disect the age-old earth crime of passion: murder. Caroll O'Connor gives a particularly fine performance as Diemos, the earth-based agent who is constantly explaining the subtleties of Earth culture to visiting supervisory agent Phobos, played by Barry Morse. (Diemos: "They're known as 'innocent bystanders', each of them tells a different version of what happened"). Grace Lee Whitney co-stars.

This episode is a strong candidate for the most boring hour of television that I have ever seen. Carroll O'Connor is an agent from Mars that is posing as a clerk in a pawnshop and Barry Morse is another agent of higher rank that arrives to study the human act of murder. Using a device that allows for events to be replayed at various speeds, they witness, re-witness and analyze a murder. Grace Lee Whitney plays a jilted woman that shoots a man in the lobby of a hotel.
Therefore, the episode consists of several replays of the shooting with the Morse character constantly trying to delve deeper into the reasons for the event. This becomes dull very quickly. Furthermore, the gadgets emit a lot of noises, whines and white pulses of light that are annoying. At the end, the events are altered so that the bullet is not fatal and the man and woman kiss and make up, where the man even asks her to marry him. Which is an odd reaction to having just missed being kissed by a bullet.
The only high point is Carroll O'Connor as the agent/shopkeeper. With a bowtie, sweater and soft demeanor, he played the part perfectly. Unfortunately, other than this, there is nothing to recommend this clunker.

The only episode of The Outer Limits done for humorous effect, Controlled Experiment shines as one of the most engaging stand-alone anthology stories ever put to televised film, combining an intriguing premise with delightful performances from all involved.

Barry Morse is Martian Chief Inspector Phobos One, assigned to Earth to rendezvous with Caretaker Deimos, played by Carroll O'Connor - the character names are plays on the two moons of Mars. Phobos One is assigned to investigate a most curious activity on planet Earth, the practice of deliberate killing, called murder; the reason for his investigation is to determine if the activity is of random nature and thus of no threat to the rest of the universe. To this end Phobos One has brought with him a temporal condenser, allowing him to "replay" time backwards, sideways, any which way, so long as it does not irrepairably harm the time-space continuum.

Alerted to a possible incident at a hotel, Deimos and Phobos One arrive and witness a sexy blonde (Grace Lee Whitney of later Star Trek fame) confront her wandering boyfriend (Robert Fortier) and shoot him down. Phobos One replays the incident and explores the reason behind it via the temporal condenser, allowing him and Deimos to read the minds of both the woman scorned and also to backtrack the boyfriend to the arms of the other woman.

Sympathizing with the feuding couple, Phobos One alters the outcome, deflecting the fatal bullet away; this leads to a reconciliation between the couple, and as they kiss in preparation for marriage, Phobos One is proud of his action - until Martian Control warns that his interference will lead to the conception and birth of a child who, believing himself invincible after learning of his father's survival, will become supremely powerful and throw the Earth (and the rest of the galaxy) into spatial collapse. Thus are Phobos One and Deimos left to correct the action - but how can they allow a murder to proceed?

Lighthearted rather than overtly comedic, the episode stands out for the performances, especially those of O'Connor and Morse. O'Connor's Deimos is most anxious to cooperate and keep his superior abreast of the subtleties of this weird little planet, and even sports a mild British falsetto in speaking with Phobos One; O'Connor segues into his more familiar gruff portrayal when a shopper appears in a pawnshop, then slips back to the Deimos demeanor without missing a beat.

Barry Morse shines as well, delighting in the strange Earth tastes for cigarettes and coffee (this gives away the refreshingly pre-PC attitude of the times). Morse is allowed to mildly spoof his Lt. Gerard character of "The Fugitive" with his portrayal of Phobos One as a fussbudget investigator, fascinated with the subject at hand but sporting no hint of malice toward either of the persons involved. Morse beams a nicely childlike enjoyment of Earth's customs at the end as the solution to the moral dilemma of their orders is found.

Without question a high point of television, Controlled Experiment endures as a sci-fi classic.

I loved this one about the time travelers. On the back of this cassette box the producer indicates he wrote this while on an air plane flight between shows. You'd never know it. Grace Lee Whitney (Pre Yeoman Rand) makes an appearence here. She plays the jilted partner in a bad relationship about to shoot her husband. The time travelers, (Carol O'Connor and Barry Morse) prevent all the mayhem that's about to occur. Both O'Connor and Morse would have made a good series together on this one. The stories they could have told would have been limitless.

It was like Quantum Leap with a playback button. You have to see this one to know what I'm getting at here. The black and white of this series just added to the mystery. It's a good thing this was in black and white. Color would have revealed the cheesey special effects and the shadows always added to the atmosphere. Most of us know this was done to save money and production costs.

We are always portraying the Martians as evil and cruel as in "The War of the Worlds" (1953) or sadistic as in "Mars Attacks!" (1996). But did you ever stop to think what the Martians must think of us?

In this episode [Outer Limits - "Controlled Experiment" (1963)], instead of being rash they send observers to fathom out a human phenomenon called murder. Never mind that the researchers look like Barry Morse (Phobos) and Carrol O'Connor (Dimeos).

Using their temporal condenser, they play the scenario over and again backwards and in slow motion in the process. You will love their interpretations. Remember this was before "Third Rock".

If you like this serious side to Outer Limits then you will like "Welcome to Planet Earth" (1996) where the vacationers (observers) take a more active interest.

The War of the Worlds ~ Gene Barry
Mars Attacks! ~ Jack Nicholson
Welcome to Planet Earth [VHS]

"If I could save time in a bottle / The first thing that I'd like to see / Is the way that they played and the things that they said / In New York in 1963..."

Executive producer Leslie Stevens wrote this one as a "bottle show," his term for a budget-saver (pulling a genie out of a bottle), and in this case the term is especially apt, since the episode is a virtual time capsule window into the year Kennedy was assassinated.

Frenetic fussbudget Phobos and genial bumbler Diemos (Barry Morse and Carroll O'Connor) are undercover Martian agents, on Earth to study the human penchant for murder. Using a "time condensor," the pair single out platinum blonde Grace Lee Whitney (Star Trek's Yeoman Rand) in a hotel lobby, who is due to murder her philandering boyfriend Robert Fortier. The time condensor replays the murder foreward, backward, slow motion, fast motion, every way but sideways, while the Martian spies take more useless measurements than the Warren Commission.

This was OL's only (intentional) comedy, and is more light-hearted than outright funny. The cast are all fabulous, especially Fortier, who has to manage some awkward freezes and movements in the time distortion. The dialogue is Damon Runyon-esque, the women all wear high heels, lipstick and coiffed hair, everybody and his brother smokes, and the men's fashions are all GQ of forty years ago.

The funniest thing in this episode today is the blatant sell of coffee and cigarettes. Phobos "goes native" by the end of the episode, becoming a happy nicotine fiend from Mars.

One thing that makes Controlled Experiment different is that it portrays a diffrent form of time travel. Instead of zipping into the future like Rod Taylor did in 1960 or Guy Pearce did in 2001, the two martians in this story manipulate time examing an event from several view points, also it would be a strange experience to be at say a car crash watching everything proceed in slow motion, this episode also gives you a chance to see Caroll O' Connor as somebody other than Archie Bunker