Customer Reviews

Outer Limits: Human Factor [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not OL's best by a long chalk, though the reviewer who commented on some critics being unduly harsh to it is well-stated. It's a good mid-level episode, with a lot to recommend it.

Gary Merrill, Harry Guardino, and especially Sally Kellerman are worth the price of admission alone, but this entry has other attributes, as well. It's thick with claustrophobic atmosphere, has a good share of wit (the military base, TABU - "Total Abandonment of Better Understanding" - being just the beginning of it), and excellent suspense, with a genuinely clever ending. Unsettling implications of invasion of privacy, national security, and nuclear diplomacy are brought up.

Merrill and Guardino do a really good job of alternately playing the nut-trying-to-pass-for-normal, and Kellerman was never more adorable in her life.

Don't expect a masterpiece. Just a good, solid suspenser. Well worth a look-see.

The eighth episode in the series, "The Human Factor" is basically an exchange of identities, one good and one bad, and how the bad takes advantage of it. This is not one of the best episodes, but it is better than a few.

In the frozen areas of Northern Greenland stands a Military Base, in which Dr. Hamilton (played by Gary Merrill), an army psychiatrist invents a device where he can connect his mind with another person and look into their thoughts. He tries his experiment with Maj. Roger Brothers (played by Harry Guardino), a delusional man who thinks they are being attached by a snow monster. However, due to an unexpected earthquake, something goes wrong with the experiment, and Dr. Hamilton finds himself in Brothers' body and Brothers in Hamilton's. Roger Brothers takes advantage of the opportunity, and pretending to be Hamilton, orders him to be confined, so that he can carry out his own mission to kill the `monster'. There is only one person who can save him: Dr. Hamilton's assistant, Ingrid Larkin (played by Sally Kellerman), who must set everything straight because of her personal feelings for Hamilton. But will she succeed?

This episode starts off slowly but picks itself up once the minds of the Dr. and the Maj. are switched. The main reason I was a little disappointed with this episode was because of the way it was directed. They creators wasted too much time in the beginning, and towards the end, everything seems to be happening really quickly. Otherwise, the concept of the story is very intriguing, and the cast, especially the three leads, Gary Merrill, Harry Guardino and Sally Kellerman did a wonderful job for their characters.

To quote Vic Perrin (The Control Voice): "A weapon, now only an instrument, neither good nor evil until men put it to use, and then like so many of man's inventions, it can be used either to save lives or destroy them; to make men sane or to drive them mad; to increase human understanding or to betrayal. But it will be men who make the choice. By itself, the instrument is nothing, until you add...The Human Factor!"

God, this episode was awful. Considering it had some nice plot twists (and some of the best in the series) and that it still stunk out the joint tells volumes on how bad The Human Factor was to watch. The episode invloves: a scientist, his love?, a pyscho soldier, a bunch of inept officers, awful/silly dialogue, a head-scratching plot, a nuclear bomb, officiers that arm nuclear bombs to show another person how it works(?), etc etc etc. This is one of the worse Outer Limits episodes.

thank you for your time, David

After seeing a long string of weaker Outer Limits episodes (The Probe, Keeper of the Purple Twilight etc.), this one just about blew my mind. Good Outer Limits is SO GOOD. I wasn't thinking of the strenghts / weaknesses of this one while watching, i was just sucked in completely.
I saw The Human Factor without knowing anything about the plot, and some of the story twists, especially the midpoint, were very nice indeed. Don't expect your typical monster show. The two male leads could have put out a less frenzied performance, but Sally Kellerman is ace. Just like Ed Asner in "It crawled out of the woodwork", she isn't even mentioned in the opening credits, but becomes the central character towards the end.

The Outer Limits Official Companion is unjustifiably harsh on this episode, which I happen to think is one of the series best. The title is a bit misleading, since it is mother nature in the form of an earthquake which is the cataylst for the mind-swap that occurs between psychoanalyst Gary Merrill and his psychotic patient, Harry Guardino, when Merrill is using a skull-cap apparatus he has devised to share thoughts. (It may be a scientific breathrough but it aint a fashion one). This set-up then allows both actors a chance to chew the scenery as the paranoid one, and surprisingly Merrill is just as funny as Guardino. Perhaps having been married to Bette Davis for 10 years has made Merrill look as haggard and ape-ish as Bogart, and his thick eyebrows and messy hair add to the believability of the mind displacement. His darting eyes are hilarious in the scene when he attempts to get access to an atomic device, and at the same time keep his true identity hidden, and the biggest laugh is when he responds to an enquiry if he is sick with "You keep your office too warm!". As Merrill's assistant (and not his fiancee as the Companion tells us, though she wishes!), this was Sally Kellerman's first role for TV, and she adds a Streisand-like sensuality. She would later be given a better star turn in "The Bellero Shield" episode, but here she gets to wear a high-collared fur-lined coat, and is given a love theme and a Garbo-esque reaction long-take. Much has been made of the huge close-up of Guardino when he first sees the guilt-induced apparition of the man he has abandoned on the frozen wasteland. This is the episodes obligatory "monster" though here it's lack of focus gives it a Shakespearean quality. I also like the stock icelandic footage, the aerial view of the "TABU" base (unfortunately, never used for a pun), the snow that doesn't attach itself to those it falls on, and the shot of an avalanche of falling rocks.

"In Northern Greenland the mountains stand like a wall along Victoria Channel, whose straight course marks the line of the Great Baffin Fault. Until recently, not even the Eskimos ventured into this Arctic waste. But today, as in other lonely places in the world, the land is dominated by those instruments of detection which stand as a grim reminder of man's fear of man. This is Point TABU, a name given this predominantly underground base by a young officer who explained that the letters in TABU stood for Total Abandonment of Better Understanding. Some two hundred men and a few women make this their permanent residence. Their task is to maintain a constant alert against enemy attack, and be prepared to respond to it, devastatingly..." In a secret military base, a psychiatrist uses a device that reveals people's deep feelings and thougts in order to cure them. A touching episode with three marvelous actors and, of course, Conrad Hall's Pop-Expressionist cinematography which is his first camerawork in the production order. (watch the extreme close-up of Harry Guardino's eyes with a chiaroscuro effect). Forget the monster of the week, just focus on the relationship between charming Sally Kellerman and introvert Gary Merrill. And above all, Harry Guardino's hysterical and paranoiac performance as Major Brothers, with his seeds twitch (like Humphrey Bogart in "The Caine Mutiny") and appetite for atomic destruction, is great. The mind alteration premise is always delightful. This is first an anti-nuclear parable with a Cold War background and above all, a romantic episode about love and the hidden desire for true love. "A weapon ? No, only an instrument, neither good nor evil until men put it to use. And then, like so many of man's inventions, it can be used either to save lives or destroy them, to make men sane or to drive them mad, to increase human understanding or to betray it. But it will be men who make the choice. By itself the instruments is nothing until you add the human factor."