Adventures in Streaming: Outer Limits is your next favourite binge
If one measures the success of a TV series by its spinoffs, Star Trek (Paramount+), must stand alone, with an astonishing 13 different television iterations — that's not even counting the dozen or so movies.
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Surely, though, the original series –Trekkers call it TOS for short — was the fountainhead that inspired all those offshoots.
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Has it aged well since its 1966-69 run? Well, developments in everything from visual effects to fight choreography have rendered the show somewhat quaint, at least through the jaded eyes of contemporary media consumers with the ability to pinpoint slipshod digital alterations while standing 20 paces from a 4K flatscreen.
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But in these divisive times, it remains a series that made one hopeful about the future in its depiction of earthlings from different backgrounds and ethnicities who put aside their differences to co-operate on a noble, non-colonizing interstellar mission: 'To boldly go where no man has gone before.'
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And yet the show's reputation as the alpha and omega of television science fiction is as persistently tight as a Vulcan Nerve Pinch.
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Star Trek's mission was, in a way, forecast in a series that developed years before Captain Kirk was but a glimmer in the eye of a CBS network programmer.
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The Outer Limits (1963-65, new on Tubi), is delightful old-school science fiction that anticipated TOS, even if its format went with a different story and cast every week. If Star Trek looked forward, Outer Limits was very much formed by its immediate past, the geopolitical aftershocks of the Second World War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation at the forefront. Also, it was shot in newsreel black and white, which gives it more gravitas than Star Trek's '60s sickly-psychedelic colour palette.
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Even with its primitive effects, it could induce nightmares. The episode The Zanti Misfits is about powerful aliens who negotiate a deal with earth to harbour a Botany Bay-like ship filled with prisoners. Once revealed, the creatures are merely large bugs with human faces, animated with stop motion. And yet, these crawlies still have the power to creep you out.
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Go for the bugs. Stay for the hair-raising sado-masochistic sparks between earthly criminal Bruce Dern and his girlfriend (Olive Deering), a runaway wife, who unwittingly facilitate the misfits' escape. (The series' main writer Joseph Stefano wrote the screenplay for Psycho, and presumably knew a little something about, psychosexual subtext.)
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The most celebrated episode, Demon with a Glass Hand, was written by sci-fi gadfly Harlan Ellison, and stars Robert Culp as a man with no memory, dropped into Los Angeles, vaguely aware of a mission to foil an aggressive alien race that will defeat earthlings hundreds of years in the future. (In 2009, TV Guide ranked the episode as #73 on an all-time list of great TV episodes.)
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