Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Wiley Aliens In "Outer Limits"

The show starts off with a fighter pilot being taken into a prison thing of the alien species that Earth is at war with. Inside the prison cell he his tossed into is another human-a female cadet. She says she's been in there for about three months and that her instructor who was there with her has already died. The fighter pilot, whose name escapes me, tries to break out of the cell by cutting the air vent bars in the ceiling with a shard of the rock that the cell is made out of. Supposedly, its harder than diamond, but that's not important. As he's cutting the bars to escape, the aliens have been taking the female cadet, Bree I think her name was, and graphing their skin onto hers to turn her into one of them. This makes the pilot speed up his efforts a bit and he finally breaks through the bars and is able to climb into the ventalation shaft. All this happens when she is being taken away for the skin graphs. He tries to attack the alien that is in the process of the skin graphing (not sure what the process is called) with the rock shard he used to cut the bars, but the alien turns it on him and cuts off his hand.  He wakes up sometime later and discovers that Bree is about halfway alienified (alienized? I don't know). They decide that it would be better for him to kill Bree instead of her being turned into the enemy, but he can't do it. It seems that she has lost all hope, but to restore her faith, the pilot tells him of the millitary's plan to hide behind the Sun and attack from behind. An alien comes in and Bree reveals that the aliens aren't changing her from human into them, they're changing her back. The episode then ends with the pilot in the corner of the cell screaming something along the lines of 'NOOOOOOO!'. The episode was good overall but it confused me a bit. It had all of the elements of sci-fi including the fustrating ambiguous ending. It had a good story line, and a wonderful twist at the end. Overall, a very good episode.

1 comment:

  1. Madison, instead of summarizing the texts discuss what questions the authors raise. By considering your genre from this point of view it will help you to delve deeper into the reasons why we are interested in aliens when there is no proof of their existence.

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