Episode 02 : ""

Summary

Minor episode, meant to stall us while the series gets its act together.

Review

I can almost see the boys in the back room at Quinn Martin Productions. "We're not ready yet. We've got this whiz-bang of an episode, 'The Mutation' in the works, but it won't be ready for another week. We've got to stick something out there in the meantime, anything at all!" So here it is. Great for the first ten minutes or so, as long as it's about Professor Lawrence Naismith being paranoid about "them" trying to kill him. But once he's out of the way, we see just a few too many of Roddy McDowall's headaches, (granted, as good an actor as he is) and the final act falls apart completely. Act IV spends most of its time showing David Vincent tied to a table, subjected to weird alien lights and noises, sweating profusely, moving up and down without much result, while Dabbs Greer moves some dials back and forth. Can you say, "filler?" Finally, McDowall decides to rescue David. Finally, something new happens! It's obvious the show's creators hadn't yet hit upon the gimmick of making the aliens burn up when they die, and so when Vincent blows up the test chamber, we see aliens flailing their arms and falling all over each other going, "Aaaaargggh!!" like a bunch of extras from a Godzilla movie. The spectacle is unintentionally funny. Not to mention the way Vincent is able to blow up the entire lab just by throwing a chair into a single panel. So much for your advanced alien technology! This "experiment" is a failure.

Review by Gerald Fitzgerald, submitted 2002-12-02

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