By now, it shouldn't be a surprise that the Outer Limits has a whole array of very strange and mysterious episodes that will leave the viewer confused even after finishing them. One of the most mysterious of all of them has got to be The Forms of Things Unknown. The title is taken from a Shakespeare play, but I don't know which one. The storyline of the episode involves two girls, Kassia and Leonora, who are in a close but reluctant relationship with someone named Andre. Andre is blackmailing one of the girl's fathers, which makes both girls hate him. After stopping his car at a lake, he says he wants one of the girls to make him a drink. As they do so, they put the leaf of a poisonous plant in the drink and give it to Andre. He dies shortly after drinking it, but has a weird grin on his face when he does. Once dead, the girls load his body into the trunk of the car and drive off. After a rainstorm, the girls try to check on the body, but it is gone. Now thoroughly afraid, they run to a nearby house, where a blind man (Cedric Hardwicke) answers the door. He is apparently the servant of a "Mr. Hobart", who will be home shortly. Hobart explains how he is working on a machine in a secret room of his house that can bring people back from the dead by sliding the past into the present, or vice versa. He shows one of the girls his invention, which is basically Andre's corpse in the middle of a huge amount of clocks all ticking at once, with each one connected to his body by a string. Later on, it's shown that Hobart himself died but was resurrected when placed on the machine. After Andre is resurrected and still wants to blackmail Leonora's father, he drives off with Kassia and crashes his car, dying a second time. Finally, Hobart asks Leonora to destroy his time machine for him after he is sent back to the past, where he is dead. Leonora shuts herself in the room with the machine, but Hobart opens the door and disappears into the past anyway. This is one of my favorite Outer Limits episodes. I always liked things that involve rain, since it gives you a creepy and foreboding feel when watching it. Throughout most of the episode, it is raining. The time machine that Hobart built is also one of the most original ideas I've seen, and it makes you wonder how the makers of the show got all those clocks together. Believe it or not, this episode also had an alternate ending that involves Kassia using a gun to kill Hobart as he tries to step into the time machine. It also makes changes to the earlier story, saying how there was no poisonous plant so Andre wasn't even dead. This episode is also the last acting role of Cedric Hardwicke, who would die a few months after this. In all, this is a strange episode even by Outer Limits standards, but the concept is very unique.
Review of The Forms of Things Unknown
