The next to the last episode is interesting though endless. How many times do they run back and forth to the facility from the crash site and why did it take so long when they drove the car? A test pilot loses control of an experimental jet and makes a crash landing. His wife is zooming along the landing site in a car when she loses control and consciousness. When the two of them come to, they are reunited, but while they are animated, the rest of the world seems to be in suspended animation. Even the jet that crashed is still in the sky and the car still has the woman in it, even though she is watching it. To make matters worse, their little girl is frozen but in th direct line of a huge truck which, if everything returns to normal, will run her over. The task is to figure out why they are there and what to do about the little girl. They also meet a poor man who has found himself in a kind of hopeless purgatory between times. He is a threat because he could eventually be displaced by the young couple. It is an innovative episode and except for the fuzziness of the logic, it works pretty well. By the way, those seat belts must have been made of cardboard.
13 Reviews
Do The Standing Still.
junk-monkey13 October 2008
Warning: Spoilers
An experimental NASA rocket-plane crashes on a test flight simultaneously throwing the pilot and his wife, who has crashed her car, 10 seconds into the future. They find themselves stationary in time (though able to move around) while the rest of the world very slowly catches up with them. Returning on foot to the Air Force base they discover a strange, ghostly apparition in the control room and that their young daughter is in danger from a runaway truck. There is nothing they can do to save her as they cannot move or change anything in the - as it appears to them - frozen world.
They cannot just wait around for time to catch up and whisk their daughter to safety because the apparition in the control room has explained in great detail that if they aren't in the right position when time does eventually start to flow again they will be stuck forever in an endless, timeless, limbo like him. And if they're NOT in place when that moment comes- he WILL be, thank you very much. (This is the weakest part of the story as after delivering his plot point the apparition is never seen again.)
Eventually the pilot thinks to cut the car's seat-belts and rigs them from the truck's wheel to the handbrake so that it will stop without him having to be there. He and his wife get themselves back into position and time catches up with them and recommences as normal. Neither remembers the events we have watched but both have a 'premonition' that something is going to happen to their daughter and rush back to the base to find she is alive and well - though the very ambiguous ending doesn't show us how or why she is safe. We have no idea if the jury-rigged braking device actually exists. It almost verges into one of those: 'Was it all a dream?' cop outs which is a pity because, apart from our hero pilot's plodding mental arithmetic - it takes him 20 seconds or so to work out ten minus eight equals two at one point, the atmosphere and the internal logic holds up pretty well for most of the show. (Having said that wasn't it lucky for our protagonists that EVERY door they needed to get through happened to be open at the moment time froze?)
Writer Ib Melchior seemed particularly fond of the frozen time theme. A similar situation occurs towards the end of 'The Time Travelers', which he wrote and directed the year before, and there's a strange time delay that crops up in his 1962 'Journey to the Seventh Planet' both of which are far better than the average SF movies of the period.
The one noticeable thing about this episode is it contains some great 'standing still' acting from various people. Everywhere our protagonists go they encounter people frozen in mid action. Some shots (noticeably the child) are done with freeze frame but a lot of them are the actors just standing there, posed, not moving, not blinking as the action goes on around them. Some pretty impressive standing still.
They cannot just wait around for time to catch up and whisk their daughter to safety because the apparition in the control room has explained in great detail that if they aren't in the right position when time does eventually start to flow again they will be stuck forever in an endless, timeless, limbo like him. And if they're NOT in place when that moment comes- he WILL be, thank you very much. (This is the weakest part of the story as after delivering his plot point the apparition is never seen again.)
Eventually the pilot thinks to cut the car's seat-belts and rigs them from the truck's wheel to the handbrake so that it will stop without him having to be there. He and his wife get themselves back into position and time catches up with them and recommences as normal. Neither remembers the events we have watched but both have a 'premonition' that something is going to happen to their daughter and rush back to the base to find she is alive and well - though the very ambiguous ending doesn't show us how or why she is safe. We have no idea if the jury-rigged braking device actually exists. It almost verges into one of those: 'Was it all a dream?' cop outs which is a pity because, apart from our hero pilot's plodding mental arithmetic - it takes him 20 seconds or so to work out ten minus eight equals two at one point, the atmosphere and the internal logic holds up pretty well for most of the show. (Having said that wasn't it lucky for our protagonists that EVERY door they needed to get through happened to be open at the moment time froze?)
Writer Ib Melchior seemed particularly fond of the frozen time theme. A similar situation occurs towards the end of 'The Time Travelers', which he wrote and directed the year before, and there's a strange time delay that crops up in his 1962 'Journey to the Seventh Planet' both of which are far better than the average SF movies of the period.
The one noticeable thing about this episode is it contains some great 'standing still' acting from various people. Everywhere our protagonists go they encounter people frozen in mid action. Some shots (noticeably the child) are done with freeze frame but a lot of them are the actors just standing there, posed, not moving, not blinking as the action goes on around them. Some pretty impressive standing still.
Time Barrier
AaronCapenBanner18 March 2016
Dewey Martin stars as Jim Darcy, an Air Force pilot who is flying an experimental X-15 plane when it hits a sonic boom and suddenly crash lands. Jim is safe without injury, but his wife Linda(played by Mary Murphy) is also driving close by, and goes to him when they both realize that a freak accident of the plane hitting Mach 6 has somehow caused them to trip the time barrier a short distance into the future, where everyone is frozen until time catches up with them, which means they must be back in their proper places, or be stuck in limbo like some poor man/being they encounter at the airbase, not to mention they must save their little girl who is about to be hit by a truck after leaving her daycare center... Interesting episode has good acting and involving characters, with the limbo man especially tragic.
"I am what you are"
XweAponX29 August 2020
"I am what you will be"
I remember those words from the very time that I saw this on TV, spoken by the trapped entity from this episode.
This is another episode that I saw when I was approximately five-eight years old. In retrospect, this being the penultimate episode of the Outer Limits, I must have remembered it all of these years because the Outer limits had been canceled shortly after. But this episode, I had no trouble as a five-year-old understanding the story, I distinctly remember that time had been frozen, or, moving forward very slowly.
I did not remember that the female lead (Mary Murphy) was not really that good of an actress, although the man playing her husband, Dewey Martin, was actually very good. He had been in the original "thing from another world", he was also in "Battleground" with Van Johnson and John Hodiak. But he was also a popular television actor in the early 60s. The man who plays the trapped entity was of course Kay E Kuter, Who we met a couple of times in Star Trek The next generation (the Nth Degree) and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. (The Storyteller). So there is your Star Trek->Outer Limits connection for this episode.
The story was written by Ib Melchior, who helped a lot with Irwin Allen shows.
This was the very first time in my life where I ever heard the phrase "time barrier". There is a place in this episode where a little bit of Star Trek style technobabble was used to explain exactly what was going on, and it actually makes a little bit of sense if you listen to what our trapped entity is saying.
It is a bit similar to the Langoliers, isn't it?
The shots of the X 15's are cleverly edited in, and I don't know where they got the prop X 15 that had "crashed". But it looked very convincing. Apparently one of the shots of the descending X 15 was a real incident where the cockpit kind of popped up. The one kind of irritating thing was that the scenes that depicted "frozen time" were merely freeze frames. But there wasn't that much they could have done to make that effect any better on a television budget in the year 1965 or so.
I highly enjoyed this when I was a child and it was this show, and two other episodes of this show that pushed me along into my lifelong love of all things science-fiction and weird.
Watching these episodes in the year 2020, all I can do is be surprised at the quality of most of these episodes. This was done on a television budget yet some of the special effects rivaled science fiction movies of the time, even surpassed them. And the story was cleverly written and cleverly resolved.
The only real problem with this episode was in regard to the trapped entity that they encounter, he seems to have been written into the episode to explain to the fourth wall exactly what was going on, but nothing else in the story explained how that entity ended up there. Perhaps an explanation was filmed and left on the cutting room floor, because even with 50 minutes per episode editors had to be frugal in the 60s.
For example in the Star Trek episode where Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and a red shirt technician (she was actually a blue shirt) start aging inexplicitly, they filmed a scene showing Bill Shatner walking down the hallway as he was getting younger, we would have loved to see that, but there just simply wasn't enough time to stick it into the episode.
Time. Time Barrier. Time wounds all heals.
If a television show from 1965 can get a child thinking about time itself, what is time? I would think that was a successful episode.
I remember those words from the very time that I saw this on TV, spoken by the trapped entity from this episode.
This is another episode that I saw when I was approximately five-eight years old. In retrospect, this being the penultimate episode of the Outer Limits, I must have remembered it all of these years because the Outer limits had been canceled shortly after. But this episode, I had no trouble as a five-year-old understanding the story, I distinctly remember that time had been frozen, or, moving forward very slowly.
I did not remember that the female lead (Mary Murphy) was not really that good of an actress, although the man playing her husband, Dewey Martin, was actually very good. He had been in the original "thing from another world", he was also in "Battleground" with Van Johnson and John Hodiak. But he was also a popular television actor in the early 60s. The man who plays the trapped entity was of course Kay E Kuter, Who we met a couple of times in Star Trek The next generation (the Nth Degree) and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. (The Storyteller). So there is your Star Trek->Outer Limits connection for this episode.
The story was written by Ib Melchior, who helped a lot with Irwin Allen shows.
This was the very first time in my life where I ever heard the phrase "time barrier". There is a place in this episode where a little bit of Star Trek style technobabble was used to explain exactly what was going on, and it actually makes a little bit of sense if you listen to what our trapped entity is saying.
It is a bit similar to the Langoliers, isn't it?
The shots of the X 15's are cleverly edited in, and I don't know where they got the prop X 15 that had "crashed". But it looked very convincing. Apparently one of the shots of the descending X 15 was a real incident where the cockpit kind of popped up. The one kind of irritating thing was that the scenes that depicted "frozen time" were merely freeze frames. But there wasn't that much they could have done to make that effect any better on a television budget in the year 1965 or so.
I highly enjoyed this when I was a child and it was this show, and two other episodes of this show that pushed me along into my lifelong love of all things science-fiction and weird.
Watching these episodes in the year 2020, all I can do is be surprised at the quality of most of these episodes. This was done on a television budget yet some of the special effects rivaled science fiction movies of the time, even surpassed them. And the story was cleverly written and cleverly resolved.
The only real problem with this episode was in regard to the trapped entity that they encounter, he seems to have been written into the episode to explain to the fourth wall exactly what was going on, but nothing else in the story explained how that entity ended up there. Perhaps an explanation was filmed and left on the cutting room floor, because even with 50 minutes per episode editors had to be frugal in the 60s.
For example in the Star Trek episode where Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and a red shirt technician (she was actually a blue shirt) start aging inexplicitly, they filmed a scene showing Bill Shatner walking down the hallway as he was getting younger, we would have loved to see that, but there just simply wasn't enough time to stick it into the episode.
Time. Time Barrier. Time wounds all heals.
If a television show from 1965 can get a child thinking about time itself, what is time? I would think that was a successful episode.
INGENIOUS VARIANT OF THE STORIES THAT TAKE PLACE IN A STILL WORLD
asalerno1029 May 2022
A test pilot and his wife accidentally cross the sound barrier and end up moving in a world where everything and everyone moves in microseconds, they come across a strange being who has been trapped in this limbo and explains that the only way to return to real time is to be in exactly the same location that they presented at the time the time is re-synchronized, they prepare for that while trying to find a way to prevent their little daughter from having an accident when normal speed resumes. One of the successes that must be highlighted in this story is the effect of seeing both cars in different time planes simultaneously. The chapter is highly entertaining.
Sparse but mostly fast paced
cpotato101013 November 2018
Warning: Spoilers
Unfortunately, it has been a while since I have seen the un-edited version of this show.
Perhaps some versions have edited out some of what I would consider key scenes.
There were some attempts at explanations why the wife was in the same advanced time as the pilot, that the X-15 crashed very near her car, and she was caught up in the same effect that put the X-15 into the future.
Also, supposedly the apparition was afraid of flame (really?), and the pilot trapped it in the control room by leaving a flare at the doorway.
And there was a payoff to the seat-belt rigged to the brake. The scene is very short, but it shows that once time catches up, the truck wheel turns, wrapping the seat-belt(s) and pulling the brake handle, stopping the truck. It stops with a short screech and the little girl looks up at the truck in surprise.
I would not say the sparseness - only two principle actors for most of the episode - was due to budget reasons, but how many people would have been caught in the time-warp?
While at times it does drag, once you know there is a clock the pilot and his wife must beat, there is considerable tension for the rest of the episode.
Perhaps some versions have edited out some of what I would consider key scenes.
There were some attempts at explanations why the wife was in the same advanced time as the pilot, that the X-15 crashed very near her car, and she was caught up in the same effect that put the X-15 into the future.
Also, supposedly the apparition was afraid of flame (really?), and the pilot trapped it in the control room by leaving a flare at the doorway.
And there was a payoff to the seat-belt rigged to the brake. The scene is very short, but it shows that once time catches up, the truck wheel turns, wrapping the seat-belt(s) and pulling the brake handle, stopping the truck. It stops with a short screech and the little girl looks up at the truck in surprise.
I would not say the sparseness - only two principle actors for most of the episode - was due to budget reasons, but how many people would have been caught in the time-warp?
While at times it does drag, once you know there is a clock the pilot and his wife must beat, there is considerable tension for the rest of the episode.
A very good premise, real sci-fi - not just another monster episode.
fedor85 January 2022
Warning: Spoilers
"What is this?! Where are we?!" says the pilot's distraught wife, after the couple finds themselves in a time limbo.
You're in a Hollywood studio. Your transition from location shooting in a desert to being in a studio lot didn't go quite as well as planned.
This is the main problem early on, the fact that the desert-studio-desert-studio transitions are totally out of synch, quite unconvincing. This is what a 60s television low budget can cause. The wildlife stock footage doesn't exactly help things either: it only makes these transitions even cheesier. The coyote chasing the rabbit is almost as awkwardly shoved in as all of the stock footage Ed Wood used to rely on.
Not long after, she gets hysterical so her husband slaps her, which felt unnecessary, over-the-top. And yet, wife-slapping was a common method used in old movies and serials as means to deal with female hysteria. Now, you know almost as well as I do that I am the polar opposite of political-correctness, but I felt the slap was unwarranted in this case. And anyway, it's not as if she didn't have any reason to get hysterical: she absolutely did, and her hubby should have been more understanding. The irony is of course this: in this situation who is more hysterical, the slapper or the slapee?
Fortunately, the couple soon leaves the studio lot "desert" and heads back to the real desert. Location shooting is so much better. Except in "Star Trek". Who doesn't enjoy those cheesy planetary sets, colorful boulders as light as hamsters? Speaking of which, ST has a season 3 episode, "Wink Of An Eye", that is based on the identical sci-fi idea, meaning that Roddenbury and co stole this premise most probably. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that TOL was the first to toy with this concept; they may have stolen it themselves from pulp sci-fi, from the vast catalog of hundreds of comic-book stories, which the vast majority of millennial sci-fi fans aren't even aware exist.
The mystery itself is interesting, but is handled somewhat clumsily on occasion. One illogicality is how the couple, during their earlier speculations and theories, tends to ignore the fact that their doubles are frozen in time.
Early on, I had briefly considered the possibility that everything revolves around their daughter being endangered in some way, but hoped I was wrong. Alas, I was right: the premise suffers greatly because of the absurd situation their daughter is in. Somehow, this military facility has such lax security that a child can just easily walk away and get in harms way by "escaping" her prison i.e. The nursery. Even dumber, she is about to get run over by a truck with the brakes off - while the driver is outside the vehicle. There was no need for the writer to not place the driver inside the truck, which would have been far more realistic. Later we find out that the writer used this silliness as a plot-device for the pilot to have a way to save his daughter. Of course, the writer could have easily devised a different, more realistic situation and solution. After all, what are the odds that a small girl in a military base JUST HAPPENS to be outside of the safety perimeter at the exact same time when a professional truck driver JUST HAPPENS to leave the breaks off in his parked truck, a vehicle that JUST HAPPENS to start moving at the exact moment when the girl is about to cross its path? This entire set-up is far too stupid, made more needlessly preposterous than is necessary.
Besides, by the looks of it, the nanny is close enough to catch the child - who surely can't be going at 100 km/h on that tiny toy vehicle.
The mysterious man they encounter, trapped in limbo for who knows how long and for what reason (which isn't explained), wants to take the place of one of them in order to go back to the normal time dimension - and yet he volunteers all the information they need to get out of limbo instead of him! "I want to sneakily take your place - and yet I will help you foil my own plan." That's essentially what he's doing, which is very contradictory. If he had changed his mind and decided to help them instead of saving himself, there was certainly no clear indication in the script that suggests that this turnaround in his attitude ever took place. The fact that this man is basically residing in a hellish world only makes his decision to explain everything quite absurd. If anything, he should be DESPERATE to escape, hence highly unlikely to want to help them.
Also silly is how much time they waste on kissing and jabbering, when time is of the essence for the pilot to get back to his cockpit on time before regular time flow goes back in effect. One kiss I can understand, but two? Why didn't they just tear each other's clothes off and make out!
Another preposterous plot-device is how the jet lands only 10 meters away from the wife's car. Very convenient, as so many plot-devices here.
The narrator's talk of Gordian knots in the intro and outro is a bit weird. That's not what the story is about. I'd rather he told us how come this time-limbo incident had to occur at precisely the same day, and same minute even, when the couple's daughter was endangered. I wasn't expecting the narrator to give us a clear-cut answer, because the ending should be open to interpretation, but the least he could have done is hint at divine intervention or anything else that may explain this wild coincidence.
You're in a Hollywood studio. Your transition from location shooting in a desert to being in a studio lot didn't go quite as well as planned.
This is the main problem early on, the fact that the desert-studio-desert-studio transitions are totally out of synch, quite unconvincing. This is what a 60s television low budget can cause. The wildlife stock footage doesn't exactly help things either: it only makes these transitions even cheesier. The coyote chasing the rabbit is almost as awkwardly shoved in as all of the stock footage Ed Wood used to rely on.
Not long after, she gets hysterical so her husband slaps her, which felt unnecessary, over-the-top. And yet, wife-slapping was a common method used in old movies and serials as means to deal with female hysteria. Now, you know almost as well as I do that I am the polar opposite of political-correctness, but I felt the slap was unwarranted in this case. And anyway, it's not as if she didn't have any reason to get hysterical: she absolutely did, and her hubby should have been more understanding. The irony is of course this: in this situation who is more hysterical, the slapper or the slapee?
Fortunately, the couple soon leaves the studio lot "desert" and heads back to the real desert. Location shooting is so much better. Except in "Star Trek". Who doesn't enjoy those cheesy planetary sets, colorful boulders as light as hamsters? Speaking of which, ST has a season 3 episode, "Wink Of An Eye", that is based on the identical sci-fi idea, meaning that Roddenbury and co stole this premise most probably. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that TOL was the first to toy with this concept; they may have stolen it themselves from pulp sci-fi, from the vast catalog of hundreds of comic-book stories, which the vast majority of millennial sci-fi fans aren't even aware exist.
The mystery itself is interesting, but is handled somewhat clumsily on occasion. One illogicality is how the couple, during their earlier speculations and theories, tends to ignore the fact that their doubles are frozen in time.
Early on, I had briefly considered the possibility that everything revolves around their daughter being endangered in some way, but hoped I was wrong. Alas, I was right: the premise suffers greatly because of the absurd situation their daughter is in. Somehow, this military facility has such lax security that a child can just easily walk away and get in harms way by "escaping" her prison i.e. The nursery. Even dumber, she is about to get run over by a truck with the brakes off - while the driver is outside the vehicle. There was no need for the writer to not place the driver inside the truck, which would have been far more realistic. Later we find out that the writer used this silliness as a plot-device for the pilot to have a way to save his daughter. Of course, the writer could have easily devised a different, more realistic situation and solution. After all, what are the odds that a small girl in a military base JUST HAPPENS to be outside of the safety perimeter at the exact same time when a professional truck driver JUST HAPPENS to leave the breaks off in his parked truck, a vehicle that JUST HAPPENS to start moving at the exact moment when the girl is about to cross its path? This entire set-up is far too stupid, made more needlessly preposterous than is necessary.
Besides, by the looks of it, the nanny is close enough to catch the child - who surely can't be going at 100 km/h on that tiny toy vehicle.
The mysterious man they encounter, trapped in limbo for who knows how long and for what reason (which isn't explained), wants to take the place of one of them in order to go back to the normal time dimension - and yet he volunteers all the information they need to get out of limbo instead of him! "I want to sneakily take your place - and yet I will help you foil my own plan." That's essentially what he's doing, which is very contradictory. If he had changed his mind and decided to help them instead of saving himself, there was certainly no clear indication in the script that suggests that this turnaround in his attitude ever took place. The fact that this man is basically residing in a hellish world only makes his decision to explain everything quite absurd. If anything, he should be DESPERATE to escape, hence highly unlikely to want to help them.
Also silly is how much time they waste on kissing and jabbering, when time is of the essence for the pilot to get back to his cockpit on time before regular time flow goes back in effect. One kiss I can understand, but two? Why didn't they just tear each other's clothes off and make out!
Another preposterous plot-device is how the jet lands only 10 meters away from the wife's car. Very convenient, as so many plot-devices here.
The narrator's talk of Gordian knots in the intro and outro is a bit weird. That's not what the story is about. I'd rather he told us how come this time-limbo incident had to occur at precisely the same day, and same minute even, when the couple's daughter was endangered. I wasn't expecting the narrator to give us a clear-cut answer, because the ending should be open to interpretation, but the least he could have done is hint at divine intervention or anything else that may explain this wild coincidence.
Another good episode but I'm going to leave a spoiler
dukeb0y28 October 2023
Warning: Spoilers
This is written by IB Melchior who did a lot of sci-fi. And as a side note, if you can find his book, Case by Case, it's excellent.
Now the reason for the spoiler, is a little girl is on her bicycle heading for a truck. And now they're in the fourth dimension of time so everything is at a standstill. For example it takes an hour for a second to move by. So they've got an hour to figure out what to do.
However the two people are not trapped in this time. So my first thought was to stop the bicycle, well you got your purse shove it in between the spokes.
Well that was my first thought anyway. This is also similar to a Star Trek episode where everybody was moving fast. But in this one everybody's moving slow. Really good science fiction.
A few more thoughts? The sets were actually pretty good for a low budget. Better than Lost in Space which was actually a favorite and more popular TV show. The X-15, that was a pretty good prop.
Now the reason for the spoiler, is a little girl is on her bicycle heading for a truck. And now they're in the fourth dimension of time so everything is at a standstill. For example it takes an hour for a second to move by. So they've got an hour to figure out what to do.
However the two people are not trapped in this time. So my first thought was to stop the bicycle, well you got your purse shove it in between the spokes.
Well that was my first thought anyway. This is also similar to a Star Trek episode where everybody was moving fast. But in this one everybody's moving slow. Really good science fiction.
A few more thoughts? The sets were actually pretty good for a low budget. Better than Lost in Space which was actually a favorite and more popular TV show. The X-15, that was a pretty good prop.
"Apparently, we both lost a little piece of time."
classicsoncall7 July 2022
Warning: Spoilers
The science involved in this episode is pretty questionable, so it takes a leap of faith to follow the entire 'frozen time' aspect of the story. And yet time wasn't entirely frozen, but in a state of quasi-suspended animation that was proceeding along very slowly undiscernible to the naked eye. The explanation for what occurred was offered by X-15 test pilot Jim Darcy (Dewey Martin) when he stated that his plane presumably broke the time barrier while his wife (Mary Murphy) experienced a parallel event when her car crash coincided with his passing out in the cockpit. A lot of film time is eaten up by the couple running back and forth to Darcy's military base to reason out a solution to their dilemma, and the dilemma of their young daughter about to get hit by a truck once time 'catches up' with them in a couple hours of their present state. There's also a brief segment in which a ghost-like apparition appears to the couple who laments its suspended existence between past, present and future, and suggests that he just might be replaced by one of them if conditions match precisely to the millionth of a second. Ultimately, Darcy hits upon a solution to save his daughter, and as suspended time coincides with real time, the memory of what the Darcy's experienced during their brief interlude appears to have vanished. What's kind of comical however, is how it took them longer to drive back to the military base than any of the times they hoofed it back and forth!
The Langoliers
bobbydjc4 May 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Does The Langoliers remind you of this episode? In that movie though there were no people at all. And The Langoliers were eating up the past.
Spoiler warning, sort of
Why not tie the safety belt to the tricycle, probability of success would be better.
Spoiler warning, sort of
Why not tie the safety belt to the tricycle, probability of success would be better.
Ha! Saw ya move
TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews1 February 2010
This is one of only half a dozen or so episodes of the original The Outer Limits show that I've seen. It isn't the best of them, but it's not half bad. After a test flight goes awry, time appears to be standing still. The pilot and his wife try to work out what's happening, and how to return everything to normal. No, the math doesn't quite work out; still, this is a compelling concept, and the execution is pretty good, as well. Unfortunately, the patriarchal values of back then *really* shine through, meaning that the man is a ridiculous jerk to the woman, who, in turn, gets extremely upset("fixed" by slaps to the face) and is largely useless(as well as ignored by him, no matter the quality of her input). This is extremely grating on the nerves of anyone who does not agree with those norms, and in fact making the otherwise fine 51 minutes nearly intolerable. Adding to that is the loud, high pitched music, which was sadly that time's take on sci-fi score. The effects are convincing(yes, my summary was a joke), though you can clearly tell what is stock footage. I recommend this to fans of the genre; just beware of the male chauvinism in the tone. 6/10
Pretty weak.
planktonrules1 July 2012
Warning: Spoilers
A pilot of the hot X-15 rocket plane is having problems and his machine crash lands. Miraculously, he survives and his wife just happens to be nearby when it occurs. Now he AND the wife are stuck in time. Everything around them is still and they can see but are unable to interact with everyone. Most oddly, the wife even sees herself driving in the car and they see their child about to get squashed by a truck! After a while, they notice something--that things around them ARE moving but at a very, very, VERY slow speed. Later, they discover a weird being who is also trapped---and they learn that it IS possible for them to return--but they need to hurry.
To me, this is a very weak episode. Much of it doesn't make sense (such as why the wife was trapped by the husband), how all this happened, how the creature knew so much as well why ANY parent would put their kid in that daycare center! It also just wasn't all that exciting to watch. As this was one of the very last episodes to air, this might explain why this particular episode is among the weakest in the series.
By the way, one great lesson I learned from this particular episode is how to deal with a scared and hysterical wife...BELT HER! Yes, he slaps her amazingly hard and it's sad to imagine that something like this was normal for 1965--as you assume the audience didn't freak out when this occurred.
To me, this is a very weak episode. Much of it doesn't make sense (such as why the wife was trapped by the husband), how all this happened, how the creature knew so much as well why ANY parent would put their kid in that daycare center! It also just wasn't all that exciting to watch. As this was one of the very last episodes to air, this might explain why this particular episode is among the weakest in the series.
By the way, one great lesson I learned from this particular episode is how to deal with a scared and hysterical wife...BELT HER! Yes, he slaps her amazingly hard and it's sad to imagine that something like this was normal for 1965--as you assume the audience didn't freak out when this occurred.
One Of The Six Stinkers In The Series
StuOz20 July 2014
A test pilot finds his world is moving in very slow motion.
I have reviewed all the wonderful Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes on the IMDb, however whenever that series did BORING low-budget shows like this, where one or two people would spend the hour running around on an empty set...I was not happy!
So I am not happy with The Premonition, the hour is made worse by the fact that it is the 2nd last show of the series: what a way to go out!
Granted, The Premonition has the odd good moment, but that footage of frozen planes/people is a taste of things to come in a few episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68).
I have reviewed all the wonderful Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes on the IMDb, however whenever that series did BORING low-budget shows like this, where one or two people would spend the hour running around on an empty set...I was not happy!
So I am not happy with The Premonition, the hour is made worse by the fact that it is the 2nd last show of the series: what a way to go out!
Granted, The Premonition has the odd good moment, but that footage of frozen planes/people is a taste of things to come in a few episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68).
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