Trama

Aliens from the planet Zanti decide to make Earth a penal colony for their criminals.

The perfectionist rulers of the planet Zanti have solved the problem of what to do with their non-desirable citizens. They are incapable of executing their own species, so they have exiled them to the planet Earth. At a Top Secret Military base in the ghost town of Morgue, California, a small group of Air Force officers and guards awaits the landing of the Zanti penal ship. Informed that the Zanti value their privacy, they are told to leave the ship alone. The military is prepared to comply until a car with a runaway wife and a three-time loser named Ben Garth crashes through the barricades and breaks down in the desert near the Zanti ship.—tomtrekp

Morally incapable of executing their own kind, the insect-like creatures of the planet Zanti have resorted to exporting their criminal element to less civilized planets for their necessary extermination. Accordingly, the penal authorities of Zanti contact the United States military and demand a top-secret "reception" of their planet's "misfits" under strict secrecy, or Zanti will attack on Earth, should its human inhabitants refuse to co-operate. Thus, when the episode opens, we find a newly deputized "historian of interplanetary events" Professor Graves (Michael Tolan) arriving by military escort at the site of the alien rendevous, an abandoned desert town called Morgue, California, where the army has stationed a battalion in a state of nervous high-alert. The base command boasts a typically Outer-Limits installation of 1960's sci-fi hardware: walls of switchboards bristling with dials, lights, switches, flicking and flickering guages and needles, reel-to-reel tapes spinning and reversing, and the requisite accompanying electronic tonal effects, low, throbbing soundtrack pulsations, and other weird noises, as the commander Gen. Hart (Robert F. Simon) explains to the young historian that the banks of electronics will translate the language of the Zantis into English. Soon enough the dreaded encounter is nigh: the no-nonsense speaker grille on the walls of equipment fills the TV screen as we hear the sharp, buzzing sounds of the approaching Zantis' language, speaking from their spaceship. Tapes whirl backwards and then play the translation: the Zanti's will brook no interference--the transport craft must be allowed to deposit its criminals into the desert rocks with no Earth creatures to observe the landing. The base commander radios his assurance to the Zantis that the way is clear, and remarks to his visitor that any person entering the area will do so over his dead body, and with typical OL irony, the next thing we see is an armed guard shaking his head, framed through the lowered window of a black 1963 Lincoln Continental, from the unseen driver's perspective. The camera pulls back further into the interior of the car to reveal that guard is refusing the driver passage through a roadblock into the desert. Dominic Frontiere's ominous music sounds repeated, deep bass notes, going up a short scale, with a bit of flickering guitar, as we see over the driver's shoulder and out through the windshield, the car is reversing away from the gate across the dirt road. A motion of the driver's hand at the car's shift, the hood ornament rises up and suddenly we're hurtling forward toward the gate, the Lincoln crashes through, knocking the guard down and killing him. The black sedan is tracked streaking through the desert by the camera, trailing a plume of dust, with an appropriate cresendo on the soundtrack, and in classic OL style, the camera sweeps up toward the black and white sky, to reveal the silvery outline of the Zanti ship flying across the speeding path of the earth vehicle. The car soon comes to a stop, and we see a young man, Ben (Bruce Dern) and an older, female companion, Lisa (Olive Deering) in an incongruous mink coat. Deering is running away from her rich but boring husband, with her bank robbing boyfriend Dern, who is not rich, but with whom she has obviously not been bored. It becomes obvious that the Lincoln has overheated from coolant loss resulting from the gate crash--they're stuck. A closeup reveals a glove-box full of money and a revolver. Deering starts to leave Dern in disgust, having finally had enough of his brand of "bad adventure", but his hold on her is too strong and she comes back to the car to get out of the sun, while he strikes off to find water for the car. His search takes him to the landed space-craft, causing its xenaphobic occupants to attack both him, and the army base. Professor Graves takes it upon himself to drive into the desert and rescue Lisa, then they return to defend the base against the swarming creatures. The Zantis's insect bodies, with humanoid faces, are imaginatively rendered, and their stop-action movements give them a sort of jerky eerieness, even 47 years after their first appearance on American TV screens in 1963. The Outer Limits was famous for the ironies of its plots, its compelling black and white photography and unusual camera angles, its other-worldly soundtrack anthems and tones, its "monsters", and its superb casting. The scenes on the base are slow compared to the more interesting relationship between the two human "misfits" in the desert, their incongruously elegant Lincoln Continental juxtaposed with the alien spaceship on the rocky slopes above, their cash useless. Olive Deering's frenzy of terror, trapped inside the black car with the hideous insects swarming its windows and peering in at her, remains an Outer Limits hallmark.