The Outer Limits: The Man with The Power

This was the first episode I saw and I was very impressed by the mind power premise. I'm particularly very fond of that episode owing to the role of Donald Pleasence ("Fantastic Voyage"), college professor, inhibited inventor ("You want me to stay a worm, don't you? Unimportant, unproductive, classroom worm! Some women take their husband by the hands and say: 'Together we'll climb to the stars'. Not you... Never you...") persecuted by his conformist and shrewish wife—for instance, witness Mrs. Vera Finley cutting her bushes with large shears while talking to her so-called "boring" husband: an obvious symbol of a castration complex in order to show Harrold Finley's deep frustration, a frustration that turns into anger and a demonstration of devastating destruction (massive bolts and anarchic moving forces) that will calm the wife down forever. The Official Space Center looks like a building designed by architect Richard Neutra. The mind power test when the dials become mad and the bar of metal tightened by two vices which melts are very bizarre. There are gripping aesthetical effects like the odd dark clouds and thunderbolts which symbolize Finley's avenging subconscious ("The terrible thing is there's a part of me, there is a piece of my brain, which hates... it's like a dark cloud in my subconscious."). The preliminary scene is noteworthy: Finley is obliged to stop his car near a maintenance truck that blocks the road to the Space Center (located in Readsville: find a veiled reference to books, a synonym for "logos" town). One of the road gardeners intimidates Finley with his theatening tone ("Are you looking for trouble, Mac?"). Finley moves back, goes the other way and scratches the scare tissue of his forehead. The dark cloud pops up and executes Finley's repressed death sentence: a few secondes later, the three men and the Ford are burnt to a cinder. This pamphlet on NASA's optimistic policy is encapsulated during the memorable final scene when Harold J. Finley says: "If I have such power, then I don't want to live..." The lead character is in the line of Dr. Morbius from "Forbidden Planet" (1956) when he voluntarily kills himself (to stop the actions of his Id) but with a masochist leaning a la Allen Leighton ("The Architects of Fear"), Private Dix ("Nightmare"), Professor Andro ("The Man Who Was Never Born"), and Dr. Simon Holm ("A Feasibility Study"). Leslie Stevens launches the basic concept of the plot and creates the optical effects of the energy cloud that is recycled in "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork". The set of the operating room originally comes from "The Architects of Fear" and you can even hear stock music from the same source. Strangely, the character of Steve Crandon can be seen as a soft Allen Leighton. When Finley demonstrates his telekinetic faculty in front of Officials of the State, we can notice the three wires that make the asteroid move into the air. TV Analogy: In the episode, "Time Enough At Last" from "The Twilight Zone", the main character played, by Burgess Meredith as book reader Henry Bemis, is persecuted by his wife too. Notes: Edward C. Platt re-appears in "The Special One" and "Keeper of the Purple Twilight".