The Outer Limits: The Mice

Find the most beautiful and poetic opening narration of the entire series: "In dreams, some of us walk the stars...". This convict/monster-oriented episode has got a good pace with outrageous and intense sequences and tackles many themes: sound ("We were experimenting with THE... motion of sound... to make contact with the planet Chromo", said Dr. Thomas Kellander), and, of course, radio transmission combined with alien contact as in the pilot "The Galaxy Being" and "The Zanti Misfits". Sound seems to be the link of actor Henry Silva (Cf. "Tourist Attraction") to the "Outer Limits" world. The main character who volunteers as a guinea pig ("So up! Go the mice!", said Rivera), as in "The Sixth Finger" or "The Chameleon", to enter a booth is in the line of anti-social Mike Benson from "Fun and Games", especially when Chino Rivera says: "This is the only ring that I wanna fight"; moreover, both characters are connected to teleportation or "electroportation". "The Mice" shares one plot element with "The Zanti Misfits", an alien race sends a criminal on Earth and this psychopath scout happens to be the exact psychological counterpart of Chino Rivera: "Everybody looks like a monster to somebody." The murder scene is typical of Joseph Stefano (also see "The Forms of Things Unknown") when the Chromoite killer strangles and drowns his victim (Dr. Richardson) in the lake of the Center (accompanied with a martial theme and the noise produced by the alien: an insect sound and the clicking of its claws; this music piece is a kind of a bleak outgrowth of the Enoch Gates' theme from Hero's Island). The appearence of the Chromoite is interesting too: a hybrid and repulsive monster (see the Greek Mythology) with some cerebral matter which melt as a jellyfish's head and the claws of crab as hands; and its way to eat his dusgusting food who floats. The character of Chino describes it as "a garbage eater". Thanks to both John Elizalde and John Caper, Jr., the sound effects for the transmitter, the teleportation (jolts of electricity) and the alien (which produces a drone blended with a distorted hideous grunt) are powerful and eerie. The insect reference is made by Dr. Richarson when he says that he creates a "compound of several common insecticides" to destroy the Chromoite's food which he defines as "scum". One shot anticipates one from Leslie Stevens' "Incubus" when Chino Rivera falls down to the meadow: it is an extreme close-up of him, seen in low angle, and made with a wide angle lens. Conrad Hall uses a lot of hand-held camera shots to emphasize the action and fashions a nice chiaroscuro lab's mood, especially when Chino Rivera reads a book above the mice's cage. Dominic Frontiere's composition is an outgrowth from "Nightmare". Music Supervisor John Elizalde recycles the mechanical sound of the "O.B.I.T." machine and he will re-use pieces from this score in "The Mutant" and "Second Chance". This is the second travel plot, after "The Borderland", in which we cannot see the actual alien surrounding but late season episodes ("The Mutant", "Fun and Games") will hardly satisfy the curiosity owing to the lack of original and quaint visions, except "A Feasibility Study". The best scene remains: the Chromoite goes bezerk and creates a mess when it materializes inside the lab. Meanwhile, Chino tries to escape from the lab, walks through the long dark corridor (as in "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork"), steps in the bedroom and finally is pushed back (as in "The Sixth Finger") by a force field—this is the first episode that shows an "electronic" force field but, here, used to protect the center from informations leaks and to keep Chino from running away. Notes: Henry Silva already appears in "Tourist Attraction" and Dabney Coleman in "Specimen: Unknown" and "Wolf 359". Hugh Langtry is the Chromoite and Robert Johnson is the (distorted) Chromo Transmission Voice: "Transmission point Chromo. Subject stable. Sequence commences. Initiate systems... Transmission accomplishes."