The Outer Limits: The Guests

Post-"The Big Heat" Gloria Grahame plays a vamp actress from the twenties, Florida Patton, like a soft version of Miriam Hopkins from "Don't Open Till Doomsday". She and the old and odd couple ("Shut-up Randall or I'll be nice to you!") try to corrupt Geoffrey Horne as Wade Norton ("I feel as if I'm having a bad dream!") in vain. Nympho Florida calls "drifter" (as the character of Don Gordon defines himself in "Second Chance")—the use of the "beatnik" word "drifter" reminds the spirit of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"—, rebel Wade Norton ("Never interrogate the wind !") who meets Luane Anders as shy Tess in the most melancholic love affair of the series with a foretaste of the XIXth Century. Norton's driving force is the search of his identity in an initiatory quest and whose bottomline-revelation will end inside the gothic-like house (a projection of his unsteady mind). The brain monster is fascinating. It has the same voice as the Senator from "Fun and Games" and it is a recycled part from "The Mice". It explores human condition like a mathematician when it compares the positive (pro-creation, work, faith, art) and the negative factor (destruction, fear, hopelessness, hate [symbolized by an atomic bomb]). You have a magnificent optical effects when the giant brain is seen with a fast-moving clouds background (also see "The Man Who Was Never Born") just like in the work of cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca ("Out of the Past" and "Clash by Night"). This is the first episode which features no Control Voice's narrations as in "The Forms of Things Unknown". Oddly enough, three episodes have got incomplete narrations: "Second Chance" and "Fun and Games" contain no end narrations and "The Special One" no opening narration. The music is interesting too because it is a blend and a variation of scores from "Nightmare" (see "Mother's Loop", "Krug's Confession", "Betty Loop" and "Jong Returns"), "The Architects of Fear" and "Don't Open Till Doomsday" to "Stoney Burke" cues (for the romantic scenes) and the haunting sound from "O.B.I.T." which is well-blended with the over-recursive "Betty Loop". The finest and the most touching scene is when Wade Norton says: "No, Tess, come back!" and Tess leaves the garden and dies (she gets old and turns to dust). But the details I like the most is the maze of long dark corridors and empty rooms which leads to nowhere. Speaking of corridor, it is a constant graphic detail whose meaning may be the loss of balance followed by a claustrophic feeling, for instance in "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork", "The Mice", "The Mutant" or "Production and Decay of Strange Particles". A landmark episode with a subtle story due to "Thriller" Donald S. Sanford, existentialist characters ("Close your eyes to illusion. Love is out there!"), a gothic approach not shot by Conrad Hall about the theme of dream and based on a teleplay by Charles Beaumont ("An Ordinary Town")—Charles Beaumont's theme about ageing remains his personal trade mark, especially in his "Twilight Zone" works: see "Long Live Walter Jameson" and "Queen of the Nile". Post-"Night Tide" Luana Anders' character last name is Ames which is a direct reference to Leslie Stevens' wife: Allyson. Notes: Robert Johnson is the voice of the brain monster. Nellie Burt appears in "Don't Open Till Doomsday" and Vaughn Taylor in "Expanding Human".