The Outer Limits: The Chameleon

This is another espionage episode ("The Hundred Days of the Dragon" and "The Invisibles") but with a humanist leaning. Post-"Vera Cruz" Henry Brandon is stubborn and skeptical General Crawford who dislikes unconventional C.I.A. manners. Howard Caine is C.I.A. agent Leon Chambers who tries to convince his military colleage ("Only an insane scheme has any chance of working, right now!"). Pre-"The Wild Wild West" Douglas Henderson plays a sensitive Dr. Tillyard (as in "The Architects of Fear") who turns Mace into an alien due to a sample of skin and also works on sound experiments as Dr. Kellander in "The Mice". Robert Duvall is undercover agent Louis Mace who is a quiet, lonely ("Between missions, I cease to exist...") and resigned drunk misfit living in Mexico (because he was "compromised"). And the most important scene remains the killing at the Mexican bar which shows two paramount sides of Mace. He is a stone-cold killer ("But being ugly is better than being nothing...") and a warm-hearted man towards a poor musician whose guitar has been destroyed. The fixing of the guitar becomes Mace's last obsession. John Elizalde re-uses the Mexican music plays by a guitarist from a "Stoney Burke" episode: "Point of Entry". The scene I like the most is when General Crawford says to Chambers about Mace: "You, Intelligents people operate in a strange and devious ways. You find a derelict for this job!" Then you see Mace's face with a blind lighting effect: that's another veiled reference to the second-rate recruit subtheme from "The Mice" and "The Invisibles". There's a reference to Leslie Stevens when General Crawford phones a certain Colonel Stevens: "Red line, get me red line... I want Colonel Stevens, hurry!" Stevens' father used to be a high officer. As in "The Sixth Finger", the first guinea pig is a (biologically-modified) ape. The whole landing site is full of cameras and speakers as in a prison. "The Chameleon" finally develops the theme of the criminal who finds redemption in another world that has been touched lightly upon in "The Mice". The spy medallion (see "Second Chance", where its purpose is protection) of Mace can be interpreted as his last link (and chain) to the (in)human world. Oddly enough, the outside of the spaceship looks like the hatch of a submarine. Both key scenes (the ordeal of the sonic transformation chamber and the discovery of the UFO surroundings) are eery-enough owing to the use of dream-like stock music. The aliens from the "warm yellow planet" use a force field to protect themselves as in "The Bellero Shield" and, the season two "The Inheritors". The last important detail is Mace's crazy laugh and off-the-wall assertion ("You do look a little peculiar, man!") while staring at Chambers and the spool of tape (containing his genetic identity) which indicates the change of his mind. Finally, he undergoes a temporarily state of schizophrenia whose first symptom is the troubled vision (see the case of Allen Leighton) because the alien genes have taken over and made him a clone who has inherited the memories and superior knowledge of the visitors in uniform—Mace is now in the political position of a foreign scientist on the verge of defection. As Dr. Dave Crowell from "Second Chance", Mace is disillusioned by his government and choose to follow the alien. An episode with peace-loving monsters, that I'm very fond of, and I always thought it was a two-parter show due to the outcome. Notes: Robert Johnson is the loudspeaker voice and the voice of chopper pilot. Robert Duvall returns in "The Inheritors".