The story itself is an exercise in the old question, does the end justify the means? Robert Culp gets to play the lead in a tale of scientists, well meaning as they might be, hatching a scheme to create a common enemy. A scarecrow, to use dialogue within the episode. A hideous monster to distract the warring populations of Earth before they blow themselves up with the genie let loose from the bottle of nuclear fission. Even more entertaining than our alien with the laser pistol is the schizophrenic episode during his transformation that will make you say, “Wow, Robert Culp. I guess Shatner wasn’t available.”
It’s a bit rushed as the time slot was an hour, but paced pretty well. I find it interesting in comparison to the second episode just before. Two consecutive episodes with injections being responsible for transforming physical appearance of people. (The previous episode was The Hundred Days of the Dragon about a foreign government planting a look a like in for the President of the U.S.).
If you pay attention to foreshadowing and you know the formula it’s obvious that something is destined to go wrong. The transformation is lengthy and painful for Culp’s character, Allen. He’s thrown away his marriage with a side story of his wife just finding out she’s pregnant, for The Greater Good. But it isn’t just enough to make him look like an alien. A cover story, with way too many moving parts is created. Weird looking spaceship created, set to land at a peace conference to drive home the angle that this is super dangerous menace. And, hey let’s foreshadow a working ray gun into that. The landing goes wrong, and a group of hunters that would have been too traumatizing to kill have their vehicle disintegrated by the laser.
And they naturally react like the fearful and xenophobic humans you would expect. Let’s give ordinary citizens lots of guns. What could possibly go wrong. Their gunfire ends Allen’s pain after an unrealistic unobserved journey back to the lab for a touching death scene with his wife. (Science fiction and fantasy are lumped together for a reason. You just get serums and spaceships instead of super strength and a wizard spell of invisibility.)
Although Allen gives his consent to the transformation after a fair lottery it’s certainly… wrong. What they’ve done to him does not go as smoothly as planned. His entire biology is altered and physically he’s not Allen, but it’s reinforced that his mind is still Allen’s.
The episode leaves us with the Serling style narration.
There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will at least be a lesson. A lesson at last to be learned.
I have the luxury of my self proclaimed arrogance on the subject of gematria to frame this according to my recency bias. Allen’s context, that his nuance and humanity is removed and he’s identified as the monster by appearance only is intentional. Do you, for example, really want the architects of fear being in charge of the decision making process when it comes to something like genocide? Your answer to that shows where you lean on in the fascist or not fascist spectrum.
The Architects of Conspiracy Gematria laid their groundwork in the hard right wing core of Alex Jones online content. Sure, as it started it was a side gig to hustle some bucks from sports betting. But once the bots got going it became twisted. The architects needed their laser gun. “You know, this sports betting angle isn’t stupid and violent enough. Let’s make everything anyone with a shred of humanity and decency a monster. Let’s remove all context and nuance and arbitrarily call everything we like (money and power) good and everything we hate (a soul and a conscience) bad.”
Do you really want someone who has aligned themselves with people that have literally picked both teams and called it a winning prediction involved in higher decisions? Those are the same people that contradict themselves every day on something like the Epstein files. Where the mutually exclusive thoughts of it being a complete fabrication, a Democrat hoax, Trump is an informant for the FBI and took down Epstein, and whatever you’re told to believe tomorrow can’t possibly be all correct.
It’s all a distraction to keep you away from realizing that objectively Epstein was a horrific monster. Closer to the serum transformation in Hundred Days than the manufactured monster in Architects. Keep you distracted from associating the rich and powerful people Epstein was actually aligned with as being recognized for the monsters they are.
You can try to think for yourself, or you can keep listening to the Architects of Fear. I highly recommend not listening to the Architects when the good intentions of our Outer Limits Architects is completely missing.
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