The Outer Limits : Nightmare

Nightmare

Thoughts?

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Re: Nightmare

The similarities between this and Star Trek's "The Empath," which was also directed by John Erman, are amazing. Both rather lousy. I think Kathryn Hays makes "Empath" better though.

Re: Nightmare

Personally I was surprised they were able to use a piece of dialogue like "THERE'S A BIG HOLE IN HIS CHEST, THEY CUT HIS HEART OUT!" in a 1963 TV show, I'd think the uptight groups would've had a field day with that one.

Re: Nightmare

Part of that episode's sheer horror with the alien wand that makes men mute...not to mention Frontiere's sickeningly sweet "Ebon Theme"...

Re: Nightmare

Lousy??? "Nightmare" is among the top five OL episodes ever produced.
It is amazingly written, directed and acted (a truly topnotch cast).
And the makeup holds up brilliantly, with the Ebonites among the most
terrifying aliens ever committed to film. A classic
offering, and another example of the often superiority of black-and-white
cinematography.

Re: Nightmare

Kind of experimental even for TOL. In a fair sized cast of talented players, James Shigeta stood out, was the coolest of the lot. Without his character, and Shigeta's flair with dialogue, the episode wouldn't have worked nearly so well. It's good but not a favorite of mine. Too much of a downer. Nobody wins, and the conclusion is not a happy one for either side, such as there are sides. The moralistic tone the show adopted near the end kind of killed what pleasure I took from the episode's surreal, minimalist production design.

Re: Nightmare

You clearly don't get this landmark show if you believe somebody has
to "win." Being a "downer", as you put it, doesn't make it inferior.
Far from it. There are truly terrible episodes of this series. This is NOT
among their number.

The Outer Limits

You clearly don't understand other people, gbennett: I was using the word win figuratively, in a dramatic sense; not literally, as in a war or even a chess game. I didn't say the episode was terrible, and I praised certain aspects of it. Well made and thoughtful, it fell short for me when it moved away from sci-fi and turned into what amounted to a sermon in the end. The Outer Limits did this fairly often; too often, for my tastes, even as I love the show overall. My favorite eps of the series are "beyond good and evil" (The Hundred Days Of the Dragon, The Invisibles, The Mice, most of It Crawled Out Of the Woodwork and Don't Open Till Doomsday), as if the show was thumbing its nose at the censors, flipping the bird to the network with a "morals, morals, we don't need no stinking morals!". When it did that it was sublime.

Re: The Outer Limits

That's YOUR opinion. There is a place for morality, as long as it is
intelligently and uniquely told. OL was extremely cerebral, and its
best episodes go beyond "flipping the bird" at the censors. You must've
initially watched this as a rebellious teenager or something, as your picks
for the best offerings seem to be all about shock value and "monsters."
And, like it or not, "A Hundred Days of The Dragon" is indeed a morality
play.

Re: The Outer Limits

I'm with gbennett5. "Nightmare" would rank with me as one of the top ten TV episodes of the 1960s, and whining about how the episode didn't have "winners" is about as absurd a misunderstanding of the entire OUTER LIMITS series as it gets. The whole series had a great deal of maturity in refuting the childish expectations of "winners" and "losers" in the overall scheme of things. Other shows of the era typically had a far more simplistic concept of "morality" than THE OUTER LIMITS had, and "Nightmare" in particular was far ahead of it's time in challenging the idea those in charge, even in the military (!) were always in the right in their actions.

And that's without considering the exceptionally unsettling nature of the aliens, the great work by the cast (Shigeta certainly stood out, but Ed Nelson, Martin Sheen and Bill Gunn also did outstanding work), the brilliant score by Dominic Frontiere, and even the way the spare soundstage set actually worked in conveying the weird Ebonite world. One of the best hours of TV I have ever seen.

Re: The Outer Limits

I also think that Nightmare was one of the best episodes.

Re: Nightmare

My thoughts: This was the first episode shown after the JFK assassination, was pre empted on Nov 25th due to coverage of the funeral, we were living through our own real life nightmare. Interestingly, the episode deals with a conspiracy, a non existent war that is used as a cover for a military behavioral experiment. The timing couldn't have been more exquisite. Martin Sheen with close cropped hair looked like a double of son Emilio Estevez in Repo Man.
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