A husband and wife finds themselves in an elongated pocket of alternate time where their younger daughter is about to be killed by a truck.A husband and wife finds themselves in an elongated pocket of alternate time where their younger daughter is about to be killed by a truck.A husband and wife finds themselves in an elongated pocket of alternate time where their younger daughter is about to be killed by a truck.
Photos
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe scene of the X-15 landing is on November 5, 1959, when a small engine fire started and forced pilot Scott Crossfield to make an emergency landing on Rosamond Dry Lake. The X-15, not designed to land with fuel, came down with a heavy load of propellants and broke its back, grounding this particular X-15, ship #2 (56-6671), for three months.
- GoofsThere are two children shown tossing a ball in the day care enclosure when Jim and Linda Darcy arrive. In the next shot, the Darcys enter the enclosure to look for Jane, and the two children are gone.
- Quotes
Jim Darcy: Who are you? Talk!
Limbo Being: I am what you are, trapped in this limbo world between the present and the future. I am what you will be if you can not return to normal time at the instant of re-synchronization of a time rift you crated, and through which you were catapulted here. What has happened to you happened to me. I didn't get back.
Jim Darcy: What DOES happen at the instant time catches up with us?
Limbo Being: At that instant, since two lives entered here, there will be space for two lives to escape this time prison. That is my chance. I must not miss that chance.
Jim Darcy: And you wanna take my place?
Limbo Being: If you miss your chance to return one millionth of a second behind time, time will pass you by and leave you where I am now, in forever now. Black, motionless void. No light. No sun, no stars, no time. Eternal nothing! No hunger, no thirst. Only endless existence. And the worst of it, you can't die.
I remember those words from the very time that I saw this on TV, spoken by the trapped entity from this episode.
This is another episode that I saw when I was approximately five-eight years old. In retrospect, this being the penultimate episode of the Outer Limits, I must have remembered it all of these years because the Outer limits had been canceled shortly after. But this episode, I had no trouble as a five-year-old understanding the story, I distinctly remember that time had been frozen, or, moving forward very slowly.
I did not remember that the female lead (Mary Murphy) was not really that good of an actress, although the man playing her husband, Dewey Martin, was actually very good. He had been in the original "thing from another world", he was also in "Battleground" with Van Johnson and John Hodiak. But he was also a popular television actor in the early 60s. The man who plays the trapped entity was of course Kay E Kuter, Who we met a couple of times in Star Trek The next generation (the Nth Degree) and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. (The Storyteller). So there is your Star Trek->Outer Limits connection for this episode.
The story was written by Ib Melchior, who helped a lot with Irwin Allen shows.
This was the very first time in my life where I ever heard the phrase "time barrier". There is a place in this episode where a little bit of Star Trek style technobabble was used to explain exactly what was going on, and it actually makes a little bit of sense if you listen to what our trapped entity is saying.
It is a bit similar to the Langoliers, isn't it?
The shots of the X 15's are cleverly edited in, and I don't know where they got the prop X 15 that had "crashed". But it looked very convincing. Apparently one of the shots of the descending X 15 was a real incident where the cockpit kind of popped up. The one kind of irritating thing was that the scenes that depicted "frozen time" were merely freeze frames. But there wasn't that much they could have done to make that effect any better on a television budget in the year 1965 or so.
I highly enjoyed this when I was a child and it was this show, and two other episodes of this show that pushed me along into my lifelong love of all things science-fiction and weird.
Watching these episodes in the year 2020, all I can do is be surprised at the quality of most of these episodes. This was done on a television budget yet some of the special effects rivaled science fiction movies of the time, even surpassed them. And the story was cleverly written and cleverly resolved.
The only real problem with this episode was in regard to the trapped entity that they encounter, he seems to have been written into the episode to explain to the fourth wall exactly what was going on, but nothing else in the story explained how that entity ended up there. Perhaps an explanation was filmed and left on the cutting room floor, because even with 50 minutes per episode editors had to be frugal in the 60s.
For example in the Star Trek episode where Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and a red shirt technician (she was actually a blue shirt) start aging inexplicitly, they filmed a scene showing Bill Shatner walking down the hallway as he was getting younger, we would have loved to see that, but there just simply wasn't enough time to stick it into the episode.
Time. Time Barrier. Time wounds all heals.
If a television show from 1965 can get a child thinking about time itself, what is time? I would think that was a successful episode.
- XweAponX
- Aug 29, 2020
Details
- Runtime51 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
- 4:3