​ "Counterweight" – The Outer Limits S02E14 Retro Review

My eyes! My ears! My everything!

The Outer Limits has a reputation among some as being outré, compared to shows like The Twilight Zone. In some part, due to episodes like "Don't Open Until Doomsday", "The Guests", "The Bellero Shield", and "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork". Supposedly, Outer Limits is more science fiction than The Twilight Zone, and it does frame the vast majority of its stories in more scientific terms than Twilight Zone did. For instance, Satan doesn't show up in any original Outer Limits episodes, and there are no ghosts or angels. Or if they do, they're conveniently labeled "aliens", like the angelic alien in "The Bellero Shield".

At least in the first season, Outer Limits wasn't shy about using psychological reality. Primarily because creator and writer Joseph Stefano liked to use his therapy sessions as the basis for some stories. Some of Twilight Zone was based on Rod Serling's experience as an advertising exec and World War II soldier, and his brother working in the aeronautics field. But Serling was a hard-headed realist compared to Stefano.

In the second season of Outer Limits, the new non-Stefano creative team turned to more established science fiction concepts. We got astronauts, and space trips to Mars and Venus, and often straightforward narratives. The problem with making Outer Limits more "realistic" was there wasn't a fig leaf of fantasy for the writers to hide behind. And there were episodes where the narrative was just bad. "Counterweight" is one of those episodes.

"Counterweight" doesn't have the advantage of a goofy performance by William Shatner in "Cold Hands, Warm Heart", Eddie Albert in "Cry of Silence", and Adam West and Rudy Solari in "The Invisible Enemy". Granted, Michael Constantine comes close, but his characterization changes on a dime. His character, Joe Dix, is flat-out obnoxious while the other episodes' characters mentioned are at least sympathetic because they're in danger. As the creative team has Joe keep telling us, the passengers in "Counterweight" are in no danger.

But what danger are the passengers not in? We start with a shot of a spaceship traveling through the solar system. Which makes no sense, since as we're quickly informed, the characters are in a simulation of a spaceship, traveling through a tunnel built above the desert. According to various interviews with the creative team, the reveal wasn't originally supposed to happen until the end. The early reveal ruins what little suspense the episode could have had.

The six passengers are engineer and business tycoon Joe Dix (Michael Constantine), columnist Keith Ellis (Larry Ward), anthropologist Alicia Hendrix (Jacqueline Scott), botanist Michael Lint (Charles H. Radilak), Dr. Matthew James (Crahan Denton), and Professor Henry Craig (Sandy Kenyon). Captain Henry Branson (Stephen Joyce) is piloting the fake ship and doing airline-pilot-style narration ("On your right you'll see us passing Mercury"), and Maggie O'Hara (Shary Marshall) is the not-so-glorified stewardess.

The passengers know they're in a simulation, which is designed to test their psychological and emotional endurance in confined quarters during the eventual long trip through space to the planet Antheon. A helpful Surface Control voice tells them to pretend the simulation is real. Which is rather like telling someone not to think of elephants. Thanks, Surface Control Voice, for telling the passengers (and the audience) what we're seeing isn't real.

The Voice also notes there's a panic button. If anyone presses it, the simulation will end and all of the passengers will have failed to pass muster for the trip to Antheon. This is so stupid it's beyond belief: why would one person pushing the button flunk the rest? Person A pushes the button, and Person F gets flunked out? Huh? Also, the Voice notes pressing the button will only flunk the six passengers, and another group will take their place. Remember this, because it will lead to another gaping plot hole later.

Voice artist Bob Johnson does the voice of Surface Control. Granted, "Counterweight" aired about two years before Mission: Impossible premiered. But since Johnson did the Tape Voice on that show, it's hard to overcome the feeling now that the passengers are on some kind of impossible mission. Fortunately, none of the passengers are named Jim (or Dan, if you're a M:I purist).

The "ship" "takes off", and they get hit by a (fake) meteor storm and fake power fluctuations. The passengers then sit down to have a meal: which is them eating paste concentrates while Maggie sprays fake food scents around. She also tells them to make nifty designs on their plates with the paste to keep themselves from getting bored. I note later that the episode is padding, but the "dining scene" is the epitome of padding. It adds nothing to the story, and nothing relates to it either earlier or later.

During this, a cute little lightning bolt shaped blip flies through the ship when no one is looking. It slips into people's ears while they sleep, and then the sleeping person speaks their deepest thoughts. And... most of them aren't very deep. Keith and Michael are preoccupied with Joe's snoring. Joe is counting the billions he'll make when he reaches Antheon, buys up all the land, and gets the building contracts. All while snoring. Alicia worries her biological clock is ticking. Matthew blames himself for the death of his wife and child in some unidentified accident. Branson doesn't seem to have quarters--he just lurks in the control cabin--and we never hear what Maggie's deepest thoughts are. Why is she sleeping among the passengers, anyway?

With a lot of help from the lightning blip (hint: it's an Antheon), the doll of Matthew's daughter materializes. Alicia's biological clock is ticking louder and she goes to Matthew's quarters. After looking uncomfortable, Matthew ushers her out, finds the doll, and assumes Alicia left it. Matthew runs out into the hallway, holds up the doll, and then accuses first her, and then everyone else of planting the doll to bug him.

The lighting blip also chokes Joe when he starts dreaming about despoiling Antheon. This leaves a garrote mark (i.e., smooth rather than jagged) around his neck. For some reason it fades when Dr. Matt traces it with his finger. This doesn't make any sense either, but it turns up the paranoia as Joe insists someone tried to strangle him because he snores. If they had, I can't blame them: his snoring shakes the rafters of my house, and I'm watching it on TV.

At this point, I want to point out the weird costuming choices for Joe, as writer Milton Krims seems to have no idea what profession Joe follows. Joe arrives in the simulation wearing a suit like the rich guy in the game Monopoly. During the nighttime sequence, he wears silk jammies. We're supposed to believe Joe is a hard-headed construction engineer, but if Donald Trump had been a major public figure in 1964, you could easily mistake Joe for The Donald. Constantine's on-again/off-again Brooklyn accent furthers the impression.

One hundred and sixty-five days pass, according to the sign on the wall. Dr. Matt is holding his daughter's doll and is near-catatonic with guilt. Alicia comes out wearing a push-up bra, a couple of collar buttons unbuttoned, and twirling a string of pearls. She goes on about how she has to "forget the children she never had", and I'd say her ticking biological clock has gone off-full-alarm mode. The non-catatonic men stare at Jacqueline Scott's "performance" like she's grown a second head.

Everybody is getting on everybody's nerves by now. Kevin has a brief bit where he laments how all he does is print words that get replaced by other words. Joe snipes at him about his profession ("Fake news!"), and it's all about to come to blows. Michael goes to check on his plants and we get Outer Limit's second attempt at stop-motion animation as one plant comes to life and kills the others. The botanist apparently drops dead of a heart attack, or so Dr. Matt tells us when they find Michael's body and checks it.

At this point, Kevin is ready to push the panic button. Or rather, he's ready to have someone else push the panic button. First, he tells Henry to do it, then he tells Michael to do it. When Branson comes out with a gun (who arms the pilot in a simulation?), Joe grabs it from him, and threatens to kill anyone who pushes the panic button. Because someone else doing it will disqualify him from going to Antheon.

The plant grows to man-size and then the lightning blip jumps into it. It turns into a grotesque-looking plant monsters (also voiced by Bob Johnson) and tells them it's an Antheon. Although what it was before the lightning blip jumped into it, I have no idea.

The Antheon very pretentiously says it looks like a monster because that's what the humans' imagination limits it to. Although why it looks like no recognizable monster anyone has ever seen, I don't know. The Antheon brought Alicia and Dr. Matt's deepest thoughts to the surface, but they acted on them on their own. So where did the doll come from? The alien then tells the humans if they go to the planet Antheon, they'll destroy it like they're destroying their own race and it's not having any of that. Kevin suddenly becomes Steroid Rockchest and asks if the Antheons would accept them as they come as friends. Mike comes back to life, because why not?

Joe refuses to give in to all this hogwash. So the Antheon grabs his hand and forces him to press the button. So now, not only does anyone pushing the button disqualify anyone. But an alien forcing someone to push the button not only disqualified the person pushing it, but everyone else as well. And making Joe push the button, even though it disqualifies all six of the passengers, doesn't disqualify the next group of passengers. One imagines the Antheon appearing to each test group, making someone push the button, and then doing the same thing to the next test group. And the next, and the next and the next, and so on.

At the end, we get a weird-ass speech from the Control Voice (Vic Perrin) about how there are light sides and dark sides. Apparently he didn't watch the episode, either, because the outro has nothing to do with what we've seen. And then to pad out the running time, we get shots of each of the passengers arriving in the simulated ship. Which you think should have been shown at the beginning of the episode. Each character is talking up a storm with Maggie, although we don't get to hear what they're saying. Hopefully, it was more interesting than what they said in the episode.

"Counterweight" is a mess from beginning to end. For one thing, the title makes no sense. The episode is based on a story of the same name by Jerry Sohl. There the name made sense: a colony ship had a terrorist running around, and it's revealed the terrorist is a deliberate plant (a "counterweight") to keep the colonists from turning on each other by giving them someone to focus their fears and hatred on. That would have made for an interesting Outer Limits story, but it would involve a much bigger budget than host network ABC was willing to splurge on for a show on the back half of what was clearly its final season. The only nod we get to that story in the episode is Henry eventually reveals he has a secret remote-control panel that lets him trigger the fake meteor storms and power fluctuations. Although he doesn't seem to be near the panel in his quarters when the events happen. And why does he have to be in the spaceship to do the psyche-testing stuff? The researchers running the experiment didn't use any surveillance cameras?

Another problem is Jacqueline Scott's performance as the sexually-repressed and then liberated Alicia. Her acting is downright embarrassing, and the cast acts like they experience some awe and mystery when she "flirts" with them.

Finally, there are just too many contradictions and about-faces in the plot. Joe is a construction engineer: no, he's a business tycoon. Michael is dead: no, he isn't. Everyone knows it's a simulation from the get-go, but Joe keeps saying it's a simulation and they have nothing to fear. If one person pushes the panic button, everyone fails. The Antheon wants one of them to push the panic button, but that won't stop Earth's "invasion" of Antheon unless the researchers blindly keep disqualifying every group that undergoes the simulation and the Antheon shows up to make one of them do so.

There are a few good moments: Joe talking about how the movie hero knows he isn't in danger is very meta-ish. The Antheon itself is pretty good-looking even if the reason it looks like a monster doesn't make much sense.

Overall, "Counterweight" is the worst episode of the original Outer Limits episodes I've seen. Granted, I haven't seen the last three yet: "The Brain of Colonel Barnham", "The Premonition", and "The Probe". But it's hard to imagine anything worse than "Counterweight". It isn't outré: it's incoherent.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?