"Soldier" - The Outer Limits S02E01 Retro Review

And so we come to season 2 of The Outer Limits. Which has a reputation as garbage after the creators, Joseph Stefano and Leslie Stevens, left at the end of season one after a series of creative disputes with the ABC Network. The show fell into the mundane hands of Ben Brady, a producer who had worked on shows like Perry Mason. Although over half of the production crew stayed on, Brady, Seeleg Lester, and Sam White took over where Stefano and Stevens had been, and the creative spark was gone. Brady did a lot of "investigator following a case and the audience getting to watch him" stories.

I haven't seen it from the season 2 episodes I've watched. "Demon with a Glass Hand" is arguably the best episode of either season, and Stevens and Stefano subsequently expressed their admiration for it. Like "Demon", "Soldier" was written by Harlan Ellison, the famous S.F. writer and who has a reputation as either a litigious troll or an intellectual giant who doesn't tolerate fools lightly. Or maybe both. Maybe I'm just watching the best episodes first. I did that with Season 1 and found out the stuff I saved for last contained a lot of turkeys.

"Soldier" stands as an example of all of those. Ellison complained the Outer Limits creative team changed his script. But he had the same complaint about Star Trek's creative team changing his story for "The City on the Edge of Forever", too. One gets the impression Ellison often either didn't understand the limits of American TV budget and FX wise, or didn't care. He later sued James Cameron for plagiarizing "Soldier" for the movie The Terminator and got a "based on a story" credit in the movie. Although the two don't bare much resemblance to each other beyond the very basic concept of time travel between the future and the present. "Soldier" bears more of a resemblance to The Terminator 2, as both of the title characters are "humanized" because of their exposure to modern-day humans, including a teenage boy. Maybe Ellison's lawyer didn't go to that movie. Or Ellison was satisfied Cameron gave in to him on the first movie and didn't bother with the second.

What's ironic is Ellison indulges in some supposed plagiarism of his own from George Orwell and 1984 . There are references in Soldier to two sides locked in an endless war that seems to serve no purpose, and the elite and migrant workers divided by class division. There are also references to cloning and crèches and hatcheries, and basically Michael Ansara is a human Sontaran.

Also, we get a lot of "tell don't show" investigative-type stuff. There are several scenes where Lloyd Nolan is the linguist, Tom Kagan, narrates what he's discovered about Quarlo. Then they do a flashback showing us about that particular encounter between Tom and Quarlo. What's the point of the flashback, if it just shows us what Tom is describing. Why not just... show the scene?

But who does Ansara play and what in "Soldier" caused Ellison to go off the deep end again? Let's take a look. "Soldier" opens with a battlefield on Earth, but an Earth where heat rays shoot down from the sky at regular intervals and the area has been reduced to a barren landscape. Sitting nearby are two soldiers, Quarlo Clobregnny (HITG* Michael Ansara) and an unnamed Enemy (HITG Alan Jaffe). They eventually locate each other via trackers on their wrist, meet on the field of battle, and two heat rays slam down coincidentally and open a time rift because of the previously unknown connection between heat and time travel. Kids, don't try this at home!

The two soldiers fall through a temporal void and the Enemy gets stuck partway. They both end up in what is presumably 1964, but the Enemy is trapped in some kind of in-between zone. Quarlo draws his gun on a news vendor when he sees the man sharpening a pocket knife. Everyone panics, the police arrive, and one of them shoots off Quarlo's helmet. The city noises deafen him and the police capture him. Quarlo soon ends up at an asylum run by one of the Outer Limit's ubiquitous government agencies. The agent in charge, Paul Tanner (HITG Tim O'Connor) calls in Tom (Lloyd Nolan) to decipher Quarlo's apparent ramblings.

Tom soon discovers Quarlo speaks English, but in an odd dialect involving slang and future gutter language. Since the creative team thought it would be boring to watch, we hear a lot of Tom telling Paul what he's learned from Quarlo, rather than the team showing us the conversations. Why the creative team thought it would be more interesting to show us two guys talking about what Quarlo said, rather than showing us Quarlo saying things, I have no idea.

The linguist eventually figures Quarlo is from 1800 years in the future. He's a soldier on one of two sides in an endless war on Earth. Tom convinces Paul to let him take Quarlo to his house and his average American family: wife Abby, daughter Toni, and son Loren. We find out a few other things, like how soldiers in the future are telepathically linked to cats, and Quarlo is a clone from the Clobregnny crèche. Quarlo continues speaking in his odd dialect, and in an amusing bit, Loren picks it up and becomes fairly conversant with it. And that's a problem with the episode: we get lots of scenes of Tom explaining things to Paul, or things happening off-screen and being described. Instead of showing us the things. Maybe it's budget, which was cut for season 2 of The Outer Limits. Although it doesn't seem to be any cheaper. Maybe it's time constraints.

The Enemy eventually emerges from the time warp, uses his wrist tracker to find Quarlo, breaks into the Kagan house, and attacks them. Tom is holding a rifle Quarlo stole earlier, and when the Enemy goes for him, Quarlo attacks the Enemy, triggers his future gun, and they both disintegrate. The Control Voice sums things up, wondering if Quarlo was acting out of fondness for the Kagan family or just instinctively attacking the enemy.

It's a pretty short synopsis, which is a shame, since there's enough story here to make a movie. There are some interesting bits: Quarlo lectures daughter Toni on how the family shoves unused food down the garbage disposal and how in his time, soldiers go without food. She challenges him, and he starts to hit her but then hesitates. That's all the real "humanizing" we get of Quarlo. I would have liked to see him interact with Loren, or Paul, or anyone other than Tom. Although they do have a bit when they first meet when they bond over cigarettes. Ah, the 60s, when smoking onscreen was cool.

I also like the bit where Tom realizes that Quarlo is playing dumb, and Ansara gets a little FU smirk on his face. As if Tom was an enemy officer interrogating him and Quarlo is amused that Tom finally realized he's playing him.

The best part is the performances. Ansara hails from the Syrian Arab Republic, but he often ended up typecast as an American Indian or a Spaniard in 50s and 60s American TV, Like on Broken Arrow, where he played Cochise. It must have been a relief for Ansara in that era to play a character without a given nationality. He seems to have channeled that relief into his performance: he plays Quarlo as a trapped animal most of the time. Even when Quarlo is "humanized" in the last quarter of the episode, he's still mostly an "ultimate soldier". His frustration with 20th century Earth, emotions like "love" and hate", concepts like "family", and even his attempts to make telepathic contact with the Kagans' family cat, all let him portray Quarlo as both a human (very) slowly awakening to his origins, and as a genetically-bred clone soldier. As one reviewer noted, he doesn't rescue a burning house with orphans or fall in love with Toni or beat up bullies picking on Loren. A POW on release he starts, and a POW on release he remains.

Lloyd Nolan's character is more interesting than the actor is. Tom is basically an all-around good guy. In one scene he touches Quarlo on the shoulder and Quarlo breaks a few of his ribs slamming him into a wall. Tom shrugs it off and goes back to trying to understand Quarlo's language. The character itself is pretty bland, and if it was 21st century TV, we'd probably get some backstory on how he worked with the Peace Corps and lost his mother when he was young so dedicated himself to helping mankind, yada yada.

Ralph Hart and Jill Hill both shine briefly as Tom's kids. I would have rather seen more of them than another scene with Tom and Paul arguing about Quarlo. The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable. Catherine McLeod plays Tom's wife Abby, and she betrays Quarlo to the Bureau after Tom brings the soldier home and convinces him to give up his gun. You'd think husband and wife would have had some long talks after that, but the episode ends with Quarlo sacrificing himself (or does he?) to save the Kagans.

In fact, one of the best parts of the episode is the questions it raises. In the beginning, Quarlo and the Enemy are virtually indistinguishable from each other. They wear essentially the same uniform, and there's no context, so we have no idea which one is "good" and which one is "bad". Part of the unspoken story is neither of them is good or bad. We figure Quarlo is "good" because he's played by Ansara, who is more high-profile than Jaffe. But if their positions were reversed and the Enemy was the one Tom talked with... would he have turned out to be "good"? If Quarlo was the one trapped, and didn't have the benefit of the Kagans' humanizing efforts, would he have barged into their house and opened fire on the Enemy?

There's a strong anti-war element running through the story. Particularly in a scene where Tom shows Quarlo films of loving couples mixed in with soldiers training to kill and keeps yelling, "Love = good. Hate = bad!" That doesn't seem like the best idea in the world--let's show the soldier-type footage of soldiers training to get him to calm down--but Quarlo angrily tearing up the projector screen and insisting he doesn't understand "love" when a soldier charges at the cameraman is still powerful. Mostly thanks to Ansara's trapped-animal performance.

There are also some wonky S.F. elements, but that's typical for Outer Limits. The soldiers time travel because what are described as laser beams create a time rift. Quarlo is shown to be sensitive to both light and sound. The sound kind of makes sense, since his helmet is programmed to feed him constant messages of "Find the enemy!", "Destroy", and "Kill". But why genetically design a soldier and make him sensitive to light? The future doesn't seem to be that dark, so having low-light vision does not appear at all helpful. But Outer Limits was never big on science even at the best of times, and they gloss over the scientific stuff.

Overall, "Soldier" is one of the best season 2 Outer Limits episodes I've seen. It's not quite as good as "Demon" or "The Inheritors", but that's mostly down to the rushed nature of the story. If it had been a two-parter like "Inheritors", and the creative team had gone with more actual scenes of Tom and Quarlo interacting instead of Tom describing those interactions to Paul or his Dictaphone, it would have been better. And given us more of Ansara, who is the main reason to watch the episode.

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

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* HITG = Hey, It's That Guy!