| "Counterweight" | |||
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| The Outer Limits episode | |||
| Episode no. | Season 2 Episode 14 |
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| Directed by | Paul Stanley | ||
| Written by | Milton Krims (teleplay) Jerry Sohl (story) |
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| Cinematography by | Kenneth Peach | ||
| Production code | 36 | ||
| Original air date | December 26, 1964 | ||
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| Episode chronology | |||
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| List of The Outer Limits episodes | |||
"Counterweight" is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 26 December 1964, during the second season.
Contents |
"The great unknown: Limitless heavens crowded with sparking mysteries, challenging Man's curiosity. But the heavens are not oceans. Man cannot push a boat into its currents and set sail for the next horizon. The heavens are a mystery only science can solve, as it penetrates the unknown."
Four scientists, a newspaper man and a construction tycoon agree to spend 261 days in isolation in an interstellar flight simulation. But the experiment is secretly infiltrated by an Extraterrestrial.
"Panic button pressed. Passengers returned. One side always in the sunlight, the other always in darkness; the known and the unknown. Frightening to each other only when they are both unknown... and misunderstood."
Based on the short story 'Counterweight' by Jerry Sohl first published in Worlds of If magazine in November 1959. The original story traces the activity of an alien creature referred to as a Nilly or "scapegoat" placed aboard a long term space colony flight so that the passengers will direct all their anger and frustrations toward it and not each other. It is known to the colonists as "Red Mask" and it keeps up a level of terrorism that keeps the colonists from killing each other, and when the time is ripe dying at their hands. (source - The Outer Limits:The Official Companion (1986), page 301.)
Milton Krims script however turns this on its head, with the stowaway ball of swirling light (in place of the Nilly), causing trouble amongst the passengers as it doesn't want them to reach their destination, (even though Krims has turned the space colony flight into a mere simulation in a mock up spaceship running the length of a tunnel under a desert on Earth.) The Antheon light ball finally occupies a plant specimen, turning into a human sized monster and, after warning them to stay away from the planet Antheon, it forces Joe Dix to hit the panic button, thus ending the "flight". (source - The Outer Limits:The Official Companion (1986), pages 300/301.)