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The Production and Decay Of Strange Particles is excellent. I just watched it tonight, wanted to mention it since I just got switched to digital, now have ThisTV network, which runs the original Outer Limits regularly. My favorite episode? Probably not. One of my favorite shows of all time, though, and they aired an excellent print, didn't have hundreds of commercials.

I'm not a big one for favorites lists, however Don't Open Till Doomsday is so well made, intricately structured and over the top that I find myself overwhelmed by admiration whenever I watch it, for everyone connected to it, from Stefano on down.

The similar in some respects The Guests is brilliant and daring, at times spooky, with its disappearing country house, the rooms without windows. The existential undercurrents work beautifully, as we see a young man, basically an angry drifter, a loner, see life's possibilities, its pitfalls, all vividly present in the various people who literally can't get outside of themselves, their pettiness, their selfishness. He sees the traps people fall into, which locks them in place. These lost souls are like his teachers, in a negative sense, as they show him how not to live. The young man chooses love, with tragic consequences, yet it awakens him to the promise of life.

The Invisibles is maybe the most far out of all TOLs, and it's amazing that its premise,--gay aliens taking over humans, which is to say men, by initiating them via clattering horse-shoe crabby things they attach to their backs--which makes for some highly unsettling scenes. The entire episode is ultra-paranoid in the best TOL fashion, features fine dialogue, an excellent central performance by Don Gordon as the government guy who infiltrates the alien cult, and a slam-bang ending that pulls no punches. This one could have been over the top, as its premise certainly is, yet it's so well made, so dramatic, that it rises above this, as it makes the viewer to actually think about what he's just seen, and maybe look at life as little differently because of it.

The closing credits of TOL are awesome, and Dominic Frontiere's music is beautiful and, literally, otherworldly.

I caught The Zanti Misfits the other night. It's very good but not a favorite of mine. I noticed the multiple storylines and it struck me that TOL did that a lot. In this was there were sort of three "competing" plot threads; one involving the couple that crashed into the quarantined area, the other the military and its dealings with Zanti itself, and then the business of the spaceship and its weird little inhabitants. It all came together in the end.

The creepy insectoid Zantian misfist are what most people remember best about this one. Many have complained that their awkward stop motion movements are hard to take. They certainly don't look natural (but then who'd expect them to?), but they work for me, especially given that the show is black and white. The basic idea of this episode is similar to another TOL, The Mice, as both deal with "communications breakdowns" with other planets in an isolated area, and each feature criminals/outcasts in pivotal roles. I prefer The Mice, which is better written and somewhat more thoughtful.

Zanti isn't helped by the actors, most of whom aren't bad, just unexciting. Michael Tolan makes a dull hero, Robert F. Simon as the general seems to bark out his orders from the side of his mouth, which I don't think he ever fully opens (dental work?). Bruce Dern does his usual bad guy schtick. I like Olive Deering best. She plays a woman from a good family who gets into trouble a lot, is her own worst enemy. That she's clearly not a young babe lends her a degree of credibility. I love the way she delivers her aria of self-loathing near the end, starting with something about a rag doll, ending with "my fault, my fault". It's rather over the top. and some might argue doesn't belong in this episode; too personal, appropriate for Tennessee Williams or William Inge, not science fiction. I like it, and Deering is quite convincing.

The Outer Limits often featured deeply flawed characters, male and female, and our learning about them is often what an episode is about. This works less well in Zanti because it comes from "out of the blue"; still, it's good work from Joe Stefano, whose shoe-horning of odd bits of business into his work on the series is one of the things that made TOL so memorable. It could be argued that the unfortunate woman is central to the story, as she brought so much of her misery upon heself and, neurotic and crazy thought she may be, she does in the end take responsibility for her actions, while the military and the Zantians fall back on doing their jobs and "following orders". As was so often the case with this series, science fiction though it was, it nearly always brought things back to the human side of the things, the individual, and this episode is a fine example of this even though it may not be in other respects one of the best of the series.

I like Olive, you find her tiresome; that's what makes a horse race, Tom.

Sometimes these things are a matter of timing, as in being in the right mood for what a show (or movie) has to offer. I was ready for Olive's monologues. Like her brother, Alfred Ryder, she had a spotty career in films and TV. I remember him best from the movie T-Men and a One Step Beyond episode in which he seemed to be turning into a wolf. Or was it a coyote? That was a strange one. Olive did a couple for DeMille and appeared in a lot of live television in the 50s. Both brother and sis appeared to be theater people, with neither pushing hard for a career in films.