It’s an open secret that the original Outer Limits did in fact equal The Twilight Zone even during its truncated season-and-a-half run from 1963 to 1965 (funnily enough, though, while Twilight Zone has had numerous short-lived revivals, The Outer Limits‘ one TV revival actually lasted significantly longer than the original series)—and while it isn’t as directly referenced as Rod Serling’s seminal TV anthology, the praise it receives from those in the know and the sheer number of times its stories have been ripped-off since then is a testament its legacy. For my purposes, it’s also a series that basically had a new monster in every episode, at least in the first season, centering each plot around what they called “the bear.” It’s such an important and interesting piece of TV, Sci-Fi, and monster history that I could fill months worth of posts covering key episodes (expect me to come back to it eventually), but for now I’m going to focus on a specific episode from early in the show’s run that exemplifies what it did well, and the influence it ended up having. Even if you’ve never seen “The Architects of Fear”, you probably know of a similar story from elsewhere—in order to broker world cooperation, an external threat is manufactured for all the powers to unite against. Famously, this device was reused for the ending of Watchmen, something Alan Moore may or may not have known about. In any case, while the story has kept some resonance, the actual episode itself demonstrates a high level of sophistication in terms of writing and filmmaking—this was clearly a show able to back up its own ideas with its execution.
The episode opens with a stark reminder that the Cold War was still a thing, with crowds fleeing from the sight of a rocket overhead. A group of secretive scientists have determined that nuclear war is inevitable unless they intervene, which in this case means implementing a plan to stage a fake alien invasion at the UN General Assembly to convince everyone to get along—a plan complete with working spaceship, alien weapons, and one of their own physically transformed into an extraterrestrial using experimental surgery. The lucky one who gets to play the alien is drawn randomly, and it turns out to be Allen Leighton, played by TV mainstay and future Half-Life 2 villain Robert Culp, who seems completely up to the task. His initially rather gung-ho reaction to the prospect of being turned into an alien in order to save the world is tested during conversations with his wife, who is of course completely unaware of it and is planning for their first child, which Allen is himself unaware of at first.
Much of the drama of the episode comes from Allen’s regret and the gradual physical build-up of his transformation, doing as much as an early sixties show can do to simulate body horror—his early deformations are expertly chosen to seem unsettling without going over-the-top too early, with scaly patches of skin slowly taking over. There’s a lot of conversation in medical labs, but the make-up effects and Culp’s complicated performance help keep the plot engaging (he gets a long freak-out sequence where he gets to play someone menacingly unhinged, quoting poems and nursery rhymes while threatening people with an x-ray), as does the excellent direction by Byron Haskin (who directed the 1953 War of the Worlds film as well as notable Outer Limits episodes like “Demon With a Glass Hand” and “A Feasibility Study”), who chooses shadowy and intense angles for every scene, even ones of simple exposition. For most of the episode, the decision is made to keep the full alien obscured or off-screen, so it’s only very late in the episode that we actually see the bizarre Bug Eyed Monster that Allen has been turned into—this is especially effective during the scenes of surgery (where the other scientists discuss replacing his lungs with ones that breathe nitrogen, just so we’re clear on just how radical this operation is) and another one where they talk to Allen after the change is complete, and he can only communicate in stilted sentences with a vocoder device. When we finally do see the appearance of the alien Allen (oh, I get it now) in full, it’s in the middle of the wilderness, peering out from tall grass—not entirely dissimilar to the way Haskin shot the martians in War of the Worlds. Given how indifferently made a lot of this genre stuff can be, having the visuals so perfectly compliment the story is entirely welcome.
The alien costume itself is a finely-crafted sort of pulp magazine cover figure, something that probably comes off as a bit silly-looking now, but apparently was seen as so frightening during the first airings of this episode that many ABC stations either blacked out the screen when it appeared or delayed the episode until later in the night (I wonder if it was just the appearance of the alien that concerned them, or whether those stations were responding to how the story contextualized it as well.) For what the story is going for and for the context of when it was made, I think the design is entirely appropriate—despite all the talk among the characters of accurately reflecting the potential biology of an alien from “Planet Theta”, I guess so they could make sure it’s convincing, it looks like an alien from a typical Sci-Fi movie of the era, which is fine because he’s playing a fake alien in the first place. It makes sense for a fake alien to look like a fake alien! On the other hand, the spaceship and ray gun weapons they build for Allen seem really elaborate even for this—Allen is able to disintegrate a truck! Even in an episode where a man is surgically transformed into a monster, I have to question how they managed to concoct that kind of technology in secret.
There’s also a little creature that the scientists keep in a box—you either hear its little scrambled voice or see it in silhouette, although it does get out of its box at one point and we briefly get a shot of a floppy marionette running around. I’m still not entirely clear what that thing was supposed to be. Was it a test for the eventual alien surgery? Was it an actual alien they were basing theirs on? To be honest, it’s a little bit extraneous to the plot and could have been left out, but I’m certainly not someone who complains about extraneous weird things in the margins.
While you’re waiting for the Sci-Fi stuff to develop, the actual character drama and ethical questions posed by the episode remain extremely solid. As I mentioned, Allen is initially onboard with his role, and its clear that all the scientists there think that this is the only course to action that can save human civilization—but the effects of keeping this enormous secret from Allen’s wife, and then trying to convince her that Allen has died in a mysterious plane crash, are never dismissed or downplayed. The other scientists are shown to be so devoted to their mission that they come off as incredibly cold and distant, both to Allen as he endures the pain of his transformation, and to his wife (who spends a lot of time in the labs where this important work is taking—you’d think they’d have a more remote location for something this classified.) You really get the feeling from Allen that his initial acceptance of martyrdom almost immediately collapses after talking to his wife for even a little bit, suddenly realizing that, yes, he has a life and people that he has chosen to abandon, and that there was no turning back. This is a story that recognizes the human cost of even the most noble of sacrifices.
This is put in further contrast when the plot is enacted, and then immediately hits a snag—Allen’s spaceship goes off-course and lands far away from its target, where he is confronted by your usual band of rednecks and is shot. He has a painful crawl back to the lab, and is able to signal his identity to his wife before dying, one final bit of good acting from that weird-looking alien costume. She ends up being the one to tell all the other scientists off, that this tragedy was ultimately pointless and that it was wrong for them to assume that they could make people behave using subterfuge—good intentions paving the road to the Other Place, you know. I was actually surprised just how hardline the moral of the story here ended up being—later reiterations of this episodes’ ideas have often attempted to be more ambiguous (including Watchmen), although maybe not in a way that disagrees with the points it’s making. The required Twilight Zone-style closing narration is a critical but sympathetic summation: “If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque, it would at least have been a lesson.”
Aside from just being a well-made piece of television drama, “The Architects of Fear” demonstrates what The Outer Limits did well: taking what could have been rather standard Sci-Fi ideas and making something meaningful out of them. Even if the producers had required a fantastical monster in every episode in order to grab people’s attention, they clearly had writers and directors who knew how to fit that into a strong story with an ethical, humanistic core, which is exactly what makes for a memorable piece of Science Fiction—monsters are fun, but monsters that mean something stick with you. In some ways, this particular episode is a much more straightforward morality tale, not yet reaching the peak cleverness and knife-twisting conclusions that other well-known episodes did, but it’s an effective one—and I think we’ll be getting to some of those others in due time.
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