Unlike “Corpus Earthling”, this episode has a proper cold opening, rather than just a preview of a scene from the episode itself—and it’s a real humdinger of a cold opening, jolting viewers with a bizarre sequence that makes them ask just what this thing is going to be about. It starts out mundane enough, with a cleaning lady vacuuming in a lab and coming across a particularly large and stubborn dust bunny in the corner, and eventually leads to an abstract splotch exploding out of the vacuum. Needless to say, we are dealing with another strange “bear”, and it’s a particularly ingenious idea to just have it appear in full as early as possible, while making the audience wait to learn just what the heck they’re dealing with. As it turns out, the inexplicable nature of the monster is maybe part of the point.
We also find ourselves not just on December 9th, 1963, but in another Gerd Oswald-directed episode, which means a lot of close-ups and shadows and canted angles looking up at the actor’s tense faces. There may be even more of that in this than in “Corpus Earthling”, which is interesting because “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork” is a far less paranoid story, but certainly deals with its fair share of intense emotions. After scarring the audience with an early glimpse of the monster, we spend the early goings of the episode with brothers Stuart (Michael Forest, still alive and a frequent voice in nineties and two-thousands anime(!)) and Jory (Scott Marlowe), who have moved to Los Angeles together so that Scott, a physicist, can work at the NORCO research facility just outside the city. Jory, the younger brother (he is stated to be twenty, but certainly doesn’t look it, and Marlowe was at least thirty when he played this role), has dropped out of school to tag along, apparently because of his emotional dependency on his older brother that resulted from a childhood incident where he witnessed the death of their parents—even so, he is apparently seeking out his own apartment, and has also started a relationship with a TV actress (Barbara Luna, known for her role in the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”) by lying about being a friend of a friend.
Jory’s presence turns out to be a problem for Dr. Bloch (Kent Smith, co-star of Cat People), the scientist running NORCO, who requests that all applicants to the facility have “no dependants”—which might have been a stranger request in 1963, but sounds like the kind of thing modern tech companies would demand (at one point, Stuart comments that people are “The victims of automation. We’re all getting used to letting the computers do our answering for us.” ) Although appearing at first to be doing normal research, Stuart is quickly informed by the incessantly nervous Dr. Linden (Stephanie Camden) that they are attempting to “overcome the law of conservation of energy”, and by that they mean try to study the entity that appeared in the cold open, an organism of pure energy—she then locks Stuart in a hallway with the thing and he dies from fright. This is all part of an even larger scheme by Dr. Bloch, who gives all his employees fatal heart attacks and then revives them using specially-made pacemaker devices, and as long as they do what he says, they will keep breathing—but if they don’t, he’ll sic the energy monster on them and suck the power out of their pacemaker. At times, he tries to justify this by saying that the other scientists tried to destroy the monster—which is apparently true—but he’s also just a power-hungry creep whose personal ambitions outweigh his respect for all human life.
There is a pulpy ambition by combining the ludicrous energy monster concept with the equally ludicrous mad scientist plot, either of which could have been the centre of an entire episode of any other TV show. But what coheres the two threads are the outlandish goals of Dr. Bloch, who sees the cleaning lady’s discovery as an opportunity to make some of the greatest scientific advances in modern history (“Every man wants to solve one mystery before he dies”), and is completely willing to throw any number of normal people—whether it be Stuart or Dr. Linden, the luckless security guards, or the cleaning lady—into the grinder to get there. As he tells Dr. Linden, “The wonderful questions are always answered at the cost of human life.” In that way, he’s not far removed from Dr. Carrington in The Thing From Another World.
The one bringing us that pulp ambition is Joseph Stefano, most famous as the scriptwriter for the film version of Psycho, and a producer on The Outer Limits’ first season as well as a frequent writer—I can tell you now that most of the episodes I will be writing about in the future will also be Stefano scripts (he also wrote the highly-regarded episode “Nightmare”, which aired between “Corpus Earthling” and “Woodwork”, just to give you an idea of how prolific he was.) As with the previous episodes, there’s an attempt to go as out there with the central Science Fiction conceit as they can, but to spend the rest of the episode dealing with genuine character drama. The former is thanks mostly to the visualization of the monster, rendered with jerky, frame-by-frame animation that is truly strange to behold, an encroaching blob that moves and acts like nothing on our world. Like some of the effects in “Corpus Earthling”, these are inventive, but could also be a little bit silly—counteracting that in this episode is the energy monster’s disturbing howl, which is also completely unlike anything in our world.
The character drama, on the other , mostly comes from Jory, who seems like a particularly fraught person, and who has leaned on his brother for most of his life—but as he tells his new girlfriend in a monologue, he has long suspected that there’s some secret resentment in their relationship. When Stuart disappears for a week after starting at NORCO, Jory becomes a paranoid, twitchy mess, worried that someone has been breaking into the motel room he and Stuart were sharing (saying that he detected a “deadly sweet scent”), and it leads to a good mid-episode twist when Stuart appears again, after the audience has already seen his body taken away on a slab. Stuart and Jory’s conversation plays on the resentment that the younger brother feared, although it’s difficult to tell if Stuart telling Jory to remove himself from his life comes from a genuine change in character or is Stuart’s attempt to protect his brother—the whole argument, with the constant sound of a filling bathtub in the background, is full of tension and leads to a payoff that is both surprising and unsurprising, some great teamwork from Stefano and Oswald.
This is where all the things at NORCO begin to fall apart, as the accidental destruction of Stuart’s pacemaker in the argument attracts the attention of the police, led by detective Siroleo (the late, great Ed Asner), who becomes suspicious when the stories told by Jory and the coroner tell him that Stuart’s pacemaker had to been implanted very recently. Siroleo takes a trip to NORCO, where Bloch and Linden are friendly enough but unwilling to share much information, but Linden eventually cracks under the strain of witnessing, and participating in, so much death—eventually she shoots Dr. Bloch with his own gun, one last act of violence that seems to break her completely, leaving her to almost willingly embrace her “punishment” by the climactic release of the energy monster. I guess the weirdest thing about this climax is how little involvement Jory has in it—after being the focus for so much of the episode, we spend most of the finale with Siroleo instead. While Jory does appear at the end—after parking outside NORCO with his girlfriend, he becomes so overcome with anger that decides to break in and confront the people who caused his brother’s death—it’s only after much of the action has taken place. There’s some storytelling logic to this decision—there’s no way NORCO would have let Jory in after a confrontation with security earlier in the episode—it’s still not the kind of traditional character conclusion you’d expect from a story like this. I guess what Jory sort of represents in the story is the kind of random X Factor that causes its dissolution—he was the non-dependant dependant, the thing that Dr. Bloch was trying desperately to avoid in order to keep his study of the energy being going.
There’s also a very random feeling to the monster, which came out of nowhere, has no known point of origin, and even by the end is little understood by any of the characters involved. The story does not end with its destruction or removal, just its continual containment, and the Control Voice reminds us in his closing remarks about the Conservation of Energy Law, mentioned so frequently in the episode. The energy being exists, and it cannot be destroyed, no matter how much Dr. Linden and the staff at NORCO (aside from Dr. Bloch) tried—it can only be “controlled, channelled for good, held isolated from evil…and somehow lived with peaceably.” This seems like an interesting way to look at a monster story like this, where the monstrous is an unmovable fact of reality, and it is only what we do with it that matters—it could be used for violence, as it done here, but there is still a possibility that it could lead us elsewhere, maybe help us better understand our universe. This is not the wholly antagonistic threat we saw in “Corpus Earthling”, and not a thing that should necessarily fill us with dread—although some dread is probably still allowed. In the end, though, it exists, and we’re just going to have to deal with it.
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