EPis0dIC! - The Outer Limits - "Soldier" (S02E01 - 1964)

"Night comes too soon on the battlefield. For some men it comes permanently; their eyes never open to the light of day. But for this man, fighting this war, there is never total darkness. The spidery beams of light in the sky are the descendants of the modern laser beam — heat rays that sear through tungsten steel and flesh as though they were cheesecloth. And this soldier must go against those weapons. His name is Qarlo, and he is a foot soldier, the ultimate infantryman. Trained from birth by the State, he has never known love, or closeness, or warmth. He is geared for only one purpose: to kill the Enemy. And the Enemy waits for him…"

 1800 years in the future, Qarlo Clobregnny (Michael Ansara ) sits smoking a cigarette whilst hiding amongst some rocks. He suddenly stops when a voice issuing from his battle helmet instructs him to "Find the enemy...Attack!..Kill!". A short distance away, a soldier from another army sits quietly and has a drink from his flask, his battle helmet also instructs him to "Find the enemy...Attack!..Kill!", both men carefully move from their hiding places as energy beams lance overhead, they spot each other, but, as they charge to attack each other, they are both hit by energy beams...and vanish.

"Time is fluid. The waters of forever close — and passage may not be completed. The present and the future are for a moment united. And the Enemy, half-today, half-tomorrow, is locked between…"

 Qarlo materialises in an alleyway, still dressed in his body armour and carrying his energy weapon. At first he is bewildered, but he carefully removes his helmet, and is immediately deafened by the sounds of the city, which drives him mad with pain.
In his madness, he attacks several people and uses his energy weapon to destroy a police car, but he is stopped by several police officers and arrested.

Tom Kagan is a philologist, a specialist in languages, he is approached by the FBI and is asked to see if he can make sense of what the mysterious madman is saying, as ever since he was captured, he has repeated the same phrase over and over again...

"Nims qarlo clobregnny prite arem aean teaan deao"

...to which no one has thus yet been able to identify which, if any language he is speaking.


Kagen is escorted to meet with Qarlo, who is being kept in a padded cell, due to it "taking six marines to get him into the two strait jackets he is wearing". Kagen insists that they be left alone, and, within a minute of their first meeting manages to win a bit of his confidence by offering him a cigarette.

After a week of questioning, Kagen manages to deduce that Qarlo is a soldier and deciphers the language and meaning of Qarlos words. He is in fact speaking English, but the language is changed, mangled,  when he says "Nims qarlo clobregnny prite arem aean teaan deao" , translated he is saying "(my)name is Qarlo Clobregnny, Private, RM EN TN DO", in essence, doing the same as any soldier would by simply giving his name, rank and serial number when captured by the enemy.
Kagen also deduces that Qarlo is from the future, by having an astronomer plot the location of the stars from drawings made by Qarlo of the night sky where he is from.


In order to continue "taming" Qarlo, Kagen requests that he be allowed to have Qarlo live with him and his family for a time, as Qarlo seems to be completely emotionally and psychologically deadened, and Kagen feels that exposure to other humans in a normal family environment will help him to lose their air of aggression and distrust he has of other people.
Initially, Qarlo seems to make some progress, revealing that in his time, the world is divided into two superstates, who are in the middle of an endless war. Qarlo says he is the product of artificial birth, and was brought up in the Clobregnny nursery to be a soldier from being a child, but despite this, he has never seen any of the ruling class in the flesh, whom he refers to as "the purple". He also says that in his time, they use cats as scout beasts, and the commanders communicate orders to the soldiers via telepathy.

Meanwhile, Qarlos enemy from the future fully materialises in our time, and immediately begins hunting Qarlo.

Things go wrong for Kagen when Qarlo breaks into a gun shop and helps himself to a high powered hunting rifle, stating that "a soldier needs a gun, otherwise he isn't a soldier". Kagen manages to talk him down by letting Qarlo accompany him back home, and tells him that if he wants a gun that badly, he can have one but he doesnt need to keep it on him at all times. Just as Qarlo agrees to hand over the stolen weapon, the enemy breaks into the house by disintegrating a wall with a blast from his own energy weapon. Qarlo throws himself on the enemy and the two men fight hand to hand, but then the enemys weapon goes off, disintegrating them both.
Kagen and his family look sadly at the pile of charred ash on the carpet....

I like this episode simply because Michael Ansaras performance of a man out of his own time is simply brilliant, he does a really good job of conveying the frustration that Qarlo must feel at having everything he has ever known taken away from him and replaced with what must seem to him to be a horrible parody of his own time.
This story was penned by Author and part time argument starter Harlan Ellison, who later went on to claim, and win, a lawsuit against James Cameron stating that the film "The Terminator" copied elements of both this story and another episode of the Outer Limits called "Demon with a glass hand"
The ending of the episode is rather sad, but also inevitable given the nature of Qarlos character, and Kagen efforts to make Qarlo more like a "modern" man as opposed to the near mindless sociopathic killing machine that he actually is are well portrayed by all concerned.

EPis0dIC! - UFO - "The Square Triangle" (S01E09 - 1970)

...SHADO mobilises its space interceptors after S.I.D detects an incoming UFO whose trajectory indicates it will land somewhere in southern England. Commander Straker hurredly calculates a rough landing point while Colonel Foster waits for the order to intercept, however at the last minute Straker orders that the UFO be allowed to pass through and land unmolested.

Meanwhile, as S.I.D reports that the UFO has passed through SHADOs outer defence cordons, a woman drives seemingly alone along a deserted road.

The UFO lands in the middle of an area of dense forest, so Straker orders Foster to lead a team of SHADO mobile units to track down the UFO and capture it intact.

The woman is not alone in her car, a young man is with her, she continues driving as he nonchalantly smokes a cigarette.

The SHADO mobiles are deployed into the search area, and begin looking for the alien craft, meanwhile, the woman and the young man reach an isolated cottage, which the man begins looking around suspiciously. The man, "Cass" (Played by a very young Patrick Mower ) tells the woman, "Liz", to "go and get it", she returns from the bedroom carrying a gun.

Straker monitors the mobiles progress, while Alec Freeman enquires why Straker hasn't simply "asked the aliens round for drinks". Straker, in private, explains that he has let the UFO through because as an organisation, SHADO knows very little about the aliens or their spacecraft, therefore, in this instance, he allowed the UFO through in order to capture it intact and learn its secrets.

Cass and Liz are lovers, and Cass has planned that Liz's husband is to die that very night, killed by his own wife in what will look like an accident as he comes in the front door. His planning is meticulous, every detail has been worked out, nothing can go wrong.

In the forest, a security guard and his dog stumble across an alien, the dog attacks the alien while the guard runs off, but is then later killed when another alien shoots him with its machine gun, before dragging his corpse away back to their ship.

The SHADO mobiles close in on the UFO, but, they are too late, the UFO has spent too long in Earths atmosphere, and it spectacularly explodes before they can capture it.

Liz and Cass lie in wait in the darkened house, the front door opens, and, after some cajoling, Liz empties the gun into the figure that enters the house, except, to their horror, the figure that came in the door was not her husband, but instead was the other alien, who had escaped the clutches of the guard dog, and had managed to find his way to the house after damaging his helmet.
Cass panics and tells Liz to go through with the plan as they worked it out, he then leaves in a hurry and tells her to contact him later.

SHADO searches the wreckage of the UFO and finds the security guards body, and then finds his dog, which follows the scent of the alien and leads them to the isolated cottage, where they find the dead alien and a terrified Liz, whom Colonel Foster arrests and has taken back to SHADO headquarters. The SHADO operatives also pick up Cass as he flees, and take him along too.

Later, Lizs husband arrives to find Foster still in his house, after a tense standoff between the two, Foster orders the husband away and says he will be contacted later once they have completed their investigation.

Cass and Liz are reunited and informed of what has happened by Straker himself, initially they don't believe him, but as he points out, whether they believe him or not is irrelevant, as they have been administered an amnesia drug, which will completely erase their memories of the past 12 hours.
Straker knows what they were up to, as do Alec and Foster, however as Foster ironically points out "unfortunately for them an alien walked through that door instead of her husband", Straker acknowledges that although they can erase their memories of the, albeit brief, encounter with an alien and SHADO, it will not erase their intent to commit murder, and also unfortunately, they cannot warn the husband about his possible impending death, nor can they tip off the local police without raising suspicion about themselves, Straker regrettably states that any future events will have to take their course, and Liz and Cass are to be released as soon as their memories are erased.





The episode ends with Liz standing over her husbands grave, before then walking away hand in hand with Cass....


Of all the episodes of UFO, this one is probably my second favourite, (My overall favourite being "A Question of Priorities") simply because in this storyline, SHADO and its ongoing battle against the alien threat is secondary to the story of a murderous love triangle, but then both storylines crash together when a one in a million chance event occurs. I also like how Straker finds himself in a moral dilemma over whether to compromise the worlds safety simply to prevent the murder of one man, but finds himself having to make the difficult decision to allow the man to die so that SHADO can continue operating in secret, even though his two closest friends disagree with him.

Film Review:- "Riddick" (2013)

Hmm, so, after seeing the somewhat lackluster "The chronicles of Riddick" many years ago (which at one point went on to become a staple filler of ITV2s late night film slots) I didn't hold out much hope of there ever being another film about the seemingly invincible ninja assassin type, save for video game entries, (none of which I have ever gotten round to playing) so, it came as something of a surprise when during a visit to my local ASDA I saw "Riddick" on sale in the DVD section.
Showing how much attention I pay to modern cinema, I wasn't even aware that this film had been made, let alone had been out long enough to be published on DVD/Blu-Ray (I don't get this newfangled Blu-ray stuff).

Now, being as I somewhat enjoyed the original "Pitch Black", and found "Chronicles" to be mildly interesting, I thought I might as well give this one a shot....

                                                                      ....Oh dear....

So, at the end of "Chronicles", Riddick seemingly got the answers to all the questions he had about his life, and became literally a king by his own hand by slaying the enemy who had put his own people to death (erm...isn't that the plot to Conan??) , so, realistically there wasn't anywhere more for the plot line to explore, however, Vin Diesel himself wasn't happy to see the character he had made his own (even more so than Dominic Toretto, who wasn't as much of a breakout character as Riddick ended up being ) get some sort of closure, so instead, old Vinny-boy decided he wanted to finance a third entry in the series, even appearing in a cameo role in "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" in order to secure the rights to the Riddick franchise for himself, then employing the services of David Twohy as chief writer to bring his ideas for the further adventures of the ninja-assassin to the screen once again.

The film starts with Riddick, still dressed in his Grand Marshall armour, being attacked by a carrion eater as he lies buried under rocks and dirt on an un named planet.
A flashback sequence tells the tale that after Riddick became Grand Marshall of the Necromonger fleet, he rapidly began to lose his power base after his refusal to convert to the necromonger religion, and thus a campaign of intrigue sees him being left stranded on the planet he is now on.
after picking himself up and dusting himself off etc etc, he finds himself being hunted by two teams of mercenaries, before he escapes the planet and heads off for further adventures.

Yeah, thats it, the films plot in a nutshell, and trust me, theres not much more to it than that.
Riddick spends about half of the film playing a "Robinson Crusoe" type role and acting as his own biographer in a series of laconic voiceovers, then after the merc guys turn up, its a predictable sequence of events as he picks them off one by one by being cleverer than them.

I'll say it, this film is boring as fuck, even the action bits are yawnsome, the "character development" as it is is bland and completely uninteresting, and while watching the film I kept thinking "something awesome is gonna happen soon..." but alas, it was not to be.

Riddick, the project financed and produced by Vin Diesel himself, is nothing but a self indulgent vanity project which falls flat on its arse, promising so much and absolutely failing to deliver, apart from you get to see Katee Sackhoffs tits...thats probably the only bit of the film I liked.

I give it 3 pairs of goggles out of 10, and thats only for the special effects and Katee Sackhoffs "celestial orbs".