With no recollection of their past, the Stranger (Colin Baker) and Miss
Brown (Nicola Bryant) wake up at a train station where something seems to
be oddly wrong, somehow artificial, and even though he has no memories of
his former self, the Stranger can't help it but starts investigating - and
finds out they are in some kind of holographic alternate reality. But
there's a robot after them ... Eventually, the Stranger and Miss Brown
make it to the conjurer of the whole illusion, a dead spacetrooper whose
brain is kept alive in his containment suit that's directly linked to the
computer that runs the whole place, and it turns out the whole
trainstation was just a mundane alternate reality for the space soldier
looking for normalcy besides his life as a space marine. The Stranger
detaches the dead spaceman from the computer, but since his containment
suit keeps his vegetative system alive, he now becomes a killing machine,
and to end the horror, the Stranger has to connect himself to the computer
to put things right again ... One of these (short) pieces of
science fiction that keep you guessing for most of the time before
bringing everything to an almost ridiculously convoluted but nevertheless
in itself completely logical solution. And while expertly handled on a
directorial level (especially considering the low budget at hand) and
well-acted, it's somewhat disappointing that only little emphasis was put
on the story's satirical undercurrents (a space soldier longing for the
normalcy of waiting for a train), but on a whole, the whole thing works
pretty well nevertheless.
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