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It's war between planet Earth and planet Ebon, and the Ebonites have
just brought down an earth battleship and made her crew their POW ... and
now they are trying to get earth attack plans out of the crew, consisting
of cleancut commander Luke Stone (Ed Nelson), his second in command
Brookman (David Frankham), black Lt. Willowmore (Bill Gunn), German Lt.
Krug (Sasha Harden), private Dix (Martin Sheen) - who totally loses his
nerve -, and the way too cool Oriental Major Chong (James Shigeta).
All of them are put through different kinds of interrogation, during
which Dix temporarily loses his voice and later sees his mother in a
hallucination, Krug is confronted with guilt from his World War II past -
he betrayed his Jewish grandfather to the Nazis when he was a kid - and
ultimately dies from a heart attack, Willowmore is temporarily turned
blind, then made seeing again only under the condition that he will take a
look at Krug's corpse - with his heart torn out -, a sight that
almost breaks him, and the bones in Chong's right arm are pulverized. Only
Stone and Brookman seem to not think much of the Ebonites' interrogation
techniques, Stone even claims he fell asleep while bein interrogated (now
this is where the story really gets silly).
After the ordeal though, the soldiers are fed and treated like proper
prisoners of war, because, as their guard claims, one of the group has
given them the information they wanted. Before long, everybody is
convinced that Chong is the traitor, because he takes his injury way too
lightly. They have no further proof than that, and Chong even proves to
them that there is similar evidence against each and every of them, still
Commander Stone insists that he is guilty and is to be killed on the spot
(what ?), and since they have no weapons, they draw straws about who has
to strangle Chong ... Brookman wins.
Before Chong can be killed, Stone is dragged again though, and now he
learns from the Ebonites and some Earth commanding officers (!)
that Earth and Ebon are not really at war, and the whole situation is just
an experiment to see how the soldiers would react under stress (in
preparation for future stellar wars) - and it's actually the Ebonites who
want to end the experiment because it got out of hand ...
However, the experiment gets out of hand anyways, and one of the
earth's commanding officers is killed by our earth soldiers before Stone
can intervene and tell them the truth ...
This episode actually has its moments and features some original
plottwists, and above all, there is nothing in terms of Cold
War-propaganda - safe maybe for the closing off-coment claiming that as
long as there is war we need this kind of exoperiments. Too bad that the
episode is rather sloppily written and full of silliness and clichés,
e.g. American country boy Dix constantly hallucinating about his mother is
a bit much, commander Stone claiming he fell asleep during interrogation
is simply not believable ... and why is all of a sudden everyone quite as
hell-bent on strangling their fellow soldier Chong as these men are ?
So, the basic plot is great, and with a good script, this episode could
have turned into something great as well. As it is, it's just one of the
better episodes of The Outer Limits - which isn't saying
much. I liked the alien masks though.
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