The Man Who Was Never Born

Capt. Reardon is flying through space, in the most peculiar way, when he accidentally passes through a time warp(it happens more often than you might think). On the other side, he finds that, 200 years from now, humans look hideous(though they can hypnotize people to not realize this), so he travels back with one of them, Andros, supposing that, and I'm essentially quoting here, "if it will take us one way in time, it may take us the other way, too". With knowledge of what caused the malady, they are determined to fix our future, and maybe inspire a Hollywood director to make his breakthrough feature. This takes off immediately, engaging us in the story and the conflict and keeping to a quite fast pace, with constant developments and numerous scenes of tension and suspense. With only a few characters, all of them get enough screen time and interactions with each other that we know what they're like, and can focus on the central concept(would you kill Hitler before he had done anything?) and relationship(I won't tell you which). This is rather well-produced, in all respects. It's filmed quite competently, except for the one part where the cameraman seems to have a seizure. And the make-up FX, convincingly(seriously, you believe that that's his skin) transforming handsome(well, he was back then) Martin Landau into Quasimodo - without us losing track of it still being him(as mentioned, he can make people think he looks normal) when we see him as the people of today are made to see him. His acting and charm keeps *us* from freaking out at the sight of him, and in general, the performances are good. I recommend this to any fan of time-travel sci-fi. 8/10

This episode explores the notion of killing evil before it has a chance to grow into a menace for mankind--sort of like if you could go back through time to kill Hitler. The show begins with an astronaut from 1961 landing in the future only to find that the planet has been decimated and what people are left are hideous creatures. One named Andro explains that all this was caused by a scientist who accidentally created a plague and wiped out most everyone on the planet. So, using the ship, Andro returns to the 1960s to kill the man who would one day destroy mankind. However, because he's so ugly, he's able to use cool psychic powers to make others think he looks just like Martin Landau! And, it turns out, he's arrived just in time to possibly prevent the scientist's parents from ever marrying! Overall, a very intriguing episode that only has one fault--the ending and the bride's reaction to Andro is just too weird and hard to believe. Still, it's a cool episode and one well worth your time. As usual for this series, it's well written and insightful. See this one.

When I saw this episode as a teenager, a hundred or so years ago ;) when it originally aired back in the 60s, I knew that Martin Landau was destined for greatness. I was blown away even then!

It took him a few decades but when he won that Oscar for his part in the movie "Ed Wood," I definitely thought of his incredible acting job in this long ago episode of "The Outer Limits." "The Man Who Was Never Born" is just the best... Landau's performance made you want to weep for the tragic character he portrayed with such beauty and depth.

You know it's a strong performance when you as the viewer are made to care so much about the character, even though his extreme ugliness makes him something less than a feast for the eyes!

One more outstanding example of the equivalence that may exist between OUTER LIMITS and TWILIGHT ZONE series topics and atmosphere. Intelligent story that also may be the DNA of TERMINATOR and BACK TO THE FUTURE movies, where some folks try to change the fate of history. When the Marty Landau's character does his best to change the future of the world, by preventing a wedding, mother and father of a possible evil scientist, I thought of Michael J Fox's character trying to make his parents meet; if not he will never exist....The same process but in reverse; no one seems to have noticed it.

A guy must go back in time to prevent disaster from happening on earth.

Time travel is a theme that I always like. From The Time Tunnel to Star Trek I just can't get enough of it. I personally know Martin Landau from his two seasons of Space 1999 (1975-77) so it is rather pleasing to know his acting range, seen here, is much wider than that seen in Space 1999.

According to the connection section of this episode, Star Trek episode Miri (1966) lifted the "signal from planet" sound effect from this Limits episode. Nice to see the two shows cross over like that.

The Man Who Was Never Born is a fine hour.