Afterlife

The Outer Limits was a series that was well under-appreciated. It was more story and character driven than star-based on celebrities like the X-Files where you had Mulder and Scully. In this episode, Clancy Brown plays Sergeant Linden Stiles who chooses a life-altering experiment over an execution for a crime of murder that he did not do. Unfortunately, the experiment is about the fusion of human DNA with alien species. Clancy Brown is brilliant as is Barbara Garrick, the doctor with a conscience. There is kind of an attraction between the sergeant and the doctor. Unfortunately, Stiles becomes more alien than human and we wonder who becomes the experiment after awhile in the end. I won't spoil the ending for those would like to see it. It's worth it.

The 100 episodes of Showtimes "The Outer Limits" was the best anthology tv series since the advent of color TV.

And this episode was one of it's very best.

I liked this episode, I really like the message, but I won't rehash the storyline. The story is well written and well acted by the main character, Clancy Brown as Sergeant Linden Styles. I knocked a couple stars off because I found Barbara Garrick's acting, as Dr. Kersaw, to be stilted, especially in the last scene. However, I have seen her in other shows where she was fine, not sure what happened here.

Make sure you see the final scene, where the message is clear. I would have liked it to be more strongly delivered with some kind of consequence, but maybe that is best left to our imagination.

What I now consider to be one of the best episodes of this under-rated series, "Afterlife" is in it's essence, "The Trial and Death of Socrates". The phrase Sergeant Styles keeps repeating as a kind of mantra while desperately clinging to the slowly fading physical elements of his humanity is the Socratic/Platonic ideal (later adopted by The Stoics) that you can harm the body but you can never harm the soul, although here it is used within a christian context.

"You can change my body, but you will never change my soul" -Sergeant Styles

"You can chain my leg, but not even Zeus can overcome my will" -Epictetus

Brilliantly adapted into a Sci-Fi setting, Sergeant Styles, being the perfect guinea pig due to his moral convictions, is set up by the military, accused of murder and after a trial, sentenced to death. When given the options to choose between the real "lethal injection", which of course would have been suicide and not morally acceptable as a christian, and to become subject to a top secret experimentation, he chooses the later, as was expected. Similarly, Socrates' only options were the type of punishment but he chose suicide instead of exile.

Interestingly, and without giving the end away completely, I would say that Styles transcended both his body and his soul and met a similar fate, if only symbolically, to that of Socrates.

Also, as a bit of pop sci-fi trivia, I thought the story was 1/3 The Fly, 1/3 First Blood and 1/3 Predator.

A man sentenced to die by lethal injection for a crime he claims he did not commit is used as a guinea pig for a gruesome experiment that involves injecting him with DNA obtained from the corpse of an alien whose ship crashed on Earth, and studying the effects that this produces in a human body. This is another superlative story in this series with a perfect development and an absolutely unpredictable and sobering ending. The cast has wonderful performances and the direction of Mario Azzopardi is brilliant as in all the episodes of this series that he had to direct. A jewel.