Afterlife

Unfortunately I have to fill this out a bit to put it up to 10 lines. So before I start; can I just say that Clancy Brown is probably the most underrated actor working in films at the moment. He has that wonderful ability to shift from gentleness to menace without effort - as he does so well here. Right I can start the comment now.... If we ever encounter intelligent life outside our planet, who will be the real 'Monsters'? The aliens or us? Stories asking this question are few and far between. They have to creep out under the radar in series such as this. I've just watched the flawed and bloated 'Spiderman 3'. It is supposed to have cost over $200 million dollars. I wonder how much this cost to make? I wish that, just for once, Hollywood would produce something as intelligent, tight and, dare we say, subversive as this excellent episode. Fat chance.

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.

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.

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.

Linden Stiles struggles to retain his humanity after he is convicted of a murder he didn't commit. When asked to make a frightful choice: accept execution or become the subject of a secret military experiment -- he chooses to live. As the experiment progresses, Stiles fights the dehumanizing influence of injected DNA from an alien lifeform. The attending doctor is troubled by a growing awareness of the inhumanity of the experiment itself, of the men in charge and of her own role. Using his preter-natural strength, Stiles escapes. Then, hunted by his former compatriots, he faces a decision even more difficult than the one that set him on such a tragic course.

This was one of my favourites episodes of the new version The Outer Limits. I have to admit I was not consistent with my viewership with the series so there was many episodes I it did not have a chance to see. The message of this episode is the moral ambiguity of our governments will do to create the ultimate weapon of war whatever the consequences.