Production and Decay of Strange Particles

This post is less a review and more of a discourse of why I thought this ep was so...awesome...

"The Production and Decay of Strange Particles" borrowed heavily from physics and lent the idea that life or at least consciousnesses could come from atomic particles. Man, that's awesome! The ep really introduced infinity and the possibilities that infinity could provide.

The lead was played George Macready and Mr. Macready was easily the most dignified actor on the American screen. If you needed a diplomat, scientist, pope or executive, Macready always delivered.

The plot was weak; a new life form arrived somehow, possessed humans and caused a big explosion. Macready had to understand and counter act the the events and with inspiration from his wife he ...."used his brain!".

There was plenty of stock footage used and in fact went over the line into classic stock but I forgave all of that just to hear all of the chemical compound names and even more.... chemical compound names plus isotopes! The over the top nerdiness was much more rewarding than the morality lectures of the Bellero Shield et all. Even a nuke explosion and then a another nuke explosion to put everything back! Dude!

TOS was scary because the intro parroted civil defense drills, every Outer Limits episode was a nuclear attack warning and this ep took you right to the fission.

I'm more experienced in life now and more critical but this ep's thrill is not gone. I don't visit the quality of the ep any longer, I visit the quality of the experience.

I first saw this episode when it aired in the original run and it made very little sense. I thought that seeing it with a more seasoned eye might add to my comprehension and that the presence of Leonard Nimoy in the cast would make it watchable.

Well, our Star Trek buddy has about 3 lines before sticking his arms into some unexplained thing and turning into another unexplained thing. The rest of the time George Macready and Signed Hasso wander around looking very concerned, while being confused as we are by the whole deal.

Subpar for the series.

I used to watch The Outer Limits with my dad when I was a small child back in the early 1960s. Most of the time it scared the hell out of me. And this particular episode, "Production and Decay of Strange Particles" was no exception. Two things about this episode always stood out for me: (1) The scientists in radiation suits who were suddenly taken over by glowing electric-arc beings, which I found extremely creepy, and (2) the nuclear explosion (and implosion) at the end.

In recent years I learned that this episode is considered by many Outer Limits aficionados to be one of the weakest in the series, if not the worst ... and I found this puzzling, since the episode stuck out so strongly in my memories of childhood. So when this particular episode was broadcast recently on our local "My-Z" channel, I decided to watch it with a more mature and critical eye.

First of all, some context: "Production and Decay of Strange Particles" was made at a time when physicists were really starting to peer beyond the Newtonian world and into the realm of subatomic particles and quantum theory. The episode makes mention of "quasi-stellar" objects, which had only been discovered a scant few years earlier. Scientists were beginning to confront the fact that the Universe was a far stranger place than hitherto imagined, that there might be other realities beyond our own ... so naturally the producers of The Outer Limits decided to speculate about what might happen if high-energy particle physicists cracked that doorway between such realities just a bit too wide.

Watching this episode reminded me of how people have raised nightmare scenarios about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and how it might create a miniature black hole that would suck up the Earth. I was also reminded of a fascinating hard sci-fi novel by John Cramer called "Einstein's Bridge" in which an experiment at such a facility allows a hive-like civilization from another Universe to invade our own world. These fears are, in a way, prefigured in this old episode of The Outer Limits, and it is the hard physics here that makes the episode a refreshing change from the usual weird creatures and spaceships.

Unfortunately, this episode is SEVERELY hampered by melodrama, enough nonsensical techno-jargon to choke a horse, a slender plot and script that have to be padded quite a lot to expand the episode to 50 minutes, and worst of all, some shameless scenery-chewing by George Macready as the tormented Dr. Marshall.

The director Buzz Kulik, who worked on many episodes of "Twilight Zone", once said that if a blind man could have described what you were seeing on the screen, then you failed as story teller since TV is a visual medium first.

This is an excellent, if flawed, example of OL trying to do just that. Stevens' other episode "The Borderland" shows the same aspect. They were going for striking visuals to tell the story, so you get a lot of eerie shots of radiation suits being animated by radiation beings who have leaked into our universe from another dimension. The science is laughable, but they were just using a bit of it to set everything up. The goal was to generate tolerable terror, not defend a PhD thesis.

The best OL episodes provide some backstory with respect to why the monster is here and what it is doing, and that is not ever really revealed here. Sometimes people just mess with something and something weird pops out. And this happens a lot with OL characters who are trying to delve into the awe and mystery of the universe.

Usually The Outer Limits often offers a science fiction subject, always in a easy language that allowed to the audience a total understanding what it refers, instead "Production and Decay of Strange Particle" the writers developed a hard tech-jargon that puzzle over the viewers in such unusual lines, including isotope, plasma, anti-matter, subatomic, quantum physics and so on, looks like a scientist exposing his master's degree with those mid-blogging language.

All start at high advanced complex of nuclear reactor that allows all kind of experiments on nuclear field spearheaded by nuclear physics Dr. Marshall (George Macready) where he got a skilled scientist staff in research, the plot is fuzzy about the source of the material on nuclear fission inside the reactor, it somehow starts a chain reaction if it reaches at high heat could be explode all complex, even such reactor having bars to equalize the temperature.

Turn out that the scientists even using radiation suit with mechanical hands dealing with the matter inside the reactor becomes them into a energy bodies, meanwhile Dr. Marshall tries out find a way to overturn the growing process aiming for to save the complex about to explode where will affect the place nearby at least within a mile radius.

This episode somewhat didn't gets fire properly, even with a fine casting especially Leonard Nimoy on small role, they had to use a massive stock footage to fill out some sequences, overrall an average presentation.

Thanks for reading.

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First watch: 2023 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.