The Borderland

As a rich man attends a séance, the plug is pulled and the medium and her partner shown to be fakes. One of the attendees then approaches the man and tells him that he has developed a machine that could move one into another dimension. How he is able to assume that the afterlife is even a possibility is beyond me. However, the man is so desperate to make contact with his son (who died suddenly and violently in a car accident, that he is willing to pay for one hour of time at a power plant. There is a necessity for test before the scientist himself will become the guinea pig. Unfortunately, there are some adversaries: the medium and her assistant (who is nuts) and a man who controls the purse strings and insists on a first level of information. The former is understandable, but the latter could simply be lied to. Anyway, like any story worth its salt, there are some complications along the way. I was rather disappointed with this one.

Peter Mark Richman stars as Professor Ian Fraser, who, along with his wife Eva(played by Nina Foch) and a fellow colleague(played by Philip Abbot) claim to have discovered a doorway into the fourth dimension that they accidentally discovered via electrical fields. They need the backing of a wealthy man named Dwight Hartley(played by Barry Jones) who has recently lost his beloved son in an accident, and is desperate to make contact with him. They manage to make use of a power station to recreate the experiment, but the sabotage of a vengeful, discredited medium(played by Gladys Cooper) and her associate(played by Alfred Ryder) threaten all their plans... Interesting episode with good writing and ideas, even if it does leave many unanswered questions in its wake.

Man of wealth Dwight Hartley is desperate to contact his dead son, after a failed seance with Mrs Palmer, he's approached by Professor Ian Fraser, who claims to have found a path to the fourth dimension, Hartley sees a potential means for contact.

A thoroughly imaginative, creative episode, I think this is without a doubt one of the more interesting ones from series one. We have the obvious sci fi element, but it's also mixed in with the occult to.

It's a very solid production, very well made, with some age defying special effects, and a quality that still shines through decades later, huge credit to the production team.

The acting is spot on, Mark Richman and Nina Foch are both great, the character of Dwight Hartley was very well played by Barry Jones, you did get the impression of a desperate father, and of course a wonderful turn from the wonderful Gladys Cooper, who played the dodgy medium.

9/10.

I was about eleven years old when The Outer Limits first aired on ABC back in 1963, and to this day it remains my favorite and, for me, the most influential television series I have ever watched. Many of the episodes (e.g., The Galaxy Being, The Sixth Finger, Production and Decay of Strange Particles) scared me almost to death back then and still make my skin crawl (a little) if I happen to catch one on cable today, but the Borderland had a different effect: With its jargon-filled dialog ("polarity ... REVERSED!") about magnetic fields, electric power, antimatter, and the like, its many stock-footage shots of the apparatus of a massive power plant, and its stunning, over-the-top visual effects, it left me awestruck, and succeeded in inspiring a profound curiosity about electricity, magnetism, matter, energy, space, and time. It made me want to be a physicist, and indeed, 15 years later I earned a Ph.D. in that field. Whoever said watching TV dulls the mind?

Scientists attempt to open a doorway into another dimension but lack enough electrical power to do so. However, the lead scientist's left hand has "changed polarity" and been turned into a second right hand when it momentarily is pulled into the gap.

When the scientists prove to a local tycoon that a psychic promising to put him in contact with his dead son is a fraud, he grants them access to the city power plant for one hour so they can succeed. The tycoon hopes they can reach "the other side" and contact his son. But the jilted psychic and her associate have other plans.

One of the weakest episodes in season 1, "The Borderland" make no sense: there is no reason for the scientists to believe that they can contact anyone on the "other side", let alone the tycoon's dead son, and in fact this subplot is never resolved; the script is unbearably talky and padded, full of pointless pseudoscientific jargon; and there's no reason for the psychic and her friend to show up inside the power plant except that it's necessary to the plot that they do so (how did they even know this experiment was happening today? Don't they have any security in this building?). Reportedly this one was one of the first episodes filmed but it's easy to see why it was held back until late in the season.