The Refuge

A boy who is lost in the snow is rescued by the inhabitants of a house who give him shelter. Once recovered, he becomes friends with a young doctor who seems to be the only one who has a normal behavior since the rest are aggressive, cynical and insensitive people who seem to be coopted by one of the members of the group who handles all situations at will with absolute tyranny. The visitor confronts him by not supporting his nefarious behavior and at that precise moment he suffers a strange shock that vanishes him but when he wakes up he observes with astonishment that all the members of that house have exchanged their personalities among themselves except for the sinister character that seems to continue dominating it all. A rather disturbing story with a logical but unexpected explanation and a happy ending.

Love the blizzard scenery and mind puzzling plot. Not at all what you're expecting, as the twist catches you completely off guard. Deals with a man stuck in a blizzard wandering into a refuge as an outsider, with some very strange activity from the seemingly normal guests. Let me say this is not a bunch of aliens or anything weird like that. These are normal people dealing with very abnormal circumstances, circumstances they are completely unaware of. You will like this episode if you are less into the sci fi alien sort of episode dealing with space travel and spaceships or war. Much better. If you haven't seen this, please do check it out. This episode and "The Havem" (very similar titles, completely unrelated stories however) are the two best episodes there are.

the first time i saw this episode, i had no idea what i was watching, as I had missed the opening (the voice of control) The first thirty or forty minutes were so bizarre and intriguing I couldn't stop watching. The way the various characters went from one role to another was just mind blowing to me. When the originals were run I worked night shift and never saw them so this was a brand new show to me, so I still catch the sci fi marathons whenever I can. It hooked me on the "NEW outer limits" and I am still trying to catch up on the episodes I have missed. I will not do the "spoiler" thing here but the whole story completely blew me away and has made me a fan of the show.

A young man runs through a snowstorm. He is disoriented and can't remember how he got there. At some point, he runs into what appears to be a force field. He awakens in the care of a group of disparate people. Among them are a doctor, a young attractive nurse, a hotheaded young guy, a vampish, middle aged woman, a young religious zealot, and, finally, an older man, played by M. Emmett Walsh, the famous character actor. He is an overbearing control freak who controls those in the house with an iron fist. It becomes obvious that no one leaves this house and most have no control over their lives. The young intruder finds himself battered back and forth by the personalities present. He aligns himself with the pretty young woman and plans to escape, but since he has no memories, he can't enlist a plan. After one escape attempt, he is back in his bed and among the same people, but their roles have changed. The vampish woman is now the kind woman and so on. What happens next is what makes this a truly memorable episode. It is one of the more imaginative efforts of the Outer Limits.

The episode opens with a young journalist finding himself in a post-apocalyptic world, specifically in a new ice age, just across some snowy hills from a warm cabin where seven other humans have taken refuge. One of them, a nurse, rescues and attends to him. The refuge turns out to be a rather psychotic milieu, the journalist and the nurse by far the most nearly normal of all the cabin's occupants, though despite the journalist's short-term amnesia as to how he survived the cold snap he seems to be more lucid about his past life than the nurse. Not surprisingly, the two fall fast in love, but suddenly the whole refuge is turned upside-down as most the inhabitants suddenly swap personalities, but not names or bodies, and see their limited memories scrambled. Only the journalist and the refuge's chief - not the nurse - are immune. The journalist surmises that the chief must be behind the mind-bending... but how, and why?

What the journalist has stumbled upon is a world in a curious intermediary between dream and reality, where the inhabitants, as victims of a megalomaniac, are reduced to mere avatars of themselves. It's up to the journalist to help them re-establish that link back to the real, back to the reality. But to do so he is forced to somehow plunge deeper into the dream while remaining whole.

I'd seen this episode as a young teenager and thinking about it today as an adult I hunted it down to see whether I could now catch the points I hadn't understood, then. Turns out there wasn't anything more to catch. It's a compelling scenario and it holds our attention to the end, but ultimately it just isn't very well thought-out. The explanation for how the journalist managed to resist the mind-scrambling is never elevated beyond the stage of primitive semi-scientific hypothesis, and no explanation is offered for why the nurse manages to resist partially but not completely. And while the explanation for all the victims' descent into the dream is satisfactory enough, the antagonist's mechanism of action is never buckled back in. It feels like a cop-out compromise between elaborate speculative mystery and bona fide "whodunit." The thematic cachet, the idea of dreams inspiring reality as much as reality inspiring dreams, is strong enough on its own but it is applied here in a rather thin and harried manner. None of this is improved by the camerawork and acting, both scarcely two steps above those of a daytime soap opera from the same period.

Perhaps a single hour-long anthology episode was simply too short to give this subject the treatment and this conflict the narrative and resolution they warranted. That's rather a shame. It was entertaining while I watched it but afterwards didn't feel like anything at all. I got the impression I had been duped into downing what looked like a packet of fancy chocolates and gotten little more than cotton candy. All-in-all, probably not worth your time.