efore you can write sci-fi TV, you have to watch it. And love it. The day you
stop watching and loving, you should probably go write something else. But
neither the act of watching nor the response is a simple process. How old
were you when you watched? What about your personal circumstances made you
willing to love? The answers are different for all of us.
Here are five episodes I have watched and liked, three from what I vaguely remember
as my childhood, two that overlapped what I vaguely remember as my professional
career.
The oldest--in my subjective timeline (see below)--is from the original Outer
Limits. Written by Anthony Lawrence, it was called "The Man Who Was Never Born,"
and it starred Martin Landau in a clever and even heart-wrenching story of a
disfigured traveler from a blasted, desolate future Earth, who accidentally
returns to his past with a chance to kill the monster who destroyed civilization.
Alas, the traveler is a bit too early. He finds himself meeting Cabot's future
mother, just before her wedding. And falls in love with her.
This is a wonderfully complex and yet emotional story that I happened to
see when I was nine years old and up past my bedtime. I had seen several
episodes of Outer Limits by that time, but had been clued to this particular
one because there was a close-up in TV Guide magazine which showed nasty-looking
Martin Landau on a barren plain marked only by some grotesque tower.
Twenty-three years later I wound up working with Anthony Lawrence on the
first Twilight Zone revival, and had the great pleasure of telling him how
powerful it was.
There is a fifth dimension
Then there was The Twilight Zone itself. Here's where my
subjective timeline comes
into play, because I was too young to see more than a handful of the episodes
in their original runs. Ah, but even in those days there were reruns, and so
I came to see "Invaders" when I was 11.
Written by the noted fantasist Richard Matheson, this episode starred Agnes
Moorhead as a lonely woman trapped in a cabin with a vicious, terrifying menace--which
turns out to be a hapless spaceman from Earth battling a giant.
Told almost without dialogue, shot in a classic, black-and-white thriller
style by director Dougles Heyes and cinematographer George T. Clemens,
it made me want to see every other episode of Twilight Zone.
I think I did, eventually. And then wound up writing some of my own.
Then we come to Star Trek. I was 12 when the series premiered; it sort
of sneaked up on me, because I became aware of it only days before its initial
airing on NBC, thanks to a newspaper ad I happened to see at my grandparents'
house. Star Trek? What kind of word was that? I only hoped the show would
be better than Lost in Space, then in its second season.
Frankly, my 12-year-old self was not impressed by the first episode I saw, the one
I still think of as the "salt vampire" story. But better episodes followed, and
I became a true fan of the series when I saw "City on the Edge of Forever."
Everyone knows this one, and not just in the sci-fi world. (TV Guide made it
one of its 100 top episodes of all time.) It's where Kirk and Spock are flung
back to the United States at the time of the Depression. Kirk falls in love
with a social worker named Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins!) only to
realize that in order for history to play out, she must die.
I was pretty close to the Golden Age of Science Fiction (13) when I saw "City,"
and immediately considered it one of the best things I had ever seen on
television. Oddly enough, I didn't learn the the name of its writer,
Harlan Ellison, for several years, by which time I had become a fan of
his short stories. Harlan later published his original version of the
script (which had been rewritten for production by Gene Roddenberry and
others) and there's even been a book about it, which is all fine and also
irrelevant.
(I see that two of my three favorites are time-travel love stories. I wonder
why I've never even attempted to write something like that?)
The truths are out there
There is a saying that as the twig is bent, so is the child, and you could make
the case that these sci-fi episodes bent me. But bending the twig is a process
just as messy as watching and loving. ... I was equally bent, and in somewhat
different directions, by the Gemini and Apollo missions, by the
nuns of St.
Patrick Grade School of Hudson, Wis., by hours of sandlot baseball and
by a few other things we can talk about over drinks.
Let's just say I was a fully-bent tree when I experienced my other two sci-fi
TV favorites.
The first was the English TV movie Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes into the Future.
I didn't see this startlingly prescient, darkly humorous, wonderfully satirical
story about a news reporter who develops a television alter ego in my living
room, but in a screening at CBS Studio Center, where I was the last writer
standing on that mid-1980s Twilight Zone revival. (My low-level staff writer
job kept me employed after the rest of the staff moved on.) I had been told
that if I was lucky, I might be able to write an episode of Max Headroom,
since it was going to become an ABC network series. You'd think this would
guarantee my affection, but I had been through a similar process a number of times
and was immune to that lure.
Nevertheless, I loved the Max movie, as well as its retooling
as a one-hour pilot,
and my enthusiasm carried over into my year of writing subsequent episodes.
Then we come to The X-Files, a show I first heard about in 1994 as one
of that season's
pilots. My reaction then--so what? It sounded like your basic boy-girl psychic
investigators, the kind of thing that gets bought every year and never works.
Somehow the produced pilot wound up in my hands, and I moderated my disdain. I
actually thought the producers had shown tremendous courage in casting Gillian
Anderson as the lead. I said so when, in the course of things, I met with Chris
Carter, Jim Wong and Howard Gordon in May 1994 about writing an episode.
But I was then committed to Outer Limits and couldn't.
But I was motivated to tune into X-Files as a viewer. Its second episode,
called
"Deep Throat," the one about pilots at an Area 51-like secret base who were
suffering the effects of test flights in retro-engineered aircraft, was
so smart and creepy and well thought out that I raved about it to family
and friends. I don't think I missed an original episode for the next three years.
Those are my favorites. I keep watching, and hoping to add to the list.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a number of SF and
fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through
Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also
the author of a number of books on space flight, including his new novel, Red
Moon, to be published by Forge Books in January 2001.
