The Outer Limits of Joseph Stefano

One of the many fascinations of The Outer Limits is the writing of Joseph Stefano, which coiled and twisted into darker forms as the series progressed.

"A Feasibility Study," an early script, celebrates the power of human solidarity and self-sacrifice in a way that never fails to make me cry, yet it remains, at heart, conventional science fiction, in which people with clear motives confront aliens with motives equally clear, in a universe that can be understood. For all of its emotional power, it could (with a bit of squinting) be taken for one of the murkier episodes of The Twilight Zone, where it would have fit in badly, but still might have been able to pass for normal.

As he continued to write for The Outer Limits, Joseph Stefano began to shift beyond conventional science fiction into something more troubled and troubling.

In "The Zanti Misfits," "Fun and Games," "The Bellero Shield," "The Invisibles," and "Nightmare," the universe, no matter how bizarre, remains knowable: it can be studied and its aliens can be understood. The difference now is that human beings themselves are mysterious. Paralyzed by existential doubts, crippled by psychological deformations, unable to meet the challenges of life and growth, of love and solidarity, many of the characters here seem a universe unto themselves. They try their best to explain their mental twists and turns, but their explanations are often as opaque as their motives.

Finally, we have episodes that seem to be less about troubled people than about a troubled writer.

"Don't Open Till Doomsday," "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," and "The Forms of Things Unknown" are no longer conventional science fiction; I would go further, and say that these are no longer conventional drama. In a universe that now cannot be understood, peopled with aliens and humans whose motives are obscured by psychological shadows, the stories themselves make very little sense; they seem, instead, like fever dreams, like undeciphered signals from the subconscious mind.

This is not a complaint. I respect these episodes even as they baffle me, in the way that I respect the films of Lynch and Bergman, and I can only marvel that dreams as bizarre and as personal as Joseph Stefano's could squeeze their way onto American TV sets, even at the risk of network interference -- an interference that came to pass, that killed the show as it had been up to that point, and that removed any further risk of undeciphered signals.