The one where Jack Warden plays a wrongly convicted criminal cruelly condemned to solitary confinement on an asteroid. Things take a turn for him when his keeper leaves him with a realistic female robot. (Jean Marsh, from Upstairs, Downstairs) What rating would you give this episode?
shareThe outro alone is worth at least a 9.
shareI thought this one was excellent and ahead of its time... clearly a forerunner to films such as Blade Runner, AI, Terminator, Ex Machina, in terms of considering robots as potentially human... and also having a progressive view of incarceration. Warden did a good job capturing the desperation of his situation as well as the conflict of having genuine feelings for machines... something which must have seemed extremely perverse back then even though we are coming closer to realizing this level of robotics almost sixty years later. I'm not too familiar with John Allenby but he was excellent as the compassionate Captain who acted as a de facto warden. Weird to see Jean Marsh in an American show, she must have tried to establish a Hollywood career before her career took off back home.
shareIt would have made a great "Black Mirror" episode.
Here's an interesting theory about Alicia from Mike over at "The Twilight Pwn" podcast:
"At the very beginning she is very robot-like, and at the end after the astronauts show up again when the Jack Warden character is shouting "Show them, Alicia!", she reverts to robot-like movements/actions again.
Do you think it was meant to imply that many of the very animated and human-like qualities were projections of the Warden character? The Alicia robot gave him enough to "fill the blanks," as it were, and some of the scenes in which she is very human are actually part of his projections due to his loneliness? Perhaps, we are just seeing Alicia the way he see her."
Possibly, although with a production schedule designed to produce 30 plus episodes, I doubt they were thinking that deeply. He rejects her, then falls in love with her... heck, if Tom Hanks could love Wilson or Tandy from Last Man on Earth could love tennis balls... of course it would be much easier to feel for Alicia. But all that really transpires after they return is that they go to her hiding place and the Captain shoots her in the face to wake up Corry. It was odd by today's standards that he wouldn't be pissed at the Captain, but back then I'm assuming people were much less comfortable with technology therefore the image of broken circuitry would have snapped him out of his "delusion". I don't think there was enough time to truly establish a crew perception vs Corry's but if the director was Kubrick then it might have been possible. Considering it was Jack Smight who directed Airport 1975 and Fast Break, I'm more inclined to think your friend at the podcast is over thinking things.
shareMaybe he is over-thinking it. But the script is certainly open to interpretation. Remember when Adams asks Captain Allenby what's in the crate and he says something like "An illusion. Maybe salvation."? And then in Serling's outro where he says "All of Mr. Corry's machines. Including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete ..." Corry's love animated Alicia, gave her an identity she maybe wouldn't have otherwise had. When Allenby shoots her face off, and Corry sees what she's really made of, he sees Alicia for the illusion that she is. And this salvation Allenby speaks of -- Corry's freedom from loneliness -- is now his. All his loneliness is left behind with Alicia because it was an illusion just like she was an illusion. Or was she more? Will his loneliness follow him back to Earth? Corry's hard-to-read reaction to Alicia's death makes us wonder just what will be Corry's fate. The episode doesn't tell us . It only tells us that all of his Corry's machines, like all of are machines will one day be, are now obsolete.
shareI kept thinking why don't they look for a SIM card or hard drive equivalent on the robot. Surely, that must be less than 15 pounds. But it's 1959, so they don't think that way. If a remake was done today they might explore whether the physical body is anything more than a phone cover. It reminds me of another Jack Warden film Heaven Can Wait where Warren Beatty gets taken by accident and then ultimately is restored into another body... but that film always bothered me because if you don't have your original body nor your memories... how is this restoration?
share And that moment when the Jack Warden character realizes his friend is gone and their relationship is an illusion is not unlike Corry's epiphany when he sees Alicia for what she is.
If memory serves they wiped Beatty's character's memories but still some residue of his former self remained. How else could he have felt a certain connection with Julie Christie's character who was when he bumps into her at the end a total stranger?
I don't know how to answer your question other then in order for Beatty' character to start over they had to completely eliminate his former self. No attachments. No previous commitments that might compromise his new identity. It seems unfair since they're the one who fucked up in the first place. Why should he have to be subjected to be a complete erasure because of their bureaucratic bungling?
It's all rather Kafkaesque if you ask me.
Something should remake this only as an existential horror show. Maybe Fincher?
I think that's why its reputation hasn't held up over the years... its as if his hard drive was reformatted and reinstalled in a different computer. Oh, well the company upheld its warranty obligations but nothing is left except for maybe some stray code?... Even Kafka's protagonists didn't completely lose their identity or their sanity... it was the world that was mad.
share But wasn't K in "The Trial" a bit insane himself? Or more than a little unreliable? I mean what's with all the women throwing themselves at him? Guilt? Wasn't "The Trial" as much about K's own inner persecution as it was the nightmarishly complex outer forces judging him?
Incidentally, did you catch Welles' "The Trial"? Pretty good stuff.
A Beatty movie that actually has held up is "The Parallax View."
Maybe, it's been years since I've read it so I wouldn't argue with you too much. The whole point of most of Kafka's work is the absurdity of the state or authority so I'm not sure how an unreliable narrator would forward his agenda. Maybe madness induced as a reflection of its intrinsic qualities but what good what it do to have a mad man simply rave about bureaucracy? Haven't seen The Trial... is it true to the novel? I saw the Parallax View when I was a child but I don't remember it much... probably time to watch it again.
share I've been diving a little into Kafka because the folks at "The Twilight Zone Vortex" said many Zones are Kafkaesque; therefore, if you like "The Zone" you might like Kafka. So far I think he's a little above my pay grade ... though I suppose the inscrutability of Kafka is part of the point.
Pretty true though the ending is different. Kafka isn't stabbed in the heart like the book. Nor does K, as he's dying, utter "like a dog." Instead, Welles' ending has him blown up (off camera, censors being what they were in the sixties).
"The Parallax View" is in the vein of "Klute", "Marathon Man", "The Conversation" and all the other '70s paranoid thrillers. I think it's Alan J. Pakula's best film next to "All The President's Men." It definitely has a main character whose reliability you start to question (much like the aforementioned "Conversation").
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