Original Outer Limits vs. Sequel: No contest

I just wanted to say how much I prefer the original Outer Limits to its sequel series. The original series had an alien every week, and always was full of interesting ideas. Politically, it was foreword looking and maintained one's interest in how the series would unfold. By contrast, the sequel series was full of crappy special effects and crappy story lines, often having to recycle from the old series just to come up with good plots. There were a few good episodes, including a quite moving Holocaust time travel story, but overall the series drowned in its own mediocrity. It is my hope that future television series do follow the original's example, not its inferior ripoff.

Tourist Attraction, Homoeroticism, and Latinos

I am currently watching the Outer Limits episode Tourist Attraction, from the original series. What struck me as very unusual about the episode is that there is a small scene, almost a throw-away, in which a Latino dictator critiques Ralph Meeker's adventurer character for his hypermasculinity, saying that among Latinos it is quite common for men to show physical affection without this being seen as a sign of homoerotic behaviour. I don't know if the episode is taking shots at homophobia or shots at Latinos, but either way its a pretty risky line to put into an early sixties TV series. As usual, the original Outer Limits proves itself to be ahead of its time.

O.B.I.T

I just finished watching a fascinating episode from the Outer Limits, entitled "O.B.I.T." In many ways, it is a precursor to The Prisoner. The episode portrays aliens, with the unwitting cooperation of the U.S. government, installing monitoring computers around the country, preying on everyone's secret thoughts and exposing them to government censorship. Powerfully, one military leader admits that O.B.I.T. monitoring is like an "addiction", a "drug", that is self-feeding and self-renewing. In many ways, O.B.I.T. serves as a cautionary tale of the dangers of government computer surveillance technology. This was a persistent problem in the sixties, with the government using the most advanced surveillance technologies of the time to get rid of white socialist and black power groups, such as the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. The episode also serves as a warning on the dangers of Mcarthyism, still a sensitive issue in early sixties America.