The Outer Limits: "Corpus Earthling"

Picture if you will a man completely possessed by an alien force, one that has an echoey voice soaked in reverb, and that force is one one of the most horrible things you can imagine in all of the world: a half-baked FUDGE BROWNIE WITH CLAWS.

(Oh, he horror! The horror! )

"Corpus Earthling" is the ninth episode of the first season of one of the greatest of all the very great sci-fi shows of the Sixties, "The Outer Limits.' It concerns a couple of living, pulsating, alien space rocks with echoey reverbed voices. They sort of look like those microwavable brownies in the Hungry Man TV dinner trays, the kind you have to rip the cellophane off of and turn over with a fork halfway through the cooking cycle. They both have the same shiny, sweaty black surface.

Anyhoo, Robert "Bill Maxwell" Culp, who most famously helped William "Ralph Hanley" Katt track down bad guys as in that other great show, "The Greatest American Hero" (1981-83), (a show that had as much to do with my mental development as an entire decade of education), plays a guy here whose old lady or whatever works in a geology professor's lab. In "Hero" Culp tries to assist the bumbling, reluctant Ralph, a Special Ed teacher in an L.A. high school, as Ralph tries to master the red superhero suit the aliens gave him, and not crash land every time he takes to the friendly skies. In this show, however, he plays a guy who goes into the lab, strikes a match for obscure reasons, gets blown up by some laboratory stove deal, and then gets a metal plate in his skull. I hate when shit like that happens.

He soon begins to hear the oozy, black, turd-like, pulsating alien rocks in his head, and they refer to him as "the listener." They are masters of mind control apparently, and they want to take over the Earth and make it a rockin' place (har-har). At one point, they convince him that he ought to jump from the window to his death, but his old lady (Salome Jens) stops him.

They then decide to go on a honeymoon to Mexico, but not before the geology prof, played by Barry Atwater, gets alien possessed by the alien rocks, who turn into black gummy crab-like thingies and attach themselves to his hand, which do a face hugger in a cool scene that leaves him covered in corpse-like greasepaint and wandering around like he's in a zombie trance. (Which I suppose he is.)

We get down to a cabin in Mexico, and a guide or local or whatever builds a voodoo ring because he knows that something "from beyond" is out there lurking, looking for Culp and his bride-to-be. Spooky.

I won't give away the ending, except to say that I'm not sure why the two extraterrestrial TV dinner brownie crab creatures wanted to take over the Earth to begin with. Perhaps it was to stake their claim to the dominion over puny man once more. Yeah, probably something like that.

If you don't watch "The Outer Limits," you really should. You can watch ALL of it gratis, and get a glimpse backward through time, with every assurance that "there's nothing wrong with your television set," and take a look back at one of the greatest of all programs ever to air in reruns on channel 12 at three a.m. in the era when cheap processed carbohydrates could take over and enslave mankind. (Actually, that sounds suspiciously like the situation as it now stands.)

Bon appetit!

Corpus Earthling