The Outer Limits: "The Sixth Finger"

There is nothing wrong with your TV set...that watching a little "Outer Limits" can't cure!

To that end, I've become, over the last year, a dedicated fan of the show, and plan to watch EVERY SINGLE EPISODE in the same weird, amblin', lackadaisical manner in which I do most everything. So far I've seen "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" (with El Capitan Kirk himself, William "The Shat" Shatner), "Demon With a Glass Hand" (with Robert "Greatest American Hero" Culp), "Soldier" (the episode written by Harlan Ellison and ripped-off by James Cameron to create Terminator), and most recently "Corpus Earthling" (again with Robert Culp). I've seen a few more, mainly from the first season, and I can't, as my "Simpsons" cartoon alter-ego might say, declare any of them the "Worst episode ever!" "The Outer Limits" never disappoints, except for maybe when the "alien" you see is anything BUT. Such is the case with Season 1, Episode 5: "The Sixth Finger".

"The Sixth Finger" is, as mentioned above, the fifth episode of the original "Outer Limits," and it's the one that's most notable for featuring an alien that isn't an alien, in the strictest sense of the word. I mean, the first time I ever saw an image of the monster from this episode, I assumed it was a bonafide, laser-pointin', farmboy abductin', saucer pilotin', extraterrestrial baddie from another galaxy. But no, it's just a big, monkey-butt-headed freakazoid from an old sci-fi monster show. One with "polydactyl" (a word I learned from watching Cyril Wecht on the old, bogus "Alien Autopsy" video with Jonathan Frakes way back in the mid-nineties); i.e. six fingers. Hence the title of the episode.

A mad scientist (Edward Mulhare) wants to kickstart the evolutionary development of mankind, and builds a ridiculous "Kickstarting the Evolutionary Development of the Human Race" chamber, complete with a little switch labeled "forward," and "backward." Okay.

Two English or Welsh or some damn thing miners (David McCallum and Robert Doyle) who look very dirty (one of them is covered in Victorian slum soot) try to get fresh with some little blonde chick (Jill Haworth), and everyone goes over to the mad scientist's place, and the more sympathetic dirty gets a bath and a shave and probably smells a helluva lot better afterward.

So the English cockney guy gets into the chamber and flashes forward, and suddenly he gets a monster hydrocephalic cranium and a receding hairline and looks a little like an Oompa-Loompa. He starts to grow the infamous "sixth finger" alluded to in the title. He also becomes a supergenius, who can play piano perfectly even though he's never touched one, and who reads massive amounts of huge, boring, dusty old books, none of which probably have cool pictures in them.

He ends up "stopping the heart" of the nosy old housemaid, and since this is a talent he now apparently possesses (besides the ability to psychokinetically knock a dude backward, off his feet, in a cool special effect shot), the Good Doctor who created this mess, to begin with, begins to get a little worried. Meanwhile, his little blonde girlfriend gets suspicious and comes around looking for him.

The entire thing is overwhelmingly entertaining comic book mind wash, but it does beg the question of the morality of making stupid people smart, and if the stupid are made smart, and they develop an urge for world domination, then what? Huh? Huh? Will ya' tell me?

But the sheer ugliness of the makeup job here is admirable. The "alien that isn't" gets a skull-bone-head visage, with prominent bones protruding through old, ugly, withered, sunken, and desiccated features. He also has a very fetching white intergalactic leisure suit. I bet he's a big hit at parties, where other guests are invited to try and outwit him at Trivial Pursuit.

He's just no alien, y'all. Close, but no cigar. He may have twelve fingers where the rest of us have only ten, but, in his case, it doesn't mean he hails from Zeta Reticuli; just, that it must make it alot harder to wipe.

But he'll manage. After all, he's a supergenius.

The Sixth Finger

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