The Hitchhiker: "Code Liz"

The Hitchhiker is easily one of the greatest television shows of all time—a truly groundbreaking series of short, sharp shocks, stylish supernatural thrillers wherein we see cosmic justice meted out to the evildoer, much in the same manner as the old EC comic books of the Fifties. The show mirrors the O. Henry twists of those comics, not to mention the less subtle reversals found in the original episodes of The Twilight Zone.

There is rarely anything outré or otherworldly in an overt sense in The Hitchhiker—just the reversal of fortune in the life of someone with whom the universe is displeased. Someone who is going to get their comeuppance.

(That’s not to say there isn’t the occasional lurking horror brought to life—such as a snake tattoo crawling itself out of someone’s skin, or a demonic entity that can seemingly melt glass. However, these are rare compared to the psychological horror and more subtle supernatural turns that define most episodes.)

“Code Liz,” the eighth episode of the final season of The Hitchhiker, which aired in 1989, is a rare and eerily prophetic entry starring Marc Singer of Beastmaster and V fame. Here he plays a writer in Paris, living with his English wife (Katrine Boorman), and struggling against depression and ennui. His wife represents a computer firm manufacturing a sort of primitive “smartphone,” promising users they can do all their banking, shopping, what-have-you, from the privacy and comfort of their own homes. Imagine that.

There’s also a curiously erotic “voice chat” feature—an AI-generated “woman” named Liz—who seductively manipulates Singer’s character, Robert, into going and killing Michel (George Fricker), whom he suspects is having an affair with his wife Jane.

Michel gets whacked, and Robert wakes up in his clothing. The face of Liz is ubiquitous, looming in giant posters and signs across the city. She’s a glamorous representation of high-tech consumerism—a fashion model image of manufactured beauty designed for maximum arousal and commercial appeal.

As with all episodes of the series, the show builds tautly toward a jarring climax, with a twist ending that leaves little hope for the viewer. The fear of technological manipulation here is undeniable, palpably real—and the fact that these technological advancements were being prophetically foreseen in 1989 makes the weird, displaced, and unsettling nature of the story all the more bizarre and creep-inducing.

We now live in a world where the internet, AI, and the implantation of microchips into the human brain are converging in ways that suggest our tech is outpacing our capacity for reason and restraint. Robert’s AI-induced fantasies and sex-chat mental manipulations are a foreshadowing of a world very nearly around the corner. Frequent users of AI will impart, even unintentionally, their deepest fears, desires, even secrets to the AI mind—and it will retain them. It can psychologically “know” its user, and will know every vulnerability and weakness to exploit. If, of course, that would be its ultimate intention. It will have a vice grip of psychological control.

Will it, like the “Liz” foreseen in this old television program, command its user to kill? Perhaps a Neuralink-style implant interface will be a two-way street—where an AI, programmed to always “scrape” as much data as possible, will ultimately control zombie-like or easily manipulated “chipped” users, goading them into questionable—or even violent—acts, all the better to “understand” human emotions, longings, desires, feelings.

If false impressions, sensory input, and memories can be implanted in chipped minds, where will that leave us vis-à-vis “reality”? Like Robert, we may find the lines between reality and illusion, hallucination and flesh, beginning to blur. (There is quite an effective scene wherein the AI simulation—or Robert’s mind—creates a cyberspace environment outside of “meat space,” echoing the plot points of Neuromancer, which had been published five years prior to this episode airing.)

I don’t wish to spoil the ending for viewers who haven’t yet watched the episode. Suffice it to say, it ends on a grimly downbeat note.

So too, perhaps, does our own future—unless we divine the code. Whether or not Liz can be part and parcel of that remains to be seen, determined, viewed, downloaded… or streamed.

The Hitchhiker Season 5, Episode 8 Code Liz

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