"Juice Him"

There are so many great science fiction and fantasy anthologies out there, and there are so many episodes of them I’ve simply never seen.

It’s easy to name some of them: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Black Mirror. But there are many more that have faded into obscurity, and many episodes of those that have likewise done the same.

Sometimes that’s for the best, of course, which I’m about to discover. But before we get there, I’d like to set out the purpose of this series.

There are probably a whole bunch of these stories that have gone unnoticed but deserve attention. And there are some that will probably make me laugh. Some that will make me cringe. Probably a lot of them.

So I put them all in a spreadsheet ( well, an Airtable , but you get the idea), threw a random number generator at it, and sat down to watch the first episode of this project at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. The only rule I’ve set for myself is that I can’t skip an episode if I want to watch something I know is good. That would kind of defeat the purpose. (Note: I reserve the right to break this rule.)

That episode? It’s “New Lease” from the 1995 revival of The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits (1995), Season 3, Episode 11, “New Lease”

I’m not sure this bodes well.

“New Lease” is, well, uh … it’s kind of bad.

It’s also kind of boring, which is really too bad considering it’s a 45-minute episode of The Outer Limits’ 1995 iteration, coming in its third season.

I suppose we should start with a bit of the plot.

Dr. James Houghton is a scientist of sorts, and he has a reasonable (I mean, sort of) vision: to invent a machine that electrocutes a corpse, bringing it back to life through some series of arcane, indeterminate processes that include “100 milligrams of lidocaine.”

His great experiment, which he shares with his partner-in-science, whose name I immediately forgot (in part because I’m bad with TV names unless it’s Star Trek, and then I’m quite good, and also in part because the character was little more than a shallow plot device), is a success more or less from the outset. The first trial run of the technology — on humans, at least—takes place in the very first scene in the episode, resurrecting a recent victim of a heart attack.

That all seems like it would be quite an accomplishment, but Houghton’s accomplice (having looked up his name now, it’s Dr. Charles McCamber) is reluctant, especially because they’re projecting that anyone brought back from the dead has just a scant few days to live.

Let’s stop here. I’m honestly a bit confused by all this. The two scientists work in what appears to be an empty warehouse, their invention is a mad scientist take on a tanning bed that involves injecting a patient with a local anesthetic, and their resurrection process has what appears to be a fairly significant flaw, which is that it’s temporary.

So, yeah. Not great.

However, it also involves the phrase “Juice him,” which is quite good. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

I assume the sunglasses are important so you don’t tan your irises or something.

So, their patient dies after suffering another heart attack, and if I were to stop the episode there, you’d probably walk away scratching your head, and maybe you’d derive some sort of moral, given the patient wanted to die and, indeed, made one extremely feeble effort to end his own life because of the pain. There’s even talk — from McCamber, which is notable and important for reasons I’ll get into later—about how it’s a bad idea, and how they shouldn’t have done it, and how they should “pull the plug.” (To be fair, I think he might have meant “murder the man we just brought back to life who will shortly be dead again.”)

Let’s take a quick break here. I think there are some things you should know.

First, this episode was directed by Jason Priestley.

Now, I didn’t actually remember who Jason Priestley was when I saw his name pop up, mostly because he’d never been in Star Trek, but I knew it sounded vaguely familiar.

It’s that guy! From that show!

This was his directorial debut. This episode of The Outer Limits, which also features him acting. (I mean, it’s his directorial debut outside of Beverly Hills, 90210, which was something that never appealed to me in the early 90s outside of the name Beverly, for fairly obvious reasons.)

And, uh, yeah. I think he got this one wrong. Now, it does appear he’s continued to direct things, like episodes of 90210, BH90210, a TV movie called Dear Santa, and a good deal of other things which I won’t get into here. Maybe he’s good. I don’t know. He wasn’t here.

Now, I’ll be honest here. I don’t really know what a director does, and my understanding is that it largely depends on the director how they do things. Moreover, I don’t really know what a director does in an anthology series, but clearly, some are better than others. Priestley managed to extract poor performances from several performers of note (who I also didn’t quite recognize, because, well, yeah, you get it,) including Stephen Lang (Dr. Houghton here, but also the voice of George Washington once, and an actor in all five Avatar movies — um, hello, 2027 for Avatar 5? What a weird world we live in), Michael Ontkean (Dr. McCamber here, but also Sheriff Harry S. Truman in Twin Peaks, which I really should watch some day soon), and Nancy Sorel (Dr. Houghton’s wife here, who played somebody in The Man in the High Castle who I don’t remember because it’s been a while.)

So. Yeah. They were all sort of bad. Also, in reading on IMDB, I found it very interesting that two of the cast here went on to play roles in Watchmen. I’m willing to bet good money that’s a coincidence.

Back to the episode, I guess.

So that takes us to about the halfway point in the episode. So far, we’ve had the following:

We don’t know anything about the motivations here, or why they’re doing what they’re doing, or why they have access to one of those highly secured vans they use to transport money from ATMs and whatnot, or why they’re doing all this work in an abandoned warehouse.

We’re finally meeting Houghton’s family, though, and that surely has to bring some sense of motivation to all this, right?

It doesn’t. I bet you knew that’s where this was going, too.

From here, we learn that Houghton is kind of a terrible dad and husband, as he plans to miss his daughter’s recital because of “the experiment.” (This further underscores the notion that this experiment is probably being done on the black market, which frankly doesn’t make any sense at all.)

And while there’s a little bit of heart break there, it’s preceded by his daughter putting nearly half a pint jar of jam on her toast. It’s the most disgusting thing in the episode, and it’s not even close. The jam is piled there, and there’s no way she’ll be able to eat her toast without her fingers being covered in jam. The episode plays some things for the gross factor, I suspect, but this was by far the worst of it.

At some point here, we end up back in the warehouse-turned-laboratory, where the dying man is being put back into the magic tanning bed in an effort to … do something, I guess. It involves probably the next-best line in the episode.

“Congratulations. You just electrocuted a dead man.”

So that’s pretty good.

And it’s not long after that — leaving the laboratory, with no sense of regret in his blood—when we find Houghton face-to-face with an armed man. That armed man? It’s Jason Priestley in a role that screams Chris R from The Room, and it’s, um, something.

From there, the story just sort of takes off, and we actually get what the story’s trying to do. The pacing’s way off, because all this happens in sort of a flash, and there’s no real heft to the impact, but here goes nothing:

Lasers!

Dr. Houghton is murdered by the man wanting money or drugs, then his body is dragged back into the warehouse by his doctor-friend, who then reanimates him successfully in what is ultimately a much shorter scene of terrible special effects. From there, Houghton is convinced he’s going to die soon, but he feels the need to redeem himself to his family (not because his wife spoke to his friend about how he’s been distant and she was worried he was having an affair) so he goes straight home and tries to do just that, despite looking, well, grey and zombie-like. (They really could have played up the zombie stuff, but instead, we got some sickly pallor and a few unexplained open wounds.)

His wife is confused, but she’s just happy he’s at home again (“Whatever it is, I’m going to stop complaining about it,” her line, is, um, problematic to say the least.) All seems well and good: Houghton goes to the park with his family, kisses his wife in public (it’s apparently a new thing for him), and has a picnic with an open fire right next to a well-trafficked footpath.

But all is not well and good, because he goes to breakfast — brunch? lunch?—with his family and sees none other than Jason Priestley, his murderer, walking into a gym of some sort. The music tells me he’s plotting something, but whatever could it be?!

Before long, he calls the gym where the murder-man walked in, asking them for his name and address by impersonating a police officer. It’s not believable, but I guess it doesn’t have to be, because he gets the information, sneaks out in the middle of the night, happens to run into murder-Priestley at 3 a.m., then shoots him with a gun in full sight of multiple frightened people. At 3 a.m., so there’s that.

While doing it, he issues the line it seems the whole episode was built around: “You should always finish what you start.” Or maybe, “Now we’re both dead.” Both are classic and meaningless in this context, but keep in mind, Houghton thinks he’s dead in the morning (or some future time, I guess) and just wants that little bit of revenge for his own benefit, despite ostensibly pretending to care more about his family than himself.

Houghton gets home, sleeps, wakes up, and is surprised to hear from his friend Dr. McCamber, who has some good news for him back in the abandoned warehouse: He’s not dying! They just hadn’t looked closely enough at the data. It seems like an oversight, but without it, we wouldn’t get in the shoehorned moral of the story.

Houghton gets home, embraces his wife with the door open, and is arrested by police, who have found the body of Jason Priestley, found Houghton’s wallet in Priestley’s apartment, and had witnesses match him to the crime in the middle of the night. Houghton blubbers on about how he was murdered by Jason Priestley, shows the police his since-healed bullet wound, and is taken into the custody.

It’s here we get the moral, with the police detective saying that the local judge doesn’t take kindly to vigilantes.

At least, I think it’s the moral.

The actual moral

Most episodes of science fiction anthology television thrive when there’s some sort of moral at the end to wrap things up nicely. This doesn’t have any of that. I suppose the moral is “revenge is bad,” or “don’t murder Jason Priestley without full information.” It certainly doesn’t appear to be “don’t play god,” and I’m frankly quite surprised by that fact. It seems to me it would have been much easier to hit that specific moral on the head, and they’ve gone the long way around it.

Maybe I’m ascribing too much moralizing to The Outer Limits, and they simply want to tell a weird story here. I don’t think so, but you never know.

The good

So the casting is apparently quite good here. Everyone’s gone on to bigger and better things, or has done better things in the past.

The bad

Where do we start? For me, it’s easy: the music. This is where I get my first Star Trek connection of the episode, and it’s Joel Goldsmith, son of famed composer Jerry Goldsmith. Joel composed parts of the soundtrack for Star Trek: First Contact, which is frankly quite good. He’s joined by two other folks who have done plenty of TV work. I’m puzzled by the usage of the incidental music here in the first half of the episode, because it’s unnecessarily loud and over-the-top.

The acting? That’s bad. I guess that’s most ’90s television for you, but it could have been so good. The lighting isn’t great. The pacing is off. The script is lacking.

The worst part is that there’s a glimmer of good here, but it’s snuffed out, not unlike our main character.