episode #02 - The One Hundred Days of the Dragon

Air Date: 9/23/63 writer: Albert Balter Director: Byron Haskin

The Manchurian Candidate-styled entry, with slight sci-fi elements: the President of the USA (Sidney Blackmer) is secretly murdered and replaced by a look-a-like. The key sf element is an invention that can temporarily change human skin to mailable plastic. This is only the first step, however; the V.P. (Phillip Pine) is next on the list to be replaced. The villains are the sinister Chinese, though it's kept more vague, as if it may be some more obscure nation in the Orient (a couple of the actors are James Hong and Richard Loo).

The style, as is usual with the Outer Limits, keeps things eerie and chilling - the murder is especially disturbing. But, by this time, some of the elements are less-than-convincing: even if one could suddenly mold a person's face like soft plastic, they couldn't transform it so easily into a duplicate of another person's face. Both the President and the V.P. seem to have hardly any security - where's the Secret Service? And, Blackmer's acting style as the impersonator, perhaps effectively creepy in the sixties, now looks transparent as he slits his eyes, suggesting the Oriental presence behind the mask. BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10
Outer Trivia: Star Trek TOS actor alert - Phillip Pine appeared in The Savage Curtain, a 3rd season episode, in which he played a legendary villain.