episode #12 - The Borderland

Air Date: 12/16/63 writer and Director: Leslie Stevens

This episode has to do with scientists seeking answers - answers about other dimensions, other planes of existence. Do they find any answers here? No. This is just the attempt. In the plot, the group of scientists, led by the brilliant Ian Frasier (Mark Richman), manage to get funding from an eccentric millionaire who wants to contact his dead son. They now have resources to use the full power of a power station for about an hour to open a door to another dimension. Ian has another personal stake in this besides scientific inquiry - in an earlier foray, his left hand was reversed into a 2nd right hand (make sense? - it has to do with switching polarity). A fly in the ointment may be two mystics (Gladys Cooper & Alfred Ryder) who are resentful that their cash cow, the millionaire, has been taken over by the scientists.

This does have a radical thought-provoking premise for TV, that the afterlife may be just another dimension. Unfortunately, the scenes of the scientists going through their motions at the power station, fiddling with controls and so on, becomes an exercise in tedium - like watching paint dry. It's all very repetitive, highlighted only by a few moments when they test their process on a mouse. Even when Ian himself finally tries the dimensional doorway, we have to listen to him calling out to his wife (Nina Foch as a fellow scientist) over & over like a broken record ("Eva! E-e-evaa! EVA! Eva! E-e-e-e-Vaaaa!!!"). I also get the impression that writer/director Stevens found out he was able to use the production value of the power station and just wrote the story around this. BoG's Score: 5 out of 10

NOTE: another drawback is that the pre-credits sequence contains a scene which gives away the climax of the episode - a spoiler. BTW, this was only the 2nd episode to be produced.
Outer Trivia: Star Trek TOS actor alert - Ryder was in the first Trek episode to air, The Man Trap