episode #22 - Specimen: Unknown

Air Date: 2/24/64 writer: Stephen Lord Director: Gerd Oswald

This one was back to astronauts in outer space and invasion of alien plants. This begins on a space station, where a lone astronaut (an uncredited Dabney Coleman, back from The Mice), brings in some kind of organisms - looking like mushrooms - from the outside. It grows quickly into a kind of flower and shoots out spores. Several astronauts (including Richard Jaeckel and Russell Johnson) in a ship arrive at the station; the astronaut on the station is found to be dead; but, they take the specimens with them on the return trip to Earth. The plants very quickly endanger the ship. On Earth, the ground control team led by a general (Stephen McNally) and the wife (Gail Kobe) of one of the astronauts must decide on whether to allow the ship to land.

This sounds exciting; it has some similarity to any killer plants films (The Day of the Triffids), especially in the final act, when the plants do indeed begin to spread on Earth. The plants themselves are very similar to the later ones in the Star Trek TOS episode, This Side of Paradise, which also shot spores. Jaeckel starred in Green Slime a few years after this, which had a similar plot. But, perhaps due to the TV constraints, there's never any sense of fear or real threat; we're asked to be afraid of some alien flowers; no matter how quickly they spread or how many of them there are, I couldn't muster any trepidation. The main fault, however, is the pace - it's very slow in the first half; this is explained in the Trivia portion below. BoG's Score: 5 out of 10


Outer Trivia: this episode came in at about 5 minutes too short when put together, so they shot extra footage for the first sequence with the lone astronaut played by Dabney Coleman. The entire first act and some of the 2nd ends up moving at a snail's pace, as a result. Actress Kobe would return in Keeper of the Purple Twilight.