User Reviews

I was 7 years old when this was broadcast. The first three episodes of season two were ultimately disappointing and I was not terribly excited about watching another tepid episode. My father's interest had waned as well but I managed to watch this up to a point and ended up walking away. I ended up buying the series on DVD as I promised myself I would if the future ever allowed this. It did!! Though, I bought it for the first season only having found so few of the second season worthwhile. So now I've watched this episode a few times. Like the first three of this season it isn't entirely terrible but it isn't all that original either. We sort of covered the expanding human mind in the first season with 'The Sixth Finger' and 'The Man With The Power' and did it more fantastically. Here, it is a Jekyll/Hyde story with an obvious comment on the drug culture of the 60s. Ho hum. He takes the drug which he mixes up in his kitchen and gets a pronounced brow, heavy cheekbones and a bulkier frame. The strength he exhibits as he holds a security guard off of the ground while he putters around in the cupboards he has broken into was compelling. And he can hypnotize people, too, folks! Naturally, with this drug-induced gift comes the usual delusions of grandeur as he attempts to recruit -- or should I say force a friend to join him in his mad quest. When this doesn't work as planned it becomes a hostage situation where the Hyde-persona is shot a few times but shakes it off since he is able to control his bleeding....or so he thinks. He hobbles out the street, bleeds, and dies. Why? No idea. If it was simply the failure of his concept of his true abilities then that is a mediocre way for an Outer Limits fiend to die. He only thought he couldn't die?? Lame! I considered alternate reasons - one being that one of the bullets had shattered a bottle of one of the ingredients he was carrying in his pocket and overdosed him, etc. Oh well. He just dies and reverts back to his original self in a very unoriginal ending to yet another episode that fails to go to critical mass.

From 1953-1964, the U. S. government conducted behavioral modification research on people in which they tested, among other things, the utility of hypnosis and LSD for clandestine purposes. Noted actor Cary Grant was an unwitting participant in some of these experiments for a brief period of time. This episode appears to draw on those early experiments delving into 'consciousness expanding substances', and just as in the present day, funding for it might have been threatened by opposition withholding a three million dollar donation if it were to proceed. Fearful of such a contingency, Dr. Roy Clinton (Skip Homeier) takes it upon himself to mix a mind expanding cocktail that transforms him into a super-human with an intelligence and body strength to match. It also mutates his physical appearance to resemble a shape shifting alien of sorts, something on the order of a Star Trek Klingon. Ominous music pervades the story as a police detective (James Doohan) investigates the destruction and body count left in Clinton's path. A confrontation occurs in which Clinton is shot with no apparent harm, somewhat contradictory since the consciousness expanding drug wouldn't have provided invulnerability, would it? Quite abruptly however, Clinton collapses from the trauma of his experience and reverts back to normal human form, whereby the CE substance wears off and he begins to bleed and die from the gunshot wounds he sustained. I didn't take this episode to be as much an anti-drug message as it was a warning against reckless experimentation with no effective control parameters, and a potential outcome that could turn into a blight on humanity.

This episode usually gets thrown away as one of the worst OL episode ever and while I can see that the story just drags on and on, you gotta give it credit for tackling the surely-taboo-in-1965 topic of consciousness expanding drugs ! In fact, it is AMAZING that some of the dialogue spoken in this episode made it passed the censors and on the air back then ! At some point, Keith Andes tells his now Schwarzneggerian-looking-scientist-brother-in-law that he's doing things that only God should be allowed to do. The madman's answer : - What if God is too busy ? Far out, Man ! Another highlight is the groovy scene of the Asian doctor coming back from a drug-induced coma and describing in very poetic terms the effects of LSD on his perception of the world ! Cooooool stuff indeed in 1965 ! Too bad the episode didn't focus on that instead of giving us boring scenes of one character following another one in order to fill the episode's running time ...

Well-acted, with decent dialogue, but too much of a murder mystery for what TOL is - or what it should have been. Not to mention that it's a mere reworking of the overly recycled "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" story.

Or the fact that it was obvious early on who the killer was. Certainly the fact that he had very ugly Picassos hanging on his walls were an indication he may be an empathy-free hipster, if nothing.

It isn't clear at all why Clinton was planning to "kill thousands more", as he put it. I mean, not Bill Clinton; we know he'd happily do away with far more than that, but why the character Dr Clinton would have the need to assassinate so many people makes very little sense. As a supposedly highly evolved mutant he should have been smart enough to realize that leaving a huge trail of blood would inevitably lead to his capture. Not to mention that their scientific team can't possibly have that many enemies; not even close.

I can accept the generic plot-device that a special brain serum makes Clinton ultra-intelligent (obviously, not Bill), a master hypnotizer and even that it turns him into a psychopath with a completely different personality. What I find way too far-fetched is his new-found immunity to being shot at from close range, numerous times. The serum may control the brain's potential, but how the hell can it alter the most basic principles of biology and physics?

Somewhat iffy also is the fact that Clinton the Hyde plays his cards so stupidly and recklessly in the end, effectively proving that he may have gained far more arrogance from the serum than intelligence. Perhaps another parallel with Bill...