The Twilight Zone had its share of extra-terrestrials, but first contact and alien invasion were really specialties of The Outer Limits. The was true right from the start—the very start. The first episode aired that under the title, “The Galaxy Being” was very slightly re-edited from the unaired pilot, appropriately known as “Please Stand By.” That “being” was from another galaxy, who did respond well when he suddenly found himself in our world. In honor of the show’s 60th anniversary, the original pilot screens tonight at UCLA.
Sit back and enjoy, because cosmic forces will be controlling the transmission we are about to watch. Allan Maxwell is a brilliant scientist, who uses his radio station as a cover for his underground SETI research. Basically, his DJ-brother Gene “Buddy” Maxwell programs polite jazz and bachelor pad-ish easy listening. It was probably a good spot on the dial to hear Joe Bushkin and Eddy Duchin, if you could pick-it up. Dr. Maxwell deliberately keeps the output low, so it does not interfere with his own experiments.
Much to his surprise, Maxwell’s microwaves create a link through which he and a mysterious alien from Andromeda start communicating. The scientist could continue their trans-galactic exchange all day, but his wife insists he attend their local town’s long-planned awards ceremony in his honor. He turns the station’s output down even further, to maintain a stable connection, while the “Galaxy Being” “holds the line,” but the fill-in DJ cranks it way up, inadvertently dragging the alien into our world. Havok soon follows.
Obviously, the network picked up Outer Limits, but they had creator Leslie Stevens (who wrote and directed the pilot) somewhat water-down its intensity. They also cut a line from the Galaxy Being that suggested his people might just come to Earth and kick our butts, now that they knew of our existence. That is especially unfortunate, because it represents one of the earliest pop-culture manifestations of Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest” concept, decades before the Chinese novelist’s Three-Body trilogy.
