The Outer Limits (1995 - 2002)
S01 E01
"Sandkings"
Gods, Fathers, Sons, And Bugs
A batter walks to the plate. The pitcher throws. Minimally, there’s either going to be a hit or a miss; but quantum physicists will remind you that the universe is much vaster than just offering up two possibilities. For example, the pitcher could slip to the right and bean the batter in the skull, and the resulting injury could make it unlikely that he’ll wake up any time soon. Or – in an even stranger twist of fate – the stadium could collapse, ending the game if not the lives of everyone present. If we apply our imagination, then there’s always more than one way …
… except when it comes to the scripts of television science fiction writers, it seems. In their minds, a scientist is either good or he’s evil. He either serves mankind or he serves himself. Granted, there may be a narrative hiccup here or there, and those storytellers might give the fallen genius a chance to redeem himself in the last act, but there’s rarely room for anything else when weaving grand tapestries.
Such is the case with The Outer Limits’ 1995 premiere episode, “Sandkings.”
The Story
Dr. Simon Kress (the reliable Beau Bridges) has committed the last ten years of his life to studying a Martian lifeform returned to Earth in a soil sample collected by a robotic probe; so he’s naturally disillusioned when his boss Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) seizes control of the program, transfers it to a different facility, and pulls Kress off the roster of specialists studying the alien insects. Instead of moving on with his life, Kress decides to do the unthinkable: he steals a number of unhatched eggs on his last day, setting up his own terrarium in an unused barn behind his home, so that he can continue his research without interruption.
It doesn’t take long for Simon’s increasingly obsessive behavior to draw the attention of his lovely wife Cathy (Helen Shaver) and his son Josh (Dylan Bridges), and a fractured relationship with his aging father (Lloyd Bridges) – a former military man – only adds to the genius’s psychological hang-ups. When she realizes that their relationship is on the brink of total collapse owed in large part of Simon’s draining their life’s savings to fund his growing laboratory in secret, Cathy takes Josh away from the man, going to live with the retired colonel.
As fate would have it, the more successful Kress is with the Martian scorpions the more estranged he grows from everyday life. He discovers that there are two species of these bugs, and – after a time – he’s only able to conclude that they exist to remain at war with one another, a conflict that may in fact be his own creation: one species has taken to building massive castles in the sand, and they’ve adorned their largest structure with Simon’s face!
As Kress’s search to uncover more makes him careless, his negligence ends getting himself infected with a Martian venom, and it even pushes him to murder his former boss, Stockley. Before all is said and done, these Sandkings get out, and they’re hellbent on destroying Kress’s world in response to all of his tinkering with theirs!
The Review
In the course of growing my content on SciFiHistory.Net, I’ve mentioned before that I end up doing a lot of online research; and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been encouraged by like-minded folks to seek out and explore this particular two-part episode. I kid you not when I say that fans have dubbed it one of the finest examples of TV Science Fiction ever made (we fans do tend to speak fondly – if not to excess – of those things that inspire us), so perhaps some of my disappointment was owed to the fact that I was promised so, so much from this story. It isn’t that it’s bad: it’s just that it’s entirely predictable – from start to finish – and I honestly would’ve expected more knowing that it’s a Melinda Snodgrass adaptation of a George R.R. Martin novel.
For those of you raised on an island, Martin is the Fantasy genius behind HBO’s Game Of Thrones and Snodgrass has contributed some solid work to the worlds of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sliders, and (non-SciFi) Reasonable Doubts, a fantastic TV procedural starring Mark Harmon and Marlee Matlin. Given the strength of these two imaginative storytellers as well as the web-based raves I’ve been subjected to for years, I think I was spoiled to this experience: Bridges never quite comes through as an authentic genius, Shaver is utterly wasted as a kinda/sorta doting housewife, and the finale ends up teaching us very little about what tomorrow’s challenges may bring as all of these folks are too tied up in getting ahead today.
The narrative openly toys with notions of manhood, Godhood, and fatherhood – all at the same time – but Snodgrass’s script never quite comes clean with what it wants to say about them collectively or individually. (As I’ve never read the Martin book, I can’t say if any of that is owed to the source.) At one point, Kress seems to imply that he’s never “good enough” to fill out the shoes required of any of those respective responsibilities; and all I can say is that – come the conclusion – I’d have to agree with him! As a scientist, he’s constantly ignoring rules; as a father, he never seems all that interested with his son; and as a man he never takes an interest in his wife or father to the point wherein one might conclude these problems aren’t of his own creation. If that’s all there is to life, then why tell this story? Don’t we already know that? Isn’t that something we’re already living? Doesn’t that defeat the point of considering how two disparate cultures – Earth and Martian – might interact?
Cinematically, we’ve been treated to alien invasion stories one after the other, but I suspect that what was being tried here was a tale wherein we – mankind – were actually the invaders, though we didn’t know it as the perspective was dramatically altered. In Sandkings, we brought the aliens here – to our world – and then we tried to force them to fit our understanding of life, albeit in an indirect and perhaps unintended way. We put them in a bubble; we saw them grow; and we dished out the usual punishment and rewards, never knowing all the while that while we were watching them they were watching us … and they secretly didn’t like what they saw.
For what it’s worth, I thought Beau Bridges was all wrong in this role. His Kress seems more aging ‘flower child’ than he does legitimate scientist, some of which is owed to his ponytailed get-up and his all-too-laidback nature. He’s constantly rejecting authority, ignoring lab proprieties, and risking his reputation on a whim. In my travels, I have met a few scientists, and – while I would say many of them had terrific senses of humor – none of them acted anything like this fictional creation; and I happen to think that’s all that was done here – Kress was more of a storyteller’s device than he was a researcher because that’s what was needed to tell this particular story. While I can understand and appreciate the invention, I’d still argue a character like this wouldn’t survive in the real world.
The finale ends up being a fairly formulaic affair: the bugs are well on their way to seizing control of the Kress household, but Simon sacrifices himself in order to save what might remain of an already fragile humanity. By this time, however, I had stopped caring about him as a person, so there was little investment in seeing the aliens vanquished when given so shabby a protagonist. I didn’t care about Kress’s comeuppance or his predictable redemption. In one estimation, Kress got what he deserved, and perhaps that’s why audiences are granted a final shot to show that the Martian threat survived and might be back to rule another day: if that’s the case, then let’s hope Earth can pony up a less self-centered scientist for the next campaign.
All of my nitpicking aside, I would agree that Sandkings is still a very well-made production for The Outer Limits. This two-parter functions like a solid telefilm, presenting a relatable SciFi scenario for fans to enjoy. The CGI is definitely a bit dated by today’s standards (I’m penning this review over twenty years after it first aired), but it’s still passable for the purposes of entertainment. And who among us isn’t occasionally creeped out by bugs?
Final Thoughts
The notions of Gods, fathers, and sons are never quite unearthed in “Sandkings,” a name itself that denotes some fascination with royalty; and I desperately wanted it to add up to something greater. Performances are good – never grand – but more talent was wasted than elevated in this color-by-numbers ‘twist’ on the classic alien invasion story.
… except when it comes to the scripts of television science fiction writers, it seems. In their minds, a scientist is either good or he’s evil. He either serves mankind or he serves himself. Granted, there may be a narrative hiccup here or there, and those storytellers might give the fallen genius a chance to redeem himself in the last act, but there’s rarely room for anything else when weaving grand tapestries.
Such is the case with The Outer Limits’ 1995 premiere episode, “Sandkings.”
The Story
Dr. Simon Kress (the reliable Beau Bridges) has committed the last ten years of his life to studying a Martian lifeform returned to Earth in a soil sample collected by a robotic probe; so he’s naturally disillusioned when his boss Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) seizes control of the program, transfers it to a different facility, and pulls Kress off the roster of specialists studying the alien insects. Instead of moving on with his life, Kress decides to do the unthinkable: he steals a number of unhatched eggs on his last day, setting up his own terrarium in an unused barn behind his home, so that he can continue his research without interruption.
It doesn’t take long for Simon’s increasingly obsessive behavior to draw the attention of his lovely wife Cathy (Helen Shaver) and his son Josh (Dylan Bridges), and a fractured relationship with his aging father (Lloyd Bridges) – a former military man – only adds to the genius’s psychological hang-ups. When she realizes that their relationship is on the brink of total collapse owed in large part of Simon’s draining their life’s savings to fund his growing laboratory in secret, Cathy takes Josh away from the man, going to live with the retired colonel.
As fate would have it, the more successful Kress is with the Martian scorpions the more estranged he grows from everyday life. He discovers that there are two species of these bugs, and – after a time – he’s only able to conclude that they exist to remain at war with one another, a conflict that may in fact be his own creation: one species has taken to building massive castles in the sand, and they’ve adorned their largest structure with Simon’s face!
As Kress’s search to uncover more makes him careless, his negligence ends getting himself infected with a Martian venom, and it even pushes him to murder his former boss, Stockley. Before all is said and done, these Sandkings get out, and they’re hellbent on destroying Kress’s world in response to all of his tinkering with theirs!
The Review
In the course of growing my content on SciFiHistory.Net, I’ve mentioned before that I end up doing a lot of online research; and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been encouraged by like-minded folks to seek out and explore this particular two-part episode. I kid you not when I say that fans have dubbed it one of the finest examples of TV Science Fiction ever made (we fans do tend to speak fondly – if not to excess – of those things that inspire us), so perhaps some of my disappointment was owed to the fact that I was promised so, so much from this story. It isn’t that it’s bad: it’s just that it’s entirely predictable – from start to finish – and I honestly would’ve expected more knowing that it’s a Melinda Snodgrass adaptation of a George R.R. Martin novel.
For those of you raised on an island, Martin is the Fantasy genius behind HBO’s Game Of Thrones and Snodgrass has contributed some solid work to the worlds of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sliders, and (non-SciFi) Reasonable Doubts, a fantastic TV procedural starring Mark Harmon and Marlee Matlin. Given the strength of these two imaginative storytellers as well as the web-based raves I’ve been subjected to for years, I think I was spoiled to this experience: Bridges never quite comes through as an authentic genius, Shaver is utterly wasted as a kinda/sorta doting housewife, and the finale ends up teaching us very little about what tomorrow’s challenges may bring as all of these folks are too tied up in getting ahead today.
The narrative openly toys with notions of manhood, Godhood, and fatherhood – all at the same time – but Snodgrass’s script never quite comes clean with what it wants to say about them collectively or individually. (As I’ve never read the Martin book, I can’t say if any of that is owed to the source.) At one point, Kress seems to imply that he’s never “good enough” to fill out the shoes required of any of those respective responsibilities; and all I can say is that – come the conclusion – I’d have to agree with him! As a scientist, he’s constantly ignoring rules; as a father, he never seems all that interested with his son; and as a man he never takes an interest in his wife or father to the point wherein one might conclude these problems aren’t of his own creation. If that’s all there is to life, then why tell this story? Don’t we already know that? Isn’t that something we’re already living? Doesn’t that defeat the point of considering how two disparate cultures – Earth and Martian – might interact?
Cinematically, we’ve been treated to alien invasion stories one after the other, but I suspect that what was being tried here was a tale wherein we – mankind – were actually the invaders, though we didn’t know it as the perspective was dramatically altered. In Sandkings, we brought the aliens here – to our world – and then we tried to force them to fit our understanding of life, albeit in an indirect and perhaps unintended way. We put them in a bubble; we saw them grow; and we dished out the usual punishment and rewards, never knowing all the while that while we were watching them they were watching us … and they secretly didn’t like what they saw.
For what it’s worth, I thought Beau Bridges was all wrong in this role. His Kress seems more aging ‘flower child’ than he does legitimate scientist, some of which is owed to his ponytailed get-up and his all-too-laidback nature. He’s constantly rejecting authority, ignoring lab proprieties, and risking his reputation on a whim. In my travels, I have met a few scientists, and – while I would say many of them had terrific senses of humor – none of them acted anything like this fictional creation; and I happen to think that’s all that was done here – Kress was more of a storyteller’s device than he was a researcher because that’s what was needed to tell this particular story. While I can understand and appreciate the invention, I’d still argue a character like this wouldn’t survive in the real world.
The finale ends up being a fairly formulaic affair: the bugs are well on their way to seizing control of the Kress household, but Simon sacrifices himself in order to save what might remain of an already fragile humanity. By this time, however, I had stopped caring about him as a person, so there was little investment in seeing the aliens vanquished when given so shabby a protagonist. I didn’t care about Kress’s comeuppance or his predictable redemption. In one estimation, Kress got what he deserved, and perhaps that’s why audiences are granted a final shot to show that the Martian threat survived and might be back to rule another day: if that’s the case, then let’s hope Earth can pony up a less self-centered scientist for the next campaign.
All of my nitpicking aside, I would agree that Sandkings is still a very well-made production for The Outer Limits. This two-parter functions like a solid telefilm, presenting a relatable SciFi scenario for fans to enjoy. The CGI is definitely a bit dated by today’s standards (I’m penning this review over twenty years after it first aired), but it’s still passable for the purposes of entertainment. And who among us isn’t occasionally creeped out by bugs?
Final Thoughts
The notions of Gods, fathers, and sons are never quite unearthed in “Sandkings,” a name itself that denotes some fascination with royalty; and I desperately wanted it to add up to something greater. Performances are good – never grand – but more talent was wasted than elevated in this color-by-numbers ‘twist’ on the classic alien invasion story.