Main cast: Juliet Mills (Cara Raymond) and Tony Fields (Sebastian)
Director: TK Hudson
Outpost is a magnificent example of an episode that tries to serve up some deep existential drama, but it forgets that it needs to have something worth telling the audience in the first place.
Set in some distant future, the company Hephaestus offers people with terminal diseases the option of being “bioengineered”: their minds will be wiped and their bodies completely remade into shambling mutant-like beings.
Well, the catch here is that these creatures are not considered citizens and have no rights, so they end up “volunteering” to man the company’s various mining outposts on distant planets. Failing to meet the shipment quota means that the outpost will be shut down and the bioengineered staff will be left to die.
It is one such case that sees outpost inspector Cara Raymond coming down to see what Sebastian is up that he is falling behind on his stipulated quota. What ensues is the her trying to get Sebastian to give her something that she can report and vamoose ASAP, while he instead babbles on and on about how he is hearing voices in his head.
The biggest issue I have with this one is that, my god, it goes on and on for what seems like forever as the conversations keep going in circles. Worse, the twist is pretty easy to see coming the moment Cara opens up about a husband that got bioengineered and she never saw him again, only there is so much babbling to further sit through before this very obvious thing is dropped.
The babbling is annoying to sit through because everything about it feels stilted and contrived. Cara is abrasive and dismissive, then suddenly she’d open up about her past for no good reason, before going back to being her previous self again—in other words, she behaves according to what the plot dictates instead of coming off like a halfway believable character. Sebastian, meanwhile, babbles in what the script clearly hopes to be a profound and philosophical manner, but he’s just serving up gobbledygook and deliberately vague or opaque nonsense in a circular manner.
Adding to my pain is Juliet Mills’s loud and abrasive voice, as each time she utters her lines, I feel as if sharp jagged glass shards were shoved into my eardrums!
In the end, this episode has nothing profound or new to say, and instead what seems like a tedious kind of forever to get to the ending. It thinks it is so smart, babbling to a captivated audience, when the audience members are actually looking at their watches and praying for the whole thing to end so that they can flee the room.
