Main cast: Orson Bean (Dr Hubbard), Robert Krantz (Lewis), and Bob Larkin (Jack Withers)
Director: Ernest Farino
When The Offering opens, Lewis wakes up in a hospital bed. Dr Hubbard, who knows him and his family well, tells him that he’s had a concussion as a result of a car accident, and Lewis had been out for 72 hours.
Well, that had to be one serious concussion, because Lewis later sneaks out of his room to visit his mother, a cancer patient a few rooms down, and finds a slug-like alien spitting out some leech-like things to infect her mother. Is that his overactive imagination, or is there something sinister happening in the hospital?
Notable author Dan Simmons wrote the screenplay of this one, which is based off his own 1987 story of the same name.
This episode loses me when Lewis immediately informs Dr Hubbard about how these slug-like aliens must be “cancer vampires” that must be drawn to the ward, which houses mostly people with terminal cancer, and I can only wonder what kind of person would immediately go to that line of thought. Is he a Fox Mulder groupie?
That’s the problem of this one: things jump from point A to Z very quickly, and I find myself wondering whether key scenes had to be removed from the final cut due to length constraint.
Lewis goes from guessing as to the nature of what he saw into somehow knowing everything there is to know about those slugs, and not once does he doubt that what he saw was real.
Well, it’s obvious that this whole episode is one big metaphor for one’s feeling of hopelessness against cancer, but with characters acting more like walking monologue and exposition, without behaving in ways that a typical person would in their situation, it’s hard to relate to or empathize with Lewis.
The symbolism is heavy, as is the preaching, but this episode never feels like a show as much as it is Dan Simmons trying tad too hard to be heavy-handed and philosophical. The episode has some hilariously dated bad special effects, which further undermines Mr Simmons’s efforts.
All in all, this is an episode that tries to do too much, only to miss the mark completely.
