Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Joel McHale, Nadia Hilker, Michelle Ang, Tim Armstrong, Brandon Jay McLaren, Jordan Peele, Michael Adamthwaite, Mark Silverman, Amy Rotifer.

It is in the arrogance of our species that we believe we have the unalienable right to investigate all that we see, not out of curiosity and how we can live alongside all things natural and unexplained, but out of a wanton desire to manipulate, to influence, too confirm our mastery over all we survey.

Science fiction on film and television has made the most of this sense of entitlement to the point where it driven home our failings, that our curiosity always gives way to control and who profits from that human weakness, that it is surprising that we continue to rape, pillage and burn our planet and all that live upon it, just because we cannot see the difference between the exploration of inquisitiveness and the hope of profit it may bring.

The Godmother of them all is arguably the cinematic classic Alien itself, and whilst other films have offered a similar resonance, it is the film to which other warnings of human interest have laid out as the peak of the dangers of meddling. Whether it is in films such as The Thing, The Descent, or even The Abyss, there is natural element to these films, whether horror based or not, that suggests humanity search for knowledge is always hand in hand with what can be gained in a monetary sense for the efforts of questioning the universe.

So inevitably, and not for the first time, The Twilight Zone turns to the idea of such human existence, and in the episode 8, the inevitable kicks back, and whilst the story revolves around a scientific research team in the Antarctic and their horrifying discovery in the deep, it is to the creature itself that interest of the episode lays.

There are moments in which the nature of the beast that the scientists encounter is to be seen resembling that of a virus under a powerful microscope, it is in that the fascination of the sea creature that the action finds a way to bludgeon its way past the almost uneventful and surprisingly short tale; and whilst the two states of existence are not joined, the virus and the octopus, it is nevertheless unnerving to see how the ‘brain’ operates in much the same way in Glen Morgan’s script.

An episode of The Twilight Zone that arguably would have profited more as a film, where the characters, including those of Joel McHale’s Orson Rudd and Michelle Ang’s Ling, would have been fleshed out and studied with greater effect, offering a further view of the tension between studious research and profit driven examination; but which, in the end, feels as though it was rushed for time and not given the moment to emulate The Thing in which it arguably doffs it creative hat to.

Ian D. Hall