Spotlight on "The Duplicate Man"

by Mark Holcomb

True story: A week from the day I happened to read Clifford Simak's short story "Goodnight, Mr. James" for the first time, I also happened to catch "The Duplicate Man" on cable TV in the small hours of the morning, also for the first time.

This was in the mid-'70s, when cable was brand new (at least in rural southern Oregon), and one of the channels in our four-station package rotated feeds on a seemingly random basis. It was never certain what this channel would run at any given time—the four-hour block of programming from a Chicago station that lasted until 3 a.m. one Monday morning, and which included a 1 a.m. screening of The Outer Limits, would end at 11 p.m Sunday night the following week, and wrestling or hillbilly concerts or religious shows would drone on until daybreak instead. It was a frustrating crap shoot.

It was also kind of exciting. Syndicated showings of The Outer Limits had slowed to a trickle by then, and were spotty at best in Oregon anyway, so even the dim hope of catching an episode provided a thrill to thrill-deprived monster kids recently transplanted from Los Angeles to a backwater logging burg in the middle of nowhere. I'd generally take my chances, then, and struggle to stay awake past midnight, sneak out of bed long after everybody else in the house was asleep, and keep the television set's volume low enough so that no one was woken up (this meant sitting three feet from the box at most). I got lucky twice over that week—alone, as it turned out; David was already sawing logs, and I didn't have the heart to wake him. Sorry again, brother.

But imagine my sleep-deprived surprise when Simak's tale of an unwitting clone's battle with "psychotic" extraterrestrial contraband turned up on our all-time favorite television show, every episode of which I thought I'd long since committed to memory. I still don't know how I'd missed "The Duplicate Man" up until then when I could practically recite the dialogue from "The Premonition" by heart (and against my will), but somehow I had. No matter—thanks to a statistically unlikely coincidence and a lucky break from the fickle gods of cable TV, my unusual introduction to this episode gave it a permanent place of honor in my private Outer Limits canon.

Beyond this personal connection, "Duplicate" holds up beautifully in almost every way, and shines almost as brightly as its thematic kin "Demon with a Glass Hand" among second season episodes. It's arguably the best execution of Ben Brady's botched mission to adapt works of science fiction literature to the small screen, although Simak's story, first published in a 1951 issue of Horace Gold's Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, is a streamlined one-hander—or one hand and a claw—that required significant fleshing out from screenwriter Robert Dennis. "Goodnight" did feature a bona fide monster on the prowl to toss ABC's way, the telepathic puudly, "a clever and deadly killing machine which directed its rapacity and its cunning against every living thing that was not a puudly," but even that turned out to be too little, too late.

As DJS notes, "The Duplicate Man" is also the series' most notable attempt to situate a story in something other than the present. Its futuristic flourishes—video phones and flying-saucer-shaped houses; collarless mens suits and knotless ties; jet-age school-kid getups; souped-up jetcars; tricked-out sidearms; coin-operated orgasmatrons (just seeing if you're paying attention)—serve little purpose beyond propping up the central conceit of a society in which advanced cloning is the norm, but they're impressively consistent and a fun diversion from the exposition-heavy, occasionally repetitious narrative. They also help remove the episode even further from the martini-and-barbecue milieu favored in season two, although the Jameses opulent swimming pool and patio are heavily featured. (To be fair, the season turned its back on bougieland pretty early on, right after "Wolf 359.")

"Duplicate" is also the optimal showcase for Dennis's skill at adaptation. He has both more and less to work with here than the dull, kid-friendly antics of Adam Link offered, and opens up Simak's stripped-down bug hunt to feature both the real James and supply him with a wife (he's a bachelor in the story) while also remaining faithful to his source. Even better, Dennis turns James's dilemma into an existential crisis worthy of the The Outer Limits' first season. For those who favor the darker tone and more layered, character-driven inclinations of Joseph Stefano and crew (WACToids, you know who you are), "The Duplicate Man" is a welcome throwback. Henderson James is a complex, divided man burdened with the classically Stefanoesque traits of self-loathing, moral enervation, and a marriage that's gone as sour as last month's milk. But like other Stefano protags he's not quite past redemption, and the hope of reawakening held out by "Duplicate" makes it more deserving of being called "Second Chance" than the episode that actually bears that title.

There's a moment when this is made plain. Shortly before heading off for the climactic showdown, one of the Hendersons says, "A man has to be responsible for what he does." This simple statement, like the episode's ambiguous coda—possibly the most poignant since "The Architects of Fear"—recalls and effectively distills The Outer Limits's first-season ethos. And while watching the series from start to finish in production order for WACT purposes (OK, I cheated and skipped a few) has made me less of a second-season bigot than I used to be, "The Duplicate Man" reminds me of how much I miss the tough-love humanism that characterized Stefano's tenure. Brady tried hard, but his version just lacks teeth.

I guess that's as good a segue into a discussion of the episode's monster as any. Frankly, despite the obvious haste taken in getting the suit and mask assembled, the megasoid works for me. (Dennis changed the species' name to something harder-edged and more lethal sounding, but he also admirably worked "puudly" into the teleplay early on.) Never described in the story, Project Unlimited made the creature big, ugly, and crude, which is about what you'd expect from "the most bloodthirsty, hate-filled thing yet found in the Galaxy." It's also dotted with unsightly fleshy lumps that may well be meant as manifestations of its delicate condition. Even its quavering, John Fiedler-like voice adds an eerie, alien quality to the beast, although I would've liked to hear more of that and less of its chronic growling; I half-expected the thing to yelp when the Hendersons blasted it with their alterna-revolvers.

Other details work to give "Duplicate" some of that long-lost OL magic, including the resurgence of Helosian eyewear in its opening scene. Kenneth Peach acquits himself well in another dark-hued episode, a surprising amount of which takes place at night, and Gerd Oswald supplies the necessary mournful tone in his final exemplary Outer Limits assignment. The cast is also solid, although half-space mom/half-OL babe Constance Towers's Laura James succumbs to season two's aimless-housefrau syndrome and isn't given much to do until her wrenching climactic reconciliation with Henderson. Some of the supporting players really stand out, too. Sean McClory is fine as the boozing, megasoid-scarred Emmet, but he basically plays the same character no matter what he's in (see the 1968 Dean Martin western Bandolero! for proof); Ivy Bethune as the duplicate bureau official and Alan Gifford as the zoological garden guide, however, are memorable in their too-fleeting appearances. The only serious aesthetic drawback to "The Duplicate Man" is Harry Lubin's score. While we do get a second opportunity to hear the complex, haunting melody first used when Trent is resurrected in "Demon" (twice, and all the way through this time), the episode's other cues are cartoonish, grating and, by this point, gruelingly familiar. Somebody should've swiped the guy's theremin.

 

Even this is easy to overlook, though, considering that the episode is such a success so shockingly close to the sad, apathetic finale of The Outer Limits. "The Duplicate Man" never lets me down, and somehow never fails to be accompanied by a strange coincidence or two: Not only was Simak's story originally published 60 years ago this very month, but get a load of the year on that plaque hanging in the zoological gardens in the opening scene:

Timing really is everything.

Anyway, before I relinquish the pulpit and take my wife to Mexico for a belated honeymoon (we'll be on the lookout for Jonas Temple), here's what I learned from participating in WACT:

● Re-watching The Outer Limits in the virtual company a bunch of people I respect and admire is a lot more fun than watching it alone, even if we don't see eye to eye and they suspect I'm full of shit, and especially since this is probably the last time I'll watch quite a few of the episodes. (You couldn't pay me to re-watch some of them.) Thanks, everybody -- I understand better why I love this show because of your insights.

● The Outer Limits resists nostalgia, and in some cases openly critiques it ("Don't Open Till Doomsday," "The Guests," and, yeah, "The Duplicate Man"). So while it's fun to recall who and where we were when we first watched it, as my reverie above amply proves, it's most rewarding to experience the series for its timeless qualities. That is, to see it in right-now time, not way-back-when time...

● While The Outer Limits borrows from and flirts with and mimics several film and literary (and television) genres, when it's going full-tilt -- like in "The Invisibles," "The Zanti Misfits," "ZZZZZ" (you knew I'd work that one in somehow), "O.B.I.T.", and so on -- it's a genre unto itself.

● Despite its explicit and implicit humanism, The Outer Limits taps into a vein of pessimism and outright misanthropy that has yet to be outdone on network or even cable television. How big a vein? Biggest vein you ever saw. (Take that, WACT stooges.)

● Finally, The Outer Limits is art, and art belongs to us all.

All right, I've written enough to hang myself a dozen times over, but that's how this show affects me. No apologies, but a big, big thank-you to John and Peter for hosting this blog; it can't have been easy and I'm pretty sure it wasn't always fun, but they made it look like both the whole way through. Nice work, guys. And thanks, as ever, to Herr Schow, whose stubborn refusal to let The Outer Limits die expands all humans. Keep it up.

End of transmission.

Mark Holcomb writes about movies, television, books, and general pop-cultural ephemera for The Village Voice, The Believer, Time Out New York, Salon, and whoever else will have him. He first watched The Outer Limits in its original run as a highly impressionable, temperamentally morbid three year old, and hasn't been able to shake it since (not that he's tried). He and his twin brother, David, indulged their fascination with the series back in the pre-blog '90s, and their efforts live on here courtesy of David J. Schow.