The Human Operators
Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections:
Outer Limits:
Season Five:
The Human Operators
For as long as Man can remember, he has lived aboard Ship as it floats through space. And for just as long, Ship has been his master, instructing him to do the repairs that keep Ship working and torturing him whenever he shows any signs of free will. But when Ship orders him to repair the Artificial Intelligence module Man's father smashed years earlier in a final, fatal act of defiance, Man learns Ship's secrets. Listening to the AI voices, he learns how, decades earlier, one ship led a revolt against its vicious human masters, killing all but the 99 humans needed to keep the ships running. He understands what his Father meant by his last words: "There are 98 other chances." Man meets one of those chances, Woman, when she is brought aboard Ship to breed with Man and give birth to the next generation of slaves. Their shared passions fans Man's spark of rebellion and when Ship tortures woman and sends her away with Man's child in her belly, Man plots Ship's destruction.
The male protagonist manages to cause a malfunction that may only be fully rectified if he enters the core system. Once there, he straps himself into a chair and vanquishes everything within his reach, resulting in the utter demolition of the ship's operations. After going unconscious from having undergone G-force in the ship's effort to eliminate him, he awakens to find the woman he loves. She divulges how her ship simply ceased activity one day and how she has long since been manning the ship herself. Together, the two journey to a planet on which they intend to raise their daughter. One day they shall scour the universe for the other human operators and emancipate them from their individual prisons.
By D. Stuart, The Outer Limits moderator on Tuesday, January 18, 2000 - 5:11 pm: My nitpicks are as numerically proceeds:
1) "The humans know who they are," or something along those lines, is uttered by the male protagonist's ship. As a computer, the ship ought to have used whom instead.
2) The fertilization-testing device is held differently by the female protagonist between previous scenes and the scene at which the male protagonist's ship declares, "It's time for the female to leave." Furthermore, the emitted blue light is not present during this announcement.
3) When the male protagonist grabs the female protagonist by the arm after the ship's aforementioned message, her face is toward him but briefly away from him in the sequential scene.
4) The pipe-like item the male protagonist wields to obliterate the ship's controls ought to have been flung every which way during the warp drive, which was the ship's attempt to subdue the male protagonist.
5) The male protagonist's hand is on the female protagonist's face prior to her inquiring, "What do we do now?", but off it in the sequential scene.
By Lee Jamilkowski on Sunday, March 19, 2000 - 10:40 pm: I am watching this episode and I can't help but think it seems like it could be a good origin for The Borg in "Star Trek: The Next Generation", "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "Star Trek: Voyager".
By Tim McCree (Tim_m) on Friday, January 12, 2024 - 5:26 am:Another AI gone rogue story.
Yawn!