Yes, you all know that I rate movies by their plausibility and how they bend or break the rules of reality. Well, there was one episode of the 90's version of the Outer Limits that really amazed me.
In this episode, a scientist was developing a machine designed to reverse the age of its target. He tried using it on his dying wife, but it killed her instead.
He moved away from that home and moved next door to an elderly couple. The woman in that couple became friends with the scientist and he developed feelings for her. He told her of his experiments and she gave him a suggestion to perfect his machine which he tried and it worked. Her suggestion was about balance and donation, like blood donation. But in this case, it was youth donation.
One night, the woman's husband seriously injured her and ran off. The scientist found her near death. So he decided to use his youth machine to reverse her injuries and regress her in age by a few decades. He used himself as the age donor.
He activated the machine and the woman was regressed to her mid-20s. He was aged by 30 years or so. When he talked to her and asked her what year she thought it was, she believed she was in the 1960s.
I was really amazed by the plausibility of this. In literally all TV shows or movies I've seen, reverse aging-machines or potions only reverse-age the body, but not the brain. You see, all of our thoughts, knowledge and memories are complex chemical chains in our cerebral cortex. Everytime we learn something or gain a new memory, a new chemical chain is formed.
But another plausible thing this episode of the Outer Limits amazed me with was when the scientist aged himself 30 years, he didn't get any future memories he would get in those 30 years. It seems whoever wrote this episode really went out of his or her way to make this episode as realistic as possible, given the fact the reverse-aging machine is pure fantasy and will never be reality.
It's always a treat when movie makers take the time to actually think about the scientific principles they're presenting in their movies and TV shows. One of my gripes about direct to video stuff is the people who make them don't even have a layman's knowledge of the subject matter they're dealing with.
I don't want to turn this into a "your favorite Outer Limits episode"thread,but wasn't there an episode starring Howie Mandel?A pretty good one too.I wish they would release the other seasons on DVD.