One thing that will shock many people (including me) is uncovering the fact that this bomb of an episode was directed by none other than Byron Haskin, the same guy who directed George Pal's War of the Worlds. That movie and the way it shows the alien invaders to be almost indestructible is still creepy today, so I think it's safe to say Haskin was a flawless director when it came to sci-fi, right? Well, you'll think twice after viewing this. The Invisible Enemy begins with two astronauts landing on Mars as part of a space mission. Mission control back on Earth tells them to proceed carefully and be patient when awaiting new orders. Signals from the red planet take around 3 and a half minutes to reach earth, so by the time they get an answer, the astronauts could be lying dead at the bottom of a canyon somewhere. Sure enough, the two men are soon killed by some unknown attacker, and their fates are unresolved. 3 years pass. Another mars mission has been given the go ahead and the commanding officer selected this time is Major Merritt (Adam West). Serving under him are Captain Buckley, Lieutenant Johnson and Captain Lazzari. Once the ship lands, Merritt is tasked with finding out what happened to the ship that landed 3 years earlier. Lazzari exits the ship to look around, and is under strict orders to not stray out of Merritt's binoculars. When Lazzari finds a piece of mangled metal behind a piece of the ship's wreckage, he is heard screaming and Merritt loses visual with him. Johnson later ventures out with a nuclear rocket launcher in order to kill whatever made Lazzari disappear, but he is silently disposed of too. Merritt reports back to earth that two of his crew are missing with one presumed dead, and his superior tells him not to go outside the ship to look for them, as the ship will be leaving in a few hours. Merritt eventually falls asleep, allowing Buckley (minus his radio) to exit the ship and discover the thing that has killed Lazzari, Johnson, and the crew of the previous mission: a large, sand-dwelling creature with tusks. When Merritt awakes, he realizes Buckley is not in the ship, and tells mission control he's going after him. Although this is basically insubordination, he has to do it to save Buckley. Merritt finds him out in a large formation of sand, but the creature traps the former on a rock. Buckley says he's going to run diagonally across the sand in order to use himself as bait for the creature. When the alien is distracted, Merritt makes a run for it and uses the rocket launcher dropped by Johnson to blast it to pieces. Right after this, more sand creatures start appearing, so Merritt and Buckley hurry back to the ship and take off. Quite disappointing by Outer Limits standards. Based on a story written by Jerry Sohl (who worked on Twilight Zone), this episode simply falls flat because there is barely any tension. The monster (at least parts of it) appear very early, so when it starts showing up more regularly later on, you won't even care as much. Apparently, this was ABC's fault as in Jerry's story, the monster didn't appear fast enough. The plot is full of problems. The alien creature roars constantly (same sound effect as used in The Invisibles) but is completely absent from the audio recordings of the dying astronauts. Sadly, I think the most intriguing part of this episode is how the puppet of the creature was operated. The producers spread ground cork on top of a water tank and the puppet's head was maneuvered from below. In order to let the guy operating the puppet know where to steer it, they had to tap codes on the side of the tank. Overall, The Invisible Enemy is not very good. We're never given a reason why the sand monster is unable to kill Merritt as he lies stranded on the rock, but that's the least of its problems. Then again, Haskin was also responsible for arguably the two best episodes of this entire show (Architects of Fear and Demon with a Glass Hand) so maybe I'm being too unfair. It just seems inconceivable that the person behind those two also brought us this.
Review of The Invisible Enemy
