We're nearing the ending of the year and we're also starting down the road to the end of Sapphire & Steel . Assignment 4 affords Erik and Kyle opportunities to discuss poetry, spooky photography, the poetry of prose, and whether P.J. Hammond is a pessimist. Fun!
Erik and Kyle take on Assignment 3 of Sapphire & Steel , in which the elemental time menders contend with, not things from the past, but beings from the dystopian future. Is it as good as ghosty ancient things? Well, it does have the first appearance of Silver...and a creepy baby man monster things. Neat!
This month, Erik and Kyle are going into an old dilapidated railway station full of war ghosts and stuff for Sapphire & Steel Assignment 2. We talk about the morality of fighting time ghosts, the sadness of war, and the pain of lost love. But, like, it's fun!
It's a new month, but it's also a new season! A very short new season, but a new season just the same. Erik and Kyle are looking at time fissures, ghost houses, and ambulatory alien element metal things. It's Sapphire & Steel! P.J. Hammond's landmark in weird sci-fi. We begin, sensibly, with Assignment 1.
Once again, Erik and Kyle have gotten to the end of a series! This month marks the final episode discussing The Outer Limits and they're thankfully ending with a bang. Story editor Seelag Lester is the subject, who wrote "Wolf 359," the amazing two-parter "The Inheritors" and the final episode ever, "The Probe." Next month, a new show has been assigned...
It's our penultimate episode about The Outer Limits , so why not talk about a bunch of crap? It's another of our now-ubiquitous episodes about writers who wrote only one episode. This time out it's "Cold Hands, Warm Heart," "Behold! Eck," "Expanding Human," and "The Premonition." Also, we've got announcements about our next two shows we're going to cover...
This month it's some episodes of The Outer Limits season 2. We cannot say fairer than that. It's a trio of stories more or less by two writers; Jerry Sohl adapted his own short story for "The Invisible Enemy," Milton Krims rewrote a Stephen Lord treatment into "Keeper of the Purple Twilight," and then Krims rewrote Sohl for "Counterweight." And that's not all the rewriting there was in these. Not by a longshot.
Friends! Because we're all having a rough go of it socially distancing, we thought we'd give you a little extra treat. The commentary we normally do once a month for our Patreon patrons is free for all to hear! And it's a good one. We talked about the Doctor Who episode "Oxygen" for our Who for Schools raffle winner, and for the commentary, Erik and Kyle are joined by podcast superstars Joy Piedmont and Shannon Dohar! Enjoy their commentary and some general Who chatter afterward. Stay safe and s...
This month, Kyle and Erik are back talking about The Outer Limits season two, and with it...a writer! It's Robert C. Dennis, a very prolific TV writer who here is adapting three short stories and re-writing another writer's story for a fourth. They are "Cry of Silence," "I, Robot" (no, not that one), "The Duplicate Man," and "The Brain of Colonel Barham". Some of these are good and some of them super aren't!
What's this now?! Why yes! Erik and Kyle have given The Outer Limits a break for a month in order to talk about Doctor Who again! As part of the Who For Schools initiative, a lucky raffle winner got to decide what New Who episode we discussed. The winner has chosen "Oxygen" by Jamie Mathieson. We're talking Capaldi, Nardole, Bill, and dystopian capitalism. Yay!
Happy New Year! And what could be happier than covering one of sci-fi's most famous writers? That's right, for episode one of our look at The Outer Limits season 2, we're talking about the great Harlan Ellison and his two scripts, "Soldier" and the immortal "Demon with a Glass Hand." Next month, it's more Doctor Who ...for a bit.
Can you believe it's been a year already? Kyle and Erik finish up their 12 months of discussing the first season of The Outer Limits with a countdown of their top 10 and bottom 5 episodes! Next year we begin season 2, with the two episodes written by the great Harlan Ellison! If you have a suggestion for a classic genre show to discuss after The Outer Limits , email us at erikandkyle@gmail.com!
This month, Erik and Kyle only have two episodes left in season one of The Outer Limits . Fittingly, they're both would-be spin-offs from each of the show's two driving creative forces. First up is "Controlled Experiment," a comedy take on sci-fi from series creator Leslie Stevens. Second is the bat-poop crazy "The Forms of Things Unknown" from head writer Joseph Stefano.
In this month's penultimate look at the first season of The Outer Limits , Kyle and Erik discuss four stories by four different writers, to varying degrees of interest. Those episodes are: "Specimen: Unknown" "The Guests" "Fun and Games" "The Special One" Two of them are really quite good!
This month, as we head to the end of The Outer Limits season one, we have a quartet of very odd stories, all featuring input from story editor and Joseph Stefano's right-hand man, Lou Morheim. These include "The Mice," "Second Chance," "Moonstone," and "The Chameleon." Robert Towne wrote that last one.
This month, Erik and Kyle keep digging deeper into the troubled psyche of The Outer Limits season 1's showrunner, Joseph Stefano. These three episodes--"The Invisibles," "The Bellero Shield," and "A Feasibility Study"--each represent the writer's best (and most upsetting) traits.
This month, Erik and Kyle are joined by writer, podcast, smart person extraordinaire, Paul Cornell to discuss the Outer Limits episode "Nightmare." "Nightmare" is a very somber episode about humans facing interrogation from a superior alien aggressor. Can their fragile Earth psyches take it?! This discussion goes deep on rules of engagement, interior storytelling, Southern Gothic Sci-fi, and writer Joseph Stefano's id and ego. Find Paul on Twitter , and check out his podcast, Hammer House of Pod...
This month we begin our look at The Outer Limits ' most important writer, producer, and story-shaper, Joseph Stefano. We go in-depth on "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "The Zanti Misfits," and "Don't Open Till Doomsday," and figure out what Gothic Sci-Fi really means.
This month, your faithful hosts have three stories from three different writers of The Outer Limits . First up is "The Human Factor" by David Duncan, an episode that seems like The Thing but is more like Face/Off . Next is "Corpus Earthling," a creepy little story about alien rocks by Orin Borsten. And finally, "Tourist Attraction" by Dean Riesner, a former child actor who went on to work with Clint Eastwood. Fun!
This month, Kyle and Erik look at two more writers of The Outer Limits . It's Jerome Ross, who wrote "The Man with the Power," and Anthony Lawrence, who wrote "The Man Who Was Never Born" and "The Children of Spider County." Enjoy!
An early contender for MVP writer of The Outer Limits season one, veteran TV writer Meyer Dolinsky wrote three fascinating and troubling episodes, two considered legitimate classics. First is "The Architects of Fear" which inspired Alan Moore's Watchmen ; the paranoid Cold War thriller "O.B.I.T."; and a legitimately weird one, "ZZZZZ" about a super attractive bee woman.
This month, Erik and Kyle delve further into The Outer Limits by talking about two episodes written by the writing team of Allan Balter and Robert Mintz ("The Hundred Days of the Dragon," "The Mutant"), and the one episode written by Ellis St. Joseph ("The Sixth Finger"). They get well into themes of bettering humanity, evolution, mutation, giant brains, giant eyeballs, goopy faces, and telepathy. And, you know, other things too.
Here we go! A new year and a new season. Erik and Kyle are embarking on their journey into the 1960s sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits , which ran for 49 episodes on ABC TV in the United States and has since been reappraised time and again. We know a thing or two about series that began in 1963 that have gone on to longevity. To begin, we look no further than the series' creator, Leslie Stevens, who wrote and directed four episodes during the first season. We're only talking about three o...
Hello everyone! Happy New Year! First and foremost, welcome to 2019 and The Writers Room's new direction. It's still Erik and Kyle discussing old TV sci-fi, but for the next year or so, we'll be talking about the original 1963-1965 series The Outer Limits . To start with, we're doing a bit of a primer about the series, how it came to be, who were the key creative types in charge of its 49 episodes, and what kinds of stories you can expect on the journey. First full episode about series creator L...
It all comes down to this! Erik and Kyle finish up their six-year journey into the writers of classic Doctor Who with part two of their listener question answer thing. Thank you to everyone for listening for this long (but very fun!) folly of ours. We'll continue to talk about Doctor Who going forward, but we're also jumping into new but similar shows, beginning with the original run of The Outer Limits !
This month, friends, it's all over bar the shouting. Kyle and Erik tackle some of YOUR questions and discussion topics about their six year journey into the writers and writing of the classic series of Doctor Who . On order are things like which script editors were the best, what Doctor/companion teams were best served on screen, and what we'd recommend to new viewers. As referenced in the episode, here's the blog of Erik's more specific recommendations for first-time classic whovians....
66 episodes down covering individual writers of classic Doctor Who , and only one to go. Crazy. Erik and Kyle finish up their revisitation of Eric Saward, six years after the initial foray, by talking about his two Dalek stories--Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks. One of them is good but not a Doctor Who story, the other definitely is a Doctor Who story but is terrible. What fun. The fellas also tell you what's coming in the new year for this podcast feed and let you know t...
The end is the beginning is the end! When we started our journey through the first 26 years of Doctor Who via the writers and the stories they wrote, we tried to start big, by tackling the stories written by '80s script editor Eric Saward, and in doing so, we bit off more than we could chew. So, to wind down The Writers Room mark 1, we're going back and doing Saward in two goes rather than just one. This month, it's "The Visitation," "Earthshock," and "Attack of the Cybermen." Do we think the sa...
Whoa. We did it, everyone. With this month's episode, we conclude our quest to discuss the first 26 years of Doctor Who via the writers and the stories they wrote. We're finishing the initial run with a bang, by talking about David Whitaker's two Dalek stories--"The Power of the Daleks" and "The Evil of the Daleks." Both are hailed as lost classics, and for good reason. Erik and Kyle break down all things obedience and extermination.
This month, Erik and Kyle continue their discussion of the Doctor Who writing of David Whittaker with a story that was almost totally missing up until five years ago, and now it's fully back and available to watch in all its glory, "The Enemy of the World," one of the most atypical stories of the entire 1960s, and certainly of the Second Doctor's era. Erik had never listened to or watched this story until now; was it worth the wait?
