Out of the Unknown: Welcome Home
Spoiler warning: this blog post gives away the reason for the mystery
Only a few months ago this show had never appeared in over a decade of TV blogging and here it is for a second time. Just to recap: Out of the Unknown (1965 to 1971) is a science fiction anthology series. You will read on the internet (apart from you and me the least reliable source of information ever) that in its final series it abandoned the science fiction to go over to horror and fantasy, but I don't think that's true. And it was at that point I knew this episode would be appearing here.
You see, this episode is about a man who has been in hospital after a car accident for a lengthy time (again, for some reason, the summaries on the internet say it was a psychiatric hospital but I can see no in indication of this myself, in fact we actually see the car accident and the remaining scar he has) who is discharged and goes home to his wife without telling her as a surprise. Only when he gets there he finds that she can't remember him and another man is in the cottage pretending to be him, and this episode is about the events that unfold. To my delight this means the main three characters are called Dr Bowers, Dr Bowers, and Mrs Bowers. I'm not going to get any names wrong here, am I.
All very mysterious and of course my summary above makes it sound like a mystery, because the mystery is what is going on. This is the real fundamental problem with this episode, that it sets the viewer up to expect a mystery and you will read the disappointment all over the internet. In fact this is at base a science fiction story and if it had been written from the perspective of the other two characters rather than the man discharged from hospital this problem would have been avoided.
The reason I insist that this is science fiction is that it should be placed correctly in its time, and it was broadcast in 1971. Regular readers will be familiar with the concern about what psychiatrists might soon be able to do expressed a few years before in The Prisoner: we see doctors swapping people's personalities, planting ideas in people's minds, reading people's minds under the influence of drugs, and so on. Out here in the real world LSD therapy was being trialled in NHS hospitals, rogue psychiatrist RD Laing was doing rebirth therapy and wasn't charged for possession of LSD because he was a psychiatrist. Out in more mainstream psychiatry the use of abreaction to release traumatic memories wasn't that far behind; people were still being therapeutically put into comas with insulin and all sorts of strange things were going on. There was an idea that therapy and/or psychopharmacology would provide all sorts of new answers to human problems of the mind, and this show is very much in the same tradition of The Prisoner, of being concerned about this progression.
When I say that the solution to the mystery here is that it turns out the fake husband has been using an experimental drug on everyone we see in the show to persuade them that our man discharged from hospital isn't who he thinks he is, this show suddenly slots right into the concerned tradition I outline above. It isn't at base a mystery, at base it is a science fiction show with a concern about the unethical trial of the drug.
Personally, though, I think it is very well worth watching, purely for the suspense, even if the mystery aspect does rather obscure the story's simple outline. I also don't think it is spoiled by a couple of problems with the plot. The first is that it is slightly incredible that the experimental drug has brainwashed everyone in the cast except one man, however as I say, this is fiction and if you can suspend disbelief about that, all well and good.
I was more irritated by the way the fake Dr Bowers injects the real Dr Bowers with some medicaton as soon as he gets home. Doctors, like anyone else, usually ring the police about intruders in their homes and if you start injecting complete strangers with medication, legally you are starting treatment and accepting a responsibility for them in a way which makes the constabulary less likely to take them off your hands. This scene was probably intended to set us up for the idea that medication would feature highly but it's a misstep.
Again, the episode would have been better if we hadn't seen Dr Bowers's discharge from the beginning but it had started with the house as if it was a sort of clinic, and if they'd had a couple of patients. The premise could have been set up by a few scenes of routine hospital stuff, with medication at all, before seeing Dr Bowers and Dr Bowers arguing about which was which. Mrs Bowers could have been a visitor but the experimental drug could have been given to all the staff and visitors to make the same effect without giving the show an appearance of being a mystery which would disappoint people. This variation would still have allowed lots of room for people to disbelieve Dr Bowers. It could even have been his own clinic taken over by an interloper.
So all in all, this episode is well worth watching for the suspense and the science fiction; just don't expect it to be a mystery and you won't find yourself writing a disappointed review on IMDb.
Image credit: Archive TV Musings.
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