Logan's Run First Watch

[Christopher]

One more issue of note about "The Innocent" is that the show has quickly forgotten the idea of people from the City growing up without families and not knowing their parents, and completely ignores the free-love hedonism of the movie's society. Logan and Jessica are portrayed as having a very conventional 20th-century view of romance and love, with Logan demurring to psychic girl Lisa that it takes time to get to know someone before deciding you love them. It's not surprising that the leads in a '70s TV show for family viewing would be written that way, but it's another way that the series erodes the premise it's based on in favor of more generic storytelling.


Moving on: "Man Out of Time" is David Gerrold's episode under the protest credit "Noah Ward," and if he objected to the way it was rewritten, I'd be curious to see the original, because the version we got is fantastic. Paul Shenar out-acts everyone else in the series to date as David Eakins, a time traveler from just before the nuclear holocaust, who comes forward 200 years to gain information on what caused the impending war so that he could prevent it. Which, of course, would mean that Logan et al. would never have existed, so there are some nice ethical debates and dramatic tension once the gang learns his true origins and mission, and once he begins to bond with them and have second thoughts about erasing their world.

It gets pretty confusing in parts, because he comes from something called the Sanctuary Project, which in 2319 has deteriorated into a bunch of illiterate, superstitious villagers who call their land Sanctuary and blindly worship the inactive computers as their temple, yet it quickly gets decided that it's not the same Sanctuary the gang is searching for, so it's a strange fakeout (maybe that was the part Gerrold objected to?). Aside from that, though, it's a potent story and a stronger science fiction piece than we've gotten so far, and it has a devastating, Twilight Zone-worthy twist at the end. And Shenar's fine performance elevates the whole thing, though it just underlines how bland Harrison and Menzies are in contrast.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

Very interesting, thoughtful and well-written commentary, but to me analyzing this series is like a gourmet food critic writing an article about a cheez-whiz sandwich. A couple of episode (if taken in isolation) are worth a discussion, such as this time-travel one, but others are beyond pointless and horrible. Mostly this was just a kids show, ironically often watched while redundantly eating cheez-whiz.

 

[Christopher]

Well, I'm watching it anyway, so I might as well talk about it. And I've reviewed cheesier shows on my blog.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

Well, I'm watching it anyway, so I might as well talk about it. And I've reviewed cheesier shows on my blog.

No problem. I'll read what you write. But, I can't help but feel that you have already put in more thought in your analysis than they did in the show.

 

[Christopher]

But, I can't help but feel that you have already put in more thought in your analysis than they did in the show.

I think that's too harsh. D.C. Fontana was surely trying to make a good, smart show; the fact that she hired writers like David Gerrold and Harlan Ellison should be proof of that. She was just working in an era when network execs were determined to dumb down SFTV to the lowest common denominator. The measure of a '70s SF show is what it managed to achieve despite that. And Logan so far has been showing occasional signs of life beyond mere formula.

Besides, I don't consider it a burden to think about things or pursue my curiosity. I'm revisiting a show from my youth, a show I barely remember anymore and want to refresh my memory of. If you think that's a waste of my time, then surely it's an even greater waste of your time to tell me that.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

... If you think that's a waste of my time, then surely it's an even greater waste of your time to tell me that.

No, that's not my point at all. It's not my place to judge what is a waste of your time, but my guess is that it is not since it relates to your profession.

As far as what's a waste of my time, discussions here are not any more a waste of time than any other relaxing activity. Like I said, if you write it, I'll read it, as it is interesting, thoughtful and well-written.

I enjoyed the show as a kid, and I watched it a few years ago when I bought the DVD set, and still enjoyed it. I'll probably watch it again soon, since reading this thread made me think about it. But, whatever the intent of Fontana, Gerrold and Ellison, the network execs apparently (as I'm learning from your words) "dumbed" it down so much as to make it a cheese sandwich for the kiddies. Sometimes a cheese sandwich is enjoyable and just what I'm in the mood for. But, if you want to analyze it, it's important to keep the context that it is a cheese sandwich for the kids and not a gourmet meal for the adults.

 

[Christopher]

But, if you want to analyze it, it's important to keep the context that it is a cheese sandwich for the kids and not a gourmet meal for the adults.

And I prefer to actually analyze rather than just hurling insults, thank you very much. I don't think the latter adds anything of value to a discussion.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

And I prefer to actually analyze rather than just hurling insults, thank you very much. I don't think the latter adds anything of value to a discussion.

Personally, I don't consider it hurling insults to call it a "cheese sandwich". At least I don't intend it as such. To me, it is a characterization of what it was (of course in my opinion). As I said, I enjoyed the show. For me, the cheesiness is good.

Value to the discussion? OK, I'll say no more about it and please continue adding it.

 

[FormerLurker]

The problem with the network execs, and the studio execs that were pandering to them, is that they had yet to learn the lesson from the '60s, mainly that intelligent shows draw wider audiences, regardless of genre. It wouldn't be until the '80s that they began to realize that the producers, directors and show-runners, along with their casts and crews, were putting out intelligent shows because they knew that already, and decided to follow along to see what worked. Even today some execs still make that mistake, though, and not only with fantasy and science fiction.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, one more detail from "Man Out of Time": We learn what Rem's name stands for. It's "Reclective Entity, Mobile," with "reclective" defined to mean "self-programming, problem-solving," although that doesn't seem to be an actual word.

Next up is "Half Life" by Shimon Wincelberg, in which our trio of wanderers gets caught up in a society that's basically institutionalized Kirk's transporter accident from "The Enemy Within" -- everyone is "processed" at age 6, split into "good" and "evil" halves, and the evil halves are banished into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Although the leader of the "Positives," the Patron (William Smith), is the kind who believes his form of enlightenment has to be imposed on everyone else whether they want it or not, and Jessica is split in two before Logan and Rem manage to escape. They have to ally with the evil-twin "Cast-Outs" to break back into the city and put Jessica back together, but Evil Jessica doesn't want to go back. They get help from the Patron's daughter, I think (though the IMDb summarist thinks she's his wife), who's played by a young Kim Cattrall, and who turns out to be the evil half masquerading as the good half, proving that the halves aren't so different after all.

I respect what this episode tried to do. It was attempting to explore a philosophical point the same way "The Enemy Within" did, to comment on the nature of good and evil and how we need both sides, but the execution is weak, with Logan and Rem's discussion of the issue just racing through it in a few sentences that feel tacked onto the story, though the later confrontation between the Patron and his doppelganger (amusingly named Modok) is more effective at conveying the point. Also, splitting Jessica doesn't really give any insights into her character, since both halves are pretty one-note, and she doesn't have that much established personality anyway. The processing sequence drags out way too long, and they run through the whole thing twice in reverse directions with Jessica, so there's a lot of padding that could've been devoted to more story. Also, the city's guards are in utterly ridiculous costumes, that kind of look as if Marty Feldman's Igor were wearing a clear version of one of those post-op conical pet collars over his head as a visor. So a nice try to do something with substance, but it doesn't quite work.


"Crypt" is Harlan Ellison's contribution, though with the teleplay credited solely to Al Hayes and Ellison just getting story credit. It sets up an impressively difficult situation for our heroes. They find a site where six great minds from just after the nuclear holocaust were stored in cryogenic stasis to preserve them from a plague, but the people who found the cure were unable to reach them, so they could only leave the cure for future generations to deliver. Our gang find their way down to the underground complex, but one of the two vials is destroyed in a tremor, so there's only enough cure for three of the six. (Amusing that in 2120, they still use glass vials to hold medicine.) So they're faced with the dilemma of choosing which three should live and which should die, and the survivors put that burden on Logan's group, as impartial outsiders.

However, it soon turns into more of a murder mystery when one of the five is killed in what seems like an accident, and Rem learns from a recording that one of the six is an impostor. So it's sort of a mix of scenes that engage interestingly with the moral dilemma and scenes that play more like a standard whodunnit. And when all the cards are laid on the table, it proves way too easy to identify the impostor through a process of elimination. But it has a nice resolution that ties into the show's core themes. Logan realizes that he fled from a society where the state took people's freedom to decide their own fates, and so he decides the survivors need to make the choice for themselves. Although it's sort of undermined by the fact that two of them have been murdered and the impostor's been identified, so the only real choice is how to punish the impostor.

So, yeah, it was probably undermined by rewrites and TV formula, and it'd be interesting to know what Ellison's original story was. But I'm starting to think this show isn't half bad. For its time, it's one of the smarter SF shows so far. It has its flaws in concept and execution, but it's trying to tell thoughtful and challenging science fiction stories, which is a lot more than I can say for Buck Rogers, for instance.

 

[Mr Awe]

Christopher, we don't always agree, but based on your review, I'm thinking I might need to watch this series. I've seen the movie but never the TV series.

 

[Shawnster]

The domed city was used as a backdrop of San Diego out of Kirk's and apartment window in STII:TWOK

 

[Christopher]

The domed city was used as a backdrop of San Diego out of Kirk's and apartment window in STII:TWOK

No, it's a painting of the San Francisco coastline: http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=304&pid=33901#top_display_media

 

[Christopher]

But I'm starting to think this show isn't half bad.

And just after I say that, we get a total dud, "Fear Factor" by John Sherlock (a novelist whose only other screen credit is co-writing the film adaptation of one of his books). Logan's gang come across a mental asylum (conveniently coming through the Holocaust intact so they can use a real-world building as its exterior) where an underground "Inner Circle" society brainwashes its people into pliable, emotionless, mind-controlled slaves. They want to do the same thing to Jessica, but the guy in charge, Dr. Rowan (Ed Nelson), thinks Logan is the key to his plans of world conquest, since the brainwashing turns all their men into cowards so he wants Logan to sire children with the remaining non-coward women (o-kayyyyy!!) to breed a fearless army, because of course courage is genetic, everyone knows that. Oh, and there's a totally pointless sidebar where he uses a magic machine to quick-grow a young boy into an adult to show Logan how fast he can breed an army. Huh?

The structure is weird, in that most of Jessica's scenes are off by herself while Logan and Rem watch her dialogue on viewscreens. It makes me wonder if Heather Menzies had availability issues and they had to rewrite the script around it so they could shoot some of her scenes separately. But the ending doesn't make much sense -- the bad guys are brainwashing Jessica and Logan is warned that taking the headband off her will kill her, so Rem has to put on another brainwashing headband and fight back in a visually dull battle of minds, and then Logan just blows up the computer, and if just removing the headband would kill her, why doesn't blowing up the whole system kill her too? Also, before that, there's a bizarre moment where he's unable to shoot the brainwasher in a glass booth because he's unable to break through the glass with his stun setting and completely forgets that the gun has a higher setting that can blow through a concrete wall.

The one high point is where Logan bonds with the junior doctor (Jared Martin) who has doubts about the oppressive system, with Logan talking about his own choice to rebel against the system he once blindly enforced, thereby inspiring him to do the same. Still, once again it's weirdly redundant how these people fleeing a dystopian city keep coming upon similar dystopian enclaves one after the other. Plus, the three of them always manage to overthrow or reform those other dystopias within 48 minutes -- so why can't they go back and do the same to their own?


And wouldn't you know it -- just after I ask that, we get "The Judas Goat" by former Star Trek producer John Meredyth Lucas, which is about them going back to overthrow their own dystopia -- kind of. It's the first episode since the pilot to really delve into the core premise of the movie/series, as a Sandman is disguised as a Runner known to Jessica, Hal 14 (former TV Spider-Man star Nicholas Hammond), using the face-changing tech seen in the movie -- albeit with the "surgery" animated using the show's distinctively blobby video-animated glow effects. Hal is given his marching orders by the same council of old guys from the pilot, sent to trick Logan and Jessica into returning by convincing them the city is on the verge of rebellion and just needs their return as the spark. It reminds me that we haven't seen Francis in 5 episodes -- did Lisa the psychic girl never bring him back from the cornfield? (Although I see that he's back in the next episode and two of the four after that.)

By coincidence, no sooner does the gang pick up Hal that they get captured by Matthew (Lance LeGault), the first Runner who inspired the whole movement, including the adolescent Jessica. He's taken up residence with a childlike community that's become dependent on him for guidance and that he controls using computer-drug "joy" sessions, and it quickly becomes evident that he's merely duplicated the lotus-eater dystopia he fled from, and holds the gang prisoner to keep them from going back, getting captured and brain-drained, and revealing his location to the City. Hal convinces Matthew to let the Runners go in exchange for Rem staying to repair his defense computers so he'll be safe, and Rem agrees, but Matthew plans to kill Logan, Jessica, and Hal -- but Rem happens to discover the deadly power surge during his repairs and reverses it, and the blowback kills Matthew and gives Rem a few pangs at breaking the First Law of Robotics, which are quickly forgotten. Then they go back to the City, but Logan catches on to Hal's deception just in time, and then Hal is killed by a passing Sandman patrol that mistakes Logan for a Sandman chasing a Runner, instead of the other way around.

It's nice that they finally delved back into the core mythos and themes of the show, but it's a bit clumsy in trying to tell two stories related to that mythos at once, the story of Hal's deception and the story of Matthew's degeneration from inspiring a rebel movement to becoming the thing he rebelled against. So it feels more superficial than it could have, and highly coincidental that both stories happen simultaneously.

I also got to wondering -- why the heck does Logan still wear his Sandman uniform? That's like a defector from Nazi Germany still walking around in an SS uniform. I know that in real life it's for branding purposes, and for the sake of reusing stock footage, but it doesn't make a lot of sense in-story. In the movie, Logan only kept it because he had nothing else to wear, and it ended up in tatters before long. But in the show, both Logan's uniform and Jessica's gauzy minidress are as indestructible and perpetually perfect as Jessica's Farrah cut.

 

[Skipper]

Errr, ok, at this point do they have any doubt that Sanctuary actually exists..?

 

[Christopher]

Errr, ok, at this point do they have any doubt that Sanctuary actually exists..?

Naturally it had to remain an open question so the series could continue. They have found one place actually called Sanctuary, but concluded it wasn't their Sanctuary because there were no other Runners there. I think that's their priority -- they're trying to find the previous Runners and hoping that they've found a place where they can live in freedom, so they can take that news back to the City of Domes and help free them. It does get kind of muddled, though.

The thing is, in the movie, it was evident that none of the Runners ever got past Box's deep freeze, so Sanctuary was just a fantasy. Here, we know that Runners did get out of the city alive -- quite a lot of them, it seems -- so the question is where they went. So far, we've only gotten answers in two episodes -- maybe five of them were killed by the Most Dangerous Game couple, and Matthew ended up where we saw him in "The Judas Goat."

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

A couple of episode (if taken in isolation) are worth a discussion, such as this time-travel one, but others are beyond pointless and horrible. Mostly this was just a kids show, ironically often watched while redundantly eating cheez-whiz.

You are correct. One needs to remember that the show's executive producers ultimately shaped the direction of the series. Inexplicably, MGM-TV tapped Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts--at the time, famous for developing Charlie's Angels for Spelling-Goldberg Productions--to bring Logan and Company to TV, and despite the contribution of Fontana and other seasoned writers, this was just another in the long line of the man-on-the-run TV sub-genre.

The series was effectively a retcon of the film with a number of significant changes (e.g., Francis alive and well, that council of elders, etc.) so anyone who loved the film would find the TV series lacking.

Still, the TV series has its fans, and it held enough public interest to be covered by popular magazines of the day:
Look-in (1971-1994) was a weekly UK publication in association with ITV and its local and imported TV series aimed at younger viewers. The Logan's Run TV series inspired an original, serialized comic feature (black and white), which was collected in a hardback annual.

Samples (not in sequential order):

Next...

Circus #168 (November 10, 1977). The once famous music industry magazine covered nearly all popular movies and TV during its run (1966-2006), and yes, the LR TV series grabbed a cover, with a fairly in-depth behind the scenes article on the show, which--at the time--seemed promising.

Dynamite #43 (December, 1977). Dynamite was a popular monthly kid's media/education magazine published by Scholastic, Inc. from 1974 - 1992, and was distributed for free in U.S. public schools, or handed out for free. Jenette Khan created the magazine two years before joining DC Comics as its publisher, and playing a significant role in the DC rebirth (starting at the end of the 70s, after the infamous "implosion") that would shake/change the mainstream comic book industry. More than the 1976 movie, the TV version of Logan's Run was thought to be somewhat kid-friendly, hence its coverage in a monthly aimed at elementary school-aged kids.

Finally,...

Starlog #9 (October, 1977) and #13 (May, 1978). Of course, Starlog was not going to miss out on the series. with issues eagerly announcing its production, to a cover story (below). Not long after the series' debut, the usually lightweight magazine did have more than a few unkind words dedicated to the series' perceived problems, and by the time CBS cancelled the series in the Spring of '78, Starlog was there to offer their post-mortem and a details-free episode guide.

There were other magazines with coverage of the show, but none of it was ever glowing. It received its best treatment after the preview of the pilot, where the many differences between it and the movie were noted, but some reviewers thought that would not matter...if the series was solid. You know the rest.

Oh, on the merchandising end, Mego (the toy company famous for their 8-inch action figures of everything from DC & Marvel characters, Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, among other properties) obtained the rights to develop an action figure line based on the TV series, creating prototypes of Logan, Rem and Francis. Obviously, the line would not see the inside of Mego's Hong Kong factories when the TV series suffered an early death, but some Sandman costumes were produced and in a strange turn, ended up used on unrelated, Barbie-like dolls.

 

[Christopher]

"Futurepast" was written by Katharyn Powers, so I knew not to expect too much. It's a budget-saving episode with a few clip-show moments, though not as many as I expected from the description. At a facility that looks exactly like the Griffith Park Observatory (which Francis calls "the middle of nowhere" at one point, even though it's the post-apocalypse and everywhere is the middle of nowhere), the trio is offered hospitality by Ariana (Mariette Hartley), a friendly hostess who doesn't bother to inform them that a) she's an android and b) the place is a dream therapy clinic with a weird kind of therapy that you can't be forced to wake up from and that will kill you if the dreams get too intense. Logan and Jessica get trapped in the dreams (which are partly flashback clips but mostly surreal sequences) while Rem tries to figure out how to wake them up and has android-style flirtation with Ariana, in the "Oh, we have no understanding of the human concept of love, now let's flirt exactly like humans" vein. Which is supposed to be cute and romantic but is more just corny, though the actors' charisma helps salvage it somewhat.

There are a few scenes of Francis and another Sandman out searching, but they're totally pointless and are just for padding. Eventually they show up and catch L&J after Rem figures out how to wake them, and Logan tricks them into getting trapped in the dream system and they get away. An unremarkable, static, and slow-paced episode.


But things really escalate with "Carousel," by D.C. Fontana and Richard L. Breen Jr. As the title makes clear, it ties into the core mythology more than any episode so far, including the pilot. A contrived encounter with an unexplained super-advanced society serves as an excuse to give Logan a "memory warp" that temporarily wipes the past year of his memory, then to separate him from Jessica & Rem, so that Francis finds Logan as his old self again and gladly takes him back to the City with Logan's full cooperation. J&R chase after him to try to rescue him before the City leaders either kill him or make him renounce the Runner movement before the assembly at Carousel, which would devastate the cause.

So we finally get the bulk of an episode set in the City of Domes, which is represented by interior shooting within some mall or hotel location, a different one from that in the movie, but supplemented with some stock crowd shots from the movie. The City inhabitants here are significantly more ethnically diverse than in the movie, notably including Rosanne Katon as a resistance friend of Jessica's with a sizeable speaking role. It's an interesting look at the pre-series status quo of Logan's life, something we didn't get to see in the pilot because they rushed through the setup. What's particularly interesting is how ready Francis is to believe in Logan's "reform" and go back to being best friends and partners like they used to be. Although it turns out that the old-guy council has been lying to him; after Francis leaves them, Morgan Woodward reveals that the plan has always been to kill Logan after he renounces Sanctuary. I wonder what Francis would think if he discovered that.

Anyway, there's also a bit where Jessica comes to Logan as a Sandman groupie hoping to seduce him, in order to assess the thoroughness of his memory loss. She wears her hair tied back for the first time, and it's kind of an improvement, or at least a refreshing change. Jessica's reluctance when Rem suggests seducing her friend Logan further underlines that the show hasn't kept the hedonism of the movie's society, favoring a more conventional 1970s sexual morality (well, at least mainstream 1970s) where one just doesn't go around seducing one's friends. Rem gets an amusing line about how paradoxical it is that it isn't easier with a friend.

So Logan eventually remembers and plans to tell the truth before the assembly, which is a suicide mission, but that falls apart when Francis spots Jessica in the crowd and Logan once again stops him and runs off with her, and the cycle begins all over again.

All in all, a pretty effective episode. It's the second time a Fontana script has focused on the Logan/Francis friendship, and that's good because it gives Francis more depth than his usual villainous-pursuer role. And this relatively deep dive into life in the City of Domes does a good job compensating for the superficiality of the pilot's presentation of it. It's interesting how we're starting to get more episodes exploring the core premise after the initial run of generic sci-fi plots. Maybe they needed to lead off with more generic plots to appease the network suits and now Fontana's easing in more arc elements (inasmuch as "arc" existed in shows of the day). Or maybe it's just that the freelancers writing for the show needed time to get to know its world and start developing stories tailored to it.

 

[urbandefault]

You do have a blog, right?

 

[Christopher]

I wish '70s TV makers had had the concept of "event" season finales, since "Carousel" would've been a nice episode to finish on. Instead, after that peak, the series fizzles out with a trio of weak standalones.

"Night Visitors" by Leonard Katzman is pure filler that doesn't fit Logan's Run at all, a stock haunted-house plot complete with a dark and stormy night, which the gang spends in a 19th-century house populated by three enigmatic figures (George Maharis, Barbara Babcock, and Paul Mantee) who turn out to be ghosts, without the slightest effort to concoct a sci-fi excuse. On the contrary, it's straight out of the Satanism craze of the '70s, with the ghosts empowered by the "Prince of Darkness" and wanting Jessica as a host body to resurrect Maharis's wife, until it conveniently turns out that Logan's gun can destroy ghosts with fire.

This feels like a generic freelance TV script tweaked to fit the show, which is odd since Leonard Katzman is one of the show's producers. Maybe that gave him the opportunity to dust off a spec script from his drawer or something. But it's deeply incongruous -- not only due to the cavalier injection of ghosts and Satanism into what's otherwise been a straight sci-fi show, but due to Logan and Jessica sharing a romantic talk and a kiss just a week after we saw Jessica protesting how weird it would be to seduce Logan because they're just friends.


"Turnabout" by Michael Michaelian and Al Hayes is problematical in another way, as our trio gets captured by the inhabitants of a desert society portrayed as a stereotypical oppressive Arab culture complete with a ban on books (Logan and the gang are carrying an "audio book" in disc form, a bit of lucky-guess futurism), horse-riding soldiers with electric swords (even though they have computers and force fields), and women forced to wear veils at all times, even in private (misunderstanding how veiling works in most societies that practice it). At least the natives are played mostly by white actors (Nehemiah Persoff as the draconian leader Asa, Gerald McRaney as the aggressive military chief Gera, Victoria Racimo as the woman the gang helps and who helps them in turn), with the most progressive, peaceful reformer, the adviser Samuel, being played by a black actor, Hari Rhodes. Still, it's the kind of condescending story where the proponents of stereotyped "Mideastern" culture are the villains and the heroes achieve victory by bringing a Western-valued reform.

The strong part is the interaction between Logan and Francis, who shows up just when the gang is captured and requests permission to extradite them. Turns out this society has met Runners before and closed its borders because they sowed disaffection and took many of their young people with them, provoking a conservative backlash. (The timing is unclear. "The Judas Goat" established that the first Runner left during Jessica's youth, probably no more than a decade before.) Francis argues that the Runners are their common enemy, but Asa is determined to execute them, so Francis breaks them out to take them back alive, and it's nicely ambiguous whether he's just following orders or acting out of his friendship for Logan. Eventually Francis gets captured and gets a big stagey swordfight with Gera before getting locked away for execution, and Logan et al. get all noble and rescue their enemy just in time for Samuel to walk in and announce he's convinced the "Assembly" to depose Asa off-camera and reform the society, because heaven forbid a '70s TV episode should have an ambiguous ending.

Aside from the Logan-Francis interplay (the last in the series), the high point is their use of an actual reflecting laser beam as a practical, on-set "force field" effect on the prison cell, a refreshing change from the usual cheesy video animation they've used for beam and field effects. I thought it was just another animated overlay until I realized the camera was moving.


The final episode is "Stargate," written by comics legend Denny O'Neil, but it's not one of his better stories. The trio encounters a group led by Morah (Paul Carr) and finding warm weather extremely chilling because it's extra-hot in their distant "homeland." Turns out they're aliens, and they drug Logan and Jessica and take Rem away for disassembly, because they can use his special parts to make their interstellar teleporter work so they can bring in an invading army. (Why do so many aliens want to conquer the nuked-out wreck of the Earth?) L&J are rescued by Timon (Eddie Firestone), the last surviving human in the city the aliens took over, and he explains that they duplicated human bodies through some process that left the originals as dead husks, though it's unclear how it was supposed to work, because there's a pointless sidebar where L&J see (and destroy) their own duplicate bodies already made and ready for alien occupation well before any harm has come to them.

Rem spends most of the episode in a half-disassembled state but still manages to build a teleporter-scrambling gizmo one-handed, and after another pointless interlude where L, J, and Timon are taken out to a mutant-infested swamp to be killed but casually walk back to the city, Jessica has the idea to freeze the cold-sensitive aliens with their own liquid oxygen canisters (convenient that they need so many). The teleporter's destroyed, the alien army presumably dies horribly in the void of space but nobody cares, and Logan bloviates about how the stranded aliens may be willing to live in peace with Timon now, even though he's obviously relishing the prospect of turning the tables on them with their own pain wands. Rem reassembles himself and the gang has a standard episode-ending laugh together before driving off into cancellation limbo. A weak ending for the series, especially since the plot is something of a rehash of the previous alien-invasion episode, but without that episode's positive aspect of helping free other aliens from captivity.


Well, I wasn't expecting much from Logan's Run, and a lot of it is a fairly generic '70s sci-fi show, but I think it actually compares fairly well to other '70s sci-fi, though that's damning with faint praise. It certainly tries harder to tell actual science fiction stories than, say, Buck Rogers did, and it doesn't get as campy as Buck or Galactica. It's reminiscent of other "wandering the post-apocalypse" shows like Planet of the Apes and Ark II, and is probably similar to what Genesis II/Planet Earth would've been like as a series. It had the usual '70s sci-fi lack of focus, jumping around between dystopian SF and random alien invasions and time travel and even an incongruous ghost story, but on a few occasions, it did manage to engage somewhat effectively with the core storyline and ideas it inherited from the movie. Mainly, it suffered from the mediocrity of leads Gregory Harrison and Heather Menzies, though Donald Moffat was a delight and Randy Powell was fairly effective as Francis (as well as being the one cast member who actually resembled his movie counterpart). But by the standards of its day, it actually managed to be slightly more serious and thoughtful than the average.