Outer Limits: "Mind Over Matter"

'''"Mind Over Matter." The Outer Limits.''' Brad Turner, dir. Showtime, 9 July 1996. Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films Ltd. (prod.) / MGM Domestic Television (dist.). 1996. "Produced in Association with CanWest Global System / TMN The Movie Netwook / CFCF Television / and SuperChannel {star symbol}. ca. 40 min. Jonathan Glassner, script. Based on Eando Binder (pseud.), "I, Robot" (q.v. under Fiction). Deborah Farentino, Scott Hylands, Noah Henry, Natsuko Ohama, and Mark Hamill (as Dr. Sam Stein), featured players.

Mark Hamill's nerdish computer-psychologist Stein (German: "stone") finally admits love for a beautiful and intelligent female coworker, who is immediately hit by a car and goes into a coma. She is cybernetically put into an AI computer with an Expert System in psychiatry—CAVE—and Stein enters the VR simulation to help her. Their VR idyll is interrupted by an injured double of the woman, who fights with her. Finally, Hamill and the simulation of the still-perfect coworker fight with the double and, what the hell, since it is only VR, kill her. It turns out the computer's researches into love convinced "her" that "she" loved Stein. Episode ends with coworker out of coma and dead, and Hamill tearing apart CAVE and weaping, moving into a longshot stressing his renewed isolation. See for gendering computers, VR, AI, and emotions as central to human/machine difference; see also for ambiguous imagery of VR life, on very big screen TV and metaphorically within a computer, plus superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human, moving «souls» in the manner of Rotwang in METROPOLIS (q.v. this Category), and the image of the scientist: Hamill's nice Jewish boy, with light hair but stooping posture, the Occidental and Oriental women as research scientist and physician.