Tue, 15 December 2020
We did it! Yes, another season of The Writers' Room comes to a close, and it's a good one. Sapphire & Steel's final story, "Assignment Six," gives us a lot to chew on, and some really fascinating implications. We also talk about the show as a whole, and prepare you all for the return of Doctor Who: The Writers' Room! |
Sun, 15 November 2020
This penultimate episode of The Writers' Room's look at Sapphire & Steel is a bit different. Creator P.J. Hammond did not write Assignment 5, aka the one that's a murder mystery---and it shows. Instead, Kyle and Erik talk about what an S&S serial looks like interpreted through the pen of former Doctor Who scribes Don Houghton and Anthony Read. The answer: not as good. |
Thu, 15 October 2020
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! |
Tue, 15 September 2020
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! |
Fri, 14 August 2020
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! |
Wed, 15 July 2020
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. |
Mon, 15 June 2020
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." |
Mon, 15 June 2020
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." |
Fri, 15 May 2020
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.
Direct download: Episode_16_-_Outer_Limits_One-Offs_2.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 12:00am EDT |
Wed, 15 April 2020
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. |
Sun, 15 March 2020
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!
Direct download: The_Outer_Limits_-_Robert_C._Dennis.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 12:00am EDT |
Tue, 14 January 2020
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.
Direct download: The_Outer_Limits_-_Episode_13_-_Harlan_Ellison.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 10:00pm EDT |
Sun, 15 December 2019
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!
Direct download: The_Outer_Limits_-_Episode_12_-_Season_1_Wrap-Up.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 12:00am EDT |
Thu, 14 November 2019
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. |
Tue, 15 October 2019
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: Two of them are really quite good!
Direct download: The_Outer_Limits_-_Episode_10_-_One-Offs.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 12:00am EDT |
Sun, 15 September 2019
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.
Direct download: The_Outer_Limits_-_Episode_9_-_Lou_Morheim.mp3
Category:television -- posted at: 12:00am EDT |
Thu, 15 August 2019
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. |
Sun, 14 July 2019
This month, Erik and Kyle are joined by writer, podcast, smart person extraordinaire, Paul Cornell to discuss the Outer Limits episode "Nightmare." Find Paul on Twitter, and check out his podcast, Hammer House of Podcast. |
Fri, 14 June 2019
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. |
Sun, 19 May 2019
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! |
Tue, 16 April 2019
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! |
Fri, 15 March 2019
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. |
Thu, 14 February 2019
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"). |
Tue, 15 January 2019
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 of them in this episode, and they are "The Galaxy Being," "The Borderland," and "Production and Decay of Strange Particles." |
Tue, 1 January 2019
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 Leslie Stevens will arrive January 15. Sorry for the sound issues in this episode, it will not be indicative of the whole run, we assure you. We just didn't have time to re-record. And finally, please consider supporting our new Patreon! Patreon.com/TheWritersRoom |