User Reviews

This is the one. The best episode in the whole third season, perhaps the best TV episode of ALL TIME.

Exactly how cutting edge was this show? Let's see…

The first seasons of VBoS were razor accurate Sci-Fi classics, mixing film noir & spy genres with extremely well researched theories of where the U.S. Navy was going in the 1960's. It predicted and pushed friendship with the Soviet Union when everyone else was running around scared. It opened everyone's eyes to deep-sea research. They even did an episode on mid-ocean trench hot vent DNA ancestry research, how they knew about a topic that has only recently become of major biotechnology interest I'll never know.

The writers then went to town virtually inventing the Toys Vs. People plot line, decades before 'Chucky' and 'Toy Story'. Stories of mind control before Madison Ave. made it a paying job. And whole episodes based around questions, real hard questions about patriotism and responsibility; before draft dodgers made it all front page news.

Then they went and made "Day of Evil". Here's what's really great about this episode - it's a new type of Sci-Fi. Maybe it's not original, but it was super cutting edge in 1966. It's hard science used as a kind of cover story, a back room explanation, a PR twist, for Black Magic.

That's it.

Nelson, Crane, and Patterson actually meet the devil in this episode, and bargain over the fate of the world. The devil is always photographed against red, with smoke curling about him. He kind of lives inside the hot radiation core of the reactor. He's a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Nelson hates his guts, actually smacking his head once in exasperation at the devil's antics. And in a strange way, the devil is YOU.

But of course, the devil is really an alien from a hot planet. It's all very reasonable, it all makes sense, it's not Black Magic, it's just science, get it?

But once you accept the explanation, man, everybody has fun with this script. They bound around, leering. Everyone is sweaty. Patterson almost dies. Lots of fun stuff.

And here's the deal; this one was written in 1966, at exactly the same time Frank Herbert was winning awards for "Dune", coincidentally having the same Science as Gothic Magic theme. And to make things even more mysterious, Herbert's first book, written in 1955, was about – get this – a 21st century nuclear submarine and worldwide conflict over oil production! So either the writing was so good it was paralleling the best in Science Fiction, or the editing and producers were so good they recognized and borrowed from the best Sci-Fi literature ever written. Either way, it's fair weather and a light breeze here on…

the good ship Seaview.