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The Man Who Was Never Born

"The Man Who Was Never Born"
The Outer Limits episode
Episode no. Season 1
Episode 6
Directed by Leonard Horn
Written by Anthony Lawrence
Cinematography by Conrad Hall
Production code 12
Original air date October 28, 1963
Guest appearance(s)
Episode chronology
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List of The Outer Limits episodes

Martin Landau
Shirley Knight

"The Man Who Was Never Born" (original title: "Cry of the Unborn") is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It was first broadcast on 28 October 1963, during the first season.

An astronaut returning to Earth is flung into the distant future, where he finds the mutated remnants of humanity living on a ruined Earth.

Having accidentally travelled through time, astronaut Joseph Reardon lands on Earth in the year 2148 A.D. to find it a desolate realm. He meets Andro, a mutated human stricken with a disfiguring disease for which there is no cure. Andro is one of the few survivors of a biological disaster brought on by an ambitious scientist named Bertram Cabot Jr., who isolated and developed a viral symbiont from an interstellar microbe. Cabot's symbiont physically altered the human race, precluding the ability to reproduce, and turned much of Earth's landscape into a barren wasteland.

Andro laments that there is no hope for mankind to survive after the last of his generation die off. But Reardon claims there is hope, and decides to see if he can return to his own time, taking Andro with him to show others what the future will be and to prevent the disastrous outcome. However, while making the return journey through the time rift, Reardon suddenly feels himself slowly dying and mysteriously vanishes, possibly from the stress brought about by making the journey twice in one day. He manages to tell Andro to kill Cabot if he has no other way to stop him, to save billions of lives at the cost of one.

The deformed Andro can project himself as a normal human using hypnotic suggestion, and uses this ability to begin searching for some way to stop Cabot's work, even if it means his assassination. It soon becomes clear that Andro has arrived on Earth prematurely: Bertram Cabot Jr. has not been born yet, and his parents, Noelle Anderson and Bertram Cabot Sr., are only about to be married. Andro, in the guise of a normal human of the time, attempts without success to convince Cabot that he should not marry Noelle.

Andro himself begins to fall in love with Noelle. While planning to shoot Cabot during the couple's wedding ceremony with a revolver obtained from Reardon, Andro hesitates and is in turn assaulted by Cabot and his wedding party, revealing his true appearance in the process. Andro flees, but Noelle follows him. He explains his mission, and Noelle confesses that she has fallen in love with Andro. She convinces him to take her with him to the future, thereby avoiding any possibility that she and Cabot will have a child.


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