The World Below

When I took high-school biology, my lab partner and I were using microscope. We were looking at protozoa, asked to draw pictures of what we saw in little circles on a piece of paper. When our teacher came around, my partner had the strangest things drawn. The odd creatures he was drawing turned out to be his eyelashes. In this really dumb episode, a group of military scientists go below 1000 fathoms in a bathysphere. One of them is killed and the others escape. When they return, they claim to have seen a city a the bottom of the ocean, but later sensors are tried and there is no such thing. The interesting thing is that these guys, instead of being hero explorers, are about to be hung out to dry by the Navy for fraud and negligence leading to death. Gene Barry is stunned. Science Fiction Theater came out during the birth of the Cold War. The paranoia that pervades almost every episode is quite interesting. People who are doing scientific work are constantly harassed and forced to prove themselves. This one doesn't pass the smell test even a little.

I'm surprised that an actor as good a Gene Barry would have been in an episode this poorly conceived.

The 'mystery' is so badly depicted by the 'photographical evidence' in the episode that any person who didn't immediately notice a problem with it should be drummed out of their profession.

Although Hitchcoc in his review notes that the series seems to subject scientists who challenge the status quo to ridicule and censure. the idiots aboard this submarine deserved to be subjected to scorn and had no business being on any mission outside of the old Disneyland Submarine ride in the first place!