THE HUNDRED DAYS OF THE DRAGON is one of the most chilling episodes of the original OUTER LIMITS series, and also one of the best. It tells the story of a presidential candidate, on the brink of winning election, killed and replaced by an impostor in a scheme cooked up by Asian Communist nation which is never named and which the viewer can reasonably assume is China. We learn in the prologue that the man chosen to take the candidates place has been prepped as to the nature of the president's personality, his tastes, his manner of speaking. By a sophisticated form of molecular rearrangement the impostor's face is totally changed, altered to resemble exactly the soon to be killed presidential candidate, and worse for our side, the replacement looks, walks and talks just like the man the man soon to be elected president.
At first the ruse is wholly successful, and then little things start to go wrong. On a hunting trip with the vice president the fake president shoots a snake that was about to strike, which puzzles the v.p., as he had known the real man in the past, and knew that he was a lousy shot, yet the impostor was a perfect shot. Then the new president turns out to be all too conciliatory with the Communist regime in Asia that he is in fact working for, as a kind of super-mole; this disturbs the vice president, as it is way out of character for the man he once knew and whom he thinks he's still serving. Then the late president's daughter confesses that since his election that her father doesn't seem like the same man she new before, has become a stranger to her. The plot unfolds quickly soon thereafter, as it must, since this is a television show, not a movie, as the viewer learns that the country the fake president represents plans to replace all high government officials with their own kind by the same method they used on the man the presidential impostor replaced, and this includes the vice president. The general idea is, as if the viewer has to be told, for this foreign power to take full control of the United States government
This is a well paced, nicely written and extremely well acted OUTER LIMITS entry, consistent with the themes the show often explored, such as government conspiracies of one kind of another. As a purely genre piece, it's one of the least "science fictional" shows of the series. There are no "bears" (i.e. monsters), and the emphasis is more on intrigue than science, which is really used more as a plot device than as an end in itself. The mood of the JFK New Frontier is captured to near perfection despite the limited budget, the back lot and sound stage Washington. We see the ups,--optimism, idealism, youthfulness--of the period, as well as, and this is worth keeping in mind, the paranoia and fear, that was an almost equal part of the Kennedy era, and which this now nearly fifty year old show offers the viewer as an alternate take on that time, and as such a corrective sorts, and a none too comforting one at that, as we learn once more, as we must, that the world beyond our borders is a very dangerous place.
26 out of 30 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink