Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea “The Cyborg”

Among the many things that fascinated little Buzzy boy, submarines ranked high on the list.

So it’s no surprise that I eagerly glommed onto Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Irwin Allen’s first TV series.

I was aware of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea from the comic book based on the original movie long before I saw the feature film.

Trust me,
the comic book
is a lot better.

Arguably the best of Allen’s four TV series (Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land Of The Giants fill out the list), Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea nonetheless was a woefully uneven show, vacillating between reasonably well executed straight forward adventure and Allen’s particular / peculiar blend of sci-fi goofiness.

Most of the first season episodes (shot in black and white) were cold war thrillers ala Tom Clancy, though a few loopy sci-fi stories slipped through.*

The remaining seasons were shot in color, rapidly moving deeper and deeper into science fiction territory.  Even as an 11 year old I rapidly grew disappointed with the series but did appreciate the better episodes they produced.

For me at that early age, their best episode ever was “The Cyborg,” written by William Read Woodfield & Allan Balter, directed by Leo Penn, co-starring Victor Buono as Prof. Tabor Ulrich. 

When the episode turned up on YouTube, I decided to rewatch it, curious if memory and nostalgia cast it in a rosy glow.

To my delight, no they didn’t.  “The Cyborg” stands up remarkably well.

Oh, it has a full measure of Allen TV flaws -- black limbo sets more suitable for an off-off-Broadway production as well as heavy reliance on stock footage and lots of it -- but Woodfield & Balter managed to use those in support of their story, not undermine it.  Granted, Buono is over the top as the villain (feh!  When did he ever turn in a performance that wasn’t over the top?), but he’s colorful and amusing as the megalomaniacal (but not mad; oh, no, he’s perfectly sane and rational) Prof. Ulrich, chewing the scant scenery and prop turkey legs with uproarious glee.

Best of all, he has a motive that more than one real world political or military leader has used to justify their crimes against humanity, and while his means are far-fetched, hey, the story is set in the far off future year of 1972 so maybe they would have working cyborgs by then.**

Ulrich’s scheme is to replace the Seaview’s Admiral Nelson (Richard Basehart) with a cyborg double who will mislead the super-sub’s crew into starting World War Three, which Ulrich plans to ride out in his bomb shelter with his cyborg retinue.

To accomplish this he lures Nelson to his lab in stock footage Switzerland where he downloads the admiral’s knowledge and personality into a cyborg double who then returns to the Seaview with a computer program that will trick the crew into thinking World War Three just broke out and they must launch their nuclear weapons.

There is a chilling scene where Captain Crane (David Hedison) and the faux Nelson talk via proto-Zoom to the admiral’s secretary back at the base, telling her to get to a bomb shelter, only for the audience to see the secretary is actually another cyborg double controlled by Ulrich.

Nelson, of course, finally figures out an ingenious way of warning his crew, the cyborg admiral is destroyed, and Ulrich and his lab blow up real good.  In order to achieve this, Nelson must persuade Ulrich’s assistant, Gundi (Brooke Bundy), to help him escape only to realize as the lab melts down that she, too, is a cyborg.

So let’s pause a moment and look at what Woodfield & Balter put on the table on October 17, 1965:

• How do we determine what is / is not real, especially when it comes to us electronically?

• Can we download knowledge from a human brain and store it electronically?

• Can we create Artificial Intelligence that can pass for a real human being?

• Can Artificial Intelligence develop a moral and ethical code all on its own?

These are topics of pressing interest today, but Woodfield & Balter articulated them fully almost 60 years ago.

And on an Irwin Allen TV show, to boot.

. . .

As much as I enjoyed “The Cyborg” there was something about it that gnawed at me, something I knew I’d seen elsewhere.

Not the cyborg double; that’s straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and has been used countless times since then in sci-fi movies / pulps / comic books.

No, there was another TV series with an episode where a villainous scientist replaces a ship’s commanding officer with a duplicate and the hero must figure out how to warn his crew about the imposter.

I’m talking “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” on Star Trek, written by Robert Bloch, directed by James Goldstone, broadcast almost a year to the day later on NBC-TV on Oct. 20, 1966.

This is not one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, despite Bloch having written it.  At first blush it seems close enough to “The Cyborg” for Bloch to have lifted the plot, but it also bears a strong resemblance to Shakespeare’s The Tempest right down to a Caliban-like creature (Ted Cassidy as Ruk) and a female android that serves as a combination Ariel / Miranda (Sherry Jackson as Andrea).

Which of course means it’s only a hop-skip-and-a-“Beam me down, Scotty” from Forbidden Planet, including a vast underground laboratory left by the original inhabitants of the planet.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” tries too hard and falls short as a result.

It strives to be Important and Say Important Things and present A Real Grown Up Drama but it lacks all the virtues that serve ”The Cyborg” so well.

Yeah, “The Cyborg” is a comic book story type of episode, but it’s a smart comic book story and the makers knew enough to embrace the absurdity and just plow ahead, letting the smart bits surprise and delight us.  Basehart and Hedison played their parts absolutely straight, but Buono displays such unparalleled exuberance as the misguided scientist that he generates enough audience goodwill to glide the story effortlessly along.

“The Cyborg” offers enough meat on its bones to support a feature length film, and it keeps things moving at a rapid pace without every losing sight of what the story is about.

And dammit, Woodfield & Balter simply wrote a much better script than Bloch did.  Nelson’s ingenious warning is to trigger hand twitches in his cyborg double that tap out a Morse code warning to Crane and the crew; Kirk’s solution is to think of anti-Vulcan racial slurs to imprint on his android double’s mind, alerting Spock by hurling insults at him.***

Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea wasn’t an exceptional TV show, but they did knock one out of the ballpark with “The Cyborg.”

© Buzz Dixon

*  Harlan Ellison wrote “The Price Of Doom” for Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea under his Cordwainer Bird pseudonym, breaking an ABC-TV executive’s hip in the process, but that’s another story for another day.

**  Technically Ulrich’s creations are androids, not cyborgs, as they are wholly constructed via artificial means while cyborgs are cybernetic organisms, living beings augmented by hi-tech add-ons and plug-ins.

*** On the other hand, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” does offer William Shatner lurking in ambush to assault Ted Cassidy with a stalacmite dildo, so there’s that…