The Premonition

The Outer Limits (1963)

The Premonition, directed by Gerd Oswald.

A test pilot flies so fast he creates a time warp. On crashing his plane he and his wife find themselves in a frozen world a few seconds before the crash. The time lines are going to sync up again, but they have another problem: how to save their little girl from being hit by a truck when they cannot move anything in the frozen world?

Another SF thriller plot with a long setup: it is 11 minutes until we reach the weirdness. Much stock footage. Instructions to the crew: just get it done in six days, hand in whatever you have then. That must have been disheartening to Gerd Oswald who put so much into the series.

It still has some Outer Limits touches: the mysterious "Limbo Being" who is caught in the warp just has they are. The notion that when time resumes they have forgotten their adventure in the frozen world and are left with the vague premonition that something was about to happen. Maybe this is the source of our premonitions...

Their solution to saving the little girl is a good one.

I remember Dewey Martin from The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Desperate Hours (1955).

Mary Murphy is the often overwrought wife, perhaps understandably so. Last seen in The Wild One (1953), The Mad Magician (1954) and also The Desperate Hours (1955).

Written by Ib Melchior, who wrote The Angry Red Planet (1959) (also directed), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and the original story of Death Race 2000 (1975).

On the Blu-ray commentary track Tim Lucas again compares this to the minimalism of French New Wave filmmaking, as he did for The Duplicate Man.

He has the details of the X-15 crash shown in this episode. Only three of these were built; I did not know that.