Background
Robert Specht's original script titled 'Natural Selection' was slightly different. Here Mike Adams, a computer expert for the U.N., walks through his office door into a black vortex and meets Em, a powerfully-built alien who remains in the darkness unseen. He tells Mike that he is Specimen #172, and that he is to be tested. Mike meets Loris Harper, a medical missionary worker, that Em has kept prisoner for two days, and they both fight off a jellyfish monster as their first test. After further tests, he is satisfied they are hardy survivalists.
Em tells them his homeworld is equidistant between Earth and Andera. One planet will have its population exterminated to make room for the overspill from Em's world. Mike and Loris are to fight two Andrites on an arena planet, armed only with pistols that fire explosive charges. The male Andrite kills his partner, and Mike pretends to do the same to lure it out of hiding. Mike trips a snare, is hit by a spear, loses his pistol and falls over the edge of a cliff. As he hangs there bleeding the Andrite emerges and Loris shoots it dead with the pistol Mike dropped. Later, Mike tells Em that his kind could colonize Earth peacefully, believing Em's race is not dissimilar to humans. Em says, "Unfortunately, we are." as he steps into the light, revealing his true appearance; that of an intelligent ape.
Joseph Stefano rewrote 'Natural Selection' as there were too many costly aliens and visual effects called for, and that the testing procedures endured by Mike were too complicated, redundant or riddled with technical gibberish. He also felt Em's revelation as an ape was too similar to the end of another episode, "The Sixth Finger", and that The Outer Limits did not need another Earth take-over story.
The story is very similar to a subsequent Star Trek episode titled "Arena". The plots of both Specht and Stefano's scripts also have elements in common with "Arena", the short story by Fredric Brown on which the Star Trek episode is based; it may have inspired Specht's story, but Stefano had not read it.
The Calco Alien mask (without its bulging eyes) and the taloned hands, made by Projects Unlimited, were reused (with an added hairy bodysuit) in the Star Trek pilot "The Cage". When Captain Pike attempts to strangle the Keeper he causes Pike to hallucinate that he is strangling a ferocious hairy alien instead (the creature is also seen in another cage near Pike's when he first awakes in captivity).
Read more about this topic: Fun And Games (The Outer Limits)
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