The Discarded

Sorry to say, but this movie is very bad. The dialog is empty, the characters unlikeable and after an extremely slow pace, a mediocre point is made.

The story is basically about a ship full of mutated humans who have been outcast by society. Eventually, they receive a special envoy from Earth with an unexpected message.

The basic problem is that this whole movie could have been summarized into a sentence and making a 1 hour movie out of it added nothing. What you essentially get is some effectively gross-looking characters with dialog that is so boring you want to blow their ship up every 5 minutes.

The director, Jonathon Frakes, is a bright fellow but not a very good director. That coupled with a simplistic script (and possibly other limitations) lead to this bad result. Brian Dennehy and John Hurt are well-established character actors so it's hard to believe that this is their fault.

If you recorded this on a TIVO-like device, don't fast forward through it. Delete it.

Challenging piece of science fiction in the truest sense of the word. This episode takes us years to the future with the chilling effects of genetics, diseases and politics run amok. Both John Hurt and Brian Denehy play their roles with a passion and verve that may seem theatrical but do the job in propelling the story forward. (I'd like to take a minute out to praise the make-up artists on this episode. Genius. They serve to disgust and humanize. Is that craft, writing or both?) Excellent science fiction takes fantastic situations and places characters living lives that ring true to contemporary readers/viewers. This episode serves testament to that quality.

This man who reviewed this episode giving it one star is a fool. Far from saying that IMDb would-be critics are a case of the emperor having no clothes, they are in many cases jibbering naked idiots running around poking berries up their asses. He has only one piece of prescient commentary in the entirety of his above drivel, which is the error in which he refers to this episode as a "movie". It is indeed something of a mini-cinema verite experience, shot with all the filmic intensity and dramatic sincerity that one could manage on the shoe string budget ABC gave the producers of this genuinely hit-or-miss anthology series.

Bravo to Harlan and the producers for trying. To paraphrase a famous television critic "television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done."

I guess the first installment of this series was about being nice to people (and not blow them up). Come to think of it, so was the second one.

Now the third one was, well, about being nice to people, whereas the fourth – I'm sorry. It's just too much being nice.

At least JERRY WAS A MAN had an edge to it. This is pure mush.

It's all about these mutants, but of course we all know it really isn't, but just to be on the safe side, we get a lecture on AIDS. It's about society being beastly to some people we could mention, this is a story about society being beastly to the less than perfect, the voice-box of Stephen Hawking tells us, and it's very beastly – just so we know.

They're all aboard this spaceship (so you see, it really is science fiction) and everybody's having a hard time. BRIAN DENNEHY at least gets a big hand, and JOHN HURT is reminded that two heads are better than one, even though the other one is very small and seems to have originally belonged to KLAUS KINSKI.

Of course, anyone not applauding such a noble intention, whatever its literary and cinematic qualities, is an insensitive brute, and here I go being beastly to a less than perfect piece of - Saturday evening entertainment. So sue me.