A mother sends her recalcitrant son, Rusty Dobson, to the Milgram Academy in a misguided desire to instill discipline and make him conform to her expectations regarding his future career.
Opening narration[]
“In our relentless pursuit of career and worldly possessions, is it we who pay the highest price or is it...our children?”
Plot[]
The administrators are actually controlling the students through a chip inserted into their brain. They want to create a group of business executives who are willing to commit murder in order to make more money for their companies.
Rusty and one other student, Charlie, are immune to the chip because of a medicine they are taking for ulcers.
Charlie wants to wait in order to graduate, and then expose the place to the outside world. Rusty is convinced that this is a bad idea, and wants to escape. However, as soon as he approaches the boundary of the academy, the chip in his head gives him a severe migraine.
Charlie's immunity is discovered by the facility's doctor, who has found a way to override it and bring him under the school's control. Rusty manages to escape by stealing the security clearance cards from the administrator's office and disabling the boundary control system. His fellow students chase after him, but he re-activates the system and they are unable to follow him past the walls of the academy.
He tries to call his mother from a payphone, but she is busy in an office. He heads to the site of an assassination plan he knows about, but two police officers detain him. Charlie performs the assassination while the police officers are shown to bear the distinctive scar from the computer chip implantation. The police tell Rusty to "get with the program" and then take him back to academy.
Closing narration[]
“It's said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is with these same good intentions that we blindly place our trust in those with power, the architects of our future and all too often, the manipulators of our ultimate fate."
Notes[]
In the same year that this episode aired, there was a Goosebumps short story titled "Perfect School" which features a similar plot, and the TV episode based on that story is a Canadian production, just like The Outer Limits.
The movie Disturbing Behavior also has some remarkable similarities to this earlier story.
Cast[]
- Ryan Phillippe as Russell 'Rusty' Dobson
- Tom Butler as Dr. Werner
- Jonathan Scarfe as Charlie Walters
- Kavan Smith as Harrison Taylor
- Peter Donat as Principal Kern
- Jane MacDougall as Marianne Dobson
- Peter Yunker as Instructor
- Tygh Runyan as James Scardale
- Jabin Litwiniec as Student #1
- Austin Basile as Student #2
- Arnie Walters as Committee Member
- Paul Hubbard as Officer Scovil
- Steve Makaj as Officer Brown
- Campbell Lane as Roland Baker
- Kevin Hansen as Young Man