One More Reference

Rating: 8/10 (3 September 2014)

To add to the bibliography, another show in the this genre is "The Sixth Finger," The Outer Limits (October 1963). David McCallum plays a miner with ambition. He volunteers for a process to "advance the intelligence of mankind." He is administered drugs, and enters a machine that initially takes his mind 20,000 years into the future, eventually reaching 1 million years of evolution, and a sixth finger. As he advances, he progresses from reading minds to telekinesis, callously stopping the heart of a cook who he perceived as a threat. Eventually he reaches the precipice of human development, prepared to shed his human body and become a creature of pure energy. Along the way, he also evolved from contempt for "lesser humans" to realizing total peace and oneness with all life before the simple town girl who loves him brings him back to his "normal" state, and he dies an unfortunate death. We'll never know how much he retained from the experience. Worth checking out for a less effects driven, inner-focused study of potential human progress in the tradition of Joseph Stefano.
"An experiment too soon, too swift. And yet may we not still hope to discover a method by which within one generation, the whole human race could be rendered intelligent, beyond hatred, or revenge, or the desire for power? Is that not, after all, the ultimate goal of evolution?"