Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Questor Tapes (1974)

Universal TV
Directed by Richard A. Colla
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Universal Vault Collection)

Another post Star Trek TV pilot from Gene Roddenberry. A group of scientists in a secret university lab awaken Questor, the world's first android. Questor immediately escapes to "find his creator", and takes along his new friend Mike Farrell. There are the usual problems explored in seemingly hundreds of movies/TV shows about robots adapting to life with humans. Robert Foxworth as Questor speaks in a robotic voice, has superhuman strength, can read entire books in minutes, etc.; in other words, he is Data from Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Questor's search for his creator leads him to Mt. Ararat of all places, where he discovers an old man dying in a cave. It gets a bit murky, but apparently this old man is actually an android as well and has a god-like role in the lives of us poor humans, which he is passing on to Questor. The ending is abrupt and open-ended, in preparation for the TV series that never materialized.

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