The Man Who Was Never Born

"The Man Who Was Never Born" (original title: "Cry of the Unborn") is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It was first broadcast on October 28, 1963, during the first season. Its premise — preventing the birth of someone in the past to change the future — is echoed in the Terminator films.

Plot
Having accidentally travelled through time, astronaut Joseph Reardon lands on Earth in the year 2148 A.D. to find desolation. He meets Andro, an erudite but mutated human stricken with a disfiguring disease for which there is no cure. Andro is one of the few survivors of a biological disaster brought on by an ambitious 20th century scientist named Bertram Cabot Jr., who isolated and developed a viral symbiont from an interstellar microbe. Cabot's symbiont physically altered the entire human race, precluding the ability to reproduce, and turned much of Earth's landscape into a barren wasteland.

Andro laments that there is no hope for mankind to survive after the last of his generation die off. But Reardon claims there is hope, and attempts to return to his own time, taking Andro with him to show others what the future will be and to prevent the disastrous outcome. However, while making the return journey through the time rift, Reardon slowly dies and mysteriously vanishes. He manages to give Andro a gun and tells Andro to kill Cabot if there is no other way to stop him to save billions of lives.

The deformed Andro, now landed on Earth, can project himself as a normal human using hypnotic suggestion, and uses this ability while searching for Cabot. It soon becomes clear that Andro has arrived too soon: Bertram Cabot Jr. has not been born yet, although his parents, Noelle Anderson and Bertram Cabot Sr., are about to be married. Andro, in the guise of a normal human, tries unsuccessfully to convince Cabot that he should not marry Noelle.

Andro himself begins to fall in love with Noelle. While attempting to shoot Cabot during the couple's wedding ceremony, Andro hesitates and is assaulted by Cabot and his wedding party. Andro's true appearance is revealed and he flees. Noelle runs after him and he explains his mission to her. Noelle confesses that she has fallen in love with him and does not see his deformity. She convinces him to take her to the future with him, thereby avoiding any possibility that she will have a child with Cabot.

However, the flow of time has been altered by Andro and Noelle's actions: because Bertram Cabot Jr. was never born, the symbiont that made Andro's mutated existence possible was never created, and Andro was also never born. Andro vanishes just as the spaceship arrives in 2148 A.D., leaving Noelle, weeping, to face the future alone. The final scene breaks the fourth wall by showing Noelle in her spaceship seat next to a similar empty seat, on a dimly illuminated stage instead of in the confines of a spaceship.

Cast

 * Martin Landau – as Andro
 * Shirley Knight – as Noelle Anderson
 * Karl Held – as Captain Joseph Reardon
 * John Considine – as Bertram Cabot
 * Maxine Stuart – as Mrs. McCluskey
 * Marlowe Jensen – as Minister

Production
The story's writer, Anthony Lawrence, said in an interview that the story was inspired by "...one of my old favorites, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, the French version, which was a beautiful film. I was thinking of that film, and also just the idea that had always kind of fascinated me. Joseph Stefano loved the idea, and it had [in it], as I remember, a lot of what I was feeling at the time. I always liked romantic stories, and this was a chance to do something that you really don't get to do very often in television. I gravitated toward that."