Not that I spend a lot of time thinking about my death, but since adolescence I have been pretty sure of one thing: in the best possible world, the lat thing I see before I die would be the end credits to the 1960s science-fiction television series The Outer Limits.
The Outer Limits has many charms that keep attracting new fans. Several episodes are well-written and acted, Conrad Hall's cinematography was always outstanding, and episode titles were among the best ever. I defy you to not want to see a science fiction story called "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" or--my favorite--"Production and Decay of Strange Particles." However, one aspect of The Outer Limits stands out most for me: its musical score. The music of The Outer Limits was created by Dominic Frontiere and Harry Lubin; Frontiere wrote the justly famous opening theme and much of the music for season one, and Lubin wrote much of the season two music. This includes a closing song that combines theremin-y "weird" music and romantic melodrama, which is the perfect compliment to the end credits slideshow of Milky Way photos. (I only recently learned that this song is a variation on another song he wrote: "Fear," for the television series One Step Beyond.) Every time I see it, I can picture being a wide-eyed boy in the 1960s and watching the show with all the breathless excitement of knowing that the stories might be fantasy, but the space race could make them realities very soon.
I am skeptical about the idea of life after death, but if any superior being does exist and wants my opinion on what would make a good afterlife, I cast my vote for the ability to travel endlessly through the cosmos, disembodied and free to go anywhere and explore anything. But I would consider it a perfectly acceptable second place if the last thing I ever experienced was the end credits to The Outer Limits: a perfect audio-visual representation of what that trip might feel like to me.
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