In this episode we meet a harried everyman named Jerry Miller (Arnold's character) who is clearly overwhelmed trying to juggle the demands of work and family--as we see when he is forced to leave work in the middle of the day to go to his daughter Candace's school because of her latest suspension. (Candace, a standard pseudo-mature "bad" girl trying to "grow up too fast," was caught smoking, and afterward gave Jerry only grief about it as if the school wronged her by forbidding her to smoke on their grounds.) However, watching TV late one night Jerry sees a commercial for "Gideon Robotics"' latest household robot model, the "Gideon 4000," and decides to buy one to help around the house. Jerry's family is initially less enthusiastic than he is about the purchase, but in short order the one they all call "Gideon" proves much more than a mechanical house-cleaner, confronting Jerry's wife Brooke over her drinking problem, and then on a night when Jerry and Brooke are both out, halting Jerry's son Russ and his friends' room-wrecking roughhousing, and saving Candace from what was fast turning into a very dangerous situation with her boyfriend. Afterward, showing that he can be Nurturing Parent as well as Strict Parent, Gideon coaches Russ in baseball as he encourages him to set aside the violent video games in favor of pursuing a spot on his school's baseball team, and Candace in singing as he gently guides her away from the things that got her into trouble to being a primly dressed model student with her mind on her studies, and her role in the upcoming school play. However Jerry grows uncomfortable as Gideon shows him less deference than before, and even supplants him in the family's life--the more obviously in that the family now actually has a family life (Gideon taking his place on a family picnic of the kind they never had, sitting in his armchair with the rest of the family as they watch television together the way they didn't do before). Increasingly threatened, Jerry makes an effort to get rid of Gideon that culminates in his attempting to physically destroy the robot and discard its remnants in a dumpster well away from home, but the next morning finds Gideon back in his house, and now laying down the law to Jerry, telling him in so many words that the Gideon robots "represent control, discipline, respect, values you forfeited or never had," just like the other "fathers failing their families all over North America" and producing a society more "dysfunctional" and "chaotic," and that he is now the head of the family, permanently. And that is that, the next scene, the episode's last, showing Gideon and the Millers sitting down together to dinner with Gideon at the head of the table from which he reprimands Jerry for his having neglected to wear a necktie to dinner, then leading the group in saying grace as the image melts into one of the Millers' next door neighbors being led in saying grace the same fashion by their own Gideon, and that image into the image of a third family in the same situation in a montage implying that this is happening all over the continent in those other North American families where fathers have similarly failed and "control, discipline, respect"-representing metallic hulks out of Gernsbackian-Golden Age science fiction art have now taken over to lead the nation back to a romanticized image of the 1950s.
Especially as this is an episode of the '90s-era The Outer Limits (with its penchant for stories in which some technological development goes badly for those involved with it) there is room to read the story as merely a "cautionary" tale about how technology may reflect the values and agendas of its creators and not the customer who unwittingly brings it into their home, rather than making a social comment about the necessity of traditional patriarchal authority. Indeed, the closing narration tells us that "Before allowing a machine to take over a part of your life, make sure that you know the true price you will be paying"--especially as the little we see of Gideon Robotics implies that the company's primary interest is not making sales (hence the bizarre terms of the contract on which it let Jerry try out the robot in his house--which require his wife, who had no part in the robot's purchase, to sign off on a return of the robot, and the indications by story's end that Gideon is not some individual robot "acting up" but doing what it seems he was supposed to be doing in all this).
However, the episode's writers also seem to agree with Gideon's essential diagnosis of the situation, and approve of much of what he does. In spite of the episode's allowing room to think that Gideon's helpful, nurturing side was a piece of manipulation to win over the family to his deference with Gideon's firm but gentle touch masking his agenda of "control, discipline, respect" that makes getting a Gideon appear to be a first step toward Gilead, even in the final frames Brooke, Candace and Russ seem not oppressed by the heavy hand of an overbearing patriarch, but healthier, happier, flourishing, and all of them crediting Gideon with having brought that about. Jerry is thus apparently alone in his misery--his displacement and anguish at it the only unambiguous downside of the situation, perhaps the price of the "upside" for everyone else, with this reading of the situation seeming the more plausible for his having no answer to Gideon's accusations against him, which the show simply allows to stand unchallenged as if they were irrefutable, even if they hardly seem to be so--especially if one recognizes the simplistic nature of the episode's attitude toward Jerry's inadequacies as a father figure. If not an ideal father the plain and simple fact is that Jerry is not out womanizing, for example, but rather blamed for working so much that he cannot attend to his family's affairs so well as he would like--while if something is made of Jerry's golf games we know that on at least one of these occasions the game appears in some measure a work responsibility, as it is his company's Vice-President with whom he will be golfing (in this as in so many other ways work not ending when one is "off the clock"). The episode's opening narration speaks of the "sacrifice of family to the altar of ambition," but the episode falls far short of showing us that this is what is going on, the claim actually contradicted by the fact that during this episode we see Jerry leave work not once but twice to deal with an apparent family emergency, and that he at least attempts to have family dinners. The accusation also slights the hard reality that in a society where workers are insecure and have little protection from the demands of their employers, the more in as business has succeeded in imposing on working people a work culture that regards employees as living to work rather than working to live and anyone expecting anything else as simply lazy scum. Epitomized by the swaggering douchebag overlords of Silicon Valley bragging about their "hardcore" company cultures, it is also the case that ceaseless rounds of layoff and "up or out" career tracks are the order of the day in far less ostentatiously "hardcore" work environments, while even where they do remain in their jobs the cost of living has pressed harder on workers' incomes pretty much every year for as long as anyone can remember with all that means for the pressure on workers to pursue raises and promotions. The practical result is that for those in jobs like Jerry's, without which he would not have been able to keep his family in the upper middle-class comfort so taken for granted here as in just about every other piece of media we get, the line between "being ambitious" and "just trying to stay out of the unemployment line" is effectively nonexistent, and the accusation that one is "sacrificing family" for work that, frankly, is a sacrifice made for family, not merely light-minded but a case of victim-blaming. In fact it seems relevant that Gideon has no such responsibilities, being a "breadwinner" apparently not part of a father's obligation in his conception (all as Jerry's contributions to the household--as its sole breadwinner--get him no consideration from Gideon). Altogether Gideon, and the script, treat Jerry's failings as a matter of shortcomings in "personal responsibility", not least the entirety of the responsibility of keeping the household in line extending to Jerry's (stay-at-home) wife Brooke, it seemingly his charge to keep her in line as much as the children.
That made for much more than the usual surprise even in a series which relies very heavily on the ironic twist ending. Certainly, contrary to the nonsense about Hollywood's "liberalism" television's content tends to be very right-wing indeed, whether in its exalting the affluent and mocking the poor, glorifying the security state, whipping up racist and xenophobic fears, or siding with "faith" against reason. However, anything touching gender has tended to be a different matter, with those who do criticize Hollywood from the right on solid ground when they point out that it makes men generally and fathers particularly look like fools--and indeed treats the would-be traditional "pater familias" with disdain, exemplified by Al Bundy's then-recently displacing a Jim Anderson as the archetypal TV dad. For a show like The Outer Limits to valorize a heavy patriarchal hand as a necessity without which a home will be in chaos and society will fall to pieces (with which right-wing messaging the treatment of Jerry's work, the advocacy of authoritarianism, the touch of hysterics about "out-of-control kidz," the hint of religiosity, were all entirely in line) was rather less expected, sufficiently so that, even if it was just one episode of a past-its-peak anthology series running on a relatively little-watched basic cable channel in a period before the web came to be as awash in pop cultural commentary of the most minute kind as it now is I would have still thought it likely to rate some remark (perhaps the more in as it was the opener of a new season on a new channel). If there is any such comment out there, though, I haven't seen it, perhaps because the show just wasn't on too many people's radars, but also likely because Hollywood's more right-wing messaging tends to go right over the heads of those who would interpret contemporary culture for the rest of us , with all that implies about the fitness of the "professionals" for the job.
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