The Alfred Hitchcock Hour/Consider Her Ways

Consider Her Ways
Season 3, Episode 11
Airdate	December 28, 1964
Teleplay by	Oscar Millard
Based on	from the story by John Wyndham
Directed by	Robert Stevens
Produced by	Joan Harrison
← 3x10 Memo from Purgatory	3x12 → Crimson Witness
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour — Season Three

Consider Her Ways is the eleventh episode of the third season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and the seventy-fifth episode overall.

Starring: Barbara Barrie (Dr. Jane Waterleigh), Gladys Cooper (Laura)

Co-Starring: Robert H. Harris (Doctor Perrigan), Gene Lyons (Max Wilding), Ellen Corby (The Chief Nurse), Virginia Gregg (The 3rd Doctor)

with Carmen Phillips (Mother Daisy), Diane Sayer (Mother Hazel), Dee J. Thompson (The 1st Doctor), Alice Backes (The 2nd Doctor), Eve Bruce (The Amazon), Ivy Bethune (The Nurse), Ginny Gan (The 1st Worker), Stacy King (The Female Worker), Penny Zaferiou (The Little Servitor)

and Leif Erickson (Doctor Hellyer)

Uncredited: Alfred Hitchcock (Host)

Plot Overview

Dr. Jane Waterleigh finds herself in a future dystopic totalitarian society where selected women are kept in clinics for the sole purpose of breeding, known as a "mother caste" (whose offspring are subsequently taken into custody by the State immediately after birth), and that she is part of the mother caste (which are perpetually overweight due to constant breeding and overfeeding by the clinic staff, are never exercised more than necessary and are never taught to read or write by the elite ruling caste). The doctors and nurses who attend Dr. Waterleigh have seemingly never heard of men and believe her to be delusional when she asks where the male doctors are, as well as when she insists that she is a doctor and is literate.

Dr. Waterleigh is later taken to meet a member of the elites named Laura, an elderly historian who tells her about the experiments conducted by a scientist named Dr. Perrigan, which led to the creation of a gender-specific virus (originally created to eliminate brown rats but which then mutated out of control) which then led to the extinction of men, leaving only women and leading to famine and societal breakdown in the immediate period after the viral plague wreaked its havoc. After a time, a group of educated women, mostly in the medical profession, took control of society and enacted a research program to enable women to reproduce without male assistance. Laura takes a feminist attitude toward men, claiming that they "oppressed" women and that the world was better off without them, even going so far as to quote from Biblical scripture (specifically, Proverbs 6:6) and twisting it to justify the current system they live in, but Dr. Waterleigh disagrees, stating that the extinction of men was a horrific blow that led to societal collapse and the subsequent rise of the current all-female totalitarian system.

Refusing to be a part of that future society where she was expected to only be a producer of babies for the State, Dr. Waterleigh then undergoes a drug-induced hypnosis and returns to her own time, where she learns from her boss Dr. Hellyer, the chief of staff at the hospital she works in, that she had taken an experimental drug which she realizes caused her to envision being in the dystopian future she had escaped from. She also learns that there is a Dr. Perrigan, a biologist currently working on the experiment to eliminate brown rats which Laura had told her about. She then goes to meet Dr. Perrigan and tries convincing him to stop his experiments but he refuses, so she shoots and kills Perrigan, then burns down his laboratory and all of his research notes with it. Dr. Waterleigh is arrested and tried for murder but refuses to plead insanity, insisting that she did what she had to do to keep society from being inflicted with the terrible future she saw it enter, but she learns from her attorney that Dr. Perrigan has a son, also a biologist, who has vowed to continue his father's work, much to Dr. Waterleigh's horror.

Trivia

Behind the Scenes

• This episode is an adaptation of Consider Her Ways, a 1956 science fiction story written by John Wyndham, which was later published as part of a sci-fi short story collection called Consider Her Ways and Others in 1961

Allusions and References

• The quote spoken by Laura as her justification for the existence of the future society's current system during her conversation with Dr. Waterleigh, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise", comes from Proverbs 6:6 in the Bible; the episode's title is also derived from this quote