Stitch in Time
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| The Outer Limits episode | |
|---|---|
| “Stitch in Time” | |
| Episode no. | Season 2 Episode 1 |
| Guest star(s) | Amanda Plummer as Dr. Theresa Givens, Michelle Forbes as FBI Agent Jamie Pratt, Gary Jones as Duncan, Kendall Cross as Allison, Andrew Airlie as FBI Agent Corey, Adrian Hughes as Warren, Brian Arnold as Newscaster |
| Writer(s) | Steven Barnes |
| Director | Mario Azzopardi |
| Production no. | 23 |
| Original airdate | 14 January 1996 |
| Episode chronology | |
| ← Previous | Next → |
| “The Voice of Reason” | “Resurrection” |
"Stitch in Time" is an episode of The Outer Limits. It first aired on 14 January 1996, and was the first episode of the second season.
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
FBI agent Jamie Pratt investigates a series of murders spanning a period of forty years — all committed with the same gun.
[edit] Opening narration
- "We all struggle to define ourselves; to live our lives with some sense of balance, with one foot in the past, and the other reaching... for an uncertain future."
[edit] Plot synopsis
The gun is traced to Dr. Theresa Givens, a former employee at a top-secret government project. Mysteriously, Givens was only five years old at the time of the first murder, and the gun hadn't even been manufactured.
As it turns out, Dr. Givens has used a property of developing fetal human brains to create a time machine and has been travelling back through time to kill serial killers before they strike, all to prepare herself (mentally) for one final journey to stop the man who had kidnapped and raped her for five days when she was a teenager; the event having left her mentally scarred for all of her life. FBI agent Jamie Pratt finally uncovers the truth, only to be pulled back in time with Dr. Givens. She assists in stopping the kidnapping and rescues the young Theresa, but the elder Dr. Givens is fatally wounded and dies. Agent Pratt returns to a world where Dr. Givens never experienced the traumatic incident of Theresa of the previous timeline. But without that trauma, Dr. Givens was never motivated to travel back through time and preemptively murder known serial killers, one of whom eventually murdered a close friend of Agent Pratt (at the beginning of the episode this friend was dead, then alive later in the episode thanks to another temporal excursion by Dr. Givens).
In the end, Agent Pratt tracks down the decidedly healthier-looking Dr. Theresa Givens of the new timeline, who -- despite lacking the motivation of preventing a traumatic event of her past -- has also been researching time-travel. Agent Pratt is last seen doing exactly what the previous Dr. Givens had been doing at the start.
Another angle of the episode is the rapidly deteriorating physical health of Dr. Givens. Already mentally scarred from the start from the trauma of her youth, Dr. Givens's physical health declines through the episode. She eventually discloses to Agent Pratt that an unfortunate side-effect of altering time for the time traveller is the sudden merging of two completely different timestreams into the brain at once upon return which, over time, has a visible physical impact (causing nosebleeds) and presumably will become fatal given enough occurrences. Dr. Givens herself explains at the end that she is finally making the journey to change her past for fear that she will not survive much longer.
[edit] Closing narration
- "Our yesterdays are like a string of pearls -- unbroken -- unchanging. But if we could change our past, would that also change who we are?"
[edit] Trivia
- Amanda Plummer won an Emmy for her appearance in this episode.
