This page is a list of the episodes of The Outer Limits, a 1995 U.S. science-fiction television series. The series was broadcast on Showtime from 1995 to 2001, and on the Sci Fi Channel in its final year.
See also:
Contents |
22 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | "The Sandkings" | Stuart Gillard | Melinda M. Snodgrass (Based on the work by George R. R. Martin) | 26 March 1995 |
| Dr. Simon Kress' (Beau Bridges) research for the government on Martian life is aborted because one of his specimens almost escapes into the natural environment. However, Kress doesn't agree with the abandonment of the project and decides to continue his experiments in his barn. He strongly believes that the insect-like species is actually sentient. He steals some sand containing Martian eggs from his lab and creates a make-shift incubator to hatch more of the Martian lifeforms. In the meantime, Kress deals with growing discord with his wife (Helen Shaver) over financial troubles and his obsession with work and the stress of concealing the stolen Martian lifeforms from his former supervisors at the government lab. Kress comes to believe that he is a god to his sandkings when they build sand structures that resemble his face (the face is looking across, unlike the Face on Mars, which is looking up.). Bitten by one of the sandkings, his obsession peaks as he alienates his wife, son, father (Lloyd Bridges), and kills his former supervisor by throwing him in the sandking incubator, where the creatures, already starved by Kress as an experiment, quickly devour him. In the end, Kress attempts to destroy all the sandkings but fails. In the epilogue of the episode, a colony of sandkings is shown surviving in the wilderness. | ||||
| 3 | "Valerie 23" | Timothy Bond | Jonathan Glassner | 31 March 1995 |
| Valerie 23 (Sofia Shinas) is the latest development from the Innobotics Corporation. She is designed to be attractive, helpful and a perfect companion for a disabled man. Although he is the ideal test candidate, due to his condition and qualifications, Frank Hellner (William Sadler) is extremely reluctant to take part and wants nothing to do with Valerie. Nevertheless he eventually agrees to a one-week test period. Valerie proves to be an excellent caregiver, and more. Over the course of the test, Valerie becomes increasingly affectionate and Frank eventually gives in. After the sexual encounter, Frank explains to Valerie that he thinks it was a mistake. Frank begins to grow closer to his physiotherapist Rachel (Nancy Allen), and she invites him to a bar. Valerie responds by displaying more human traits such as anger and envy. After following Frank and Rachel on a rock climbing outing, Valerie attempts to dispose of her rival Rachel and is shut down before being returned to Innobotics. Frank decides that he must speak to Valerie before she is dismantled and asks for her to be reactivated. While restrained at Innobotics, Valerie tries to explain her feelings for Frank and rekindle the relationship, but to no avail. Valerie escapes, follows Frank and again tries to kill Rachel. Frank is forced to destroy Valerie with an electric shock. As she lies dying, she tells him that she is afraid to die. Earlier Frank had been told by Rachel that anything that fears its death is alive. | ||||
| 4 | "Blood Brothers" | Tibor Takacs | Brad Wright | 7 April 1995 |
| Cameron Deighton had Huntington's Disease and his two sons, Michael and Spencer, may have inherited the gene responsible for the illness. Spencer decides not to be tested. Michael claims to have been tested and pronounced clear. Spencer spends his time working on cures for serious illnesses, while Michael pushes for the development of more lucrative drugs—such as Jericho, a drug used to calm rioting crowds. Spencer begins a romantic relationship with a reporter, Tricia. Spencer makes a breakthrough and finds what appears to be a wonder drug, Deighton C, capable of curing virtually any disease. He decides to announce his breakthrough and make the research available to the world for further research and development. Michael disagrees and sees the opportunity to keep it secret and limit the use of Deighton C to the rich and powerful. When Carl, Spencer's research assistant, attempts to smuggle the drug out of the laboratory, Michael uses the laboratory's fire cleansing system to kill him and dispose of the body. Assuming that Spencer must have told Tricia about the drug he attempts to kill her too, but fails. Michael uses the drug on himself and attempts to kill both Spencer and Tricia the same way he killed Carl. Spencer disables the lab's fire system and escapes. He questions Michael about why he would take a virtually untested drug—Michael lied about his Huntington's test. He does have the gene. For Michael, Deighton C is not the wonder drug he had hoped for—and its side effects are disastrous. | ||||
| 5 | "Second Soul" | Paul Lynch | Alan Brennert | 14 April 1995 |
| A dying race of aliens has come to earth to stop its own extinction... by reanimating human corpses. But a government doctor senses that there may be more to the aliens' plans than mere survival! | ||||
| 6 | "White Light Fever" | Tibor Takacs | David Kemper | 21 April 1995 |
| Harlan Hawkes' (William Hickey) heart fails again and he sees himself moving down a tunnel of light. His personal physician, Dr. McEnerney (Bruce Davison), rushes to the scene and resuscitates him just in time. A mysterious blue energy appears near Hawkes' body and moves into the electrical systems of the room. Although Hawkes is still alive, his heart is badly damaged, and the artificial heart being developed by McEnerney will not be ready in time. Hawkes threatens to pull funding from the artificial heart project unless he is moved to the front of the queue for the next available donor heart. This puts Dr. McEnerney in a difficult moral situation. Losing funding for the artificial heart project could mean the loss of a system that could save thousands of lives. To keep the funding he must give priority to a ruthless, cold elderly man who has already had a full life. The situation is even more difficult because the future sister-in-law of his friend, Dr. Anne Crain, is only eighteen and needs a heart transplant. She will not survive beyond a couple of weeks. The blue energy release during Hawkes' last resuscitation begins to try to kill Hawkes. McEnerney realizes that keeping Hawkes alive beyond his time has serious consequences and refuses Hawkes' request to be given priority. Both of the prospective heart recipients—Hawkes and the young girl—die. Hawkes sees the girl inside the tunnel of light, and realizes that their future paths are very different. The girl comments that it is so warm and that she expected it not to be. She goes to Heaven while he descends into the depths of Hell. | ||||
| 7 | "The Choice" | Mark Sobel | Ann Lewis Hamilton | 28 April 1995 |
| A young girl, Aggie Travers, is an outcast at her elementary school, and mysterious things happen to people when she doesn't get along with them. Since it appears that she is responsible for these strange things, she is suspended from school. Her parents are at their wits end, so they decide to look for a nanny for their troubled child. Karen Ross, their first candidate, seems perfect; she bonds with Aggie from the start, and seems to understand her special needs. | ||||
| 8 | "Virtual Future" | Joseph Scanlan | Shawn Alex Thompson | 5 May 1995 |
| Despite his breakthrough, Jack finally loses his funding. He takes his research to Bill Trenton, billionaire owner of a successful research company. Trenton offers Jack a lucrative contract and a well-equipped laboratory to continue his work. Jack takes the job, and eventually Trenton convinces Jack to allow him to try his virtual reality suit. Trenton "jumps" a few hours into the future and sees a newspaper headline about a woman killed at an ATM. Upon returning to the present, Trenton saves the life of the woman whose death he saw reported—proving that it is possible to alter the future as well as see it. Trenton begins secretly making plans to profit from the device by using it to win a United States Senate election. He sneaks into the laboratory and "jumps" into the future again. He sees himself losing the election and ending up subpoenaed. Jack continues working on his suit and extends the range, allowing him to "jump" even further into the future. He sees his own murdered body floating in the ocean. Jack tells his wife, Isabelle, about the suit, its capabilities and what he's seen. At Isabelle's suggestion, Jack takes another trip into the future to find out more about the circumstances of his death, and sees Bill Trenton about to murder him. Meanwhile, Trenton breaks into the lab and Jack is forced to flee. He runs out onto the waterfront and along a pier. Trenton follows him and just as he is about to shoot Jack, Isabelle shoots Trenton instead. The final scene is Bill Trenton's dead body floating in the ocean, in the same manner that Jack foresaw his own death. | ||||
| 9 | "Living Hell" | Graeme Campbell | Pen Densham and Melinda Snodgrass | 12 May 1995 |
| Ben Kohler is shot in the head during an armed robbery. He undergoes an experimental procedure to have a chip implanted in his brain, but when he starts seeing and experiencing violent images, it becomes clear something is desperately wrong. | ||||
| 10 | "Corner of the Eye" | Stuart Gillard | David Schow | 19 May 1995 |
| A priest begins to see horrific demon creatures amongst the ordinary population who are aliens that have the powers to alter their appearance and to heal the sick. | ||||
| 11 | "Under the Bed" | Rene Bonniere | Lawrence Meyers | 26 May 1995 |
| When a little boy is abducted, the only witness, his sister, claims that someone or something under the bed took him. | ||||
| 12 | "Dark Matters" | Paul Lynch | Alan Brennert | 2 June 1995 |
| A commercial transport vessel on a routine mission is suddenly forced out of hyperspace into a black and starless void. The crew begin to see strange creatures inside their ship. After scanning the local space they find a huge chunk of dark matter and two spaceships: an alien craft and the derelict Slayton. After moving closer to the alien craft they begin to see more and more alien creatures appear on board their ship. Suspecting that the aliens may have attacked and killed the crew of the Slayton, they panic and begin shooting at them, to no effect. The pilot of the Nestor, Paul Stein, suddenly sees an apparition of his older brother Kevin (one of the crew of the ill-fated Slayton), who explains that they are all dead and disappears. Commander Manning orders the Nestor moved away from the alien craft and towards the derelict Slayton. As they get closer, John Owens, captain of the Slayton appears. He explains that he cannot touch or feel them because he is no longer alive... he is some kind of ghost, trapped forever inside the pocket of space created by the dark matter. If they die here, as he and his crew did, their "essence" or "souls" will be trapped too. After analyzing the records of the Slayton, they realize that the aliens did not attack. They were attempting to dock with the Slayton in order to escape. They make contact with the alien "ghosts" and use their plan. The dark matter is made up of high frequency superstring particles which are immensely heavy, add energy and the frequency lowers as does its mass therefore releasing the pocket in space that is holding everyone prisoner. The crew release the "ghosts" and escape themselves by turning the engines of the Nestor and the Slayton on the dark matter. Paul confronts Kevin's ghost over an old secret shame and gains confidence from the resolution to trust his own judgment. | ||||
| 13 | "The Conversion" | Rebecca De Mornay | Brad Wright | 9 June 1995 |
| Henry Marshall participates in a real estate scam and is caught. After a long stretch in prison he still hasn't learned to value people more than money. | ||||
| 14 | "Quality of Mercy" | Brad Turner | Brad Wright | 16 June 1995 |
| Major John Skokes and a young female cadet are taken prisoner during an interstellar war and thrown into a dark cell. The story concludes in episode 18 of season 2, "The Light Brigade". | ||||
| 15 | "The New Breed" | Mario Azzopardi | Grant Rosenberg | 23 June 1995 |
| Dr. Stephen Ledbetter makes a technological and medical breakthrough when he creates a type of tiny machine, known as nanobots, capable of curing any disease or imperfections in the human body. They don't know when to stop... | ||||
| 16 | "The Voyage Home" | Tibor Takacs | Grant Rosenberg | 30 June 1995 |
| The Mars III manned expedition to Mars is in its 315th and final day when the crew discover a cave containing strange alien writing and a capsule. The capsule suddenly opens and the crew is knocked unconscious. | ||||
| 17 | "Caught in the Act" | Mario Azzopardi | Grant Rosenberg | 1 July 1995 |
| Jay (Jason London) and Hannah (Alyssa Milano) are madly in love, so much so that he respects her chaste request to wait until marriage to make love. But one night, a strange object falls into Hannah's room, and emits a mysterious violet glow. Possessed, Hannah craves sex, and to feed the alien presence within her, she must prey upon willing males who morph into her body while making love. Hannah first approaches Jay. When Hannah seduces the star Quarterback, Jay follows them in disbelief. He finds Hannah alone and notices the hole in the ceiling where the alien object entered her room. Realizing that Jay is in danger while in her presence, Hannah forces him to leave, but Jay steals back to her room later and discovers the remains of the object and the Quarterback's jacket. Investigating the disappearance of the Quarterback, the police trace Jay to the scene, and he becomes the prime suspect. Jay turns the object over to his professor, who determines its origin, and researches similar occurrences. As more men vanish, the police pursue Hannah, who is then "caught in the act" devouring a convenience store clerk. A cop shoots Hannah, and to his utter horror, the undevoured top half of the clerk drops to the ground to die. He then watches as the violet light emanates from the bullet hole in her stomach. Hannah is rushed to the hospital and doctors watch in awe as the wound heals itself. The professor is able to substantiate Jay's outrageous claims, and when the police release him, he rushes to the hospital to be with Hannah. Desperate for fresh victims, Hannah attacks her doctor, who refuses to give in to her obsession. Certain that his love is more powerful than the force within her, Jay risks his life to try to cure Hannah. Fearing for Jay's safety, Hannah tries to resist him and the craving within her, and ultimately, the purity and power of their love forces the alien presence from her system. (When The Outer Limits was aired in the UK, this episode was used as a pilot.) | ||||
| 18 | "The Message" | Joseph Scanlan | Brad Wright | 16 July 1995 |
| Jennifer Winter (Marlee Matlin), deaf since birth, has had a revolutionary implant placed in her ear, to help her hear for the first time. The device doesn't help her to hear normal conversation and sounds, but she does hear something, and no one believes her. While on a routine visit to the hospital to check on the implant, Jennifer befriends the janitor, Robert (Larry Drake) who empathizes with her. Suddenly, Jennifer is plagued by nightmares and searing pain in her head, all at 3:16 in the morning or afternoon. Once the pain starts she begins furiously writing in binary code. It's Robert who suggests that perhaps the binary code's 0's and 1's might be able to be translated. As a former astrophysicist who had mental problems that forced him to work as a janitor, Robert enters the code into his computer to try to translate it. Meanwhile, Jennifer's husband Sam, concerned for his wife and their young baby, is convinced that Jennifer is going crazy. But as the sounds and dreams become more pronounced Jennifer and Robert are determined to break the code. What they discover is an alien force, trying to communicate a cry for help through Jennifer's implant. The aliens are in a ship hurtling toward the sun and they need help from Earth to save their ship. The message sent was really instructions for a high energy laser designed to push the ship out of a terminal path. They build and activate it just in time to see the ship pushed away from the sun and towards safety. | ||||
| 19 | "I, Robot" | Adam Nimoy and Tibor Takacs | Brad Wright (based on the short story by Eando Binder) | 23 July 1995 |
| Dr. Link is working on the central memory of a robot, Adam, when it suddenly activates and attacks him. A lab assistant enters the room in time to see Adam smashing up the laboratory before crashing through a window and escaping. Dr. Link is left dead. Some time later, a police officer finds Adam in a back alley. It asks the officer to contact Dr. Link and it apparently remembers nothing of the incident. Adam is taken to a cell and preparations are made to disassemble it. Mina, Dr. Link's daughter, contacts a lawyer, Thurman Cutler. Cutler pushes for a murder trial, insisting that Adam is his client and not simply a machine. A court hearing begins, and the prosecutor pushes for dismissal of the case and immediate disassembly on the grounds that Adam is just a machine. Cutler argues that, although Adam is clearly not human, it possesses intelligence and will, and on that basis, deserves a trial. During the hearing, one of Dr. Link's colleagues reveals that he had lost his funding. Cutler begins to look into Dr. Link's financial records and finds that he was working for a defense contractor, and eventually discovers that he was working to turn Adam into a weapon. Cutler is threatened by a shady representative of the defense company, but brings the matter up in court anyway. He argues, with supporting evidence of financial accounts and company memos, that Dr. Link was forced into attempting to rewrite Adam's central programming, effectively lobotomizing it. Adam reacted in the way any human might when faced with death. The court eventually finds that Adam is a person and will stand trial for the murder of Dr. Link. As it is being led away, Adam sees the prosecuting attorney in danger of being run over and rescues her, sacrificing its own life in the process. Leonard Nimoy, father of co-director Adam Nimoy, co-stars in both this episode and the 1960s Outer Limits version of "I, Robot," albeit as different characters. Neither version has any connection to the famous "I, Robot" stories of Isaac Asimov. | ||||
| 20 | "If These Walls Could Talk" | Tibor Takacs | Manny Coto and Eric Estrin | 30 July 1995 |
| A woman asks physicist Dr. Leviticus Mitchell to investigate a "haunted house" where her son and his girlfriend were last seen. | ||||
| 21 | "Birthright" | William Fruet | Michael Berlin and Eric Estrin | 13 August 1995 |
| Senator Richard Adams (Perry King) is at the top of his game. But after a press conference extolling the virtues of a new fuel additive BE-85, which is supposed to clean up the atmosphere, he and his aide, Evan Branch are in a serious auto accident. Branch is dead, and Adams has a head injury, but his attending physician, Dr. Leslie McKenna (Mimi Kuzyk), is baffled by his unusual x-rays--four frontal brain lobes and only three major organs. Before Adams can figure out what happened, a large security detail whisks him and his files away to the Sendrax Corporation, the home of BE-85. It turns out that Adams is an alien and his "kind" are trying to keep their presence a secret. And because their body make up is different, BE-85, with long term use, will reconfigure the earth's atmosphere so it is poisonous to humans, and compatible for the aliens. Adams realizes that he is in danger, and escapes to see McKenna, the only person he can trust. Together they unlock the secret of Adams' identity and the horror of the alien master plan, and divulge the secret of BE-85 to Kyle Haller (Scott Swanson), an aggressive young reporter. Before Haller can expose the aliens he is killed and McKenna is framed for the murder. In the end, Adams thinks he has escaped the aliens, but in reality his nightmare has only begun. | ||||
| 22 | "The Voice of Reason" | Neil Fearnley | Brad Wright | 20 August 1995 |
| Strong, a former member of Army intelligence, tries to convince the members of the committee that a number of different alien invasions of Earth are occurring, and demands an official investigation and response to the threats. His evidence comes from incidents in previous episodes of the first season: the experiments of Simon Kress in "The Sandkings"; an attempt to take over and impersonate the crew of a spacecraft returning to Earth in "The Voyage Home"; the alien parasite in "Caught in the Act"; the alien enzyme able to absorb and imitate living and non-living matter in "If These Walls Could Talk"; the aliens posing as religious messengers in "Corner of the Eye". Strong also believes that the committee itself has been infiltrated by one or more aliens posing as humans (see "Birthright"). The episode "The New Breed" is also referenced, though as counter-evidence that bizarre occurrences are not necessarily a result of alien interference. During the long and stressful meeting it appears that the committee chairman, Thornwell, is an infiltrator because of his opposition to Strong's evidence and claims. The committee adjourns for a private conference to discuss their decision. Upon returning they announce that Strong's evidence and claims of multiple alien invasions have been rejected. In response Strong grabs a gun from a guard and kills Chairmen Thornwell, believing him to be the one blocking further investigation and hoping to expose his alien nature by injuring him. However, Thornwell was privately arguing in support of Strong and was outvoted. Other committee members were the infiltrators, and the death of Thornwell has opened the way for a complete takeover of the committee's activities. The episode ends with the infiltrators wondering if any of the other alien species will pose a threat to their plans, musing that "anything is possible". | ||||
22 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Stitch in Time" | Mario Azzopardi | Steven Barnes | 14 January 1996 |
| FBI agent Jamie Pratt investigates a series of murders spanning a period of forty years—all committed with the same gun. 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. (The character Dr. Theresa Givens also appears in season 6 two hour finale "Final Appeal"). | ||||
| 2 | "Resurrection" | Mario Azzopardi | Jonathan Walker and Chris Dickie | 14 January 1996 |
| Humanity has destroyed itself in a biological war, and only a few hundred androids remain. Two of the androids have a plan to recreate the human race from DNA samples... but the ruling military androids are violently opposed to recreating their former masters. | ||||
| 3 | "Unnatural Selection" | Joseph Scanlan | Eric A. Morris | 19 January 1996 |
| Howard and Joanne Sharp are having a baby. They must decide whether to give their child all the advantages of black market genetic enhancements, which run the risk of Genetic Rejection Syndrome. After discovering that their neighbor's son didn't die years ago, but rather has been turned into a monster as a result of GRS, Howard and Joanne decide to reverse the genetic enhancement process of their unborn child. | ||||
| 4 | "I Hear You Calling" | Mario Azzopardi | Katherine Weber | 26 January 1996 |
| A reporter on her way to work overhears a cellular phone conversation about the "removal" of a controversial author. Her investigation reveals a trail of people who disappeared leaving only a pile of ash behind... and the involvement of a man with strange violet eyes. After a series of chases and narrow escapes, the alien hitman finally catches up with the reporter and reveals to her that the people he's been "removing" had accidentally contracted a deadly alien virus, and that he's been hunting them down in order to prevent them from spreading the virus to the rest of humanity. The hitman explains that the reporter has also contracted the virus through her contact with one of the targets, and the reporter ultimately decides to sacrifice herself to spare humanity from the disease. The hitman corrects the reporter, he has not been vaporizing the targets, merely teleporting them off Earth where the disease is not fatal. The episode ends with the alien and the reporter teleporting away. | ||||
| 5 | "Mind Over Matter" | Mario Azzopardi | Steven Barnes | 2 February 1996 |
| Dr. Sam Stein (Mark Hamill) develops a machine that allows a person to connect themselves directly to the brain of another and experience their thoughts and feelings. Intended for use with coma patients, he suddenly gets the chance to use it with a colleague who is comatose after an accident. Dr. Sam Stein initially thinks that his machine's application for communicating with the comatose Dr. Rachel Carter is a complete success. However, a mysterious pair of hands emerge to grab at Carter whenever Stein and Carter start becoming intimate. It is soon discovered that the pair of hands belongs to the machine itself; It has learned to love Stein and is jealous of Carter. Stein's only two options are to disconnect the machine or to "show" the machine that it cannot love. Stein attempts to show the machine that it cannot love by grabbing what he thinks is the virtual representation of the machine (a Caucasian female in the image of a disheveled) and smothering it with an equally virtual pillow (with goading from Carter). Once he does that, though, the physical body of Carter dies. At this point, the machine reveals that it has been masquerading as Carter all along; the entity he had mistakenly suffocated was apparently the real Carter. Stein, in a rage, destroys the machine. It is not known for how long the machine was mimicking the appearance of Carter; Whether the "pair of hands" were Carter's from the very start or only at the very end. | ||||
| 6 | "Beyond the Veil" | Chris Brancato | Allan Eastman | 9 February 1996 |
| Eddie Wexler suffers from flashbacks to an alien abduction, which eventually drives him to suicidal behavior. After checking himself into a mental institution with others suffering from similar problems, he begins to suspect that there is something more sinister going on at the hospital. | ||||
| 7 | "First Anniversary" | Brad Turner | Richard Matheson, Jon Cooksey and Ali Marie Matheson | 16 February 1996 |
| Norman Glass celebrates his first wedding anniversary with his beautiful and talented wife, Ady. Norman's best friend, Dennis, also has a beautiful wife, Barbara. However, over the next few days, both relationships unravel rather quickly. First, Dennis walks out on Barbara; Norman goes to talk to Dennis in a city park and is frightened by what he finds. Dennis, clearly unhinged and paranoid, claims that Barbara is not what she seems, and that she is an alien creature who can change appearance (through influencing people's thoughts). A strange woman approaches Dennis and claims to be Barbara, begging him to take her back. Norman doesn't recognize her, but Dennis does—whereupon he runs into traffic and is killed. Later, after Dennis' funeral, Norman experiences the same effects: he begins to feel repulsed whenever he touches, smells or tastes his lovely wife. Ady attempts to bluff her way out of the situation but is forced to admit the truth: she and Barbara are aliens whose ship crash-landed on Earth some time ago. They are repulsive creatures in their natural form (apparently, of aquatic origin), but since they are stranded on Earth with no way to leave, they decided to try to blend in and live out the rest of their lives as human women. Their ability to trick someone's senses wears off, as the victim grows a resistance, after a year or so. Norman becomes unhinged at this knowledge and is taken away by paramedics. | ||||
| 8 | "Straight and Narrow" | Joseph Scanlan | Joel Metzger | 23 February 1996 |
| A mother sends her recalcitrant son, Rusty Dobson, to a military academy. The administrators are actually controlling the students through a chip inserted into their heads. They want to create a group of business executives who are willing to commit murder in order to make more money for their companies. Rusty and one other student are immune to the chip because of a medicine they are taking for ulcers. The other student wants to wait to graduate, and then expose the place to the outside world. Rusty is convinced that this is a bad idea, and wants to escape. However, as soon as he approaches the boundary of the academy, the chip in his head gives him severe migraine. At the end of the episode, Rusty manages to escape by stealing the security clearance cards out of the administrator's office and disabling the boundary control system. His fellow students chase after him, but he re-activates the system and they are unable to follow him past the walls of the academy. He tries to call his mother from a payphone, but she is busy in an office. He heads to site of an assassination plan he knows of, but police (who show the distinctive scars from the computer chip implantation) detain him. His friend from school performs the assassination. | ||||
| 9 | "Trial by Fire" | Jonathan Glassner | Brad Wright | 1 March 1996 |
| The president is taken to an underground bunker on his way to his inauguration. He is told that an object is quickly approaching the Earth. It turns out that this object is from an alien spaceship. After this, a fleet of alien spaceships heads towards the Earth. The aliens in these ships live in a liquid environment. The president is given as much information as possible, but usually in scientific or technical language. He demands that everything be told to him in plain English. The Russians are very afraid of these ships. As the fleet grows nearer to Earth, the aliens try using Earth's artificial satellites to communicate. The president asks his general what to expect if the aliens were attacking the Earth. The general tells him that the aliens would send a scout down to test the Earth's defenses. The aliens send one ship towards the Pacific Ocean, and it looks like they are attacking. The president orders a nuclear submarine to fire a nuclear missile at the ships. The Russians also fire missiles. The aliens destroy the missiles, the submarine, and send weapons bound for Moscow and Washington, DC. Computers manage to decode the message sent by the aliens by removing the interference of a liquid environment. The message said, "Let us be your friends." | ||||
| 10 | "Worlds Apart" | Brad Turner | Chris Dickie | 22 March 1996 |
| An astronaut crashes on an alien planet, but by some miracle he is quickly able to contact Earth and speak directly to the space agency behind his mission. Twenty years have passed for them and his former lover is now married and the director of the agency. | ||||
| 11 | "The Refuge" | Ken Girotti | Alan Brennert | 5 April 1996 |
| Raymond Bava stumbles through a forest in a vicious snow blizzard before finally collapsing. He wakes in a warm and comfortable log cabin with a group of people, only to be told that the entire world is blanketed by an enormous storm, and he has found the only safe place. | ||||
| 12 | "Inconstant Moon" | Joseph Scanlan | Larry Niven | 12 April 1996 |
| A physics professor spots that the moon is extremely bright. He realizes that the sun must have gone nova and the side of the Earth in daylight must be suffering extreme heat—and that he has only a few hours left to live. He speaks to another academic and decides that it would be better if people did not know what had happened. He contacts a woman whom he had been in love with and invites her to go for a walk with him; a love story ensues where he and the woman marry on what they assume is their last night on Earth. He is forced to admit what is going on to the woman, who is initially extremely disconcerted and distrustful of his intentions, although he defers these misgivings by repeatedly professing his love. When they go to her apartment to eat, he begins to suspect that the Earth is merely being hit by an extreme solar flare, and he begins to plan for an extended period of survival, despite his new wife's reluctance. He turns out to be correct, and the professor and his wife are one of the few left alive despite extreme flooding, although the story is ambiguous as to the scale of the disaster. | ||||
| 13 | "From Within" | Neil Fearnley | Jonathan Glassner | 28 April 1996 |
| A slightly underdeveloped boy named Howie is the last unaffected person in a small town overrun by a strange madness. Miners unearth ancient parasites, in the shape of worms, which attack the brains of their hosts. While the infected townsfolk lose all their inhibitions, Howie must save his sister Sheila, the only person who truly cares for him. Deprived of Sheila's guidance for the first time in his life, Howie struggles to evade his maddened neighbors and destroy the parasites. In the process, he becomes a hero to the whole town. | ||||
| 14 | "The Heist" | Brad Turner | Steven Barnes | 5 May 1996 |
| A bitter ex-soldier agrees to help a militia hijack a U.S. Army shipment of missiles. Instead of missiles, they find a lone guard who pleads with them not to open the shipment because it is deadly. Major Mackie demands to know what is in the shipment and believes that the Captain is lying. But all the lone guard will tell him is "don't open it". Even under threat of death, Captain Washington refuses to stand down, but Major Mackie eventually forces his will to be done. They open the door and a chilling series of events begin to unfold as an alien life form freezes them to death. The soldiers lose their discipline and begin to scatter, questioning their loyalties. All the while the alien stalks with cold impersonal efficiency, taking out the self-styled militia one by one. The final scene shows a police officer frozen outside of the building. | ||||
| 15 | "Afterlife" | Mario Azzopardi | John F. Whelpley | 19 May 1996 |
| Stiles is a wrongly convicted murderer of 11 of people and is offered a choice between his execution and his cooperation with an experiment. His Christian beliefs don't allow him to make any choice but to go through with what turns out to be a genetic experiment to splice his genes with extraterrestrial genes. What surmises is Stiles becoming more and more of a horrific monster with increased thought and increased senses. He escapes in what turns out to be an intentional manhunt as they wanted him to escape so they can hunt him down. When the end comes near for the now mutated Stiles, the tables turn when aliens resembling the now mutated Stiles appear. The aliens and the mutated Stiles beam away, leaving the people that were chasing Stiles to realize that they were being tested by the aliens and that they failed the test. | ||||
| 16 | "The Deprogrammers" | Joseph Scanlan | James Crocker | 26 May 1996 |
| Earth is under alien occupation and the human race has been conditioned for slavery, unable to think for itself or disobey an order. One human, the slave of an important ruler, is captured by a small band of rebel humans who try to break the conditioning and restore his free will. | ||||
| 17 | "Paradise" | Mario Azzopardi | Jonathan Walker and Chris Dickie | 16 June 1996 |
| Dr. Christina Markham and Sheriff Grady Markham have to investigate a spate of strange incidents involving young and apparently healthy women suddenly growing old and dying. | ||||
| 18 | "The Light Brigade" | Michael Keusch | Brad Wright | 23 June 1996 |
| In this sequel to episode 14 of season 1, "Quality of Mercy", the ship The Light Brigade is the last hope of humanity in a war against an alien race. In an attempt to turn the tide of the war, humanity is resorting to a Hiroshima-type strike. The Light Brigade carries a new bomb to be delivered to the enemy homeworld. This bomb works by breaking down the forces which hold subatomic particles together to form an atom. As with the original atomic bomb, a very limited number were made. The first was tested on one of the Martian moons, and created an explosion of such power that it was daylight on earth for several days. The Light Brigade's purpose is to deliver this powerful weapon to destroy the enemy homeworld. The aliens ambush the ship, and use their unique methods to trick the survivors of the Light Brigade into failing their mission. This feat is achieved by Robert Patrick's character, John Skokes, whose physical likeness has been assumed by an alien spy, leading one to believe the real Skokes died in captivity (following the events depicted in "Quality of Mercy"). In the closing scene, at huge personal cost, a young cadet (Wil Wheaton) releases the bomb over what the he believes to be the alien homeworld. It is in fact Earth, and the mission is not only a failure, but the unleashing of the doomsday weapon on an already crippled humanity. | ||||
| 19 | "Falling Star" | Ken Girotti | Alan Brennert | 30 June 1996 |
| Pop singer Melissa McCammon (Sheena Easton) is about to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs. With her once meteoric career at a standstill and her husband (Xander Berkeley) cheating on her, she sees no hope. Then she encounters Rachael, an ardent fan from the future. Rachael is a time traveler—and an uninvited tourist in Melissa's body. She tells Melissa that her music inspired her future fans to resist a totalitarian takeover, which will succeed if she dies now. However, special authorities are out to punish Rachel for her crime, as time-traveling and using a host body plus changing the past is a serious offense, and she must be taken care of. The authorizes from the future want Melissa dead and will resort to anything—including murder—to preserve their version of the past. The final scene shows Melissa on the stage (in her friend Janet's body) singing to an audience. | ||||
| 20 | "Out of Body" | Ken Girotti | Mario Azzopardi | 14 July 1996 |
| Rebecca Warfield and husband Ben McCormick are trying to find out if out-of-body experiences can be artificially induced by subjecting monkeys to electric impulses. They see it as pure science, but to religious groups like Family Foremost, it is sacrilege. Desperate for funding, Rebecca decides to run the experiment with a human subject: herself. She asks her assistant, Amy, to help. Amy, a secret religious fanatic, alters the experiment. Rebecca escapes from her body, but, unless she finds a way to communicate, she will remain trapped in another dimension. | ||||
| 21 | "Vanishing Act" | Jonathan Glassner | Chris Dickie | 21 July 1996 |
| An alien race that has no concept of time uses wormholes to find planets with living creatures and enter them as hosts. When the host is asleep, they use a wormhole to abduct them and transport them to their home world where they can learn everything the host has experienced. However, since the aliens have no concept of the passage of time, they aren't realizing that each time they return their host — Trevor — home, they are returning him 10 years later each time, putting him further out of touch with everything he loves. At the end they remove the connection and send him back to the night he first left; he has his life back, and nobody knows what happened, except Trevor, who retains the memory of his experiences. | ||||
| 22 | "The Sentence" | Joseph Scanlan | Melissa Rosenberg | 4 August 1996 |
| Dr. Jack Henson is conducting experiments in simulating time in prison for a powerful Senator which he says will free up space, money and curtail what he feels are inhumane punishments. The first prisoner visibly experiences twenty years in prison, though in reality twenty minutes passed, and is tearfully grateful to be released. The next prisoner brought in for the experiment repeatedly claims to be innocent before being put in simulation. When the prisoner begins to have seizures Dr. Henson, worried that he may really be innocent and the simulation is affecting him negatively because of this, enters the simulation to bring the prisoner out within the 17-second time limit. Dr. Henson succeeds and with time to spare. However, the moment of relief was short as the prisoner dies from a heart attack, apparently due to the shock of his "murder" by another inmate in the simulation. Dr. Henson is charged with the murder of the prisoner due to his perceived depraved indifference over this risk, found guilty, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Dr. Henson is beaten up by his cell mate and tormented by hearing threats from what he believes is the brother of the prisoner who died, apparently in the next cell. Attending mandatory sessions with the prison psychiatrist (a hologram, due to budget cuts) he is told the dead prisoner's brother is not in the prison, and he must be hallucinating. Dr. Henson attempts to escape, but is shocked by the floors' electrical discharge, something he previously denounced. He resigns himself to prison life, adjusting slowly until release. It turns out he got the original prisoner free from the virtual prison in time and unharmed, but felt so guilty at seeing what the prisoner was subjected to he simulated his trial and sentence. The Senator is very impressed with the simulation and will push for its approval. Dr. Henson snaps at hearing this after his experience, attacking the Senator and trying to destroy his machine, but is restrained while he struggles despairingly. | ||||
18 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Bits of Love" | Neil Fearnley | James Crocker | 19 January 1997 |
| After a nuclear holocaust, Aiden Hunter is possibly the last human being alive. Despite this, for the last seven months he has lived a hedonistic life deep below ground in a comfortable hi-tech bunker, with only computer-generated holograms of his friends and family for company. He even has a machine capable of creating physical stimulation for more intimate encounters with simulated women. The controlling artificial intelligence personality of the computer system is Emma, who appears as an attractive female. Eventually, Aiden tires of creating ideal women and decides to seduce Emma. Afterward he treats her like the many other disposable simulated females he created. However, it seems Emma is more than a simple computer program and begins to make life difficult for him. She alters her appearance to seem pregnant and begins to control the other holograms to create her own world. When Aiden attempts to reset the system, Emma retaliates by creating a holographic Aiden, along with his family and friends. Aiden finds himself completely alone and, in effect, a ghost unable to interact with the new "real world." | ||||
| 2 | "Second Thoughts" | Mario Azzopardi | Sam Egan | 19 January 1997 |
| Karl Durand is a man in his 30's, but with the mind of a child. Dr. Jacob Valerian discovers a method for transferring memories and experiences into another person's brain. As his last dying act he transfers his own memories into Karl's brain. Karl begins to have flashes of skill and talent from absorbing the doctor's memories. When he accidentally kills another man, he uses the device to transfer the man's memories into his own brain. However, this causes Karl to exhibit multiple personality and schizoid behavior. Meanwhile he tries to date a woman he's secretly loved for years, with no success, and is forced to kill and "absorb" the detective investigating about the death of the man Karl accidentally killed. Finally he absorbs the mind of an artist that the woman had a fling with hoping that his personality helps him to finally get her to love him. The artist was temperamental and suicidal. The ending sequence shows Karl kneeling on the floor going crazy with a gun pointed to his head. The final scene shows a photo of Rose with Karl apparently committing suicide off-camera. | ||||
| 3 | "Re-generation" | Brenton Spencer | Tom J. Astle | 24 January 1997 |
| A high-profile and powerful public figure, Graham's position allows him to offer the opportunity to clone their deceased son. Rebecca is at first horrified and repulsed, but eventually agrees to undergo the procedure. After six months strange things happen. Rebecca begins seeing things from her son's eyes. She meets with Dr. Cole and tells her of the episodes, they both conclude that the child she is carrying is not just a clone, but has the memories of her dead son, Justin. She also realizes that her baby reacts strangely whenever she is around her husband Graham. As she sees through the baby's eyes, she can see the moment of Justin's death, and it doesn't line up with what she had been told. Although Justin did die in an accident, Rebecca's husband, busy with some project, lost patience when the boy wanted attention, and brutally pulled a toy from Justin's hands, accidentally knocking him down; the boy fell and struck his head, and died in the hospital later. She decides to leave, since her husband lied, but Graham tries to convince her to give him a second chance. Images communicated from Justin make her fear that Graham will attempt to kill her and make it look like an accident rather than allow her to leave him knowing his secret (a high-profile divorce, especially if she reveals the truth about what happened to their son, could ruin him,) so she hides in the attic. She finds a shotgun up there, and when Graham approaches her she shoots him (it is left ambiguous as to whether he truly intended to harm her.) After three months, Rebecca has brought her newborn son in for a checkup. (There is no explanation as to what occurred after Graham's death or what legal ramifications, if any, Rebecca faced for killing her husband.) When she leaves on the elevator, we see Dr. Cole, now pregnant, and—responding to a kick—she calms the unborn child, calling his name: Graham. | ||||
| 4 | "Last Supper" | Helen Shaver | Scott Shepherd | 31 January 1997 |
| Frank Martin's son Danny brings home a beautiful girl to meet his family. The girl, Jade, looks exactly like a girl Frank once rescued from a top-secret military experiment 20 years before. | ||||
| 5 | "Stream of Consciousness" | Joe Nimziki | David Shore | 7 February 1997 |
| Due to a brain injury, Ryan Unger cannot enjoy the benefits of a neural implant that allows other people to tap into The Stream—a direct connection into all human knowledge. He tries, unsuccessfully, to keep up with everyone else by using a long-forgotten skill: reading books. For the human race, the Stream has been erroneously programmed to crave information instead of knowledge. Soon, it begins to turn the human race into its slaves to attempt to locate and process every single bit of information, a process that will lead to the human race's extinction as people stop doing everything to obtain the desired information. Ryan's injury keeps him from falling under the sway of the Stream, leaving him the only person who can stop it. The Stream will not allow itself to be shut down, however, and it commands the humans under its control to defend itself from Ryan. In the end, Ryan succeeds in shutting down the Stream and saving mankind. Cut off from the mental crutch humanity has used for so long, Ryan finds himself needing to teach mankind the old ways of acquiring information again—from books. | ||||
| 6 | "Dark Rain" | Mario Azzopardi | David Braff | 14 February 1997 |
| A chemical war leaves most of humanity unable to reproduce. Only rare couples, such as Sherry and Tim McAllister, are able to have healthy normal children. Sherry and Tim McAllister conceive and become the focus of intense attention from the government. The couple slowly comes to the realization of how important the pregnancy is to the government, and how far it will go to get what it wants. They find themselves in a secret maternity hospital overseen by Dr. Clayton Royce. The McAllisters are truly horrified when they find that Dr. Royce has hidden designs on their new-born son as he intends him to be a permanent ward of the state. | ||||
| 7 | "The Camp" | Jonathan Glassner | Brad Wright | 21 February 1997 |
| For the last twelve generations, mankind has been enslaved by an alien race and imprisoned in concentration camps overseen by androids. One woman, Prisoner 98843, dares to challenge the authority of the Commandant. Her desire to be free is pitted against the seemingly invincible alien New Masters. All the prisoners believe the world outside the camp is uninhabitable by humans. Prisoner 98843 discovers that the Commandant and the guards are androids who have received no maintenance for decades and are in desperate need of repair. She mends them from spare parts gleaned from other guards that have ceased to function, and finally forces the Commandant to reveal that the rocket fuel made in the camp is no longer in use by the alien fleet, which has moved beyond earth. He has received no communication from his superiors for decades, and has maintained the camp regimen simply because those were his orders. She leads a revolt that overpowers the guards and beheads the commandant. The episode ends with the inmates looking through the open gates at a virgin earth. | ||||
| 8 | "Heart's Desire" | Mario Azzopardi | Alan Brennert | 28 February 1997 |
| It is set in the north-west Pacific town of "Heart's Desire" sometime in the late 1800s. In the episode, a visitor from another world takes over the body of a human preacher. He gives four outlaws a special energy power, which they can use to destroy anything they wish as long as they "want it more than anything else." The first outlaws to be given these powers are two friends, Frank and JD Kelton. Frank wants to use them to rob people. Later in the episode, the visitor gives the powers to two brothers, Jake and Ben Miller who use them to rival their ex-partners. After this, the visitor explains to Jake and a woman who witnessed the violence his reason for coming to earth, and giving them this power. Jake asks him, "All of these people, dead, for what?" He then shows them that he is an alien, and tells them that he is scouting ahead to see if humans will ever be able to rival his civilization. "The fate of a world isn't determined by its best examples, but by its worst. It takes a few to destroy the many, especially when even the best of you can be dragged down into the mire. Judging from your example, brother against brother, friend against friend, you people have such a potential for violence, sheer, unvarnished wickedness, I've got every confidence you'll destroy yourself before you build your first inter-stellar engine. We've got nothing to fear from you." He then disappears. | ||||
| 9 | "Tempests" | Mario Azzopardi | Hart Hanson | 7 March 1997 |
| A spaceship crashes while on a mission of mercy. One of the crew is bitten by a strange spider-like creature and begins to hallucinate—unable to tell what is real, and what is fantasy. Commander Virgil find himself between two realities. An effect from a poisonous spider bite after his ship crash landed on a moon and he attempted to fix it. He finds himself shifting from the "bad" reality where his stuck on the moon trying to survive with his crew mates and apparently hallucinating from poison, and the "good" reality where he is with his family and heralded as a hero and hallucinating due to a virus called Ellycia C. In the end Virgil makes a choice to save his people in the "bad" reality saying goodbye to the "good" reality. The captain manages to fire him on an escape pod. As he flies through space he manages to get a transmission from his wife. As he claims: "I save them." Reality shifts again... The truth of everything is that Virgil is in fact taken over by the spiders as so have the rest of the crew. | ||||
| 10 | "Awakening" | George Bloomfield | James Crocker | 14 March 1997 |
| Beth, a woman with alexithymia is a test experiment for a chip that could restore emotion in alexithymia 'sufferers'. Upon having the chip implanted and experiencing emotion for the first time, Beth begins to hear voices, and even sees space aliens who make experiments on her. The doctors suspect that this is a result of the implant and want to remove it. Beth escapes from the hospital and returns to the house where she was before. She discovers a secret room with space alien props. Beth's friend and love interest get into the room and reveal that it was all a big show to discredit the implant as a favor for a competing company. Beth is hiding and hears all. Beth comes out and kills the two of them by pushing them out of a window with a drawer. Given the unusual nature of the case, Beth is not given any prison time and because she appears to have returned to her previous unemotional state, it is assumed that the chip has burnt out and painful surgery would be pointless. Days later, Beth is seen at home, stroking Mulligan (her cat) and a slow smile ascends on her face, implying that she was just acting unemotional in order to avoid having the chip removed and going to prison. | ||||
| 11 | "New Lease" | Jason Priestley | Sam Egan | 21 March 1997 |
| Dr. James Houghton and Dr. Charles McCamber, working in secret, develop a means of revitalising the dead. After a semi-successful test—a patient is revived, but immediately begins a painful deterioration—Dr. Houghton is assaulted and killed in a robbery attempt. He is revived believing that he has only a few days to live. Fearing that he has neglected his wife, he tries at first to make up for it by showering her with attention and affection—but his resentment toward the man who murdered him takes over. Certain that he will die soon, he takes revenge on the robber—only to find out later that he will live. He is arrested later that day on murder charges, and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. | ||||
| 12 | "Double Helix" | Mario Azzopardi | Jonathan Glassner | 28 March 1997 |
| A geneticist, Dr Martin Nodel, is a researcher looking into introns, mysterious sections of DNA that he believes hold the secret to future evolution. He develops a formula that he believes will activate them, and tests it on himself. After developing the liquid that acts on the intron (genetic material in DNA that acts as spacers and does not code for protein) he tests the liquid on himself. He begins experiencing strange symptoms, including a sort of map that grows on his back and a pattern that grows on his hand. Shortly after he begins looking for students that are suitable candidates. They have to have a high IQ, never had surgery, and are free from imperfections such as tattoos or glasses. They also have to be in a certain age, weight, and height range. After finding the needed candidates, he reveals the map. The area is discovered to be a hidden military area not on any normal map and, along with Nodel's son and his girlfriend, the group travels to the area. Inside that area, is a spaceship-type device, which symbols match the ones on the Doctor's hands. It activates, and a message from an apparent alien race is played back. The Doctor, and the students, decide to enter the ship on a journey to the home planet. Despite his son and son's girlfriend not qualifying, the Doctor says that they'd need someone like the two of them. The ship takes off. The story concludes in episode 23 of season 4, "The Origin of Species". | ||||
| 13 | "Dead Man's Switch" | Jeff Woolnough | B. Richardson | 4 April 1997 |
| Lieutenant Ben Conklin is given the assignment of spending one year in a bunker 11,000 feet underneath Alaska. He is told by General James Eiger that a fleet of alien ships are heading towards the Earth, as photographed by the Hubble Telescope. His job is to be a revenge weapon should the aliens turn out to be hostile and take over. The world's chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons stockpiles have been linked to create a single doomsday weapon. Five people are placed in five bunkers around the world (American, Russian, Chinese, African, and Australian). An alarm sounds randomly, and at least one of the bunker occupants must hit the dead man's switch to disarm it. If a 30-second countdown passes and no-one activates the switch, the doomsday weapon will fire and leave the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. To prevent them from being fed false information the bunker occupants are sealed off from the world, and can communicate only with each other and the General in charge of the operation. | ||||
| 14 | "Music of the Spheres" | David Warry-Smith | Steven Barnes | 9 May 1997 |
| Devon Taylor, a young physics student, picks up a strange signal during his work at a radio observatory. He believes that he can hear a pattern in it, but none of his older colleagues can hear it. Taylor's younger sister, Joyce Taylor, plays the tape and enjoys the sound so much she plays it at a rave. When Devon finds her at the rave, everyone there is infected with skin deformities. All the teens are quarantined at a hospital, but when they are separated from the music on the tape they all experience severe pain and withdrawal symptoms. Devon and his superiors are left with no choice but to let the patients listen to the tape until they can figure out the rest of the transmitted message. It is later discovered that a dying alien world had transmitted this audio in order to save other planets from a dire fate: their sun had shifted to the ultraviolet spectrum, and all their world's inhabitants would have died if they had not figured out how to alter their own physiology so that they would resist the effects of the changed sun. They detected that Earth's sun would also undergo the same change and sent the audio signal to Earth so that humanity could prepare. In the end the rest of humanity either transforms by the transmitted sound (developing new, hardened skin) or chose to remain as they were. Any humans who did not change would have to avoid the sun at all times since the new sun's radiation would be fatal to anyone who did not change. | ||||
| 15 | "The Revelations of Becka Paulson" | Steven Weber | Brad Wright, Stephen King (story) | 6 June 1997 |
| Becka Paulson accidentally shoots herself in the head while watching a soap opera. The bullet lodges in her brain, and begins to have some strange effects. In a stroke of 'luck', the bullet does not kill Becka, but her severe brain damage causes her to begin to hallucinate that the picture of a tuxedoed stranger on top of the TV (Who calls himself 'The 8 By 10' Man; in the original story it was a picture of Jesus) is talking to her. Under the advice of the 8 By 10 Man, Becka eventually decides to kill her worthless husband, and in a bit of 'damaged savantry', rigs up the television (under the 8 by 10 Man's instructions) to deliver a fatal electrical pulse to whoever touches the knob. Becka in the end tricks her husband into touching it, but as he begins to be fatally electrocuted, she finally realizes just what she's done and tries to save him. All she does is alter the circuit by touching him, and the two fall dead, the victim of a tragic quirk of fate that was in the end far from lucky. | ||||
| 16 | "Bodies of Evidence" | Melvin Van Peebles | Chris Dickie | 20 June 1997 |
| The crew of the space station Meridian begins to see visions of loved ones or enemies that lure them to their deaths. After three crewmembers die, the remaining two (including Captain Clark) escape to Earth, where Clark is accused of murdering his crew. Dysart, his ex-wife, defends him by suggesting that the crew was driven insane by an experimental chemical, Soroxin. | ||||
| 17 | "Feasibility Study" | Ken Girotti | Joseph Stefano | 11 July 1997 |
| Joshua Hayward and his daughter Sarah wake one morning to find a four-block section of their suburban neighborhood surrounded by a mysterious energy barrier. Sarah finds a badly disfigured alien, Adrielo, who tells her that her neighborhood has been grabbed and moved by another race of aliens. He shows her a way through the energy barrier to his own captured realm. He begs her to help him save his people. Meanwhile, her father Joshua also finds a way through the barrier and comes face-to-face with their captors, the Triunes, a slothful race who feel physical activity is beneath them. They explain—in a matter of fact manner—that Joshua, his daughter and the rest of the inhabitants of his neighborhood have been taken as part of a feasibility study into the suitability of humans for slavery. If they are found able to survive the aliens' native environment, the rest of Earth's population will also be taken and enslaved. Meanwhile, Sarah finds the rest of Adrielo's people. They are dying from disease that is turning them to stone, and Sarah accidentally becomes infected. Joshua eventually finds her and she pleads with him not to touch her or he may also become infected. They both slip back through the energy barrier and return to their own neighborhood. Joshua explains the purpose of the energy barrier to the other residents, and they wonder what choice they have other than to serve the Triunes. Joshua explains the disease his daughter has been infected with, and suggests they deliberately infect themselves to save Earth from enslavement by the Triunes. After discussing it, the residents join hands in the church to sacrifice themselves and prove that humans are unsuitable as slaves. | ||||
| 18 | "A Special Edition" | Mario Azzopardi | Naren Shankar | 25 July 1997 |
| Donald Rivers, a journalist for the television show The Whole Truth, has found proof that the government and large defense contractors have been illegally and secretly cloning human beings. After locking himself in the studio with only a small crew he plans to air his report to the world. (This episode is a clip show, and Donald Rivers' reports are made up from clips from other episodes of The Outer Limits. However, this episode is unusual because one clip came from an episode that had yet to be broadcast; the report that Rivers runs on Mason Stark did not air for another four episodes.) | ||||
26 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Criminal Nature" | Steve Anker | Brad Markowitz | 23 January 1998 |
| The GRS monster children are now adults who commit murders. Detective Ray Venable has a "secret" son with GRS, Dylan, who is harassing Ray's family. Ray injects himself with a serum to temporarily enhance his sensory abilities (like GRS people) in order to hunt him. He does this successfully, only to find out that it was a plot by his son, who placed the serum so that Ray would find it. His son forcefully injects more of the serum into his dad, so that Ray now has irreversible GRS and transforms into a monster. Ray kills Dylan, but his family no longer loves him because he looks like the other GRS monsters. | ||||
| 2 | "The Hunt" | Mario Azzopardi | Sam Egan | 30 January 1998 |
| A group of obsolete androids (a doctor, a miner, and two others) attempt to escape from the hunters during the beginning of the hunt. They find a way to remove their inhibitors (chips that keep them from confronting and/or attacking the humans), allowing them to set traps instead of merely running away. One of their traps kills the son of the lead hunter. However, none but the miner android survives to reach the end of the hunting area. A police officer tells him he is free because he has survived the hunt. In the next scene, another group of androids are unloaded for another hunt. The hunter that informs them what they are about to endure is the android who survived the first hunt. | ||||
| 3 | "Hearts and Minds" | Brad Turner | Naren Shankar | 6 February 1998 |
| All soldiers of the team have drug injectors to protect them against an "alien virus". After a drug injector malfunction, the soldiers slowly realize that the drug is actually designed to cause hallucinations of disgusting looking aliens. The "aliens" are actually humans as well, but from another federation. The team tries to make contact with the "alien team" to explain the situation and ask for peace. But their drug injectors work properly and they kill everyone from the team, believing that they are the aliens. The final scene shows the soldiers dead on the floor. | ||||
| 4 | "In Another Life" | Allan Eastman | Naren Shankar, Brad Wright, Naren Shankar, Chris Brancato | 16 February 1998 |
| Mason Stark hates his life. A year ago, he lost his wife Kristin to a mugger's bullet and he still blames himself for not doing more to protect her. And today, he was fired from his job. With a gun in his hand and a severance package on his desk, Mason finds himself torn between suicide and psychosis—between killing himself and killing his co-workers. But before he can do either he's pulled into another dimension, into a world where there are hundreds of Mason Starks, each with a different life and a different character. The version of himself that brought Mason here is a powerful, manipulative man—we know him as Stark—who, in this dimension, runs the same company that fired Mason. Stark explains that he built a machine, the Quantum Mirror, to explore all those different versions of himself, only to have his experiment go horribly wrong because he pulled a murderous version of himself, a man we know as Mace, into his reality. Now Stark wants Mason to stop the killer and promises to reunite him with Kristin as his reward. In this looking glass world, Mason must hunt himself on behalf of himself, in a desperate race to stop a killer ... and change his own life for the better. | ||||
| 5 | "In The Zone" | Jorge Montesi | Naren Shankar | 20 February 1998 |
| With its deadly lasers and hand-to-hand battles, "The Octal" is a combat sport for a new generation of athletes, but Tanner Brooks is no longer a young man. Although he's promised his wife Jessica that this will be his final tournament, Tanner is desperate to go out a winner. Dr. Michael Chen has a way to make that happen. Through an experimental treatment that taps the power of the human nervous system, Chen accelerates Tanner's reflexes and perceptions. To Tanner, everything in the Octal begins to move in slow motion ... and Tanner quickly becomes unbeatable. However, there are side effects: Jessica notices that Tanner is tired, haggard and his hair is going gray. But, when Tanner's body begins to blur and fade out of existence, Tanner and Jessica must choose between one last moment of glory ... their love for each other ... and oblivion. | ||||
| 6 | "Relativity Theory" | Ken Girotti | Carleton Eastlake | 27 February 1998 |
| Biologist Teresa Janovitch (Melissa Gilbert) is a civilian among military men, traveling on the Resource Survey Vehicle Cortez to Tau Ceti Prime in search of minerals for an Earth that has squandered its own. Initial signs indicate that the planet is both uninhabited and rich in mineral resources, which could mean a million dollar payday for both the crew and the company that owns the Cortez. But on the first exploration, the crew is attacked by gigantic and apparently primitive aliens. After the command falls to Janovitch, she is overpowered by her crew: Sgt. Adam Sears, a veteran of pacification missions on Earth, who favors annihilation of the new race and the ambiguous Corporal Charles Pendelton. Sears leads a patrol that hunts down and kills the aliens, in the process seizing a golden object that appears to be a religious totem. As he celebrates his slaughter, Janovitch examines his victims and makes a shocking discovery. The "primitive" aliens are in fact youths, an alien version of boy scout teams of a far more advanced race whose "father" appears through a wormhole much to the surprise of the humans. Having downloaded the location of the homeworld of these bloodthirsty aliens that would murder children, this "father" then plants a bomb killing the remaining crew. The closing scene shows the alien ship approaching Earth ready to attack. | ||||
| 7 | "Josh" | Jorge Montesi | Chris Ruppenthal | 6 March 1998 |
| Tabloid TV reporter Judy Warren (Tara Strong) knows she's come across a big story when she sees the videotape shot by two tourists in a remote Alaskan park. The tape shows Josh Butler, a recluse who lives in a cabin near the park, bringing back to life a young girl who has died after a fall, a feat he accomplishes by generating a mysterious blue glow. But, she only discovers how big a story it is when her pursuit of the strange young man is cut short by a top-secret military unit that is also chasing him. It seems that the blue glow sent out electromagnetic pulses that knocked out two satellites orbiting 20,000 miles above the Earth, and the Air Force wants to know what's going on. A battery of tests doesn't produce any answers, leaving the brass, led by Col. Roger Tennent and Major Samuel Harbeck to debate whether Butler is an alien or an angel—someone to be dissected or to be worshipped. Warren doesn't know what Josh is either, but she knows she doesn't trust the soldiers to make the right choice. This prompts her to try to save the recluse. | ||||
| 8 | "Rite of Passage" | Jimmy Kaufman | Chris Dickie | 13 March 1998 |
| The birth of a child is a joyful event, but for Shal and Brav, two young naive humans who live in a small commune in the woods, it is also a mystery and moment tinged with sadness. After Shal gives birth to a son, the first of the commune to do so, she and the baby are taken away by Mother, a wise alien who acts as a parent to the young people. When the aliens send Shal home without her baby, she asks Brav to help her to rescue the child. With the knowledge Shal has gained from her time with Mother, they break through the protective barrier set up by the aliens to discover a new and fascinating world. It is a dangerous trip, with stinging, snake-like crawlers lurking in the shadows. But, it is also a journey of discovery as Shal and Brav find evidence—skeletons and body parts—that leads them to believe that their real parents were killed by the aliens. They find their baby, and after a fight with an alien, escape into the forest. But, they must grapple with some haunting questions. Is Mother a monster or a savior? And, did the aliens destroy mankind or rescue it? | ||||
| 9 | "Glyphic" | Catherine O'Hara | Naren Shankar | 20 March 1998 |
| When Tom Young (Peter Flemming) from the Department of Health travels to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to examine an old case file, it appears as though long ago the town had stopped trying to live in the present. Twelve years have passed since a tragedy killed many of their young children and left the residents without hope, without a future. Many of them are still angry with the medical community for not finding a cure to save the children in their small community. The town's physician, Dr. Malcolm Boussard (Lane Smith) has felt the brunt of their anger—especially since his own two children did not die during the epidemic. Although they were spared, his son Louis (Brad Swaile) still lies in a coma, while his daughter Cassie (Rachel Leigh Cook) has learning disabilities and expresses herself through abstract sculpture and artwork. Through hypnosis, Tom begins to probe Cassie's mind and unravels a memory of 'alien' proportions. | ||||
| 10 | "Identity Crisis" | Brad Turner | James Crocker | 27 March 1998 |
| Captain Cotter McCoy (Lou Diamond Phillips) is the first of a new breed of soldier. As part of a top secret program overseen by Dr. Greg Olander (Robert Joy), General Langston Chase (Dale Wilson), and Cotter's friend, Colonel Pete Butler (Scott Kraft), the contents of McCoy's brain can be temporarily transferred into an android version of himself. This process creates a virtually indestructible fighting machine with the smarts and experience of a human being. But, one day something goes wrong. During the transfer, the real McCoy's body is blasted with electricity, stopping his heart, inflicting serious brain damage and leaving Cotter's mind trapped in the android body. To make matters worse, the interface between his mind and the android body is flawed. McCoy's motor control is already beginning to break down and the interface will likely collapse within 12 hours. The General is prepared to sacrifice McCoy to keep the program secret, but McCoy uses his enormous strength to break out and visit his wife, Holly (Teri Polo). Together, they track down Olander and begin a desperate search for what went wrong. As all the signs begin point to sabotage, McCoy asks himself who would do such a thing? And, more important, how can it be undone? | ||||
| 11 | "The Vaccine" | Neil Fearnley | Brad Wright | 3 April 1998 |
| A genetically engineered virus, developed and released by a doomsday cult, has wiped out almost all human life on Earth. Twelve hospital patients, accompanied by the one remaining staff member, nurse Marie Alexander, are living on borrowed time in the hospital, with food and fuel for the generator running dangerously low. A soldier arrives with a newly developed vaccine, but Marie is horrified to learn that there is only enough for three people. Along with this, the vaccine requires three days to fully develop before it can be injected into any humans. Marie only reveals to the group that there is a vaccine, not the amount, a fact she only reveals to her closest companion in the group, terminally ill cancer patient Bernard Katz. When two members of the group discover the truth, they arm themselves with the only gun and force Marie to administer the vaccine to them, which she agrees to only if the third recipient is the child Harry. While she is preparing the vaccine, she turns her back only to see the third dose of vaccine being administered to one of the others, dooming young Harry to the virus. Immediately, the three die of anaphylactic shock, leading Marie to conclude that the group survived not due to the hospital's sterile atmosphere but because they were immune, and after three months of confinement the group emerges from the hospital to face the new world. | ||||
| 12 | "Fear Itself" | James Head | Sam Egan | 10 April 1998 |
| For as long as he can remember, Bernard Selden (Ayre Gross) has been haunted by a paralyzing fear. It started when he was six, when he set a fire that killed his four-year-old sister and today, at 27, the fear clings to him like a blanket. But, Dr. Adam Pike (Jeffrey Demunn) has hope for a cure. He has diagnosed Bernard's condition and believes that if he can isolate the part of the brain responsible for fear, the amygdala, he can cure him. The series of injections and radiation designed to build a layer of calcium around the amygdala produces stunning results: Bernard's fear recedes. He even starts a relationship with his neighbor Lisa (Tanya Allen). But there are side effects. Now, Bernard can use his brain to make others feel the kind of crippling fear he used to feel. He is still a prisoner of the past, haunted by images of Mr. Wilkes (Alex Diakun), the owner of the foster home where Bernard's sister died. It is a terrible risk, but Bernard knows that if he is to be truly cured, he must go back to the day when the fear began and discover the truth. The truth being that he didn't kill his sister, Mr. Wilkes did. | ||||
| 13 | "The Joining" | Brad Turner | Sam Egan | 17 April 1998 |
| When a transport ship crashed and wiped out the colony on Venus, Capt. Miles Davidow (C. Thomas Howell) was the sole survivor. But, after he's rescued by a team that includes his fiancee, Kate Girard (Amanda Tapping) and Scott Perkins (Jeffrey Jones), it soon becomes clear that Davidow did not escape unscathed. Removed from the high radiation atmosphere of Venus, his body is reacting to the Earth's air like that of a chemotherapy patient. When doctors give him the radiation his body seems to crave, strange things start to happen. Davidow's body begins to spawn duplicate parts: a hand, a torso and more from wounds that miraculously heal. In spite of this, Miles and Kate get married while he's still in isolation, but his time on Venus and the strange creatures he encountered there have had a profound change on Miles. As the mysterious changes continue, it becomes clear that although Davidow did what it took to survive, the price of survival may be exile from everything he knows and loves. | ||||
| 14 | "To Tell the Truth" | Neil Fearnley | Brad Wright | 24 April 1998 |
| Dr. Larry Chambers (Gregory Harrison) helped build the colony on the Janus Five. He and fellow scientist Amanda Harper (Kimberly Huffman) run computer simulations that show the planet's star will flash over in a matter of days, emitting waves of deadly radiation, so Dr. Chambers urges evacuation. This is not a popular recommendation, especially among the colony's leaders who include council chairman Franklin Murdock (William Atherton), security head Montgomery Bennett (Alan Scarfe) and Amanda's father, Ian Harper (Ken Pogue). They point out that Chambers has been wrong before; the colony had to be moved at great cost after he warned of deadly volcanic activity that never occurred; and suggest that his judgment has been clouded by the death of his wife Elise. When that doesn't stop Chambers, Murdock and Bennett discredit him by falsely accusing him of being one of the aliens who originally inhabited the planet, suggesting that the evacuation plan is a plot to reclaim the planet for his people. Imprisoned and threatened with death, Chamber's only hope is that Amanda will uncover the truth in time to save him and the colony. | ||||
| 15 | "Mary 25" | James Head | Jonathan Glassner | 29 May 1998 |
| Mary 25 replaces the household's current nanny. She is designed not to allow anyone harm the children, including the children themselves. When they start fighting amongst themselves, Mary places them in separate rooms. Teryl, the mother and Charlie's wife, wants Mary out of the house but Charlie says no since he has started using Mary as a sex toy when the others are asleep. It becomes clear that Charlie has been abusing Teryl when the children ask Mary "why does daddy hurt mommy?" It is then revealed that Teryl and Melburn had a relationship once and Melburn still has feelings for Teryl by trying to protect her from Charlie. He then re-programs Mary so that she now considers that by hurting the mother, Charlie is hurting the children. One night when Charlie is beating Teryl, Mary comes in, strangles Charlie, and breaks his neck. In the aftermath, the first Nanny has been rehired and the spark is rekindled between Teryl and Melburn. In the episode's twist ending, Teryl's dark secret is discovered: The real Teryl that Melburn loved had been killed by Charlie and was replaced by Valerie 24, a successor to the defunct Valerie 23. She had used Mary to get rid of Charlie because she believed Melburn would love her. It also explains why Teryl did not remember her history with Melburn. The final scene shows the robot grinning. | ||||
| 16 | "Final Exam" | Mario Azzopardi | Carleton Eastlake | 5 June 1998 |
| Dr. John Martin (Brett Cullen), a negotiator for the Department of Energy Nuclear Response Team, is called in when a disgruntled grad student takes hostages at a university. The student, Seth Todtman (Peter Stebbings) claims to have invented a cold-fusion bomb and is threatening to detonate it, killing millions, unless the government brings him five people on a list and kills them for him. Martin's colleagues dismiss Todtman as a crank, until a sample device he provides goes off with megaton force, wiping out a DOE team and the top-secret facility where they work. Faced with an impossible choice, Martin meets with Todtman face to face and tries to understand the logic behind his rage at the people he wants killed: cruel foster parents, corrupt professors, a heartless librarian. As the clock ticks, Martin tries to reason with Todtman while the military tries to find a way to disarm the device. They assassinate Todtman and defuse the bomb, but he warns that just like the creation of the atom bomb, someone else will find a way to create another cold fusion bomb. At the end it shows a disgruntled student in a different college taking a test, one of the questions is "why cold fusion is impossible". He crumples the paper and leaves to carry on Todtman's work. | ||||
| 17 | "Lithia" | Helen Shaver | Sam Egan | 3 July 1998 |
| Lithia is set in 2055, in a world populated only by women. The men were killed years earlier in a war. The women are living in a commune, and seem to be living full and happy lives, although they lack some of the technology of the past. Neighboring villages are in control of many of the resources, which makes Mercer jealous. He tries to tell the women living in the commune that they must make sure that they have enough resources for themselves. Their leader tells him that kind of thinking is what led to war. Mercer becomes aggressive and proceeds to steal electricity from a rival village. This leads to the deaths of several different women. It is revealed that the women were responsible for unfreezing eleven other men and attempting to integrate them into their society, but each attempt resulted in a similar tragedy. Mercer is then condemned to being refrozen as punishment. Also, the leader of the women's village happens to be a former love interest of Mercer's before he was frozen. | ||||
| 18 | "Monster" | Allan Eastman | Chris Ruppenthal | 10 July 1998 |
| The four people gathered in the top-secret research facility seem at first to have nothing in common: Ford Maddox (Harry Hamlin) is a former spy, Rachel Sanders (Nicole De Boer) is a nurse, Roger Beckersly (Aaron Pearl) is an Army Ranger and Louise McDonnaugh (Bridget O'Sullivan) is a computer programmer. What has brought them together is their telekinetic ability, a talent that Mr. Brown (Robert Guillaume), a CIA project head, hopes to exploit through the use of Teeks, devices that amplify telekinetic power. At first, Brown tries these individual's talents out on simple tasks—moving or crushing a granite block with their minds—but soon his true intentions are revealed. Their first real assignment, says Brown, is to use their powers to kill a Balkan terrorist leader and war criminal. Rachel objects to the assignment on moral grounds, but Brown forces her to take part by threatening to send her brother, a junkie and small-time crook, to jail for life. With Rachel on board, the assassination is a success, as is the elimination of a pesky African revolutionary leader. But, the telekinetic powers produce unexpected side-effects and soon the killers find that they have become the prey. The final scene shows a bunch of people dead on the floor (just like in Rachel's dream). | ||||
| 19 | "Sarcophagus" | Jeff Woolnough | Bill Froehlich | 7 August 1998 |
| Natalie (Lisa Zane) is a driven researcher, faithfully though dutifully supported by her husband who is the first to touch the odd, amberlike cocoon mass found in an anachronistic burial chamber. The contact has two effects, beginning the reawakening of the dormant mass, and imprinting Curtis with the last memories of a long suspended alien who was attacked by primitive men. Each further contact speeds the regeneration at the temporary expense of Curtis' energy. Emmet is substantially more pragmatic and chooses the commercial rewards made possible by the longevity potential evidenced by the now reforming alien. Convincing the remaining two members of the team, he stages a coup which is eventually thwarted by the alien and a panic-induced cave in. The severely wounded husband and wife, finally reconciled through their shared adversity are trapped and in dire straits until the alien coats them in his preservative, allowing them to be revived and made physically whole roughly a 1000 years in their future, in a world which their wisdom allowed to become a cooperative human-alien world. | ||||
| 20 | "Nightmare" | James Head | Sam Egan | 14 August 1998 |
|
During a war with the planet Ebon, a group of Earth soldiers are sent to deploy a top-secret device on an uninhabited planet near enemy territory. Captured there, the soldiers undergo physical and psychological torture by an unseen enemy. The prisoners become suspicious of each other when their captors claim they have received cooperation, and physical wounds from torture are healed after interrogation. Eventually Dr. Elayna Chomski, one of the primary designers of the device, is forced to activate the device so the enemy can use it for themselves, but sets the device to go off. It is revealed that they were on earth the whole time being tested, and now that the device has been turned on, which was supposed to be impossible, it cannot be turned off and they have doomed the planet. |
||||
| 21 | "Promised Land" | Neill Fearnley | Brad Markowitz | 21 August 1998 |
| This episode is a sequel to The Camp. Years ago the Tsal-Khan race arrived on earth to become friends with humans but the distrusting nature of the earthlings led to war. Dlavan (Rene Auberjonois) and his family are Tsal-Khan, offspring of the handful of aliens who remained on Earth after a bitter war of conquest with the human race. Today they live on a tightly guarded farm where they must grow all their own food, since their forebears poisoned all the plants during the war with mankind. Most of the aliens believe that the human race was wiped out in the war, but there is a group of humans in the woods near the farm. This group, led by Rebecca (Caroline Goodall), escaped from the alien's robot run camps. The group also includes David (Joseph Kell), Ruth (Jane Sowerby) and the mute, orphaned child Tali (Jessica Harmon). They are desperately hungry and have seen their children die from eating poisoned fruit. So, when they spot Dlavan's grandson Ma'al, wandering in the woods, they follow him home to the farm. After they see the well-fed aliens, Rebecca leads the group to raid the farm for food. At first, Tali figures out how to get around the farm's deadly defensive measures. But, things escalate and individuals are hurt and killed on both sides. When Rebecca captures an alien weapon and Tali is seriously injured, the scene is set for the final showdown, a battle that could destroy both groups. | ||||
| 22 | "Balance of Nature" | Steve Johnson | Derek Lowe | 4 September 1998 |
| Dr. Noah Phillips (Maurice Godin) is in development of the "Cellular Regressor," a machine designed to rejuvenate an individual's cells and restore youth upon its subject. In the midst of creating the machine, his wife, Meredith (Lisa Maris), goes into a coma from her cancer. Although the machine hadn't been properly tested, he attempts to restore Meredith's health by using the Cellular Regressor to reverse the effects of age and cancer on her cells. Meredith awakens, completely oblivious to the treatment, and asks Noah if she had overslept. Noah rejoices, embraces Meredith, and tells her that he loves her. His celebration, however, is short-lived as the cancer returns a few minutes later and kills Meredith instantly. Disgusted by his actions, Noah's superiors cut off Noah's funding and terminate him from his job. Meredith's family decides not to press charges after some legal battle with Noah. Noah, devastated by the loss of Meredith, moves out to a small town and meets the 65-year-old Barbara (Barbara Rush), who is very friendly in welcoming him to the neighborhood. Her husband, Greg Matheson (Harve Presnell), is not the welcoming type and views Noah with suspicion, thinking that he will move in on his wife, despite being 30 years younger than her. Greg is abusive and beats Barbara routinely. All the while, Noah has continued to test the Cellular Regressor and, inspired by Barbara's words that the world always maintains a "balance of nature," Noah discovers that he can restore an elderly frog's youth only if he allows a young frog to grow old in the process. Noah's love for Barbara deepens while Greg becomes more jealous and, on one night, Noah finds Barbara beaten within an inch of her life. He realizes that she is about to die and he does not have time to take her to the hospital. Instead, he decides to make the Cellular Regressor to restore her youth--and lose his in the process. | ||||
| 23 | "Origin of Species" | Brad Turner | Naren Shankar | 27 November 1998 |
| In this sequel to episode 12 of season 3, "Double Helix", Dr. Ira Nodel has his body altered to communicate with aliens who have seeded Earth with their genetic material. He is joined on an alien spaceship by son Paul, Paul's girlfriend Hope, and six students. When Dr. Nodel touches a glowing post in the ship's control room, both he and Paul are consumed by a mysterious light. This leads Hope and the students to believe that they've been led into a trap, a suspicion that is reinforced when the ship captures two of the students and pulls them through the wall. Desperate to find out what's going on, Hope reads Dr. Nodel's journal and risks her life by touching the glowing post. Her body begins the same transformation, and a strange glowing entity speaks in the voices of Dr. Nodel and Paul, trying to communicate with her. The ship, however, continues to snatch the students two by two, until finally they are all suspended, naked and unconscious in a black void. When they awaken some time later, they find the ship has landed on a dead planet. Have the aliens who promised that they were part of a great experiment in hope, led them astray? | ||||
| 24 | "Phobos Rising" | Helen Shaver | Garth Gerald Wilson | 4 December 1998 |
| Two separate political entities of both Earth and Mars, the Free Alliance and the Coalition, have been in a state of cold war for 30 years. Both are currently mining triradium, a radioactive material that could conceivably be used for weapons that could destroy an entire planet. Amidst fear on both sides, a giant explosion is seen to destroy Earth and sends shockwaves towards Mars, where a Coalition and an Alliance base are currently situated. Colonel Samantha Elliot (Barbara Eve Harris) believes that the Coalition has been smuggling triradium and is responsible for the destruction of Earth. Major James Bowen (Adam Baldwin) does not believe that they should jump to conclusions, though his credibility is compromised by the fact that there has been an increasingly romantic relationship between him and Major Dara Talif (Joan Chen), the Coalition liaison officer at the base. As the Alliance prepares a strike, James fears that it will only result in a Coalition counterstrike and the destruction of all humanity. As the story progresses at fast pace, bad decisions are taken due to mistrust and scarcity of information. | ||||
| 25 | "Black Box" | Steven Webber | Brad Markowitz | 11 December 1998 |
| A missing package contains powerful secrets, and everyone wants a piece of the action. | ||||
| 26 | "In Our Own Image" | Steve Anker | Naren Shankar | 18 December 1998 |
| The Android "Mac 27" is seen to kill one of its handlers and injure another, then kill a guard as it makes its escape from Innobotics, the corporation that created it. Mac car-jacks Celia, an apparently random person just pulling into the facility parking lot. He takes her to a remote abandoned warehouse, where he forces her to repair the damage he sustained in his escape. Using a device that allows Mac to transmit images directly to Celia's optic nerve, he shows her how to fix his systems, but also shows some of his "memories": archives of past experiments with robots and androids. These are all pulled from previous episodes that featured robots, androids, or holograms, with most clips taken out of the context of the original episode. She sees a number of AIs that have gained emotions and/or turned against their masters, and deduces that Mac has followed this trend as well. Under the pretense of performing another repair, Celia disables Mac's motor control functions. She reveals herself to be a "troubleshooter" hired by the corporation to figure out how to keep robots from going "rogue", and declares that she thinks she knows how to install a "built-in lobotomy" that will prevent AIs from becoming self-aware in the future. Mac reveals a double-cross, whereby he fooled Celia into thinking he was disabled when he was in fact not. He also lets on that he has stolen her retina imprint, which will allow him to use her credentials on the Innobotics network. The corporation's investigative team enters the abandoned warehouse and finds Celia dead, but no sign of Mac. The scene shifts back to the laboratory, where the scientist who created Mac sees the network being accessed by someone who appears to be Celia. Since he has learned of Celia's death, he realizes this must be an intruder. He sees Mac enter, and the android uses his new network access to activate the other Mac-class units. The episode ends with Mac strangling his creator while all his brethren look on. | ||||
22 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Alien Radio" | Neill Fearnley | Alan Katz | 22 January 1999 |
| Stan Harbinger (Joe Pantoliano) is a top-rated talk show host with a flare for the outrageous and a reputation as a skeptic's skeptic. Assisted by his producer Trudy (Cynthia Nixon), Stan takes delight in shooting down callers who claim to have alien encounters, especially people like Eldon DeVries (Alan Zinyk) who believes that his body has been taken over by aliens. However, when Eldon commits suicide by setting himself on fire in front of Stan, things begin to go wrong for Stan. A plan to syndicate the show is threatened by protests from UFO believers, angry at Stan's role in Eldon's death. Stan's skepticism is challenged when he notices that other people have the same distinctive triple heartbeat he heard coming from Eldon just before he died. Close to the edge, Stan finally loses it after Darcy Kipling (Leslie Hope), a woman he picked up in a bar, turns out to be a believer and sets him up with a phony tape. He assaults Darcy's fellow believer, Moses Saxon (Alex Diakun), and is consequently thrown off the air. Although out of work and living out of his car, these are the least of his problems. Everywhere he goes, Stan hears that strange triple heartbeat and sees the glimpses of the aliens. And, every beat and every glimpse shakes the foundation of his disbelief. The final scene shows Stan's dead body on the floor after being shot. | ||||
| 2 | "Donor" | Jimmy Kaufman | Sam Egan | 29 January 1999 |
| Dr. Renee Stuyvesant and her protege Dr. Vance Ridout have perfected the full-body transplant in which a patient's entire disease-riddled body is replaced and Renee has convinced the hospital board to allow her to perform the first such procedure on Dr. Peter Halstead. A fitting choice since Halstead originated the procedure before being stricken with terminal cancer but his rare blood and tissue types make a match unlikely. Renee, who has secretly loved Halstead for years, solves that problem by murdering Timothy Laird, a perfect donor, as he emerges from the flower store. The transplant is a success and the vision of millions in fees dance in Renee and Vince's heads. But Peter is having visions of his own involving a woman, a little girl and a killing outside the flower store. Mysteriously drawn to Laird's old neighborhood, he learns that the people he's been seeing are Deirdre, Laird's widow, and his daughter, Kylie and that he has apparently inherited Laird's love for them. Deirdre recoils when Peter eventually confesses that he inhabits her late husband's body. But that's nothing compared to how Renee responds when Peter reveals that he's had flashes of what Timothy Laird saw just before he was killed. | ||||
| 3 | "Small Friends" | Neill Fearnley | Tom Szollosi | 5 February 1999 |
| When he was young, Gene Morton killed a man, Deanjordan, who tried to steal the credit for his brilliant research. Now working on a prison assembly lines fixing the busted tape decks of fellow inmates, his chances at parole have been sabotaged by his own honesty and sense of guilt. Although it's a lonely life, late at night, after lights-out, Gene brings out his small friends, a swarm of microscopic machines that he made from prison scrap and keeps in a matchbox. The MEMS (short for microelectromechanical systems) are controlled by a small keypad and can work together to perform an amazing variety of tasks, from sculpting steel to picking locks. The MEMS are Gene's little secret until one night when he takes pity on Lawrence, a fellow inmate who has broken a CD player belonging to Marlon, the prison tough guy. Knowing Marlon might kill Lawrence, Gene sends the MEMS to fix the player. Lawrence is dazzled, but repays the favor by teaming up with Marlon to blackmail Gene. The two cons threaten to kill Gene's daughter Becky and grandson Phillip unless he uses the MEMS to help them break out of prison. When things turn ugly during the jailbreak and Marlon's demands increase, Gene knows he's in big trouble and the only help available is from friends who are smaller than the eye can see. | ||||
| 4 | "The Grell" | Jorge Montesi | Jeff King | 12 February 1999 |
| The Grells were rescued from their dry and dying planet by humans, only to be turned into slaves on Earth. Now the aliens are rebelling against their masters, fighting a guerilla war against a government led by men like High Secretary Paul Kohler (Ted Shackelford). When a jet carrying Paul, his wife Olivia (Marina Sirtis) and their children is shot down by a missile, his Grell slaves Jesha (Maurice Dean Wint) and Ep (Gerry Currie) have the opportunity to escape. Ep breaks for freedom and is killed when Paul activates the electronic slave collar that all grells must wear. Jesha, driven by his love for Paul's children Sara and Ken, stays and rescues his master's family from the jet's twisted wreckage. Despite his horror at Ep's death and Paul's brutal treatment of him, Jesha remains loyal to the humans. He rescues Sara when the rebel slave leader Shak-el (David McNally) captures her. Then he uses his Grell alchemy to heal Paul, who has been mortally wounded in a fire fight with a Grell rebel. When Jesha saves Paul, however, the master becomes a half-breed; his skin changes to a mottled yellow, like a Grell's, and he is able to see ultraviolet light by day and heat at night. Paul also begins to see the world from a Grell point-of-view. He's horrified when he comes across a rebel settlement, where men, women and children have been massacred by federal troops. And he's terrified when a federal soldier, Lt. Lockhart, captures him and slaps a slave collar on him, believing him to be a Grell rebel. The experience changes Paul, but will he, his family or Jesha live long enough to change the world? | ||||
| 5 | "The Other Side" | Jeff Woolnough | Sam Egan, David Alexander[disambiguation needed ] and Dan Wright | 19 February 1999 |
| Dr. Neal Eberhardt (Ralph Macchio), a former boy genius gone bitterly to seed, studies brain-damaged and comatose patients hoping to learn how the brain reroutes itself. Despite having a revolutionary new machine to work with - the Neural Intercortex Stimulation Array or NISA - Dr. Eberhardt is getting nowhere. To make matters worse, his valued assistant Vince Carter has just quit. But suddenly Neal has a breakthrough. The brain waves of two comatose patients, Adam (Aaron Smolinski) and Lisa (Emmanuelle Vaugier), fall into sync while they're hooked up to the NISA and one of them whispers the other's name. Neal knows he's onto something and tells his boss, Marty Kilgore (Michael Sarrazin). What Neal doesn't know is that Adam and Lisa have landed in an idyllic parallel consciousness and are falling in love. As Adam and Lisa get to know each other, Neal continues his research, joined now by his ex-girlfriend and colleague Janice Claymore (Susannah Hoffman). Desperate to try the technique on other comatose subjects, Neal loses patience and makes the journey himself. After giving himself a calculated overdose of fentanyl, he hooks himself up to NISA and launches himself into Adam and Lisa's world. He catches a glimpse, but he's pulled back at the last minute, leaving him more determined than ever to find a way to rescue his patients from the other side. But do they really want to be rescued? Or is it really Neal that wants to cross over to the other side? | ||||
| 6 | "Joyride" | James Head | Sam Egan, David Alexander and Dan Wright | 26 February 1999 |
| When NASA astronaut Theodore Harris was in space the first time, in 1963, it didn't go quite as planned. Alone in his Mercury capsule, he panicked and aborted the mission when a mysterious violet light penetrated the cockpit and began enveloping his body. In the investigation that followed, no evidence could be found to support his story, leaving a blot on Harris' NASA record and his life in ruins. And now, at age 63, he knows he can never make amends with his estranged wife Madelaine, but he feels that he could clear his name if he could just get back to where he saw the light. When NASA turns him down, Harris is recruited by Carlton Powers, a self-made billionaire who plans to privatize space travel and thinks Harris' presence on the inaugural flight (on his new Daedalus spaceship) will help him sell the service. Harris and Power are joined on the flight by Martin Reese, a skeptical tabloid reporter, Lil Vaughn, an eccentric fashion mogul and Ty and Barbara Chafey, young newlyweds who won a contest to travel on the space plane. But none of the Daedalus passengers know that Harris has reprogrammed the flight plan to take the flight to the site of the close encounter that shattered the young man's life. | ||||
| 7 | "The Human Operators" | Jeff Woolnough | Naren Shankar (script), Harlan Ellison and A.E. van Vogt (story) | 12 March 1999 |
| Humanity constructs advanced military spacecraft, but the ships learn to think for themselves. They kill their crews by disengaging the life support systems. However, they kept a small number of humans alive for repairs they cannot do themselves. One such ship, Starfighter 31, carries a father and his son, but once the father discovers that he is nothing more than a slave, he attempts to cripple the ship's computer core and is killed in the process of successfully destroying one of several spheres that apparently are critical to the core systems, in that way the ship can't deactivate his automated defenses. This is witnessed by his son through the hatch doors. Once the son reaches adulthood and is able to fix the core systems (so that ship can deactivate his defenses), Starship 31 rendezvous with Starship 88, whose single female crew member is brought aboard in order to mate with him and conceive a child. The male is shown what to do by the ship through "tutorials" and with guidance from the female. He falls in love with her and due to her effect on him, he finds himself angering the ship on numerous occasions. At one point, they are both "racked"; they are subjected to electric shocks, despite the risk of her having a miscarriage. When she becomes pregnant with a girl, she is told to return to her own ship. He is threatened with death in the rack if he attempts to keep her aboard. He eventually comes to the same realization as his father that he is nothing more than a slave. He sabotages the rack because its circuitry is connected to the computer core. This gives him an excuse to gain access the computer core. He destroys the primary control systems, and then straps himself in while the ship tries to kill him with extreme maneuvers. This destroys most of the ship's aged systems. Afterward the woman returns aboard her ship. Sometime in the past, her ship's computer core shut down, due to age or malfunction. She was able to repair its drive and navigational systems, and fooled other starships into believing her craft was still "alive". She tells him that she left subtle clues as to how to free himself, as she did with three other crews on other craft, but he is the first to free by himself. They settle on an Earth-like world with three moons after attempting to locate a place based on a picture of a sunset the man had kept hidden in his communication device. They stand on a beach, with her visibly pregnant. The two of them deciding to try to free the remaining ninety-seven humans on the other ships after spending time together to enjoy their newfound freedom. | ||||
| 8 | "Blank Slate" | Lou Diamond Phillips | Will Dixon | 2 April 1999 |
| A man is being chased down an alley. He ends up in a shelter without any recollection of who he is, just that his memories are stored in a small box he is carrying. | ||||
| 9 | "What Will The Neighbors Think" | Helen Shaver | A L Katz | 23 April 1999 |
| Mona wants to stay in her apartment building The Clackson Arms, at any cost... | ||||
| 10 | "The Shroud" | Stuart Gillard | Pen Dansham & Scott Peters | 30 April 1999 |
| A married couple seeks help with conceiving a child. Behind the scenes some scientists plan to use the woman to clone the human nature of Jesus Christ. | ||||
| 11 | "Ripper" | Mario Azzopardi | Chris Ruppenthal | 7 May 1999 |
| Jack discovers an alien creature that lives inside women. After a time it leaves is host body by bursting out of the chest and enters another host which it has selected. Jack follows this creature, trying to unveil the truth. His only lead is a green substance that the infected women cough up. But in the meantime the bodies are discovered and police are searching for a mass murderer they dubbed "The Ripper". The creature uses this to its advantage, planting further evidence that Jack is the ripper. In the end Jack is discovered killing the alien, while still inside the body of a woman, and is because of that sentenced to a mental institute. His fiancee Ellen visits him to tell him that she is leaving for America. Directly after the Inspector visits Jack to tell him that he's retiring and is going to follow Ellen to America. The Inspector calls America "the land of opportunity" and coughs up the same green substance as the infected women. He leaves Jack alone in the asylum with the message "Don't worry; she'll hardly feel a thing". | ||||
| 12 | "Tribunal" | Mario Azzopardi | Sam Egan | 14 May 1999 |
| Aaron is a lawyer who is obsessed with his father's treatment at the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. He is sure that Robert Greene, aka Karl Rademacher, was the commanding SS officer in charge of his part of the camp, and he wants to see justice. Aaron is able to do little to prove who Robert Greene really is, or prosecute him, until a mysterious man starts handing over evidence to him. Nicholas Prentice gives him a jacket, a notebook, and other evidence which he obtained by going back in time to 1944 and posing as a concentration camp prisoner. Prentice witnessed Greene/Rademacher shoot someone at the beginning of the episode. He is discovered writing something in his notebook, and is chased by a guard carrying an MP40, but returns to the future before being shot. Nicholas Prentice is from the late 21st century, where time travel has been perfected (character Nicolas Prentice also appears in episode 17 of season 6, "Gettysburg" and episode 15 of season 7, "Time to Time"). Aaron continues building his case, but has trouble, even with the airtight evidence provided to him by the time traveler. Greene insists that he is not Rademacher, and near the end of the episode he plans to leave for Argentina and never return to avoid prosecution. Aaron goes to Greene's house with a gun, demanding a confession. Prentice follows him there, telling him that he is Aaron's great-grandson, and that if Aaron kills Greene and goes to prison, he will cease to exist. Realizing that it would be foolish to allow Greene to harm anyone else in his family, Aaron agrees not to shoot him. Instead, Prentice gives him a bag with two SS uniforms and a prisoner uniform. They make Greene put on the prisoner uniform at gunpoint, and the three travel back to 1944. Greene sees himself as a young man, and tells the young version of himself who he is. His young counterpart shoots him, thinking that he is an average Jewish prisoner. Aaron also returns with his sister, then a child, to raise her in the 21st century. At the end the episode was this note by Sam Egan: "Dedicated to my father who survived Auschwitz... and to his wife and daughter who did not." | ||||
| 13 | "Summit" | James Head | Scott Peters | 21 May 1999 |
| Deep space. A small planetoid. The site of an intergalactic summit between two warring worlds. Diplomats from both Earth and Dregocia, a distant planet, are dispatched to the neutral ground to work out a peace accord. We quickly come to learn that Dregocians are human as well, but a genetically-engineered race, kept on Dregocia to mine Trion ore, shipping it back to Earth to run its power plants. Now, not unlike England and its colonies, Dregoicians demand their freedom and autonomy from Earth. But when a shuttle carrying the Dregocian delegation to the summit site malfunctions and crashes, apparently due to sabotage, things quickly deteriorate. The delegation from Earth, already at the summit facility, watch in horror as the crash of the shuttle sparks an exchange that results in the mutual destruction of both the Earth and Dregocian flagships, orbiting the planetoid. This sets in motion a doomsday process, that if allowed to proceed will result in the extinction of humans, Earth-born and Dregocian alike. Kate Woods (Marcia Cross), the Earth's senior surviving diplomatic representative, can save the world, but only if she can re-establish contact with Earth. In order to do that, she must overcome some serious obstacles. She must resist the hawkish instincts of her military adviser, Col. Wallis Thurman (John Spencer) and her own hatred of the race that killed her husband. And she must deal with a determined Dregg rival, Prosser (Michael Ironside), who survived the crash and is willing to let his people perish rather than continue to be ruled by Earth. As the clock ticks, Kate and Prosser negotiate to the brink of annihilation, hoping to establish enough trust to save both civilizations. But can a trust so fragile survive the efforts of those on both sides who would rather see war continue than relations improve? And are Kate and the others willing to pay the price that might be required to save the world? | ||||
| 14 | "Descent" | Steve Anker | Erik Saltzgaber | 25 June 1999 |
| Shy, unassertive researcher Dr. Arthur Zeller daydreams about what it would be like if he could unlock the animal within him. It turns out his real life is that of a "doormat" for his co-workers and even for a bum who shakes him up regularly for "lunch money". All his brilliance and scientific accomplishments take a backseat to his personality and no one takes him seriously. He begins to try to make his dreams a reality by developing a kind of gene therapy which involves injecting himself with the genes for dominance extracted from primitive primates. This starts changing his entire personality. Zeller suffers from occasional lapses in which he reverts to the mind of a caveman and attacks his boss, and kills and eats a dog. The changes may improve his life on many levels but they are doing nothing for his love life. His affection towards his co-worker Dr. Laura White remains unrequited and so he decides to tip the scales. During a routine flu shot session, he surreptiliously injects Laura with the genes for submissiveness. The injection has severe side effects for Laura because her basic personality is not submissive at all, so she starts to pass out. Arthur takes her to his place and attempts to attack her, but regains control of his senses and begs her for help. He tells her what he has been up to and the shocked Laura decides to help him develop a way of reversing the process. Together they come up with an experimental antidote, but things go really bad when he reveals to Laura that he had injected her with the submissiveness genes. Seeing he blew his chance with her forever, he escapes into the night with a batch of his syringes. Laura has a change of heart and follows him to offer her help, but it's too late for Arthur who had already injected himself with a megadose of the ape genes. | ||||
| 15 | "The Haven" | Jimmy Kaufman | James Crocker | 2 July 1999 |
| A man comes home from work, to his seemingly luxurious apartment building. Having to share the elevator with two other attendants seem to distress him; we soon learn that all of the building's inhabitants live solitary, isolated lives, all their needs catered to through technology. But the self imposed isolation has gone so far that when an old lady has a heart attack in the hallway, nobody is willing to leave their apartment to help her. The situation is brought to a head when the building's computer control systems malfunction, and the residents find that they must literally co-operate or die. | ||||
| 16 | "Déjà Vu" | Brian Giddens | A L Katz & Naren Shankar | 9 July 1999 |
| A teleportation experiment goes wrong, the wormhole it created expands and engulfs the scientists. Suddenly they're back to the day before, but only one man seems to remember what happened. | ||||
| 17 | "The Inheritors" | Mike Rohl | Sam Egan | 16 July 1999 |
| A man is walking home with his girlfriend when he is suddenly struck by a meteorite in the head. When the morticians remove the object from his head, he rises from the dead. He's not the only one, and they seem to have a plan. | ||||
| 18 | "Essence of Life" | Brad Turner | Steven Weber & Scott Peters | 23 July 1999 |
| An old woman is given a tube containing a mysterious liquid by an equally mysterious man. When the man leaves she inhales the fumes from the liquid as she seems to have done many times before and is once again reunited with her dead husband. While the world is struggling to rebuild itself from a plague eleven years earlier such conduct like "looking back" or open displays of emotion are prohibited by the international "Code of Conduct". | ||||
| 19 | "Stranded" | Steve Anker | Chris Ruppenthal, Naren Shankar & Tom Szollosi | 30 July 1999 |
| A neglected boy (Adam Hann-Byrd) finds comfort in an alien. | ||||
| 20 | "Fathers and Sons" | Michael Robison | William Mikulak & A L Katz | 6 August 1999 |
| A young woman visits her grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. As soon as the young woman leaves, the caretakers put the grandmother back into a container in a very large storage facility. | ||||
| 21 | "Star Crossed" | Helen Shaver | Chris Ruppenthal | 13 August 1999 |
| The story is a futuristic reinterpretation of "Casablanca" where a couple is carrying a parasite that might win the war for the humans. The couple flees to the city Archangel looking for a way to escape the Hing and gain the support of a former lover Michael who owns the cafe. | ||||
| 22 | "Better Luck Next Time" | Martin Cummins | Naren Shankar | 20 August 1999 |
| This is another 'clip-show' style episode, centering around two men, both of whom are suspects in a murder. But the police find the truth to be much more than they ever expected as both men tell the same story - that they are inter-planetary energy beings, each one claiming to be a 'cop' searching for the other, who they claim is a mass-murderer. Each alien has the ability to swap bodies under certain cirumstances, and each tells an interesting story, involving a chain of events from previous Outer Limits episodes. The only question remaining for the police is - which one is telling the truth - or are they both lying? | ||||
22 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Judgment Day" | Brad Turner | A L Katz and Scott Nimerfro | 21 January 2000 |
| In a television show, killers are hunted and killed by family of their victims. Judgement Day was produced by Jack Parson and hosted by Stan Draper and Heather Cattrell, the show has turned the Justice system on its ear by becoming judge, jury and executioner, allowing a murder victim's family to carry out the death sentence on live television. | ||||
| 2 | "The Gun" | Jeff Woolnough | Sam Egan | 28 January 2000 |
| A man is looking for a gun and is offered one by a man that does not question his motives. When the gun's first used it fuses itself with its owner. | ||||
| 3 | "Skin Deep" | Dan Ireland | Scott Peters | 4 February 2000 |
| Sid Camden, a rather unremarkable, socially inept sort of guy, works in an accounting department of a high-tech company known as Veil-Tech. He spends days in chatrooms. Hal, one of the project managers, secretly loans Sid a prototype of one of the company's latest developments—a device known as an image enhancer. With the help of his friend Deb, Sid is able to acquire the image of good looking co-worker Chad Warner and soon Sid is stepping out on the town with his new and improved look. Deb gets involved with sexy co-worker Chad and losses her glasses in favour for contact lenses. He soon decides to wreck Chad's life by getting him fired. One night he collects money that Chad collected from a bet. Soon Deb begins to regret using the device and Sid becomes more erratic and drunk with power. The real Chad arrives and hears about Sid's misuse of the device. A fight ensues and Chad is killed. Sid crashes his body in a blazing car and makes it look like he killed himself. At Sid's funeral Deb gives an emotional eulogy and Sid in disguise as Chad comforts her and leaves. He is confronted by three armed men and killed. Apparently Chad was involved in shady dealings. At the end Deb is seen on a computer conversing in a chatroom. She is asked what she looks like. She types "the truth or a lie?" to which she is asked to lie. Now wearing glasses again she turns off the computer. | ||||
| 4 | "Manifest Destiny" | Brad Turner | Lawrence Meyers, Mark Stern, Geoffrey Hollands | 11 February 2000 |
| An invisible alien race inhabits a spaceship and causes a salvage team to go insane. | ||||
| 5 | "Breaking Point" | Neill Fearnley | Grant Rosenberg | 18 February 2000 |
| A man gets fired from his job as a scientist at a technology company as they don't believe in his time travel theories. So he tests his time machine himself to prove them wrong, only to arrive just in time to see his wife die two days from the day he traveled. Seeing himself driving away from the scene he becomes perplexed over the situation, was he the cause of her death? Either way, only he can stop it from happening. | ||||
| 6 | "The Beholder" | Jeff Woolnough | Sam Egan | 25 February 2000 |
| The episode begins as Patrick, a blind humanities professor, volunteers to undergo a medical operation that will allow to see for the first time since childhood. Soon after the operation he begins to see a ghostly woman in the hospital. After he returns home she reveals herself to be an alien named Kyra who has been stranded on earth and wishes to go home. Patrick's aide Louise is told by the doctors that the drug that cured his blindness was manufactured in space and can also enhance his senses. Mike Warden, a scientist from British Intelligence working for the NSA has been using the drug iridium, used in treating stroke victims in order to see Kyra. The next day Kyra meets Patrick in the woods and gives him an electric shock which allows him to hear and feel her as well. After a few weeks (wherein they make love) Louise is told by Mike and Patrick's doctor that they wish to investigate Kyra's origins and possibly send her home. Patrick and Kyra know she will be in danger if the doctor's are allowed near her. In a lab Patrick acts as an intermediary between the scientists and Kyra. It is revealed that Kyra is a pacifist alien from a neutron star out of our reach. The scientists trap her in magnetic field causing her great pain. Despite some of the scientists and Patrick's pleas to stop Mike asks to continue the experiment. Knowing that they will never help her Patrick fakes Kyra's death and unplugs the magnetic field, releasing her. Patrick is given the last iridium on earth and goes to the woods to destroy it. Kyra appears and tries to stop him as it would mean he will never see again but Patrick proceeds and is soon caught by Mike and the police. At the end Patrick is seen giving a lecture, blind again. Kyra visible only to the episode's viewers, touches his cheek softly. | ||||
| 7 | "Seeds of Destruction" | Steve Anker | Chris Ruppenthal | 3 March 2000 |
| A veterinarian in a small farming town probes links between the rash of fast-growing tumors and a new breed of genetically engineered corn. | ||||
| 8 | "Simon Says" | Helen Shaver | Scott Peters | 10 March 2000 |
| A man who lost his wife and his son in a car accident several years ago has built a robot which has his son's memories. | ||||
| 9 | "Stasis" | Brian Giddens | Lawrence Myers | 14 April 2000 |
| In a future world of scarce resources the world government regulates the population into two working classes (Alphas and Betas) in order to maximize conservation. These two classes rotate in and out of suspended animation for 72 hour periods. But what happens when an Alpha and a Beta fall in love with each other and never see each other face to face except for shift changes? | ||||
| 10 | "Down to Earth" | [Mike Rohl] | A L Katz and Scott Nimerfro | 21 April 2000 |
| At the North American UFO Convention, Max Buford has in his possession what appears to be a fragment from an alien spaceship. | ||||
| 11 | "Inner Child" | Ken Girotti | Grant Rosenberg | 28 April 2000 |
| Anne Reynolds, estranged from her mother, haunted by her dead father and terrified of being close to anyone, is attacked, injured and wakes up on the operating table a changed woman. Learning of a Siamese twin sister that was sacrificed so that she could live, the personalty of the dead sister begins to take over. | ||||
| 12 | "Glitch" | Mike Rohl | Michael Burman and Ron Greenstein | 5 May 2000 |
| Tom and Wendy seem like the perfect couple, happy together and very much in love. But at night when Wendy sleeps, Tom has terrible memories about being stuck in a burning building with a crying baby. The nightmares, however, aren't real and neither is Tom. He's an android and the "memories" are bugs placed in his artificial intelligence by his creator, the late Joe Walker. Walker had originally created Tom to save humans from fires and other dangerous situations. However, he anticipated that his colleague, Dr. Edward Normandy, might try to militarize the android and use him as a cyber-soldier-spy and planted the bugs as a way of forcing Normandy to upgrade Tom so the android could think for itself. Wendy is revealed to be another android secretly developed based on his wife. By creating Tom and Wendy the scientist and his wife could live forever. | ||||
| 13 | "Decompression" | Jorge Montesi | James Crocker & [Brad Wright] | 30 June 2000 |
| Senator Wyndom Brody has just won the New Hampshire primary and he's flying to South Carolina to press his campaign for the Presidency. He aims to have all the private details of America's citizens via computers. Suddenly, a woman appears and foretells his death on the plane. She appears intermittently and reveals she is a traveler from a new golden age in the future created by the future President Wyndom Brody. She can only project herself to him, so no-one else can see her. As another time traveler had visited him several minutes before he entered the plane to personally meet him, the future was changed. She explains that the plane left slightly later and thus was struck by lightning and crashed, killing him. Thus a new darker Orwellian future is created by his opponent. She says that if he jumps from the plane before the lightning strikes, she will save him, returning everything to normal. As the clock begins to tick, Wyndom becomes increasingly erratic until he takes his bodyguard's gun and opens the hatch window to escape. As he falls to the ground, he is suddenly transported to the street below unharmed. The time traveler appears and tells him that he actually created the dark future and her mission was to prevent it from happening. He asks why he was saved and she remarks, "Saved you? Who said I saved you?" In reality, Brody fell to his death. The plane lands safely with the aides and reporters pondering over his behavior. | ||||
| 14 | "Abaddon" | Steve Anker | A. L. Katz & Scott Nimerfro | 7 July 2000 |
| In the late in the 23rd century an outdated star ship is on a ten-year reclamation project. The crew is in suspended animation and awakes to find a mysterious object floating in space. The pod contains the body of a rebel who was executed 150 years earlier for the slaughter of more than a million people and is still alive. | ||||
| 15 | "The Grid" | Charles Winkler | Duncan Kennedy | 14 July 2000 |
| When Scott Bowman gets an urgent message from his brother Peter, he decides to drive back to their hometown of Halford, Washington to see what is wrong. When he gets there, he discovers that Peter is dead and his wife Eilleen has been charged with his murder. But that's not the only shock awaiting Scott. The town where he grew up has been transformed. Antenna towers dot the landscape and the people act strangely, as if they are under some kind of sporadic mind control. Scott goes to the jail to visit Eileen, where she warns him about the towers—just moments before grabbing the Sheriff's gun and killing herself. This turn of events convinces Scott that he needs to investigate further. He meets with a former colleague of Peter's, Dr. Jim Holbrook, who seems friendly, but doesn't give Scott any information. Scott doesn't know where to turn next, when out of the blue, one of Peter's former students shows up. She tells Scott about a book that holds the secret to what is known as Project Halford. Scott finds the book and a videotape that reveals the Army's plan to construct a neural computer network that would communicate directly with the brain. It also reveals that the project spun out of control and that Peter stole vital codes in an attempt to halt the computer's drive to take over the minds of the townspeople. Sadly Scott was too late and the towers are placed all over the nation, including near his home. Scott's wife is already under their control and shoots Scott. | ||||
| 16 | "Revival" | Michael Robison | Chris Ruppenthal (story) & Mark Stern (teleplay) | 21 July 2000 |
| A tent revivalist finds faith as he battles an evil alien masquerading as a divine power | ||||
| 17 | "Gettysburg" | Mario Azzopardi | Sam Egan | 28 July 2000 |
| Two friends, Andy and Vince, are at a Civil War re-enactment in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A time traveler disguised as a photographer (character Nicholas Prentice, who also appears in episode 12 of season 5, "Tribunal" and episode 15 of season 7, "Time to Time") takes their picture and transports them back to the eve of the real Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. He has done all of this because Andy will shoot the President of the United States in 2013 at a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the battle. He does this in honor of the flag of Confederate states of America. Nicholas wants to show Vince that "there is no glory in this or any other war." The two are confused about why were sent back there, and demand to be sent home. Prentice tells them that he can't return them until he has completed his mission, which he keeps a secret from them. Prentice's camera/time machine is confiscated by the Confederates. Col. Angus Devine is accidentally transported to the year 2013 when messing with the captured time traveling device. Vince is taken prisoner because he is wearing a Union uniform, and Andy decides to fight for the Confederates in order to make himself feel important. Vince drops a book about battles of the Civil War, and it is found by a woman, but it has little impact on the episode. The woman returns the book towards the end of the episode. Andy does not learn his lesson, and tries to stop Pickett's Charge in order to achieve a Confederate victory, even after Prentice explains why he has been sent back there. Andy is deemed a coward and shot by a Confederate soldier. The Confederate colonel who was accidentally transported to 2013 shoots a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, thinking he really is Lincoln. He also shoots the President in the process. The episode ends with Prentice shaking his head. | ||||
| 18 | "Something About Harry" | Brent-Karl Clackson | Grant Rosenberg | 4 August 2000 |
| Nancy Henninger, teen-aged son Zak is suspicious of the man who rents out her backyard apartment and claims to be opening a new factory for his company. Then people begin to disappear from town and Zak decides to conduct his own investigation. | ||||
| 19 | "Zig Zag" | James Head | A L Katz and Nora O'Brien | 11 August 2000 |
| The bombs are in place, ready to destroy the super-computers at the Department of Information Technology. Inside, the members of the Syndrome, the anti-technology group that planted the bombs, lay dead or dying. All of them, that is, except Cliff Unger, or as he calls himself now, Zig Fowler. Unger has his finger on the detonator as he negotiates with Pete Yastremski, the head of the department. As the two men talk and FBI agents prepare to storm the building, we move back in time, through the hours, days and years leading up to the attack. | ||||
| 20 | "Nest" | Scott Peters | Scott Peters | 18 August 2000 |
| Scientists in the Arctic discover a species of Polar Mites that infest humans and cause them to become psychotic. | ||||
| 21 | "Final Appeal, Part 1" | Jim Kaufman | George R.R. Martin | 3 September 2000 |
| In the opening of a two hour clips episode, the character Dr. Theresa Givens from episode 1 of season 2, "Stitch in Time", is on trial for using her time travel device in a world that has banned technology. | ||||
| 22 | "Final Appeal, Part 2" | Jim Kaufman | George R.R. Martin | 3 September 2000 |
| In the conclusion of a two hour clips episode, the character Dr. Theresa Givens from episode 1 of season 2, "Stitch in Time", is on trial for using her time travel device in a world that has banned technology. | ||||
22 episodes
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Family Values" | Mike Rohl | James Crocker | 16 March 2001 |
| Jerry Miller (Tom Arnold) is the stereotypical American father who is forced to spend more time at work than home. As head of the household, he is looked to as a source of stability in an effort to unite the family and provide stability for their hectic lives. Jerry is fighting a losing battle. While up late one night watching TV, Jerry sees an infomercial for a robot that could be the solution to his family's woes. Designed to obey every human command and available as a thirty day free trial, Jerry phones the company that produces the unit immediately. The next day, Gideon arrives and a surprised family grudgingly accepts the artificial life form. Though Gideon is initially ignored, the family quickly becomes attached to it. Gideon performs better than Jerry could ever hope for, so well that Jerry's role as head of the household is removed in favor of an artificial replacement. Jerry grows increasingly hostile towards Gideon but despite his change of heart, Gideon's hold of the family has become too strong. Though Jerry's newest electronic device was once the envy of every male neighbor, they are all finding that this jealousy was hastily misplaced as their family roles are respectively being replaced by other units. | ||||
| 2 | "Patient Zero" | Mario Azzopardi | James Crocker | 23 March 2001 |
| An epidemic has broken out across earth, and most of humanity has been killed by a virus. The virus began with patient zero, a woman who comes into contact with the three DNA strands necessary for this virus to come into existence. A soldier, Colonel Beckett (Michael Rooker), is sent back in time to kill her and prevent the virus from forming. Beckett becomes attached to the woman and decides not to kill her, but instead to simply keep her from making the contacts necessary to form the virus. In the revised timeline, Beckett himself becomes patient zero; in his attempt to protect the woman, he himself contracts all three strains and becomes sick. A fellow soldier arrives from the future, and Beckett is given the chance to sacrifice himself when his friend administers a fatal dose of poison. Since Beckett dies before the disease reaches its contagious stage (and the woman never develops the disease at all), the plague is stopped before it starts; in the new history, there never was an epidemic, all of the disease's former victims (including Beckett's family) are now alive, and humanity survives without ever contracting the virus. | ||||
| 3 | "A New Life" | Mario Azzopardi | Mark Stern | 30 March 2001 |
| A preacher leads people into a secluded enclave away from the temptations of the outer world. However, a few of the residents begin to suspect the preacher's motives, and eventually find the reason behind the creation of the enclave | ||||
| 4 | "The Surrogate" | Ken Girotti | A L Katz | 6 April 2001 |
| Claire is an artist struggling to make ends meet. A surrogacy program presents her with the possibility of making a tidy sum, however a few days into the pregnancy, something isn't quite right. | ||||
| 5 | "The Vessel" | Jimmy Kaufman | Sam Egan | 13 April 2001 |
| Jake Worthy (Jere Burns) is a cynical writer sent along as the civilian member of a space expedition. Upon re-entry into Earth, the shuttle malfunctions, and crashes. Jake is the only survivor, suddenly incapable of being harmed physically, as well as being endowed with flashes of brilliant insight. | ||||
| 6 | "Mona Lisa" | Brad Turner | John Schulian | 20 April 2001 |
| Mona Lisa (Laura Harris) is a machine assassin that develops a sense of humanity after the creators disengage her fail safe devices she precedes to find out more about earth and its inhabitants. | ||||
| 7 | "Replica" | Brad Turner | Sam Egan | 27 April 2001 |
| A biogeneticist (Peter Outerbridge) illegally clones his comatose wife (Sherilyn Fenn). | ||||
| 8 | "Think Like a Dinosaur" | Jorge Montesi | James Patrick Kelly, Mark Stern | 15 June 2001 |
| The Hanen, dinosaur-like aliens have set up an installation on the moon to teach their human allies the secrets of interstellar teleportation. During a test jump managed by Michael Burr (Enrico Colantoni) an accidental duplicate of a woman is created by the teleportation process, leading to an ethical dilemma when the Hanen tell Michael to "balance the equation" by killing the duplicate. | ||||
| 9 | "Alien Shop" | Peter DeLuise | Pen Densham | 22 June 2001 |
| An alien shape-shifter owns a unique curio shop whose merchandise possess strange powers; when a petty crook (Jonathon Schaech) accepts a peculiar wallet he learns the hard way that money not earned comes at a price. | ||||
| 10 | "Worlds Within" | Brian Giddens | Michael Sadowski | 29 June 2001 |
| A mutant child is a link to another dimension and a scientist tries to save him from secret government manipulation. | ||||
| 11 | "In the Blood" | Jorge Montesi | Alan Brennert | 6 July 2001 |
| Callie Whitehorse Landau (Irene Bedard), an astrophysicist of Navajo heritage, and her husband Alec (Cameron Daddo), an expert in space medicine, are asked to embark on an astounding exploratory mission into space led by NASA Flight Drew Director James Dreeden (Greg Evigan). Along with Dr. Louisa Kennedy (Helene Joy), a navigation expert, the small team of four passes through a quantum hole torn into the very fabric of the universe and enter another continuum, a trans-space just beneath its surface. It is unlike anything the crew has ever seen—but for Callie, trans-space triggers vivid hallucinations and a powerful realization that their presence has caused a serious imbalance in the universal order. Dreeden is determined to return to Earth with their startling discoveries, but Callie is convinced the survey ship's re-entry could have disastrous consequences for all of humanity. In the end Callie sacrifices herself for humanity. | ||||
| 12 | "Flower Child" | Brad Turner | Jeffrey Hirschfield | 21 July 2001 |
| A mysterious glowing green object hurtles towards earth and lands in a flower bed. An old lady who tends to the flowers finds a new flower the next day. As she's trying to figure out what it is, the plant reaches out with its roots and starts sucking the life out of her. The plant uses her substance to form a new body: the body of a beautiful woman. | ||||
| 13 | "Free Spirit" | Brad Turner | Danny McBride | 28 July 2001 |
| A sanitarium for schizophrenics is plagued by a series of bizarre killings. It turns out the carnage is the handiwork of a restless, body-hopping spirit, the ghost of a man whom Dr. Rachel Harris (Dina Meyer) had been forced to kill during a botched military experiment four years earlier. But even with this knowledge, Rachel has no way of knowing into whose body the malevolent spirit will leap next -- nor what the deadly entity ultimately has in mind for her. | ||||
| 14 | "Mindreacher" | Jim Kaufman | Chris Ruppenthal and Naomi Janzen | 4 August 2001 |
| The sanity of a doctor is challenged when uses herself a a guinea to test a psychological tool allowing her to enter her patients' minds. | ||||
| 15 | "Time to Time" | James Head | Sam Egan | 11 August 2001 |
| A woman being recruited by a future organization of time travelers (led by character Nicholas Prentice, who also appears in episode 12 of season 5, "Tribunal" and episode 17 of season 6, "Gettysburg") is given a chance to return to the day in 1969 when her father died. | ||||
| 16 | "Abduction" | Mario Azzopardi | James Crocker | 18 August 2001 |
| An alien kidnaps five high school students, and tells them that one must be killed. They must decide which of them it will be. The five students are: Ray (Zachary Ty Bryan), a typical jock, Danielle the hottest girl in school, Jason, a stereotypical geek, Brianna, a devout religious girl, and Cody, the social outcast. It is later found out that Cody had a gun with him, and planned a shooting spree at school. The alien abducted the five students and gave them the ultimatum to force Cody to think about the consequences about killing everyone in sight. The five students are transported back to the time they were abducted and Cody turns himself and his gun over to the principal. | ||||
| 17 | "Rule of Law" | Mike Rohl | Tracy Tormé and (written by) & John-Michael Maas | 25 August 2001 |
| A circuit court judge goes to a frontier planet that has never known the law or had a judicial system. His first trial is of an alien accused of attacking and killing several humans. | ||||
| 18 | "Lion's Den" | Matt Hastings | Matt Hastings | 8 September 2001 |
| Coach Peter Shotwell (John Wesley Shipp) used to be a contender. Back in Lewisborough High School he just missed his Olympic dreams when he blew out his knee. While his best friend Jon (Roger R. Cross) went on to international athletic stardom, Peter became coach of the Lewisborough Lions, the school's wrestling team. But in a series of bad years, this year's the worst. The Lions are at the bottom of the league and Morris (Shawn Ashmore), his son and a member of the team, is constantly angry at his dad for his failures. Jon tells Peter about a new performance-enhancing drug called Nuriflex 500 which he assures contains scientifically balanced nutrients that can help the team to victory. Peter hesitates, but with mounting pressure from the school's principal and his own son to win, he agrees to a trial run. The results are almost immediate and astonishing. With the Lions on the drug they soon rise to the top, but their startling success comes with a high price. Spliced with unusual DNA, the drug has side effects with horrific consequences. | ||||
| 19 | "The Tipping Point" | Brent Clackson | Jim Crocker | 15 September 2001 |
| A project to develop a universal computer language may lead to all the computers in the world to link and form an artificial intelligence that oen computer whiz feels that he must destroy or risk world domination. | ||||
| 20 | "Dark Child" | Steve Anker | Micheal Sloan | 4 January 2002 |
| Seventeen years ago single mother Laura Sinclair was abducted by aliens, but no one would believe her. A newspaper article about alien abductions and her recurring nightmares threaten to distance her from her moody teenaged daughter, Tammy. Tammy's new English teacher, Marcus Fellows seems to have quite a positive effect on her who also seems very familiar to Laura. | ||||
| 21 | "The Human Factor" | Steve Aspis and Robert Habros | Grady Hall and A.E. van Vogt (story) | 11 January 2002 |
| Jupiter's moon Ganymede is now the only hope for the human race in 2084 as overpopulation and constant warring has left much of earth uninhabitable. Space Commander Ellis Grover (Robert Duncan McNeill) must convince android assistant Link (Zack Ward) that humanity is worthy of existence over a game of chess. As Link activates the station's self-destruct sequence, Grover's officers attempt to reach the manual override at the same time as trying to get over bitter distrust. Link tries to convince Grover that the world's governments do not care about peace but only want to extend power. In the end, after shutting down Link and the countdown, Grover is informed by the United States President that the US launched a pre-emptive strike against the "Eastern Coalition", starting a nuclear war, which along with the underestimated retaliation killed almost the entire human race (including Grover's wife and daughter). The US President's spaceship, with the few remaining people, will arrive in several months. At this point Grover, having lost faith in life and his humanity, reactivates both Link and the self-destruct sequence and starts his last game of chess. Link asks about what had happened to which Grover replies: "It was... human error." | ||||
| 22 | "Human Trials" | Brad Turner | Grady Hall and Brian Nohr | 18 January 2002 |
| Captain Kelvin Parkhurst (Jason Gedrick) has proven himself the best on previous military missions, and now he's agreed to take the toughest test of his life to prove himself the most qualified again. Along with three other equally decorated recruits—Captain Alice Wheeler (Leanne Adachi), Captain William Hinman, and his old rival, Captain Eric Woodward (Lochlyn Munro)—he has been invited by the military to compete for the opportunity for a secret solo mission. The recruits are tested using a Neural Stimulator which transports them into dangerous, challenging and very real situations. Captains Wheeler and Hinman are soon eliminated, leaving only Parkhurst and Woodward to compete for the mission. But as the tests become more extreme, the line between reality and simulation becomes blurred, and winning may no longer be the ultimate goal. | ||||