The Outer Limits

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Second Soul:
Season 3, Episode 5.
This is also the fifth episode of the first season of the 1990s The Outer Limits and this episode is about reanimating the dead.
The third episode of NuWho’s own first season, The Unquiet Dead also had the reanimation of the dead.
The Outer Limits episode was shown on April 14 1995 and the Doctor Who episode came almost ten years later on April 9 2005.
In both instances the reanimation of the dead is needed for the survival of alien races in the respective episodes.
The Outer Limits episode is not bad which sees the personal costs for the episode’s lead character and not bad revelation that ends this episode.

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The Choice:
Season 3, Episode 7.
The Choice is also the seventh episode of the first episode of the 1990s Outer Limits.
Doctor Who alum Karen Gillan is an Outer Limits fans and the seventh episode of her first season as Amy Pond in Doctor Who also has the word choice in it that of Amy’s Choice.
In The Choice, the words “heaven sent” was said and Heaven Sent is a name of a post-Karen Doctor Who episode which was broadcast on her birthday on November 28 2015.
While Amy Pond was played by the real life Karen Gillan, The Outer Limits episode has a character called Karen played by Megan Follows.
Coincidentally I have been seeing Follows in her regular role as Catherine de' Medici in Reign.
The Choice is about a young girl Aggie Travers (Thora Birch) who has powers and Karen Ross has been assigned to tend to her and her powers.
Pretty enjoyable and in the midst of Aggie ultimately being tracked down by a government agent

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Virtual Future:
Season 3, Episode 8.
Featuring David Warner.
Warner later played the Unbound Third Doctor for Big Finish.
The Doctor is a time traveller and this Outer Limits episode deals with time travel of a sort as it is about a machine that sees into the future.
Dee Jay Jackson played Guard in this episode and this episode came on May 5 1995. What is curious about this is that a year later in the same month Jackson appeared in the Doctor Who TV movie in which he played Security Guard.
Jackson also performed the same function in other places as well.
Warner is very good as the villain Bill Trenton as he intends to use the said machine for his bid to be elected a US Senator.
Effective in seeing the personal cost for the protagonist Jack Pierce (Josh Brolin) of the said project including neglecting his wife.

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Living Hell:
Season 3, Episode 9.
Featuring Don S. Davis. Davis later played General Hammond in Stargate SG-1 co-developed by Jonathan Glassner who also developed the 1990s The Outer Limits which Living Hell is part of.
After Ben Kohler got shot in the head he gets inserted a chip in his head that saves his life.
However he gets visions from a killer as he sees his latest murders.
The premise is intriguing but the execution of it in this episode felt very muddle to me.

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Corner of the Eye:
Season 3, Episode 10.
Featuring Justin Louis. Louis later became a ead actor of Stargate Universe where he was credited as Louis Ferreira playing Everett Young. However Universe is one Stargate series that 1990s The Outer Limits developer Jonathan Glassner had no involvement in.
Intriguing episode in which a priest (Len Cariou) is beginning to lost his faith when he literally sees demons.
The demons are in actual fact aliens from another planet and they gave the priest their powers but for nefarious purposes.
Very good how a loose grip of faith is being capitalises by aliens to make this episode works.
This episode came on May 19 1995 and the demon-like aliens looked remarkably like the Graske who made their debut in the Whoniverse a decade later in Attack of the Graske on Christmas 2005.

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Quality of Mercy:
Season 3, Episode 14.
Starring Robert Patrick and Nicole de Boer but credited as Nikki de Boer
This is mostly a two hander between Patrick and de Boer as they are prisoners of war during an interstellar war in the far future.
Intriguing and tense episodes as the two POWs deals with their situation at hand.
Shocking on how this ends but I have been informed that the story continues in 4.18 The Light Brigade.
As far as titles go mercy is also used for Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy featuring The Outer Limits fan Karen Gillan as Amy Pond.
The Nicole De Boer character mentioned blue skies and the song Mr Blue Sky was played in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 featuring Karen as Nebula.

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The Voyage Home:
Season 3, Episode 16.
Featuring Michael Dorn. Dorn had played Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation & Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as well as the TNG movies.
The Voyage Home is also the subtitle for Star Trek IV which was released in 1986 the year before TNG marking among many things Dorn’s debut as Worf in 1987.

For Dorn’s Voyage Home it came on June 30 1995, just months before his DS9 debut in the season 4 opener The Way of the Warrior.

Fascinating episode about a manned expedition to Mars when it got infiltrated by an alien that can change its shape.
A very haunting episode that culminates in the sacrifice at the end.
The closing narration sure stated its point about the sacrifice as its one that no one will ever know.

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I, Robot:
Season 3, Episode 19.
This episode came on July 23 1995 and it is a remake of the episode of the same name that of 2.9 on November 14 1964.
The original and the remake both featured Leonard Nimoy.
In the original Nimoy played the newspaper reporter Judson Ellis. In the remake he played the lawyer Thurman Cutler who was played in the original by Howard Da Silva. Da Silva died in 1986 almost a decade before the remake.
Judson Ellis incidentally is not featured in the remake . Apparently he was not needed when writing was made for the remake.
The remake was directed by Nimoy’s son Adam and I knew about this collaboration between father and son when I saw Adam’s documentary on his father For The Love of Spock released in 2016 the year after Leonard’s death in 2015.
Somewhat coincidentally Adam is also the name of the said robot.
The remake of I, Robot comes three episodes after The Voyage Home which was also the subtitle of Star Trek IV which featured and directed by Leonard Nimoy.
The Outer Limits’ The Voyage Home even featured another Star Trek luminary in Michael Dorn (TNG/DS9).
Adam Nimoy delivered a solid direction with the remake of I, Robot and Leonard fills in Da Silva’s shoes well as Thurman Cutler.
Like the original the said robot Adam comes to his end but this time it is with irony due to the person Adam saves here.

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If These Walls Could Talk:
Season 3, Episode 20.
Starring Dwight Schultz and Alberta Watson.
Schultz is well known as Howling Mad Murdock in The A-Team. For Star Trek fans he was Reg Barclay in TNG and Voyager
This is the third episode of the third season to star or feature a Star Trek luminary after The Voyage Home with Michael Dorn and I, Robot starring Leonard Nimoy.
This episode came in 1995 and it was a couple of years before Alberta Watson played Madeline in La Femme Nikita (1997-2001).
A notable appearance in this episode from 1995 is that of Ryan Reynolds as the son of the Watson character.
This episode featured a couple of actors who would later make many appearances in Stargate SG-1 co-developed by 1990s The Outer Limits developer Jonathan Glassner, that of Gary Jones and Tom McBeath.
Also noticed Molly Parker who had been seeing of late in US House of Cards and will in the future be seen as Maureen Robinson in a remake series of Lost In Space.
If These Walls Could Talk is about a haunted house and the Watson character employs the help of the Schultz character a sceptic and debunker of such phenomena to track down her son whom she believed was trapped there.
Pretty good how this got played out and how the house was dealt with.

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Birthright:
Penultimate episode of season 3.
Thrilling episode about a US Senator and that he turned out to be an alien.
Solid premise of how this is part of an invasion and in retrospect the ending should not have been surprising.

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Stitch In Time:
Season 4 opener.
A fascinating way to open the fourth season with a time travelling vigilante Dr Theresa Givens (Amanda Plummer) who killed serial murderers before killing their victims.
FBI agent Jamie Pratt (Michelle Forbes) is led to Dr Givens as they were murders spanning a 40 year period and the gun that Givens used was not yet manufactured and was five years old at the time.
Pretty good on how Jamie gets embroiled into the time travel and how she then used time travel for a very personal reason at the end.

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The Outer Limits 4.2 Resurrection starred Dana Ashbrook and Heather Graham.
This casting is of a curio to Twin Peaks fans as Ashbrook had played Bobby Briggs and Graham played Annie Blackburn in that series.

The Outer Limits episode came on January 14 1996 during the long interregnum between Twin Peaks seasons 2 and 3.

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Unnatural Selection:
Season 4, Episode 3.
A horrifying episode which shows a child born of genetic enhancements becoming a monster.
The episode ends ominously when the main couple of this episode getting a new born baby who has these genetic enhancements.

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First Anniversary:
Season 4, Episode 7.
Starring Matt Frewer and Michelle Johnson.
Co-written by the legendary Richard Matheson.
I am also seeing Frewer in Orphan Black.
Michelle Johnson is someone who could have become a big name star and it has been attributed the reason why it didn’t that way for her was what she was given to do in the movie Blame It On Rio (1984) also starring Michael Caine and Demi Moore.
According to IMDb, Michelle Johnson stopped acting in 2004, several years after First Anniversary in 1996.
So for its worth given it was in the twilight of her career, Michelle Johnson was very good and very creepy as a shape changing alien posing as a human woman and her human husband played by Frewer suspecting something is wrong with her.
Quite terrifying that a beautiful woman had a terrible odour as the Frewer character finds with his wife.
Things does not end well for the Frewer character and the episode ends with the cycle beginning all over again with someone else.

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The Refuge:

Season 4, Episode 11.

Starring Jessica Steen. She later became the first actor to play Elizabeth Weir in Stargate SG-1. The character of Elizabeth Weir then continued in spin-off Stargate Atlantis but with her played by new actor Torri Higginson due to Steen’s unwillingness to move to Vancouver where Atlantis was filmed.

Raymond Dalton (James Wilder) stumbled upon the said refuge where the host Sanford Valle‘s( M. Emmet Walsh) true nature is soon revealed

What a revelation that this turned out to be a dream that Dalton was having and from cold sleep with the other people from the dream.

Dalton goes back to cold sleep for Gina (Steen) and a good way that was seen to defeat Valle.

While a complete resolution for Gina and Dalton wasn’t achieve here, the episode ends with it being on its way in getting there.