The Outer Limits

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Inconstant Moon:
Season 4, Episode 12.
Based on the short story of the same name by Larry Niven.
Originally broadcast on April 12 1996 and exactly 12 years later came the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii which marked the Doctor Who debut by The Outer Limits fan Karen Gillan who later on played companion Amy Pond.
The Outer Limits episode as indicated in its title is about the Moon and one of Karen’s stories as Amy is about the Moon that of The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon.
Inconstant Moon is a very moving story as a physics professor Stan Hurst noticed how bright the Moon is and soon figured that the world is coming to an end.
With this knowledge in mind Stan asked a bookstore owner Leslie (Joanna Gleason) that he has known for a long time finally on a date.
Very moving on this first and perhaps last date comes along with the world about to come to an end.
Overall the episode succeeds in showing just how precious life even with it showing that it come to an end very soon.

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From Within:
Season 4, Episode 13.
Starring Neil Patrick Harris.
Harris played a mentally handicapped boy Howie. This is certainly a contrast to the character I had seen him played the most of that of Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother.
Howie’s condition proved to be a benefit not just for himself but for his town as it has become a weapon against slugs that has infested the town.
The slugs breaks people’s inhibitions making them do things that they would normally do.
Howie’s condition makes him unsuitable for the slugs.
A fascinating piece as Howie along with his sister figures a way to get rid of these slugs.

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The Deprogrammers:
Season 4, Episode 16.
Featuring Brent Spiner.
Very intriguing plot to overthrow an alien overlord with rebels led by the Spiner character deprogramming one of the overlord’s human servant and get him to assassinate the overlord.
Touching the efforts to re-humanise the human servant and what a shock of an ending after the assassination was successfully carried out.

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Paradise:
Season 4, Episode 17.
Apparently healthy women are growing old and dying.
This episode is very eerie and certain parts somewhat disturbing.
Intriguing revelation about the alien here.
Christina’s mother and uncle becomes young again and produces a child and gives a child for childless Christina and her husband Grady to raise even though the baby is technically Christina’s half-sister.
Frankly having the new child’s effective mother who is by blood her half-sister rather confusing for this child whilst growing up.

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The Light Brigade:
Season 4, Episode 18.
This is the sequel to the previous season’s Quality of Mercy with Robert Patrick reprising his role as Major John Skokes with an explanation in the middle of what happened to him since that previous episode.
While The Light Brigade does not see the return of future DS9 star Nicole DeBoer from that previous episode, The Light Brigade however does feature another Star Trek alum Wil Wheaton (TNG).
Wheaton plays a cadet alongside Major Skokes in a spaceship.
Wheaton gets to be back on a spaceship from his days as Wesley Crusher on the Enterprise in TNG.
Wesley Crusher and the cadet that Wheaton plays in The Light Brigade could easily be interchangeable but there is a minor difference between the two characters.
Wesley Crusher got it on his own to become part of Starfleet, the cadet in The Light Brigade however got his father to pull strings for him to be on the spaceship.
A solid sequel to Quality of Mercy culminating in a shock about Major Skokes and a more shocking ending.

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Falling Star:
Season 4, Episode 19.
Starring Sheena Easton.
The episode title is not about a star in space but one of a human kind.
Sheena Easton played pop singer Melissa McCammon who was about to commit suicide but was stopped by a time traveller from the future who is also a fan.
It is a Quantum Leap type situation with the time traveller Rachael arriving inside Melissa’s body.
However the problem is that Melissa’s suicide was meant to happen and a couple of other time travellers followed Rachael to the present to make sure that Melissa dies like she is supposed to with Melissa and Rachael fighting against them.
Very enjoyable seeing this struggle for Melissa’s life and death and what a resolution that was achieved at the end although I am not certain it is one that entirely satisfied with.

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Out of Body:
Antepenultimate episode of season 4.
Starring Peri Gilpin, Victor Garber, William B Davis and Joely Fisher.
Gilpin and Garber played a scientist husband and wife team.
Given what this episode is about as indicated in the episode title, Garber these days kind of having the opposite experience as he plays Dr Martin Stein one half of Firestorm in Legends of Tomorrow.
On paper the idea of this episode made have seen fascinating but it is kind of flat for me and that this episode presented as a fight between science and religion definitely did not help.
The way this episode reached its resolution did not feel comfortable to me.

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The Sentence:
Season 4 finale.
Starring David Hyde Pierce.
Pierce is well known from his regular role in Frasier which was running when this episode came on in 1996.
I am not a Frasier fan but I have seen a few Frasier episodes featuring Pierce.
Curiously enough this episode came two episodes after Out of Body which starred Peri Gilpin and Victor Garber as spouses.
What is curious about this is that Gilpin is a co-star of Pierce on Frasier while he and Garber had both appeared in the movie Sleepless In Seattle in 1993, three years earlier.
Pierce played a scientist who invented a machine that makes simulation for prisoner to serve their sentences in making them believed they had served for a long time but in reality only little time has passed.
Things go wrong when a prisoner who says that he is innocent dies from the effect of the machine and the scientist gets blamed for it and served a sentence in prison.
It didn’t really come as a surprise to me that the scientist was going through a simulation from the machine that he invented.
A very powerful end to the episode when the scientist gets back to reality and destroys the machine now fully realising when harmful effects it has.

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Bits of Love:
Season 5 opener.
Starring Jon Tenney and Natasha Henstridge.
Tenney played Aidan Hunter is the only survivor from a nuclear holocaust and lives safely deep underground.
However he is not completely alone as he has holograms for company including his parents.
One of these holograms is Emma played by Natasha Henstridge.
Aidan does whatever he likes including pleasure and has pleasure with Emma.
Things became unhinged for Emma when she says that she loves Adam and that she is going to have his baby (yes from a hologram).
I saw bits (no pun intended) of this episode on television some years after its original broadcast and I think I was somewhat perturbed by it at the time.
Now having seen this episode in full this is truly haunting and shows the ultimate consequence of love even bits of it.

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Second Thoughts:
Aptly named title for this the second episode of the fifth season.
Starring Howie Mandel and I saw as his more recent self as a judge on America’s Got Talent in episodes that I have gotten hold of.
Also featuring Gordon Tipple and this episode came in January 1997 several months after his brief appearance as the Master at the beginning of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie.
The episode is quite literally as Howie Mandel plays a man in his 30s who has the mind of a child when a scientist who just before his death transfer his thoughts to him.
Quite terrifying the premise that this episode explored especially in the midst of the Mandel character having affections on his carer.
The ending was certainly tragic.

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Re-generation:
Season 5, Episode 3.
Starring Kim Cattrall, Daniel Benzali and Teryl Rothery.
This episode came in 1997, the year before Kim Cattrall will be in her well known role as Samantha in Sex and the City.
Incidentally The Outer Limits fan Karen Gillan attended the premiere of Sex and the City 2 featuring Kim Cattrall in 2010.
Teryl Rothery played Dr Lucy Cole and Rothery would later play another doctor Janet Frasier in Stargate SG-1 which would make its debut also in 1997 and months after this Outer Limits episode.
Benzali and Cattrall played husband and wife who loses their four year old son at the beginning of their son.
The husband had his son cloned and the wife is now impregnated.
The husband is a candidate for the Senate and amidst this political backdrop, the wife discovered that her new unborn son is just a clone of her dead son but is exactly like him.
Haunting especially when the unborn son revealed what really caused his predecessor’s death.
Very eerie on how this episode ended with Dr Cole.

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Last Supper:
Season 5, Episode 4.
The episode title is a Biblical reference and although it was not my last I had early morning supper whilst watching this episode as per its title and I had lobster flavour noodles.
Frank and his wife Carol are having dinner with their son Danny (Frank Savage) and new girlfriend Jade (Sandrine Holt).
Upon meeting Jade, Frank finds that she looks exactly like a woman that she met 20 years previously when he was an army private and she an experiment by a scientist Sinclair (Michael Hogan).
In fact it is exactly the same woman despite not aging at all in the intervening time as she has lived for centuries.
Back then Frank and Laura as she was known back then had a little thing back then.
Remarkably Frank is the one person who has fought for Danny to stay with Jade after Danny saw something disturbing to him involving Frank and Jade.
Sinclair finally tracks Jade down and holding Frank and his family hostage and he takes her blood thinking it will make him young again.
It certainly did but aging backwards did not stop which sees him reduce to literally nothing. I saw this little bit several years ago and I remember being terrified by it.

Remarkably the 2015 movie The Age of Adaline ran a similar situation as a youthful immortal Adaline met her current boyfriend’s parents only to find that the father is an ex-boyfriend from decades ago.
The father soon finds out that it is same Adaline that he was with all that time ago and fought for her to stay with her son just as Frank did the same for his son Danny to stay with Jade.

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The Camp:
Season 5, Episode 7.
Second and last episode which was written by Brad Wright and directed by Jonathan Glassner together after the previous season’s Trial By Fire.
This episode came on February 21 1997 five months before the debut of Stargate SG-1 on July 27 and that was developed by the said Wright and Glassner.
The Camp takes place in the far future where the said camp has humans imprisoned by androids.
Overall I did not find this episode impressive and the ultimate rebellion and overthrow of the androids felt pretty much un-climatic.

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Heart’s Desire:
Season 5, Episode 8.
Heart’s Desire is a Western episode and part of the 1990s series’ third season.
Matt Smith’s own third season as Doctor Who also had a Western episode that of A Town Called Mercy which featured The Outer Limits fan Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond.
Mercy like Heart’s Desire is a human feeling and like Mercy from the Doctor Who episode, Heart’s Desire is also the name of a town.
Both Western episodes have the presence of aliens.
Both Mercy and Heart’s Desire each has a preacher but the preacher in Heart’s Desire is at its forefront as he is possessed by an alien and served as the episode’s antagonist.
Heart’s Desire stars Casper Van Dien.
Other residents of Heart’s Desire includes John Novak and prior to this was in the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie.
Novak would later appear in another Western episode of another time travel series that of Legends of Tomorrow in 1.11 The Magnificent Eight which featured Arthur Darvill as Rip Hunter and Darvill was also a Doctor Who companion Rory Williams in the aforementioned A Town Called Mercy.
The Preacher alien makes for a very good antagonists and has knowledge of Earth’s future and he gets the residents of Heart’s Desire to destroy themselves hoping to weaken humanity and ensure the safety of his own race.

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Tempests:
Season 5, Episode 9.
Written by Hart Hanson who would later be the creator of Bones (2005-17).
A spaceship crashes on a planet and a crew member has hallucinations and we see him experiencing two worlds that of him in the spaceship and him back in the colony world.
The later Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice ran on the same premise with the TARDIS crew experiencing two worlds simultaneously that of being in the TARDIS and on Leadworth on Earth.
In both the Doctor Who and The Outer Limits episodes, the characters concerned are experiencing two worlds simultaneously and we are led to believe that one of these worlds is real and in both cases one of these worlds is on a spaceship.
The said Amy from Amy’s Choice is played The Outer Limits fan Karen Gillan.
Tempests is a very haunting episode as we switch back and forth between the two worlds and quite a twist that marked the episode’s ending.