The Outer Limits

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The Awakening:
Season 5, Episode 10.
The third episode in a row that I find having similarities with a Doctor Who story.
The Awakening is also the name of a Fifth Doctor story.
In fact The Outer Limits episode is part of the 1990s series third season and its Doctor Who namesake is part of Peter Davison’s own third season as the Fifth Doctor.
They also come close in third season episode placings. The Doctor Who story is the fifth and sixth episodes of the third Fifth Doctor season while The Outer Limits episode is the tenth episode of the 1990s series third season.
Featuring Roger R. Cross and I am coincidentally now seeing him in his regular role in Dark Matter which is now soon ending its own third season in another coincidence with third seasons.
The Outer Limits’ The Awakening is about a woman with a psychiatric disorder having a chip inserted in her to manage her life better.
She soon have hallucinations in which she sees aliens.
Not bad when the truth about these aliens and how the episode concluded.

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New Lease:
Season 5, Episode 11.
Directed by Jason Priestley.
Priestley also an actor directed New Lease concurrent to his lead role as Brandon Walsh in Beverly Hills 90210 when New Lease came on in 1997.
As an actor, Priestley also appeared in front of camera on New Lease and gets to direct his own death scene.
Coincidentally I am now seeing Priestley as one of the Private Eyes.
New Lease stars Stephen Lang as a scientist who working on revitalising the dead.
After his test subject died from his experiment the scientist Dr James Houghton found himself as the subject of a robbery when the robber Anthony Szigetti played by director Priestley held at gunpoint.
Dr Houghton attempted to wrest the gun from Szigetti but got himself shot from the gun.
The wound was fatal and the said experiment revitalise him back to life a solution that is not permanent as indicated by how long the test subject had lasted.
Knowing he has little time left Dr Houghton spends some quality time with his wife and little daughter.
Whilst spending this quality time Dr Houghton by sheer luck spotted Szigetti and eventually tracked him down and kills him for revenge but he did it in front of witnesses.
As he did not think he had much time left he didn’t really care about witnesses to his execution of Szigetti.
However Houghton’s colleague Dr Charles McCamber discovered from tests from the experiment that Houghton lived after all.
Sadly the episode ends with Houghton getting arrested for Szigetti’s murder and could spend a lifetime in prison for it.
Such a cruel irony for Houghton just as he got a new lease of life he now has a spend it in prison.
Another irony is that McCamber was the one who discovered that Houghton was going to live due to a hint that he has a thing for Houghton’s wife due to what was said between McCamber and Mrs Houghton in a conversation between these two.

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Music of the Spheres:
Season 5, Episode 14.
Starring Joshua Jackson and Kirsten Dunst as a brother and sister and of course their names got a little bit bigger since doing this episode of The Outer Limits.
Howard Hesseman also features as the siblings’ father.
A fascinating premise that ultimately sees the power of music result in physical changes and I am beyond words on the physical change that the siblings and others have gone through as a result of the music.

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The Revelations of Becka Paulson:
Season 5, Episode 15.
Written by Brad Wright based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King.
The short story was published in 1984 and King would later reuse Becka Paulson as a character in his novel The Tommyknockers which became a 1993 mini-series a few years before The Outer Limits episode about Becka Paulson.
However as far as I can gather there is no continuity between the short story of The Revelations of Becka Paulson & The Tommyknockers including the fact that in The Tommyknockers, Becka is a deputy sheriff whereas in The Revelations of Becka Paulson she is a mere housewife.
Although honestly I do not consider myself a Stephen King fan I have however seen many King adaptations including recently starting a King adapted TV series that of The Mist.
In The Outer Limits episode Becka Paulson (Catherine O’Hara) accidentally shot herself in the head but survives and hallucinates that the man in the picture frame (Steven Weber who directed the episode) is talking to her.
A very eerie episode as Becka’s actions are influenced by what the picture man tells her and leading to the episode’s denouement.

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Bodies of Evidence:
Antepenultimate episode of season 5.
Starring Mario Van Peebles and Jennifer Beals.
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles, Mario’s father.
As director, Melvin directed son Mario to quite an ordeal here and makes me wonder whether he thinks it somewhat parallels to his own parenting method on Mario.
Mario Van Peebles played Captain William Clark who was in charge of the space station Meridian and is placed on a court-martial when he was accused of murdering his crew members.
Captain Clark is defended at the court-martial by his ex-wife Robyn Dysart (Jennifer Beals).
Fascinating on how this unfolds with the crew members being killed not by Captain Clark but by an alien who is able to tap in on their thoughts and appear as their loved ones.
The moment when Captain Clark faced off against the alien was very unexpected and certainly culminates in an unsettling ending.

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Feasibility Study:
Penultimate episode of season 5.
This is the 1990s remake of the second season episode A Feasibility Study from 1964 with the remake omitting “A” from its title.
The remake was written by the original episode writer Joseph Stefano who was both prolific writer and producer on the original series of The Outer Limits.
Starring David McCallum and Laura Harris as a father and daughter.
Incidentally the originally episode came on in April 1964 just five months before the start of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which featured McCallum in his well known role as Illya Kuryakin.
The episode begins with Sarah (Harris) telling her father Joshua (McCallum) that she is going to take off and married her boyfriend much to Joshua’s disapproval.
However the boyfriend who was also there gets told by Joshua to go without Sarah leaving her behind with Joshua.
This little plotline which started off this episode is soon forgotten as it is rendered largely irrelevant to the grand scheme of things.
This is because the entire neighbourhood gets placed in a barrier and eventually revealed that it is no longer on Earth as it got taken out of it by aliens.
A very noble sacrifice that was made by the residents knowing that there is no way out for them but at least they can save Earth from enslavement by making themselves unworthy as slaves.

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A Special Edition:
Season 5 finale.
Starring Alan Thicke.
Sadly Thicke died almost a year ago now on December 13 2016.
This is a clip show as Thicke played journalist Donald Rivers who host his show The Whole Truth as he uncovered strange goings-on that relates to previous episodes of the series.
Curiously enough one of the clips comes from In Another Life which is not a previous episode but one from the next season.
Also featuring Bruce Harwood as Dr Avery Strong the guest on The Whole Truth and is the source of the said strange going-ons.
This episode came on July 25 1997 and at this time Harwood in a recurring role as John Byers in The X-Files which of course is a series that is well known for seeking the truth.
Avery Strong is revealed to be the brother of Randall Strong who was in the season 3 finale The Voice of Reason and we find out here what became of Randall since that episode.
As clip shows goes this one is quite fascinating and what a shock when a double of Rivers came on TV disclaiming everything that was said on The Whole Truth.
Somehow it should surprise me that this is a case in which the bad guys win and the ending was not surprising.

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The Outer Limits 6.20 Nightmare (1998) is the remake of the 1963 season 1 episode of the same name.
The original episode was written by producer Joseph Stefano and this is not the first time that a Stefano episode got remade.
A Feasibility Study another season 1 episode was remade as the season 5 episode Feasibility Study and Stefano wrote this remake of his earlier episode.
Curiously enough despite Stefano writing the remake of his own A Feasibility Study, Stefano did not write the remake of his other season 1 episode Nightmare.

The Nightmare remake includes at least two cast members who worked with other cast members of episodes of the same season that Nightmare remake was in.
The two Nightmare remake cast members I am referring to are Robin Shou and Maurice Dean Wint.
Shou had been in the 1990 TV movie Forbidden Nights with Melissa Gilbert and Gilbert had starred in The Outer Limits 6.6 Relativity Theory which is fourteen episodes before the Nightmare remake.
Curiously Relativity Theory & the Nightmare remake are almost at opposite ends symmetrically of the sixth season.
Just as Relativity Theory is the sixth episode of the sixth season, the Nightmare remake is the seventh to last episode of the sixth season which consist of 26 episodes.

Maurice Dean Wint had been in the movie Cube (1997) the year before he was in Nightmare and Cube also featured Nicole de Boer.
Wint narrowly missed having a reunion with de Boer in The Outer Limits when she appeared in Monster two episodes before the Nightmare remake.

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Two related The Outer Limits episodes The Camp (1997) and its sequel Promised Land (1998) presents an apocalyptic world and appearing in both episodes was Jessica Harmon who was 11 and 12 respectively in those two episodes.

Almost two decades later she was back in a similar environment in The 100 in a recurring role.

As well as her recurring role in The 100 I also seeing Harmon in her recurring role in iZombie.

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In The Outer Limits 6.22 Balance of Nature. Dr Noah Phillips (Maurice Godin) tells his friend Don (Andrew Airlie) that he would have made a great priest.
Curiously enough Airlie got to play a priest later on in four episodes of US Mistresses.

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7.13 Summit feature Marcia Cross, John Spencer and Andrew Airlie.

Summit was shown in May 1999 and months after he was seen in this episode John Spencer began being seen in his regular role in The West Wing (1999-2006) as Leo McGarry.
Initially the White House Chief of Staff, Leo ended his run in The West Wing as the Democratic vice presidential nominee but died on Election Day sadly because Spencer had done the same in real life.
I think it was because of Spencer’s role as Chief of Staff Leo in The West Wing that influence me for the position of Chief of Staff created for my sci fi club a position which I took myself.
Just as Leo was a vice presidential candidate I was offer the vice presidency of the said sci fi club which I eventually accepted.
Curiously enough Spencer’s Summit co-star Marcia Cross would also become a Democratic vice presidential candidate in Quantico (2015-present). In her case she went further than Spencer did in The West Wing as she in Quantico became vice president and even became President afterwards.
I had this viewing of Summit hours after seeing the movie Blade Runner 2049 which feature Robin Wright who like Spencer and Cross had also played a Democratic vice presidential candidate and in her case it was for US House of Cards.
Summit is the fourth of five appearances in the series by Andrew Airlie. Summit was written by Scott Peters.
Peters later co-created The 4400 (2004-07) and Airlie had appeared in six episodes of that series in which he played the husband of one of the principal characters Lily played by Laura Allen.

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The Outer Limits 7.18 Essence of Life marked the third of four appearances in the series by Robert Moloney.
Somewhat coincidentally both this episode and The Hunt the previous episode that Moloney was in each featured a Melrose Place luminary.
The Hunt had starred Doug Savant (who had played Matt in Melrose Place) while Essence of Life featured Daphne Zuniga (who had played Jo in that aforementioned series).

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Some years before he was Mal Reynolds in Firefly, Nathan Fillion was the sci fi version of Humphrey Bogart.
This came about when he starred in The Outer Limits episode Star Crossed, the penultimate episode of the series’ 1999 season and it is the futuristic reinterpretation of Casablanca the classic film starring the aforementioned Bogart.
Fillion played Michael Ryan, the Star Crossed version of Rick Blaine played by Bogart in Casablanca.
Coincidentally I have read the Doctor Who novel The Price of Paradise with the Tenth Doctor and Rose which featured a spaceship called the SS Humphrey Bogart.

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Judgment Day:
Season 8 opener.
Apart from a religious context, Judgment Day is generally well known as the subtitle to Terminator 2.
The Judgment Day of The Outer Limits opened the sixth season of the series that began in 1995.
NuWho’s own sixth season opened with The Impossible Astronaut starring Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith and Smith himself later appeared in another Terminator movie that of Terminator Genisys.
Judgment Day of The Outer Limits refers to the name of a television show in which convicted killers gets hunted down to be killed by the victims’ families and it features Molly Ringwald.
Judgment Day is shown on The Justice Channel and during the showing of Judgment Day the fictional show The Justice Channel URL justicechannel.com is presented on-screen.
However if this URL had existed when the episode came on in 2000, it does not exist now.
Very interesting premise that gets explored here and not surprising that the convicted killer Declan McMahon was not as guilty as he initially presented to be.
Bold the ways that McMahon went through to prove his innocence escpecially when he took his eye out as it had a tracker on it.
Quite a trick McMahon played in exposing the real killer and the punishment the real killer gets afterwards.

The Twilight Zone episode How Much Do You Love Your Kid? which came on three years later in 2003 played on a similar concept to Judgment Day.
However whereas The Outer Limits episode is about a show that deals with a convicted killer the Twilight Zone episode is about a show that is about a kidnapping.

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The Gun:
Season 8, Episode 2.
Starring Stacy Keach and John de Lancie.
Good episode in which de Lancie plays an alien who sold a gun to Matthew who just got out of prison and used the gun to kill his wife Sandra.
However the gun got fused onto Matthew’s hand and he can’t get rid of it.
Keach plays Sandra’s father Cord and organises a hunting party to track down his son-in-law.
The alien using the name Donald Finley joins Cord’s party and gives Cord another one of his guns and that too fused to Cord’s hand.
Finley turns out to be a recruiter searching for mercenaries for an alien war.
Finley’s experiment with Cord and Matthew did not go to what he expected and disappointed by this.
No doubt that this shows that we humans are not ruthless battle as aliens makes us out to be.