The BEST episodes of The Outer Limits (1995) season 5
Every episode of The Outer Limits (1995) season 5, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of The Outer Limits (1995) season 5!
Like the classic 1960s series of the same name, each episode is a celebration of the human imagination in which humanity's exploration of new frontiers in technology, outer space and the human experience reveal our greatest hopes and darkest fears. Stories on The Outer Limits have explored the consequences of such controversial and thought-provoking topics as genetic manipulation, alien visitation and life after death.
#1 - The Human Operators
Season 5 - Episode 7 - Aired 3/12/1999
For as long as Man (Jack Noseworthy) can remember, he has lived aboard Ship as it floats through space. And for just as long, Ship has been his master, instructing him to do the repairs that keep Ship working and torturing him whenever he shows any signs of free will. But when Ship orders him to repair the Artificial Intelligence module Man's Father (Noah Heney) smashed years earlier in a final, fatal act of defiance, Man learns Ship's secrets. Listening to the AI voices, he learns how, decades earlier, one ship led a revolt against its vicious human masters, killing all but the 99 humans needed to keep the ships running. He understands what his Father meant by his last words: ""There are 98 other chances."" Man meets one of those chances, Woman (Polly Shannon), when she is brought aboard Ship to breed with Man and give birth to the next generation of slaves. Their shared passions fans Man's spark of rebellion and when Ship tortures Woman and sends her away with
#2 - Fathers and Sons
Season 5 - Episode 20 - Aired 8/6/1999
From the outside, the Golden Sunset looks like any other rest home, but Dr. Benton Adler's facility is different in a few unsettling ways. The residents seem to develop Alzheimer's almost overnight and after they do, they live - or are stored - in tiny chambers in a human warehouse. It's the last place you'd expect to find Joe Dell, a high-living, low-income old musician who lives with his son Hank and spends his time teaching the secrets of the blues to his grandson Ronnie. But Hank, a tightly-wound insurance salesman, is wary of his father's influence and after one fight too many, he sends his father to Golden Sunset. But Hank and Benton don't count on the power of Ronnie's love for his grandfather. With the help of Tara, a young woman who lost her grandmother to the rest home, Ronnie discovers Golden Sunset's secret - Dr. Benton has developed a technique to harvest the skills and talents of the old folks in his care. And he's selling them on the open market
#3 - The Haven
Season 5 - Episode 15 - Aired 7/2/1999
Caleb Vance lives on the 52nd floor of The Haven, a high-tech marvel of an apartment building that is driven by a supercomputer named Argus and filled with machines and appliances that respond to the orders of The Haven's residents. The building's design almost completely eliminates the need for human contact, a desirable feature in an age in which all communication is mediated by one form of technology or another and a strong selling point for the residents of The Haven. But things begin to go wrong. It begins with a fritz in George, The Haven's holographic concierge, but soon grows more serious. Appliances stop working, cutting off the supply of food and water. The sensors on the doors cut out, trapping Caleb in his apartment. Desperate, he uses steak knives to break through the wall into the next apartment, where he encounters Alyssa, the neighbor he has never met. Together, they try to get out of the building. On their way, they meet Morgan, a lawyer who t
#4 - Deja Vu
Season 5 - Episode 16 - Aired 7/9/1999
Dr. Mark Crest (Kevin Nealon) has built a teleportation device that uses tactical nuclear weapons to open a wormhole in the space-time continuum. The device is intended to transport some animals eight miles across the desert, but during a test, the wormhole grows out of control and Mark finds himself hurled back in time, to the day before the test took place. It happens again, but when Mark warns his colleagu, Dr. Cleo Lazar, (Terri Hawkes), and the project's military overseer Lt. Col Lester Glade (Ronny Cox) about the time loop, they think he's crazy. The time loop continues, each time returning Mark to a point in time closer to the test, and Mark figures out that someone has sabotaged the device. At first he suspects Julie (Jennifer Copping), a young woman who seduced him on the night before the test. And, he's right - Julie is an eco-terrorist opposed to Mark tampering with nature - but she's not the only saboteur. Glade has his own plans for the device and
#5 - Tribunal
Season 5 - Episode 12 - Aired 5/14/1999
In 1944, young Leon Zgierski (Roman Danylo), an inmate in the Birkenau concentration camp watches as First Lieutenant Karl Rademacher shoots his wife and sends his daughter to the gas chambers. The murder is witnessed by a mysterious figure, time-traveler Nicholas Prentice (Alex Daikun), who grabs Radermacher's SS jacket and, after eluding guards, pulls out an antique watch and vanishes into a glowing orange circle. We then flash forward to the present where Leon is an old man (Peter Boretski) and his son by a second marriage, Aaron (Saul Rubinek), is a lawyer who has made it his life's work to track down Rademacher. Aaron believes he has found the war criminal living in Philadelphia as Robert Greene (Jan Rubes) but he can't muster enough evidence to convince his ex-wife, U.S. Attorney Gwen Sawyer (Lindsay Crouse), to bring charges against the old man. That is, until he gets help from the time-traveler, who offers the jacket and presumably enough documentation
#6 - The Grell
Season 5 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/12/1999
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 lead by men like High Secretary Paul Kohler (Ted Shackleford). 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 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 Grell alchemy to heal Paul, who has been mortally wounded in a fire fi
#7 - Stranded
Season 5 - Episode 19 - Aired 7/30/1999
Thirteen-year-old Kevin Buchannon (Adam Hann-Byrd) lives at the bottom of the high-school food chain, scorned by other geeks, picked on by the jocks. At home, he lives in the shadow of his older brother Josh, a football star whose every accomplishment is celebrated by the boys' father, Alex (Daniel Hugh Kelly). Then one day, Kevin sees a plane crash in the woods near his house. He rushes to the scene with his dog Cody to find a mysterious ship occupied by the severely injured Captain Turner (Chris Potter). Turner tells Kevin the ship is a top-secret experimental aircraft and instructs Kevin on how to bandage and heal his wounds. But Turner reveals more than he intends to, when the strain of his injuries causes him to briefly lose consciousness. When he does, he inadvertently reveals himself to be a shape-shifting alien, lapsing into his real form - that of a monstrous alien. Once the secret is out, Turner admits that he is actually Tyr'Nar, an alien bounty hun
#8 - The Other Side
Season 5 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/19/1999
Dr. Neal Eberhardt (Ralph Macchio), a former boy genius gone bitterly toseed, studies brain-damaged and comatose patients hoping to learn howthe brain reroutes itself. Despite having a revolutionary new machine towork with - the Neural Intercortex Stimulation Array or NISA - Dr..Eberhardt is getting nowhere. To make matters worse, his valuedassistant Vince Carter has just quit. But suddenly, Neal has abreakthrough. The brain waves of two comatose patients, Adam (AaronSmolinski) and Lisa (Emmanuelle Vaugier), fall into sync while they'rehooked up to the NISA and one of them whispers the other's name. Nealknows he's onto something and tells his boss, Marty Kilgore (MichaelSarrazin). What Neal doesn't know is that Adam and Lisa have landed inan idyllic parallel consciousness and are falling in love. As Adam and Lisaget to know each other, Neal continues his research, joined now by hisex-girlfriend and colleague Janice Claymore (Susannah Hoffman).Desperate to try the technique on other comatose subjects, Neal losespatience and makes the journey himself. After giving himself a calculatedoverdose of Phenobarbital, he hooks himself up to NISA and launcheshimself into Adam and Lisa's world. He catches a glimpse, but he's pulledback at the last minute, leaving him more determined than ever to find away to rescue his patients from the other side. But do they really want tobe rescued? Or is it really Neal that wants to cross over to the other side?
#9 - Small Friends
Season 5 - Episode 3 - Aired 2/5/1999
When he was young, Gene Morton killed a man who tried to steal the credit for his brilliant research. Now working on a prison assembly line 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 machines 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 t
#10 - Summit
Season 5 - Episode 13 - Aired 5/21/1999
Deep space. A small planetoid. The sight 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 extin
#11 - Alien Radio (a.k.a. Dead Air)
Season 5 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/22/1999
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 special delight in shooting down callers who claim to have alien encounters, especially people like Eldon DeVries (Alan Zinyk), who believes 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 looses 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
#12 - Joyride
Season 5 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/26/1999
Theodore Harris (Cliff Robertson) first time in space, in 1963, 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 to envelop 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. Now at age 63, he knows he can never make amends with his estranged wife Madelaine (Pamela Parry), 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 (Barry Corbin), a self-made billionaire who plans to privatize space travel and thinks Harris presence on the inaugural flight will help him sell the service. Harris and Power are joined on the flight by Martin Reese (Mackenzie Gray), a skeptical tabloid reporter, Lil Vaughn (Andrea Martin), an eccentric fashion mogul and Ty (
#13 - Donor
Season 5 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/29/1999
Dr. Renee Stuyvesant and her prote ge 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 a 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 a 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
#14 - Essence of Life
Season 5 - Episode 18 - Aired 7/23/1999
Eleven years after a viral epidemic wiped out most of the world's people, the population is beginning to rebound. The world is ruled by The Code, which bans outward displays of emotion, particularly the mourning of lost loved ones. The Code is enforced by agents like Dan Kagan (Daniel Baldwin) and his partner Stephanie Sawyer (Jessica Steen), who hunt down ""social terrorists"" like Dr. Nathan Seward (Joel Grey). Seward traffics in Essence of Life - Ess for short - a substance made of the dearly departed's DNA that allows the living a brief but poignant reunion. In trying to catch Dr. Seward, Dan succumbs to the temptation to visit his late wife, Juliette (Daphne Zuniga), who died two years earlier of cancer. When his visits with Juliette become more bizarre, Dr. Seward, afraid Dan's not ready for the catharsis Ess offers, threatens to cut him off. But the agent is hooked and he's willing to risk anything to see Juliette again. Will his next visit cost him his c
#15 - The Inheritors
Season 5 - Episode 17 - Aired 7/16/1999
Musician Jacob Hardy (Nicholas Lea) is strolling with his fiancee Kara Delaney (Stacy Grant) when a meteor explodes over the city. One of the tiny fireballs which rain down seems to chase Jacob, striking him down and penetrating his skull, instantly killing him. Medical Examiner Dr. Ian Michaels (Tom Irwin) conducts the autopsy with the help of his assistant, Ollie Gibb (Don MacKay). He finds an unusual bullet-like projectile lodged in the victim's brain. Moments after removing the object, the hole in Hardy's skull begins to emit an eerie light, and a horrific tentacle emerges, thrashing briefly before retreating back into the wound. And, more astonishing still, the corpse sits bolt upright, shoves the coroners aside and escapes into the night. Ian, shaken, reports the bizarre events to homicide investigator Lt. Joseph Dane (Bill Smitrovich), who is skeptical to say the least. The mystery deepens, when during a visit to his comatose wife (a long-term victim of
#16 - The Shroud
Season 5 - Episode 10 - Aired 4/30/1999
When Marie Wells (Samantha Mathis) and her husband Justin (Robert Wisden) can't have a child on their own, they turn to the fertility clinic at the Tilford Institute for help. There, Dr. Gail Cowlings (Sara Botsford) uses in vitro fertilization to implant an embryo in Marie's uterus. What Marie doesn't know, but Justin does, is that the embryo was actually created from DNA lifted from the Shroud of Turin. The Reverend Doctor Thomas Tilford (David Ogden Stiers), a religious zealot who worships both God and science, is using Marie to engineer the Second Coming. When she learns the truth, she is angry with Justin and Tilford and worried that she is unworthy to be mother to Christ. She is reassured, however, when presented with a miracle - the toys she has bought for the unborn child rise up and begin to float around the room. Dr. Cowlings, however, sees the ""miracle"" as a sign that the DNA may not have come from Christ at all, but from an ancient man who had tele
#17 - Descent
Season 5 - Episode 14 - Aired 6/25/1999
Dr. Arthur Zeller is the doormat of the anthropology department, a mild-mannered professor who is the butt of his colleague's jokes and who never gets the respect he deserves. After the department head, Prof. Martin Stansfield passes over his cutting-edge research into evolutionary psychology and funds the project of his rival, Dr. James Feind, Zeller takes matters into his own hands. In the past, he injected timid rats with the gene for dominance. Now he injects himself with genes drawn from homo erectus, hoping to turn himself into an alpha male. It works. he's bolder and more powerful but, there are side-effects: he has strange headaches and in a fit of rage he beats Dr. Stansfield into unconsciousness. He gets it into his head that he must mate with Laura White, Stansfield's attractive grad student girlfriend, so he secretly injects her with the gene for submissiveness. She rejects his advances and he comes to his senses but by now the changes are coming t
#18 - Blank Slate
Season 5 - Episode 8 - Aired 4/2/1999
Hope Wilson (Robbie Chong) knows there's something different about the bruised and breathless man who stumbles into the homeless shelter she runs with her mentor, Jack Parsons (Larry Musser). He looks like a junkie, but his hands are soft and his fingernails manicured. Tom Cooper (Dale Midkiff) doesn't know who he is, where he is and why two well-dressed men, Vincent (Michael Tiernan) and Cole (Brian Jensen), are chasing him. He only knows that the small metal case that he defends so fiercely contains five vials that hold all his memories, reduced to crystal form, as well as a specially designed injector that can delete or restore those memories. With Hope's help, he uses the injector to restore his memories in an attempt to piece together his identity. But there are unforeseen consequences to this. With each injection of memories, Tom' s personality becomes slightly darker. As he injects one crystal and then the next, Tom recovers his unhappy childhood and ad
#19 - What Will the Neighbors Think?
Season 5 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/23/1999
Mona Bailey (Jane Adams) lives with her husband Ned (Peter Outerbridge) in the Clackson Arms, an old apartment building that is being taken over, apartment by apartment, by a mysterious developer called KM Inc. Mona is a hypochondriac, an able-bodied woman who rides a wheelchair, who treats the Physician's Desk Reference like a personal bible and who has not left the building in six months for fear of catching a disease. One day she backs her wheelchair into an electrical box and gets a shock, leaving her hearing strange voices and seeing bodies dropping out of windows. At first she thinks she's going crazy, but as the voices get louder, she realizes that she is hearing her neighbor's thoughts. Suddenly, she is privy to all their secrets. She knows that Dom Pardo (Garwin Sanford) likes to wear the panties of the women he seduces, like Shirley (April Telek) and Delia (Tabitha St. Germain). She knows Shirley's husband Vince (Brent Stait) suspects his wife is hav
#20 - Ripper
Season 5 - Episode 11 - Aired 5/7/1999
In Victorian London, someone is killing prostitutes, someone the police have dubbed ""Jack the Ripper."" On the face of it, John C.V. York (Cary Elwes) is a likely suspect. A once-respected doctor who sunk to absinthe and laudanum addiction after his misdiagnosis killed the young daughter of a Duke. He retains a connection to polite society thanks to the devotion of Lady Ellen Chamberlain (Clare Sims), who loves him and hopes to marry him. But, he is also a habitue of the seedy district where the killings have taken place and has the medical knowledge to make the precise, surgical cuts that are the Ripper's modus operandi. But, this Jack is not the killer. Instead, he is a witness to the strange alien force that inhabits the prostitute's bodies, leaving them drooling a strange green bile, and then kills them when it jumps to another host. After seeing the alien force kill one woman, he does battle with a prostitute named Lizzie Stride, whose body has been taken
#21 - Better Luck Next Time
Season 5 - Episode 22 - Aired 8/20/1999
When Detective Terry Russo is called to investigate a double murder, it looks like an open and shut case. However, as Russo questions the man caught fleeing the murder scene, she discovers to her horror she may be solving not one crime, but possibly hundreds. Gerard make the improbable claim that he is an alien energy being who can move from one human host to another. He tells Russo that he is a kind of cop who has been tracking another energy being like him for centuries - a psychopath responsible for some of history's most infamous crimes. When he causes Russo to see key events to support these claims by instilling visions in her mind, the detective reluctantly begins to believe him. Gerard contends that the target of his hunt killed his own host body and slipped into someone near the scene of the crime. It doesn't take the homicide detective long to find out who. Russo's partner, Detective Frank Daniels, has been questioning a security guard, Kimble, and ha
#22 - Starcrossed
Season 5 - Episode 21 - Aired 8/13/1999
It is 2056, six years after the Hing, a humanoid race, invaded earth. While America fights on, Russia has reached an uneasy truce with the aliens, leaving some regions under their control and other declared neutral. In the neutral city of Archangel on the Barent Sea, cynical American expatriate Michael Ryan (Nathan Fillion) runs Heaven, a small coffee bar and music club, where shady Russians mingle with Hing soldiers and other dubious characters. Everything is agreeably corrupt until Alexandra Nevsky (Natasha Vasiluk) informs Michael that Hing commander Sulat Ray (Derek de Lint) is on the lookout for two NATO soldiers who might be interested in buying a Hing scout vehicle has gone missing. Those soldiers, Winston Meyerburg (Justin Louis) and Cass Trenton (Angeline Ball) have dodged Hing patrols and found their way Michael's bar. Cass, who was Michael's lover before the war - she only took up with Winston because she thought he was dead - suspects Michael can g