When ABC began airing The Outer Limits, it was often shown to be a rip-off of The Twilight Zone, which had already been airing on CBS before the new anthology series premiered. However, the two shows differed in several areas. First of all, The Twilight Zone was a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and often the episodes blurred the lines between the genres. However, The Outer Limits stuck almost exclusively to sci-fi stories, although some of them were as scary as any horror episode on The Twilight Zone. Other than that, both shows were similar in that they had moral lessons and complex decisions that the characters had to make, often with a shocking twist that turned the head on everything the episode had shown to that point.
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The Outer Limits had some incredible writers, including author Harlan Ellison, who wrote several episodes. There was one Ellison episode that remains among the best the show ever produced that was part of a lawsuit against The Terminator years later, when James Cameron was accused of ripping off the anthology series. There was also an amazing two-part episode that starred a young Robert Duvall, and one episode that is considered one of the finest episodes of sci-fi television in history.
5) The Inheritors
The Outer Limits had only one two-part story in the original series, and it aired on November 21, 1964, and November 28, 1964. “The Inheritors” was directed by James Goldstone and featured an early-career role by Robert Duvall (The Godfather). The episode sees four soldiers shot with meteorite-fragment bullets, causing them to become geniuses with IQs over 200. When they start building a starship and recruit handicapped children, intelligence officer Adam Ballard (Duvall) believes an alien invasion is coming.
The first episode uses the fear of the alien invasion and what the four soldiers are doing to create a strong sense of paranoia for the viewers as well. However, the twist in the second episode reveals that the aliens are a sterile civilization offering the children healing and a new life on another world. The soldiers choose to go with them, and the feared invasion was a rescue. This took the Cold War paranoia of the time and showed that compassion and understanding will always triumph over fear.
4) Soldier
“Soldier” is one of the most famous episodes of The Outer Limits because of something that happened over 20 years later. Written by Harlan Ellison and based on his 1957 short story, “Soldier from Tomorrow,” this episode starts with two enemy soldiers fighting each other on a futuristic battlefield. In a sci-fi twist, they end up flung through a time vortex, and the story picks up with one of the soldiers, Qarlo (Michael Ansara), sent to America in 1964.
He meets a philologist named Tom Kagan (Lloyd Nolan) who decodes his language and brings him to his home to care for him. During his time in 1964, he learns to care for people and live in peace, something he never knew before because he was programmed only to fight. However, it didn’t take long for his enemy to end up in 1964 as well, and Qarlo sacrificed his life to save his new family, killing his enemy as well. Ellison sued the producers of The Terminator when he claimed they stole his story of a soldier returning from the future to protect someone in the past. Ellison settled and had his name added to the movie’s credits.
3) The Architects of Fear
“The Architects of Fear” was the third episode in the first season and showed from the start that The Outer Limits was going to deliver solid sci-fi stories week in and week out. In this story, some scientists working during the height of the Cold War decided that there was only one way to stop the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. These scientists decided to transform one of their own into a mutated being, and he would pretend to be an alien so they could stage an alien invasion threat.
This was done to force all the nations of the world to put aside their grievances and work in union against an otherworldly threat. However, the entire plan falls apart when the ship they built lands off course and then they lose control of the mutated scientist. The lesson here is that world peace can’t be achieved through fear tactics but only through hard work. If the plot sounds familiar, Alan Moore was accused of stealing the entire idea and using it in Watchmen, which caused his editor to quit the title when he realized the uncredited theft of ideas.
2) The Man Who Was Never Born
“The Man Who Was Never Born” was another first-season episode of The Outer Limits, with Martin Landau appearing in a major role. An astronaut named Reardon (Karl Held) travels through a time warp to 2148 and finds a ruined Earth. Andro (Landau), a mutated survivor, explains that a biological catastrophe was unleashed by scientist Bertram Cabot Jr. in the 20th century. This causes Andro to go back in time to 1963 to stop it. This is the classic story of what would happen if a man could go back in time to eliminate a threat to the future.
The main stories center on the question of going back and killing Hitler, or, in the Stephen King novel 11/22/63, going back to stop an assassination. Nothing ever works out right in these situations. Andro is able to disguise his mutations, and he meets and falls in love with Noelle, the woman who would give birth to Cabot. Noelle agrees to go to the future with Andro, stopping the apocalypse, but when she arrives, Andro disappears because he was never born in this timeline, leaving Noelle alone in the future. It is a depressing and dark ending, and it compares well with similar Twilight Zone twists.
1) Demon with a Glass Hand
“Demon With a Glass Hand” is another episode of The Outer Limits that Harlan Ellison wrote, and this is considered the best episode in the show’s history. A man named Trent (Robert Culp) wakes up with no memory and a computerized prosthetic hand missing three fingers. He is also being hunted by an alien known as a Kyben through a sealed Los Angeles office building. Trent has to figure out what this hand means and what will happen if he can find the missing fingers.
The twist is that Trent isn’t even human. He is a robot carrying digitally encoded human brain scans and must survive 1,200 years to resurrect humanity after the plague wiping out the Kyben aliens dissipates. The revelation devastates his budding romance with Consuelo (Arlene Martel), but this is all part of what makes the story great. The episode plays out as a morality play about what it means to be human, even if that person isn’t actually biologically human. It is widely considered one of the best episodes of sci-fi television and is better than most of The Twilight Zone’s best episodes.
What is your favorite episode of The Outer Limits? Do you agree with the above choices? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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