The Outer Limits: Time Travel & Infinity

The Review

The Outer Limits: Time Travel & Infinity includes six episodes with one common lesson: Humans, no matter their era or level of technology, cannot disrupt the time stream without altering history in unexpected ways.

The collection opens with "A Stitch in Time," where we meet Dr. Theresa Givens [Amanda Plummer], a frumpy, isolated university professor who has a single-minded mission: As soon as the state executes a serial killer in present time, she uses her portal to visit the past and exterminate the murderer before he can hurt his first victim. Although she is smart enough to build a time machine, Dr. Givens foolishly uses the same gun for each killing, which has brought her to the attention of the FBI with its comprehensive ballistics database. Investigating the murders of these men—killings which span 40 years—is Agent Jamie Pratt [Michelle Forbes]. At first, Agent Pratt is everything Dr. Givens is not: smartly dressed, comfortable in the company of fellow human beings, engaged in the world. But a serial killer derailed Agent Pratt's life when he murdered her best friend, and when Pratt discovers that she can undo this atrocity with Dr. Given's device, her life and values [and even the set of her eyes and smoothness of her hair] change.

Plummer was an excellent choice for a mad scientist as few actors do red-eyed twitchy-crazy as well as she, and this role earned her a 1996 Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series. In Agent Pratt, writer Steven Barnes gives us more than a suit with a gun, for we learn that the same bad choices Pratt makes about men—preferring the handsome alphas to the sensitive quiet guys—is the female behavior that initially set off the serial killer who later murders her best friend.

Three of the episodes in the collection include Nicholas Prentice [Alex Diakun], a visitor from 2059 with permission from the Chrononics Institute to meddle in the past. Slender and deliberate, Prentice resembles a lizard—one which moved too slowly to escape the uninvited kiss of a girl searching for her prince. Despite his superior vantage and technology, Prentice still has difficulty managing individuals and events during his temporal trespassing.

In "Tribunal," for example, Prentice helps the son of a Holocaust survivor find justice for his father, whose first wife and daughter died at the hands of Birkenau's commandant, now a retired dry cleaner living without penalty in the US. When fetching artifacts from the 1940s fails to convince present-day prosecutors of the old man's true identity, Prentice and the son use time travel to relocate the senior Nazi—dressed in prisoner clothing—to his own camp; there, his younger self metes out punishment in a satisfying way.

"Gettysburg" shows that destiny is a powerful force difficult to escape. In this episode, Prentice relocates a Civil War reenactor to 1863, hoping to teach the young man that war and Confederate values are not glamorous. Prentice has an ulterior motive: If this young man realigns his fundamental beliefs, then he won't grow old and bitter and shoot the first African-American President in 2013. The reenactor does not survive the trip through history, but Prentice's meddling puts other pieces in play that nevertheless cause the President's assassination.

In "Time to Time," the Chrononics Institute snatches a grad student right before death. She can work for Prentice in 2059—a time traveler for hire—or return to 1989 and perish in the car wreck. To help her decide, one of Prentice's subordinates escorts her to 1969, where she learns that her anti-war hippie father died disarming—not detonating, as she believed—a bomb in the ROTC headquarters at Berkley. She must wrestle with preserving her own life, trying to save her father's life, and weighing the consequences to the time stream that her decisions will cause.

Weakest of the six stories is "Déjà Vu." This hackneyed episode chronicles a temporal loop spawned during the botched test of a transporter. The lead scientist realizes the problem and so each new cycle hatches plans to escape. The predictably malevolent military supervisor, whose intentions are to use the transporter for evil, suffers like Tantalus—the off switch to end the loop just out of reach.

The episode with the most moral tangles is "Patient Zero." A plague has ravaged the future; scientists hope to avoid the devastation by eliminating the woman who birthed the virus. The assassin from the future sent to kill her loses his "killing glove" and discovers he cannot perform a bare-handed murder of a woman with whom he strongly identifies [both are recently widowed]. He must weigh the life of one against the millions of sick and dying who are to come if he doesn't act.

Since each episode of The Outer Limits has a new cast in a new place, the stories resemble plays with minimal sets. Those episodes that attempt to capture big historical events are at first noticeably small. In "Gettysburg," for example, the audience cannot experience the magnitude of the 70,000 men who fought with General Lee as we get just a handful of well dressed extras [some affluent gentry, some greasy hillbillies] with a horse or two thrown in for realism. "Tribunal" is cramped as well; scenes at the Birkenau camp are gray, bleak, and muddy, but the prisoners are too fleshy and laundered to be anything but actors in roles. One tight shot after another—without the panoramic sweep of big-budget movies—contributes to the claustrophobia. But then the writers throw in such an effective line that the scene expands. The horror of the Holocaust becomes big and real when the commandant says to a prisoner, "I don't like being here any more than you. But killing a Jew before breakfast is the only solace of this miserable job."

As this collection shows, time travel is fun to consider, but we also learn that no human has the omniscience necessary to determine if the consequences to history will truly benefit or harm humankind.

To View the Season

You can view "A Stitch in Time" at Internet Movie Database or YouTube.

All of the other episodes in the collection are available online: "Tribunal," "Gettysburg," "Time to Time," "Déjà Vu," and "Patient Zero."

To Own the Season

The Outer Limits: Time Travel & Infinity is out of print, but you can easily purchase a new or used copy from a Marketplace Seller at Amazon US or UK.

Cross Post

This review also exists at Amazon US.