7.0/101 votesLoading...#1 - The Machine Stops
Season 2 Episode 1 - Aired 10/6/1966
In the far future, the material needs of humankind are tended by the omnipresent Machine, which makes their environment, in vast tunnels beneath the earth, comfortable and safe. But safe from what? And what if the Machine Stops? A young boy, Kuno, finds his questions can't be answered until he has lifted the veil of security and trespassed upon the surface.
Director: Philip Saville
Writer: Kenneth Cavander, Clive Donner, E.M. Forster
NaN/100 votesLoading...#2 - No Place Like Earth
Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 10/4/1965
Earth is no more, destroyed by nuclear war; but itinerant handyman Bert Foster, wandering the canals of Mars, is possessed by a restlessness for a home which no longer exists. Perhaps the isolated outpost on Venus retains something which could satisfy this hunger; or has the madness which shattered a world merely settled in a new location?
Director: Peter Potter
Writer: John Wyndham
NaN/100 votesLoading...#3 - The Counterfeit Man
Season 1 Episode 2 - Aired 10/11/1965
On Jupiter's moon Ganymede, an alien life-form has taken over the body of a human astronaut, creating an almost perfect copy. But perfect enough to escape discovery on the long return trip to Earth? Can the deadly counterfeit be detected and stopped before its hunger for new life can endanger an entire planet?
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
NaN/100 votesLoading...#4 - Stranger in the Family
Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 10/18/1965
A young man, known as 'Boy', is born with no fingernails and with mental powers that enable him to control others. He falls for a young actress, initially repulsed, whose agent-boyfriend encourages the relationship because he thinks Boy's powers can be used to make a lot of money via TV commercials. But he is being hunted by a mysterious surveillance team who have moved into the next-door flat in the tower block where he lives...
Director: Alan Bridges
Writer: N/A
NaN/100 votesLoading...#5 - The Dead Past
Season 1 Episode 4 - Aired 10/25/1965
Time travel may still be impossible, but the Chronoscope, sensing the nearly imponderable tracks of ancient photons, allows a glimpse into any event in Earth's distant past. Historian Arnold Potterley is rebuffed when he petitions for use of the Chronoscope to study ancient Carthage. So he commissions the building of a private time-viewing machine, with unexpected results.
Director: John Gorrie
Writer: Jeremy Paul
NaN/100 votesLoading...#6 - Time In Advance
Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 11/1/1965
Imagine a future where you serve your prison sentence before you commit your crime, in the various hells of savage new planets just being colonised. If you survive, like Nick Crandall and Otto Henck, you can return home with carte blanche to commit murder...
Director: Peter Sasdy
Writer: Paul Erickson
NaN/100 votesLoading...#7 - Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come... ?
Season 1 Episode 6 - Aired 11/8/1965
Henry Wilkes cultivates rare tropical plants as a hobby; with an attention to detail which is, perhaps, closer to an obsession. The length to which he goes to propagate and nurture new hybrids alarms his wife. Is there more going on in the greenhouse than could safely be exhibited at the next Battersea Flower Show?
Director: Paddy Russell
Writer: N/A
NaN/100 votesLoading...#8 - Sucker Bait
Season 1 Episode 7 - Aired 11/15/1965
An expedition sets out to discover what has happened to a lost colony on a distant planet. Amongst the scientists is a strange, intense teenager called Mark Annuncio, raised to be a kind of human computer, able to make connections between different specialisms. Disliked by the crew, Mark nevertheless may be the only person capable of saving the ship when they land and scientists begin dying mysteriously.
Director: N/A
Writer: Meade Roberts
NaN/100 votesLoading...#9 - The Fox and the Forest
Season 1 Episode 8 - Aired 11/22/1965
Sarah and David Kirsten are tourists from the 21st century who take a forbidden holiday in 1938 Mexico. But enforcers from the future, trying to keep the time-stream free from pollution and paradox, are on their trail. Can they evade their pursuers without betraying their origins?
Director: N/A
Writer: Terry Nation, Meade Roberts
NaN/100 votesLoading...#10 - Andover and the Android
Season 1 Episode 9 - Aired 11/29/1965
Roger Andover will inherit a fortune if he marries. But he is a solitary man with no ambition: human relationships mystify and dismay him. But to present a life-like female android as your wife: surely that will satisfy everyone? Andover finds more than he bargained for when his robot bride challenges his preconceptions about humanity.
Director: Alan Cooke
Writer: N/A
NaN/100 votesLoading...#11 - Some Lapse of Time
Season 1 Episode 10 - Aired 12/6/1965
Dr Max Harrow is awakened from a re-current nightmare in which he is pursued by a barbaric accusing figures, to find collapsed on his doorstep, The tramp is suffering from a genetic radiation disorder that should killed him in infancy as it did Harrow's baby son. The ma is the living image of Harrow's nightmare figures, Clutched in his hand is a human finger bone and he speaks a strange, unknown tongue, Why did he collapse outside Harrow's house? What is his motive for tracing him?.
Director: N/A
Writer: Leon Griffiths
NaN/100 votesLoading...#12 - Thirteen to Centaurus
Season 1 Episode 11 - Aired 12/13/1965
Interstellar travel at sub-light speeds: the enormous distances, isolation from human culture and the aching loneliness of space are enough to drive the strongest personality insane. Better to block all memories of human contact and to program the 12-strong crew to accept only the reality they can see and touch within their spacecraft. But a child born on "the Station" becomes insistent on learning the truth about 'Outside'.
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
NaN/100 votesLoading...#13 - The Midas Plague
Season 1 Episode 12 - Aired 12/20/1965
The Future is bright for most of society: robot labour and free energy make the creation of goods easy and automatic. But the disadvantaged of this Golden Age are those who have to stem the inexorable tide of robot-manufactured goods; they are continually supplied with more things than they can possibly consume. Is there any way for a 'poor' man to get off this treadmill of consumption?
Director: Peter Sasdy
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#14 - Frankenstein Mark II
Season 2 Episode 2 - Aired 10/13/1966
A stranger calls at the home of divorcée Anna Preston, asking to collect some of her ex-husband's belongings. Anna agrees, but is suspicious, and tries to contact her 'ex' at the space-research establishment where he worked. But none of his colleagues can tell her where he is and the authorities block all her efforts to find out. Anna grows more convinced that he is in danger, but the truth is more horrifying than even she can imagine.
Director: Peter Duguid
Writer: Hugh Whitemore
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#15 - Lambda I
Season 2 Episode 3 - Aired 10/20/1966
Why take the Great Circle route to Australia when you can tunnel through the very molecules of the solid earth itself in a TAU-mode shuttle? When a routine TAU-shuttle becomes entombed in solid rock miles under the earth, the only means of rescue may be the wildly experimental LAMBDA-mode shuttle; and even its creator has no idea how it will behave, or whether its pilot can keep his sanity during the rescue mission.
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#16 - Level Seven
Season 2 Episode 4 - Aired 10/27/1966
In the huge, labyrinthine nuclear bunker meant to shield the survivors in government from the aftermath of atomic war, Level 7 is the deepest and the safest from radiation. But in spite of its hermetic isolation, the nerve center of government is ultimately not safe from the consequences of the holocaust which rages miles overhead.
Director: Rudolph Cartier
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#17 - Second Childhood
Season 2 Episode 5 - Aired 11/10/1966
Charles Dennistoun, a 60-year-old contestant on 'You Bet a Million' - a quiz show for millionaires - wins the jackpot prize, a course in rejuvenation. But his friends and family have mixed feeling, and the repercussions have blackly comic effects on all concerned.
Director: John Gorrie
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#18 - The World in Silence
Season 2 Episode 6 - Aired 11/17/1966
College student Sarah Richards is alone in fearing and disliking the new teaching machines but even she does not foresee the terrifying situation that arises when her supervisor, Stephen Kershaw, re-arranges the machines to conform with revised fire regulations.
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#19 - The Eye
Season 2 Episode 7 - Aired 11/24/1966
Julian Clay is accused of murdering Andrew Maddox - a charge he cannot deny because 'The Eye', a device which records the past, saw him do it, However, the law affords one loophole.
Director: Peter Sasdy
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#20 - Tunnel Under the World
Season 2 Episode 8 - Aired 12/1/1966
Déja vu: as Guy Birkett goes through the day he has a nagging feeling that he's been here before, experienced this already; except the details are always different. Is it conceivable that he is merely a simulacrum, the ultimate in consumer market surveying? He finds there is a reality behind the reality he knows; but for a pawn to question the reality of the chessboard is a perilous undertaking.
Director: Alan Cooke
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#21 - The Fastest Draw
Season 2 Episode 9 - Aired 12/8/1966
Amos Handworthy's grandfather was quick on the draw: as a U.S marshal it was a job requirement if you wanted to stay alive. But now Amos has built a gun-slinging robot, programmed to be a split second slower than him in a gunfight, so that he can perpetuate the myth and glory of his grandfather's frontier past. But will Amos bet his life on a duel with real bullets?
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#22 - Too Many Cooks
Season 2 Episode 10 - Aired 12/15/1966
Dr Andrew Cook, inventor of a process for making living replicas of human beings, has unwittingly duplicated himself and becomes a secret weapon in the Solar System's struggle for economic survival against a powerful alien culture, the Sentients.
Director: N/A
Writer: Hugh Whitemore
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#23 - Walk's End
Season 2 Episode 11 - Aired 12/22/1966
Dr Saint's offer of a free place in his comfortable old-folks' home appears entirely philanthropic to Miss Claythorpe. However he is suspiciously vague about the treatment that goes with it.
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#24 - Satisfaction Guaranteed
Season 2 Episode 12 - Aired 12/29/1966
A human-looking robot housekeeper is the latest gadget to acquire in the ceaseless battle to keep up with the Joneses. But housewife Claire Belmont starts to question the wisdom of her husband's purchase when TN3 (Tony) arrives. Can a man-like robot do everything a man can do: but willingly, obediently, tirelessly? Is a robot less than a man, or more?
Director: John Gorrie
Writer: N/A
- NaN/100 votesLoading...
#25 - The Prophet
Season 2 Episode 13 - Aired 1/1/1967
Robot QT-1, aboard an orbiting space-station, controls the massive energy beam which transmits the sun's power to receivers on Earth. But QT-1 (Cutie) has some strange bees in his positronic bonnet. How could weak creatures of protoplasm create a nearly invincible, totally logical entity like himself? It is up to his human supervisors, Powell and Donovan, to convince Cutie of his niche in creation before his new robot theology becomes a threat to all life on Earth.
Director: N/A
Writer: N/A
The Best Episodes of Out of the Unknown
Every episode of Out of the Unknown ranked from best to worst. Let's dive into the Best Episodes of Out of the Unknown!
Out of the Unknown is a British television science fiction anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and broadcast on BBC2 in four series between...
Genres:Sci-Fi & FantasyDrama
Network:BBC Two
Best Episodes Summary
"The Machine Stops" is the best rated episode of "Out of the Unknown". It scored 7/10 based on 1 votes. Directed by Philip Saville and written by Kenneth Cavander, Clive Donner, E.M. Forster, it aired on 10/6/1966. This episode scored NaN points higher than the second highest rated, "No Place Like Earth".