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The Best Episodes of The Outer Limits

Every episode of The Outer Limits ranked from best to worst. Let's dive into the Best Episodes of The Outer Limits!

Binge this in 4d 19h•Peaking at 8.6/10

Anthology series of composed of distinct story episodes, sometimes with a plot twist at the end, with occasional recurring story elements that were often tied together during season-finale clip shows.

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Episode Rankings

  1. #1 Fan Favorite
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    The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 1 - A Stitch in Time
    8.6/10(9 votes)

    #1 - A Stitch in Time

    S2:E1

    FBI agent Jamie Perrin has investigated some pretty strange cases in her time but this one may be the strangest of all. During the last fifty years, seventeen men throughout the country were all murdered with the same gun. This gun is traced to Dr. Theresa Givens, a scientist who recently left a top-secret government agency. This discovery deepens the mystery because Givens was only five years old at the time of the first murder. The gun itself hadn't even been made. While investigating further, Perrin discovers a secret that lies behind the locked door in Dr. Givens' office and learns first-hand of the temptations and dangers of undoing the evils of the past.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:Steven Barnes

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  2. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 12 - Inconstant Moon
    8.4/10(8 votes)

    #2 - Inconstant Moon

    S2:E12

    When a lonely physics professor realizes the sun is going to burn out, he knows that he and humanity have only a few hours to live. In that time, Stan resolves to make up for lost years. He courts and proposes to Leslie, a woman he has known for two years but never dated. Leslie, although puzzled, finds herself more and more entranced by Stan until she finds out the reason for Stan's sudden attention. Based on a short story by famed sci-fi writer Larry Niven, this episode brings its characters face to face with both death and their own visions of life - with surprising results.

    Director:Joseph L. Scanlan
    Writer:Larry Niven

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  3. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 21 - Vanishing Act
    7.8/10(5 votes)

    #3 - Vanishing Act

    S2:E21

    THE OUTER LIMITS examines the classic domestic fable of a husband who leaves to go to the store and doesn't return for ten years. Where has he been? And why? It happens to Trevor McPhee and his return is more than a little distressing for his wife Theresa, especially since he insists he was in a car crash ... only hours ago. Then, just after they reconcile, he vanishes again ... for another decade. Trevor finds himself trapped between two worlds; one is a recurring nightmare of caves and predatory creatures; the other is the real world, ever-changing as civilization leaves him further and further behind. Is Trevor mad ... or just reaching The Outer Limits?

    Director:Jonathan Glassner
    Writer:Chris Dickie

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  4. The Outer Limits Season 4 Episode 9 - Glyphic
    7.7/10(3 votes)

    #4 - Glyphic

    S4:E9

    When Tom Young (Peter Flemmming) from the Department of Health travels to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to examine an old case file, it appears as though long ago the town had stopped trying to live in the present. Twelve years have passed since a tragedy killed many of their young children and left the residents without hope, without a future. Many of them are still angry with the medical community for not finding a cure to save the children in their small community. The town's physician, Dr. Malcolm Boussard (Lane Smith) has felt the brunt of their anger - especially since his own two children did not die during the epidemic. Although they were spared, his son Louis (Brad Swaile) still lays in a coma while his daughter Cassie (Rachel Leigh Cook) has learning disabilities and expresses herself through abstract sculpture and artwork. Through hypnosis, Tom begins to probe Cassie's mind and unravels a memory of 'alien' proportions.

    Director:Catherine O'Hara
    Writer:Naren Shankar

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  5. The Outer Limits Season 5 Episode 12 - Tribunal
    7.6/10(5 votes)

    #5 - Tribunal

    S5:E12

    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...

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:Sam Egan

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  6. The Outer Limits Season 7 Episode 2 - Patient Zero
    7.6/10(5 votes)

    #6 - Patient Zero

    S7:E2

    A desperate man from the future travels back to the present to find and kill the carrier of a deadly plague that threatens to annihilate humankind.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:James Crocker

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    The 20 WORST Episodes of The Outer Limits

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  7. The Outer Limits Season 3 Episode 9 - Tempests
    7.5/10(2 votes)

    #7 - Tempests

    S3:E9

    The Tempest, a rickety old spaceship piloted by space colonists John Virgil and Captain Parker, is on a mission of mercy. It is ferrying two bigwigs from Earth, Dr. Vasquez and Governor Mudry, along with a lifesaving vial of serum to the Tabloss Colony, where an epidemic of Ellysia C is devastating the population. But things go horribly wrong when the ship shifts down from lightspeed and crashes somewhere in space. As he attempts to repair the ship, Virgil is bitten by a strange spider-like creature and passes out. When he awakes, he finds himself sliding between two equally convincing realities. Is he battling for his life against the deadly Ellysia C having already delivered the serum and saved the colony, including his beloved wife and his young son, from certain death? Or is he alive, trapped in a spaceship in the middle of nowhere, with no way out? Or are both realities merely hallucinations, one man's desperate attempt to find hope and heroism in a situation too bleak to face?.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:Hart Hanson

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  8. The Outer Limits Season 4 Episode 19 - Sarcophagus
    7.5/10(2 votes)

    #8 - Sarcophagus

    S4:E19

    The archeological team has just about given up on finding anything significant in this remote corner of Alaska when Natalie Grainger (Lisa Zane) stumbles upon what appears to be a burial mound. Inside, the team discovers a number of human skeletons, including one dressed in a strange metallic tunic and preserved in an amber cocoon. When Natalie's husband, Curtis (David Cubitt), touches the cocoon, something amazing happens. He begins to see through the eyes of the creature whose bones were contained in amber, an alien with fearsome claws and teeth. This psychic connection also provides a jolt of energy that liquefies the cocoon and initiates the reconstitution of flesh on the alien's bones. As the creature begins to come back to life, some of the team, including Emmet Harley (Robert Picardo) want to call in a big corporate lab in order to cash in on their discovery.

    Director:Jeff Woolnough
    Writer:Bill Froehlich

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  9. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 8 - Straight and Narrow
    7.4/10(7 votes)

    #9 - Straight and Narrow

    S2:E8

    Rusty Dobson has always been a problem child. His single mom decides to send him to the Milgram Academy, an ultra-strict private school that has produced some of the nation's top business and political leaders. What Rusty's mom doesn't know - and what Rusty finds out the hard way - is that Milgram doesn't just build the leaders of tomorrow, it controls them. The academy installs small computer chips in the student's brains, turning them into blindly loyal servants of the academy and The Committee, a shadowy body that controls the project. Thanks to a malfunctioning chip, Rusty has eluded their control so far, but can he escape from this prison of the mind?

    Director:Joseph L. Scanlan
    Writer:Joel Metzger

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  10. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 15 - Afterlife
    7.4/10(7 votes)

    #10 - Afterlife

    S2:E15

    Linden Stiles struggles to retain his humanity after heis convicted of a murder he didn't commit. When asked to make a frightful choice: accept execution or become the subject of a secret military experiment -- he chooses to live. As the experiment progresses, Stiles fights the dehumanizing influence of injected DNA from an alien lifeform. The attending doctor is troubled by a growing awareness of the inhumanity of the experiment itself, of the men in charge and of her own role. Using his super-human strength, Stiles escapes. Then, hunted by his former compatriots, he faces a decision even more difficult than the one that set him on such a tragic course.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:John Whelpley

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  11. The Outer Limits Season 1 Episode 12 - The Conversion
    7.3/10(8 votes)

    #11 - The Conversion

    S1:E12

    Henry Marshall is a greedy man who has paid for his greed with a prison sentence but has yet to learn his lesson. His life abruptly changes when he encounters visitors from another planet who instill new sense of compassion for others.

    Director:Rebecca De Mornay
    Writer:Brad Wright

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  12. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 16 - The Deprogrammers
    7.3/10(7 votes)

    #12 - The Deprogrammers

    S2:E16

    With Earth under alien rule and millions dead, the human race has been programmed to slavery. A small band of rebels kidnaps Evan, alien leader Koltok's personal slave. Trent Davis, leader of the rebels, tries to return Evan to his former self through arduous deprogramming sessions. To aid in the process, Evan is reintroduced to his wife Jill. As his sessions progress, Evan learns of the death of his daughter. He agrees to join the rebels and assassinate his former master - with devastating results.

    Director:Joseph L. Scanlan
    Writer:James Crocker

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  13. The Outer Limits Season 3 Episode 17 - Feasibility Study
    7.3/10(3 votes)

    #13 - Feasibility Study

    S3:E17

    The residents of a suburban neighborhood have their lives turned upside down when a four block section of their subdivision is ripped from the earth by a mysterious force and transported to a distant planet. Thrown together in crisis, Joshua Hayward, his daughter Sarah and their neighbors try to understand what has happened to them -- why their neighborhood now ends abruptly in an invisible force-field. Sarah gains some insight when she comes across Adrielo, a horribly disfigured alien who tells her that they have been brought here by another group of aliens. Guiding Sarah through a gap in the force-field, Adrielo begs for her help in curing the disease that is turning him and his people to stone. Meanwhile, Joshua makes an even more startling discovery when he is pulled through the force-field and comes face to face with his captors, the Triunes. These big-brained, feeble-bodied creatures subject Joshua to strange and painful tests and explain without apology, that he and his neighbor

    Director:Ken Girotti
    Writer:Joseph Stefano

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  14. The Outer Limits Season 5 Episode 2 - Donor
    7.3/10(3 votes)

    #14 - Donor

    S5:E2

    Dr. Renee Stuyvesant and her protege 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.

    Director:Jimmy Kaufman
    Writer:Sam Egan

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  15. The Outer Limits Season 5 Episode 9 - What Will the Neighbors Think?
    7.3/10(3 votes)

    #15 - What Will the Neighbors Think?

    S5:E9

    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...

    Director:Helen Shaver
    Writer:A L Katz

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  16. The Outer Limits Season 6 Episode 12 - Glitch
    7.3/10(3 votes)

    #16 - Glitch

    S6:E12

    Tom and Wendy seem like the perfect couple, happy together and very much in love. But at night when Wendy sleeps, Tom has terrible memories about being stuck in a burning building with a crying baby. The nightmares, however, aren't real and neither is Tom. He's an android and the ""memories"" are bugs placed in his artificial intelligence by his creator, the late Joe Walker. Walker had originally created Tom to save humans from fires and other dangerous situations. However he anticipated that his colleague, Dr. Edward Normandy, might try to militarize the android and use him as a cyber-soldier-spy and planted the bugs as a way of forcing Normandy to upgrade Tom so the android could think for itself.

    Director:Mike Rohl
    Writers:Ron Greenstein, Mike Berman

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  17. The Outer Limits Season 7 Episode 1 - Family Values
    7.3/10(3 votes)

    #17 - Family Values

    S7:E1

    A man believes all his family problems will be solved when he purchases a robot to help around the house.

    Director:Mike Rohl
    Writer:James Crocker

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  18. The Outer Limits Season 1 Episode 20 - Birthright
    7.2/10(6 votes)

    #18 - Birthright

    S1:E20

    An environmentally-friendly U.S. Senator's life changes drastically after a freak accident, when he realizes he's actually an alien in disguise, with a "mission" to surreptitiously reconfigure the earth's atmosphere.

    Director:William Fruet
    Writer:Eric Estrin

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  19. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 11 - The Refuge
    7.2/10(6 votes)

    #19 - The Refuge

    S2:E11

    ""What is reality?"" is the question before Raymond Bava after he collapses during a blizzard and awakens in a private refuge run by Sanford Valle. Valle's companions include his son and daughter-in-law, Thomas and Justine, and Gina Beaumont. Ray, drawn to the gentle Gina, recoils from the callous corruption displayed by the all-controlling Valle and the other inhabitants. Then, following a moment of violence, Ray begins to doubt reality when all the characters, including Gina, reverse roles and personalities. When he is suddenly freed from Valle's control, Ray finds he has been locked in a cryogenic-induced nightmare, but one he must return to fulfill his love for Gina.

    Director:Ken Girotti
    Writer:Alan Brennert

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  20. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 18 - The Light Brigade
    7.2/10(9 votes)

    #20 - The Light Brigade

    S2:E18

    Actor Robert Patrick returns for this first-ever THE OUTER LIMITS sequel, a follow-up to last year's 'Quality of Mercy.' On a desperate mission, a young Cadet learns the difference between heroic ideals and the bitter realities of war. The only survivors on a crippled battle cruiser - Earth's last hope for victory and survivors - are the Cadet, the weapons Chief and Major John Skokes, a repatriated prisoner of war. Exposed to fatal doses of radiation when their fleet was wiped out by the aliens, they fight illness and death to launch a preemptive strike. As the awesome responsibility for success descends on him, the Cadet learns that fear is not his only enemy.

    Director:Michael Keusch
    Writer:Brad Wright

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  21. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 22 - The Sentence
    7.2/10(5 votes)

    #21 - The Sentence

    S2:E22

    Let the punishment fit the crime: an ambitious inventor, Dr. Jack Henson, creates a "" virtual prison"" and wants the government to adopt it nation-wide. Using his invention, convicts serve a life sentence in just a few hours. Henson claims the harsh sentences will ensure that criminals never offend again while the short time required cuts prison costs. He seems to be making his point until they connect an innocent man to the apparatus and the demonstration goes sour. To save the young man's life, Henson must submit to his own invention -- and to a lesson in the true meaning of justice.

    Director:Joseph L. Scanlan
    Writer:Melissa Rosenberg

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  22. The Outer Limits Season 4 Episode 2 - The Hunt
    7.2/10(5 votes)

    #22 - The Hunt

    S4:E2

    After environmentalists successfully ban the hunting of animals, a black market emerges, with humans paying big money to hunt androids who have outlived their usefulness in the mines. The androids are the perfect prey -- strong and intelligent yet unable to turn on their pursuers, thanks to an inhibitor chip that prevents them from harming humans. A group of bow-hunters, George Nichols (Rob White), his son Eric (Tobias Mehler), his older brother Clute (Bob Gunton) and their guide Pete (David McNally), count on that chip as a safety net while they track down a quartet of androids led by Kel (Doug Savant). Eager to provide his brother and his reluctant nephew with a real challenge, Clute has secretly planted information that allows the androids to disable the inhibitor chip thus allowing them to fight back. The machines, angry at being turned into game, contemptuous of human bloodthirstiness, are only too happy to oblige.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:Sam Egan

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  23. The Outer Limits Season 7 Episode 7 - Replica
    7.2/10(4 votes)

    #23 - Replica

    S7:E7

    A biogeneticist illegally clones his comatose wife.

    Director:Brad Turner
    Writer:Sam Egan

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  24. The Outer Limits Season 7 Episode 16 - Abduction
    7.2/10(4 votes)

    #24 - Abduction

    S7:E16

    An alien makes an offer to five high school students.

    Director:Mario Azzopardi
    Writer:James Crocker

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  25. The Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 7 - First Anniversary
    7.0/10(5 votes)

    #25 - First Anniversary

    S2:E7

    As he celebrates his first wedding anniversary, Norman Glass thinks he's the luckiest man alive. His wife Ady, whom he met after the tragic death of her first husband, is stunningly beautiful and talented. She loves him more than anyone alive. They have two great friends, Dennis and Barbara, who were arried on the same day and are just as madly in love as Norman and Ady. But suddenly things start to change. First, Dennis leaves Barbara. Then, Norman must struggle with the strange, growing revulsion he feels when he touches, smells, tastes or sees his lovely wife. Norman thinks he's going crazy, but Barbara and Ady know better. Is love blind? Is beauty only skin-deep? Guess again.

    Director:Brad Turner
    Writers:Richard Matheson, Ali Marie Matheson, Jon Cooksey

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Best Episodes Summary

"A Stitch in Time" is the best rated episode of "The Outer Limits". It scored 8.6/10 based on 9 votes. Directed by Mario Azzopardi and written by Steven Barnes, it aired on 1/14/1996. This episode scored 0.2 points higher than the second highest rated, "Inconstant Moon".