The Outer Limits (1963 TV series)
The Outer Limits (1963-1965) was an American television anthology series, airing on ABC, that focused mainly on science fiction themes and often featured a twist ending.
Opening and Closing
[edit]- Control Voice: [introduction] There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.
- Control Voice: [sign-off] We now return control of your television set to you, until next week at this same time, when the Control Voice will take you to... The Outer Limits.
Season 1
[edit]The Galaxy Being [1.01]
[edit]- Allan Maxwell: The secrets of the universe don't mind. They reveal themselves to "nobodies" who care.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The planet Earth is a speck of dust, remote and alone in the void. There are powers in the universe inscrutable and profound. Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the stranger in a new light - the light of understanding. And to achieve this, we must begin to understand ourselves, and each other.
The Hundred Days of the Dragon [1.02]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Somewhere south of the Mongolian border and north of the Tropic of Cancer, in that part of the world we call the Orient, a slumbering giant has shaken itself to wakefulness. Passed over in most histories as a nation forgotten by time, its close-packed millions in the short span of twenty years have been stirred to a fury by one man: Lee Ching Sung. A benevolent despot in his homeland, Sung stands as an irresponsible threat to peace in the eyes of the rest of the world. William Lyons Selby, candidate for the presidency of the United States, predicted by every poll, survey and primary to be a certain winner in the forthcoming election.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] To Theodore Pearson, not even so monstrous a crime as the assassination of William Lyons Selby justifies an act of war, because there is no war as we knew it, only annihilation. A great American has been killed in the service of his country. Now it is the job of those who continue to serve to carry on guarding our freedom with dignity and unrelenting vigilance.
The Architects of Fear [1.03]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time to wonder. No time to ask "Why is it happening? Why is it finally happening?" There is time only for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray...or do we merely run now and pray later? Will there be a later...or is this the day?
- Gainer: Now I don't care what reading of history you take. The pattern is always the same. Whenever a bacterium invasion strikes or a fire rages or a wild beast roams the streets. Then and only then do men stop fighting each other and work together to save themselves. A common enemy, a common fear. That is the only answer. If all the men of the Earth are threatened by an enemy from a hostile planet... well, gentlemen, we are going to create that enemy.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque. It will have been at least a lesson - a lesson at last to be learned.
The Man With the Power [1.04]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In the course of centuries, Man has devoured the Earth itself. The Machine Age has dried up the seas of oil. Industry has consumed the heartlands of coal. The Atomic Age has plundered the rare elements — uranium, cobalt, plutonium — leaving behind worthless deposits of lead and ashes. Starvation is at hand. Only here, in the void of space, is there a new source of atomic power. Above us, in the debris of the solar system, in the meteorites and asteroids, are the materials needed to drive the reactors. Yet in their distant, silent orbits, these chunks of matter are beyond the reach of man, beyond the reach of human hands, but not beyond the reach of human minds. Driving along a country road in an ordinary car is a modest man: Harold J. Finley, quiet and profound...
- Vera Finley: You wouldn't hurt anyone even if you could. You're not a violent man. You've never hated anyone, never.
- Harold Finley: Not to hurt them, no, Vera. But I have this power. It acts whether I want it to or not.
- Vera Finley: No, Harold, you don't have any power. You've always been quiet. You told me yourself you're too mild, you're too weak.
- Harold Finley: No more, Vera! I could split this ceiling open if I wanted to! I could crash down these walls. I could splinter this whole block into bricks and rubble.
- Vera Finley: Harold, you're a little man, a nobody. You don't have any power.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Deep beyond the kindest, gentlest soul may lurk violent thoughts, deadly wishes. Someday, Man will learn to cope with the monsters of the mind. Then, and only then, when the human mind is truly in control of itself, can we begin to utilize the great and hidden powers of the universe.
The Sixth Finger [1.05]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Where are we going? Life, the timeless, mysterious gift, is still evolving. What wonders, or terrors, does evolution hold in store for us in the next ten thousand years? In a million? In six million? Perhaps the answer lies in this old house in this old and misty valley...
- Gwyllm: The whole town must be utterly destroyed. An example must be made.
- Prof. Mathers: You're wrong.
- Gwyllm: The human race has a gift, professor. A gift that sets it above all the other creatures that abound upon this earth. The gift of thought, reasoning, understanding. The highly developed brain. But the human race has ceased to develop. It struggles for petty comfort and false security. There is no time for thought. Soon there will be no time for reasoning and man will lose sight of the truth.
- Gwyllm: Don't be afraid. I came back because I knew you were here.
- Cathy: What have you done.
- Gwyllm: I was going to destroy everyone. Suddenly, it no longer mattered. I evolved beyond hatred or revenge, or even the desire for power. I feel myself reaching that stage in the dim future of mankind when the mind will cast off the hamperings of the flesh and become all thought and no matter. A vortex of pure intelligence and space. It is the goal of evolution. Man's final destiny is to become what he imagined in the beginning when he first learned the idea of the angels.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] An experiment too soon, too swift. And yet may we not still hope to discover a method by which within one generation, the whole human race could be rendered intelligent, beyond hatred, or revenge, or the desire for power? Is that not, after all, the ultimate goal of evolution?
The Man Who Was Never Born [1.06]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Here, in the bright, clustered loneliness of the billion, billion stars, loneliness can be an exciting, voluntary thing, unlike the loneliness Man suffers on Earth. Here, deep in the starry nowhere, a man can be as one with space and time; preoccupied, yet not indifferent; anxious and yet at peace. His name is Joseph Reardon. He is, in this present year, thirty years old. This is the first time he has made this journey alone…
- Andro: [Decrying the present condition of mankind] But man was too busy, too busy going to the moon, too busy clubbing his brothers over the head with its new found toy, the atom, to anticipate and resist the parasite that was to suck out his right to immortality.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] It is said that if you move a single pebble on the beach, you set up a different pattern and everything in the world is changed. It can also be said that love can change the future, if it is deep enough, true enough and selfless enough. It can prevent a war, prohibit a plague, keep the whole world... whole.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] In this room, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, security personnel at the Defense Department's Cypress Hills Research Center keep constant watch on its scientists through O.B.I.T., a mysterious electronic device whose very existence was carefully kept from the public at large. And so it would have remained, but for the facts you are about to witness…
- Lomax: The machines are everywhere! Oh you'll find them all, you're a zealous people. And you'll make a great show of smashing a few of them, but for every one you destroy hundreds of others will be built. And they will demoralize you! Breaks your spirits! Create such rivets and tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them! Oh, your a savage, despairing planet and when we come here to live you friendless, demoralized, flotsam will fall without even a single shot being fired. Senator, enjoy the few years left you, there is no answer...Your all the same. Dark persuasion! You demand, insist on knowing every private thought and hunger of everyone. Your families, your neighbors. Everyone! But, yourselves.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Agents of the Justice Department are rounding up the machines now. But these machines, these inventions of another planet, have been cunningly conceived to prey on our most mortal weakness. In the last analysis, dear friends, whether O.B.I.T. lives up to its name or not will depend on you.
The Human Factor [1.08]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In northern Greenland, the mountains stand like a wall along Victoria Channel, whose straight course marks the line of the great Baffin Fault. Until recently, not even the Eskimos ventured into this arctic waste; but, today, as in other lonely places of the world, the land is dominated by those instruments of detection which stand as a grim reminder of Man's fear of Man. This is Point TABU, a name given this predominantly underground base by a young officer who explained that the letters in TABU stood for 'Total Abandonment of Better Understanding'. Some two hundred men and a few women make this their permanent residence. Their task is to maintain a constant alert against enemy attack, and be prepared to respond to it, devastatingly.
- Major Roger Brothers: [to Dr. James Hamilton] We live in a world of cowards, Dr. Hamilton. Every man is afraid of his brother, and most men try to hide from that awful fact. Even here, the men are afraid to see the evil that is here on this base. And they are responsible for it.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] A weapon? No, only an instrument: neither good nor evil until men put it to use. And then like so many of man's inventions, it can be used either to save lives or destroy them, to make men sane or to drive them mad, to increase human understanding or to betray it. But it will be men that make the choice. By itself the instrument is nothing until you add the human factor.
Corpus Earthling [1.09]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Rocks: silent, inanimate objects torn from the Earth's ancient crust. Yielding up to man over the long centuries all that is in know of the planet on which we live withholding from man forever their veiled secrets of the nature of matter and cosmic catastrophe, the secrets of other worlds in the vastness of the universe, of other forms of life, of strange organisms beyond the imagination of man.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Two black crystalline rocks: unclassifiable. Objects on the border between the living and the nonliving. A reminder of the thin line that separates the animate from the inanimate. Something to ponder on. Something to stay the hand when it reaches out innocently for the whitened pebble, the veined stone, the dead unmoving rocks of our planet.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] A war between worlds has long been dreaded. Throughout recent history, Man, convinced that life on other planets would be as anxious and belligerent as life on his own, has gravely predicted that some dreadful form of combat would inevitably take place between our world and that of someone else. And Man was right. To the eternal credit of the peoples of this planet Earth, history shall be able to proclaim loudly and justly that in this war between Unified Earth and the planet Ebon, Ebon struck first. Ebon: Its form of life unknown, its way of life unpredictable. To the fighting troops of Earth, a black question mark at the end of a dark, foreboding journey.
- Stone: There's no leniency for a traitor. None at all. He earned the death penalty all by himself. There's no reason why we should handle Major Jong any differently here than if he were down on Earth. I told you all before we were captured, the only laws we would have here were those we brought with us. We need those laws. Even the questionable ones, even the painful ones. We need them. They remind us that we were civilized enough to make them in the first place.
- Jong: Or perhaps to remind us that we are not as civilized as we should be.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The exploration of human behavior under simulated conditions of stress is a commonplace component of the machinery called war. So long as Man anticipates and prepares for combat, be it with neighboring nations or with our neighbors in space, these unreal games must be played, and there are only real men to play them. According to established military procedure, the results of the Ebon maneuvers will be recorded in books and fed into computers for the edification and enlightenment of all the strategists of the future. Perhaps they will learn something.
It Crawled Out of the Woodwork [1.11]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] His name is Warren Edgar Morley. For the past six months, he has guarded this gate from eight in the morning until six at night, at which time he is replaced by another just like himself. These are the last few moments of his life.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The Conservation of Energy Law... a principle which states that energy can be changed in form but that it cannot be either created or destroyed. And this is true of all energy... the energy of genius, of madness, of the heart, of the atom. And so it must be lived with. It must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil, and somehow lived with, peaceably.
The Borderland [1.12]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The mind of man has always longed to know what lies beyond the world we live in. Explorers have ventured into the deeps and the heights. Of these explorers some are scientists, some are mystics. Each is driven by a different purpose. The one thing they share in common is a wish to cross the Borderlands that lie beyond the Outer Limits.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] There are worlds beyond and worlds within which the explorer must explore, but there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death. It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all other forces combine to tear us apart. We call it the power of love.
Tourist Attraction [1.13]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In man's dark and troubled history, there are vestiges of strange Gods. This stone statue was once such a god a thousand years gone by in the central mountains of Pan-America. Today, new gods have emerged: the god of power, the god of money. The Republic of San Blas lies west of the Orinoco Basin, slightly north of the equator. Its principle exports are coffee, copra, mahogany, mace and saffron. In a hundred odd years, the reigns of government have changed many times in blood and fire and death. The last of these revolutions was led by General Juan Mecurio, the most absolute and powerful ruler of them all. Only the Indians who live close to old gods in the volcanic uplands are unimpressed. They have seen the coming of conquistadors with the power of their guns and flashing flags, the revolutionaries with the power of their zeal and willingness to die, the Americans with the power of their money and bulldozers with their summer houseboats in the crater lake of Ali Papa with their gadgets and machines and devices.
- Control Voice: [Act One narration] Moving through the deep, protected only by a tank of air and a hunting spear, the scientist/explorer descends beyond the San Blas shelf; but, all unknown to him, the observer is, himself, observed. Hidden in the sinuous rills of seaweed, sightless eyes, blind for centuries, stare out of the abyss. The legendary creature of the deep, sensing through neuro-receptors in its skin, becomes aware of the alien invader - Man...
- Control Voice: [Act Four narration] Stressed and strained by constant drilling of ultrasonic beams, the concrete face of the dam cracks and falls. Ten million tons of pressure build towards ultimate collapse...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The forces of nature will not submit to injustice. No man has the right, nor will the checks and balances of the universe permit him to place his fellows under the harsh yoke of repression. Nor may he again place the forces of nature under the triple yoke of vanity, greed and ambition. In the words of Shelley, "here lies your tyrant who would rule the world immortal".
The Zanti Misfits [1.14]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Throughout history, compassionate minds have pondered the dark and disturbing question: what is society to do with those members who are a threat to society, those malcontents and misfits whose behavior undermines and destroys the foundations of civilization? Different ages have found different answers. Misfits have been burned, branded and banished. Today, on this planet Earth, the criminal is incarcerated in humane institutions.....or he is executed. Other planets use other methods. This is the story of how the perfectionist rulers of the planet Zanti attempted to solve the problem of the Zanti misfits.
- Hill: Fifteen minutes is not a long time. In our conception of time. For them it could be long enough to conquer a world. When a country allows itself to be coerced, it has to suffer the consequences.
- Grave: So far the only real consequence is uncertainty.
- Hill: I've always felt that was one of the worst things a country could suffer.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Throughout history, various societies have tried various methods of exterminating those members who have proven their inability or unwillingness to live sanely amongst their fellow men. The Zantis merely tried one more method, neither better nor worse than all the others. Neither more human nor less human than all others. Perhaps merely... non-human.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] In dreams, some of us walk the stars. In dreams, some of us ride the whelming brine of space, where every port is a shining one, and none are beyond our reach. Some of us, in dreams, cannot reach beyond the walls of our own little sleep.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Hunger frightens and hurts, and it has many faces, and every man must sometimes face the terror of one of them. Wouldn't it seem that a misery known and understood by all men would lead Man not to deception and murder, but to faith, and hope, and love?
Controlled Experiment [1.16]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Who has not seen the dark corners of great cities, whose small and shabby creatures wander without purpose in the secret corners of the night? Without purpose? There are those whose purpose reaches far beyond our wildest dreams.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Who knows? Perhaps the alteration of one small event may someday bring about the end of the world. But that someday is a long way off, and until then there is a good life to be lived in the here and now.
Don't Open Till Doomsday [1.17]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The greatness of evil lies in its awful accuracy. Without that deadly talent for being in the right place at the right time evil must suffer defeat. For unlike its opposite good, evil is allowed no human failings, no miscalculations. Evil must be perfect or depend upon the imperfections of others.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Without that deadly talent for being in the right place at the right time evil must suffer defeat, and with each defeat doomsday is postponed for at least one more day.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] Human life strives ceaselessly to perfect itself, to gain ascendancy. But what of the lower forms of life? Is it not possible that they, too, are conducting experiments and are at this moment on the threshold of deadly success?
- Control Voice: [closing narration] When the yearning to gain ascendancy takes the form of a soulless, loveless struggle, the contest must end in unlovely defeat. For without love, drones can never be men, and men can only be drones.
The Invisibles [1.19]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] You do not know these men. You may have looked at them, but you did not see them. They are newspapers blowing down a gutter on a windy night. For reasons both sociological and psychological, these three have never joined or been invited to join society. They have never experienced love or friendship, or formed any lasting or constructive relationship, but today, at last, they will become a part of something. They will belong. They will come a little closer to their unrealistic dreams of power and glory. Today, finally they will join th... I almost said the human race, and that would have been a half-truth, for the race they are joining today is only half human.
- Larry Hillerman: [to his new recruits] Welcome, gentlemen. The society which you have voluntarily joined is called "The Invisibles." It is subversive and illegal. It is also powerful and large and it is ready. When the invisibles have become the masters of everyone and everything on this planet, you, the vanguard of this virile and violent inevitability, will sit so high that mankind will come to recognize you by the lines in the soles of your feet.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] You do not know these men. You may have looked at them, but you did not see them. They are the wind that blows newspapers down a gutter on a windy night and sweeps the gutter clean.
The Bellero Shield [1.20]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] There is a passion in the human heart which is called aspiration. It flares with a noble flame and by its light, Man has traveled from the caves of darkness to the darkness of outer space. But when this passion becomes lust, when its flame is fanned by greed and private hunger, then aspiration becomes ambition, by which sin the angels fell.
- Richard Bellero, Sr.: [Arguing with Judith Bellero] I spend every hour, every dollar, and every dream developing men and means that are devoted to the prevention of war. That says how much I hate war! And yet I am not sickened or enraged, even by war, as I am by a single soul like yours. Your ambition is singularly the most active form of violence I have ever encountered!
- Control Voice: [closing narration] When this passion called aspiration becomes lust, then aspiration degenerates, becomes vulgar ambition, by which sin the angels fell.
The Children of Spider County [1.21]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In light of today's growing anxieties it has become more absolute that the wealth of nations consists in the number of superior men that it harbors. It is therefore a matter of deep concern, and deeper consequence, when four of the most magnificent and promising young minds in the country suddenly disappear off the face of the Earth...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The wealth of nations, of a world, consists in the number of superior men that it harbors, and often it seems that these men are too different, too dreaming. And often, because they are driven by powers and dreams strange to us, they are driven away by us. But are they really so different? Are they not, after all, held by the same things that hold us, by strong love and soft hands?
Specimen: Unknown [1.22]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] For centuries, Man has looked to the skies and sought to uncover the mystery of the universe. The telescope brought into focus the craters on the moon and the canals on Mars, but it was limited and Man's insistent hunger for knowledge and experience would not be satisfied until he broke the massive chains of gravity and set foot himself on a planet other than his own. Project Mercury was his first venture into space, a testament to his technical ingenuity and courage, a green light to a hundred other projects which would take him still further. This is Project Adonis. A laboratory orbiting a thousand miles above the earth, a tiny far flung world connected only by radio and memory, and inhabited by a handful of men dedicated to removing the unknown for future space travelers. At ten minutes after six, on January 8th, Lieutenant Rubert Howard stumbled upon something clinging to the wall of the space lock that appeared alive. He called them space barnacles for temporary identification. They were not.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] There are many things up there. Evil and hungry, awesome and splendid. And gentle things, too. Merciful things... like rain.
Second Chance [1.23]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] When fear is too terrible, when reality is too agonizing, we seek escape in manufactured danger, in the thrills and pleasures of pretending... in the amusement parks of our unamusing world. Here, in frantic pretending, Man finds escape and temporary peace, and goes home tired enough to sleep a short, deep sleep. But what happens here when night comes? When pretending ends, and reality begins?
- Control Voice: [opening narration] In Man's conquest of space, his own moon must be the first to surrender. From there he will step his way across the heavens to the edge of infinity. Each step will be as uncertain as the last, yet each will bring him closer to ultimate truth... Lunar Expedition One: Here a handful of brave scientists and technicians pave the way to the future. Their mission: to collect information that will eventually enable Man to inhabit the Moon; to use the Moon as a springboard to the stars. Once during each twenty-four hour period, a force of three, commanded by General Lee Stocker and including Lieutenant Travers and Major Clint Anderson, makes its slow, uncharted way across the lunar surface, a surface whose depths and desires are, as yet, unprobed...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The steps man takes across the heavens of his universe are as uncertain as the steps he takes across the rooms of his own life and yet if he walks with an open mind, these steps must lead him eventually to that most perfect of all destinations, truth.
The Mutant [1.25]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] At this very moment, our horizon is menaced by two explosive forces both man-made: one is a deadly wonder, the other wondrously alive. Both forces have compelled man to reach out for worlds beyond his own, new worlds where he may find peace and room to grow. This is the first of those new worlds. The United Nations of Earth have claimed it and called it Annex One. It is almost identical to Earth, except that there is no night. Sunlight is constant. Early reports from the small expeditionary team stationed on Annex One indicated that the ancient planet appeared to be suitable for colonization by Earth's overflowing population, but the most recent reports have contained unspoken, oddly disturbing undercurrents. And the United Space Agency has decided to investigate. The man chosen: Dr. Evan Marshall, psychiatrist.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The forces of violence and the forces of nature compel Man to reach out toward new horizons where peace and sanity may flourish, where there is room to grow. But before we run, should we not first make certain that we have done all that can be done here to end madness, quiet the disturbers of peace, and make room for those who need so little room to grow in?
The Guests [1.26]
[edit]Fun and Games [1.27]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] There was a moment in time when those who were brilliant and powerful also were playful, and when they took recess from their exhausting and magnificent strides toward glory, they replenished their darker passions with fun and games. On the planet Earth, such pastimes have been civilized and drained of all but their last few drops of blood.
- Laura: You said you'd explain.
- The Senator: When civilized creatures have conquered all that they believe to be worth conquering, then one conquest remains. One elusive conquest. Pleasure. Here on Andera, we are finished with warring, and plundering is done. Our citizens enjoy self-respect, peace, and affluence. But a high order of civilization does not lift the low order of passion. And so such passions must be both appeased and controlled.
The Special One [1.28]
[edit]- Control Voice: [closing narration] The mold of a man stems from the mind of a child. Educators and emperors have known this from time immemorial. So have tyrants.
A Feasibility Study [1.29]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The planet Luminos: a minor planet, sultry and simmering, incapacitated. Earth scientists have concluded that there could be no life on Luminos, that it is too close to its own sun, that its inhabitants would be victimized by their own blinding atmosphere. But there is life on Luminos, life that should resemble ours, but doesn't, desperate life suffering of great and terrible need. The Luminoids have begun to search the universe in an effort to gratify that need. They seek a planet on which life is healthy, vibrant, strong and mobile. They need such people: to do their work, to labor and slave for them, to manufacture their splendored dreams. The Luminoids need slaves and they have chosen the planet off which their slaves will be abducted. Not too many at first... a neighborhood perhaps... a neighborhood like mine, or yours. Those who will be abducted sleep in dreamy ignorance, unaware that they are about to become the subjects of a grotesque and sophisticated experiment: a feasibility study.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] "Do not enter upon or cross this area. Do not touch or remove possibly radioactive dirt or rocks. If you have any knowledge concerning this disappearance, please contact your nearest police department." It could have happened to any neighborhood. Had those who lived in this one been less human, less brave, it would have happened to all the neighborhoods of the Earth. Feasibility study ended. Abduction of human race: infeasible.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] In recent years, nuclear physicists have discovered a strange world of sub-atomic particles, fragments of atoms smaller than the imagination can picture, fragments of materials which do not obey the laws of gravity. Antimatter composed of inside-out material; shadow-matter that can penetrate ten miles of lead shielding. Hidden deep in the heart of strange new elements are secrets beyond human understanding-new powers, new dimensions, worlds within worlds, unknown.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] As Man explores the secrets of the universe, strange and inscrutable powers await him. And whether these powers are to become forces of destruction or forces of construction will ultimately depend upon simple but profound human qualities: Inspiration. Integrity. Courage.
The Chameleon [1.31]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The race of Man is known for its mutability. We can change our moods, our faces, our lives to suit whatever situation confronts us. Adapt and survive. Even among the most changeable of living things, Man is quicksilver-more chameleon-like than the chameleon, determined to survive, no matter what the cost to others... or to himself.
- Mace: I don't think you understand me, General. I'm not interested in becoming a hero. Nor do I have an overdeveloped sense of duty. I'm doing this because I'm nothing more than an instrument for action. Mr. Chambers knows that also. Between missions, I cease to exist. I am what I've done, and that's not always very pretty. But being ugly is better than being nothing. I have no one, I care for no one, and I'm cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] A man's survival can take many shapes and the shape in which a man finds his humanity is not always a human one.
The Forms of Things Unknown [1.32]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] There is a fear that is unlike all other fears. It has a special, clammy chill, a deadly gift for inspiring deeper, darker dread. It is the fear of unentered rooms, of bends in lonely roads. It is the fear of the phone call in the middle of the night, of the stranger you recognize, perhaps from a nightmare. It is the fear of the unexpected, the unfamiliar. It is the fear of the unknown.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Murder, madness, and other lurking horrors are the raw certainties that await you in the depths of the unknown. And no switch of time, no twist of plan can cancel your meeting with it. For some night, in some blind panic, you will venture into the world of dark reality. And on that night, you will keep your rendezvous with the unknown.
Season 2
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Night comes too soon on the battlefield. For some men it comes permanently, their eyes never open to the light of day. But for this man, fighting this war, there is never total darkness. The spidery beams of light in the sky are the descendants of the modern laser beam -- heat rays that sear through tungsten, steel and flesh as though they were cheesecloth. And this soldier must go against those weapons. His name is Qarlo, and he is a foot soldier, the ultimate infantryman. Trained from birth by the state, he has never known love, or closeness, or warmth. He is geared for only one purpose: to kill the enemy. And the enemy waits for him.
- Control Voice: [Act One narration] Time is fluid. The waters of forever close — and passage may not be completed. The present and the future are for a moment united. And the Enemy, half-today, half-tomorrow, is locked between…
- Control Voice: [closing narration] From the darkest of all pits, from the soul of man, come the darkest questions. Did the soldier finally come to care for those he protected? Or was it just his instinct? Questions from the dark pit, but no answers, for answers lie in the future. Is it a future in which men are machines born to kill? Or is there time for us? Time. All the time in the world. But is that enough?
Cold Hands [2.02]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The most brilliant planet in our solar system is Venus, named for the Greek Love-Goddess. It is closer to Earth than any other planet — twenty-eight million miles away. Until sometime in the last half of the twentieth century it is still a planet shrouded in mystery, enveloped in a heavy blanket of clouds and steam. Because its surface temperature was believed to be several times that of Earth's, it was not thought possible for Man to reach Venus and come back... until one day, somebody did it.
- Jeff Barton: [to his wife] I love you more than anything in this world... You're the only "world" I can discover over and over again, every time I come home to you, every time I'm close to you. You're the best of all possible worlds.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The eternal, never-ceasing search for knowledge often leads to dark and dangerous places. Sometimes it demands risks not only of those who are searching, but of others who love them. These, in their own special way, know that knowledge is never wasted, nor is love.
Behold, Eck! [2.03]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Since the first living thing gazed upward through the darkness, man has seldom been content merely to be born, to endure, and to die. With a curious fervor he has struggled to unlock the mysteries of creation and of the world in which he lives. Sometimes he has won. Sometimes he has lost. And sometimes, in the tumbling torrents of space and time, he has brief glimpses of a world he never even dreams.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Paradoxically, man's endless search for knowledge has often plundered his courage and warped his vision, so that he has faced the unknown with terror rather than awe, and probed the darkness with a scream rather than a light. Yet there have always been men who have touched the texture of tomorrow with understanding and courage. Through these men, we may yet touch the stars.
Expanding Human [2.04]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] As far back as men have recorded their history, veils have been lowered to disclose a vast new reality — rents in the fabric of Man's awareness. And somewhere, in the endless search of the curious mind, lies the next vision, the next key to his infinite capacity...
- Roy: What difference does it make, whether it's 20 minutes or 20 years, since neither amounts to the faintest echo of the tiniest whisper in the thunder of time?
- Peter: But don't you see, you'll be doing exactly what you say your fighting: killing. Using force because your certain your right.
- Roy: But it wouldn't be the same thing because we'd be advocating nothing, forcing nothing. Now there are many stong men in the world today fighting for tolerance, compassion, wisdom, for your right to be different, to be wrong even. They wouldn't be touched. Only the dogmatists, the infallible.
- Peter: But that's trying to play God. You just can't do that.
- Roy: Why not if God's too busy? Who to say its not his will, that we're not his agents?
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Some success, some failure, but either way the gnawing hunger to know is never sated, and the road to the unknown continues to be dark and strange.
Demon With A Glass Hand [2.05]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Through all the legends of ancient peoples — Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerican, Semetic — runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death ... the hero who strides through the centuries ...
- Battle: I'm prepared to die.
- Trent: How prepared? Why not give yourself a couple of minutes?
- Battle: We all knew we would die when we came on this mission. It was worth it.
- Trent: You can stay alive in this time.
- Battle: I don't care about that. Helping my race is more important.
- Trent: Bargain week on patriots.
- Battle: Call it what you like. I'm not afraid to die.
- Trent: Really? Then why are you whispering? You Kyben were always super patriots, especially when you bombed Earth from ten miles out. How does your patriotism sit with burning women and children alive?
- Battle: That's war.
- Trent: So's this.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Like the Eternal Man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh, one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love. Without friendship. Alone: neither man nor machine, waiting. Waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility. Movement, but not life.
Cry of Silence [2.06]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In the not-distant future, the sound of man will invade those unknown depths of space which as yet we cannot even imagine. In his own world, there are no places left beyond the reach of his voice. His neighbor is no longer just next door, but anywhere at the end of a wire. And it all began when prehistoric man discovered the art of communication.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] 'And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.' The sound of man probes the dimensionless range of space seeking an answer. But if it comes, will he hear? Will he listen? Will he comprehend?
The Invisible Enemy [2.07]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In the vast immensities of cosmic space, bold adventurers streak their way to join battle with strange enemies on strange worlds. The alien, the unknown, perhaps even the invisible, armed only with Man's earthbound knowledge...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Battle joined. Casualties? Yes. Resolution? Victory, of a sort. A painful step from the crib of destiny. On another day, a friend, perhaps, instead of a deadly peril. Part of the saga of the Space Pioneers.
- Control Voice: [opening narration] Outward stretches the quest for truth. Stars without end. Timeless infinities. A billion billion galaxies. Man's imagination reaches out and out while betimes the farthest reaches of knowledge are found in the smallest places...
- Jonathan Meridith: Final report, Dundee Planet, star system Wolf 359. The experiment is finished. My planet is destroyed. My recommendation to the Dundee Foundation change the planet selected. Its not a place we can land our spacemen, but the project is feasible. A planet can be recreated in a laboratory. The odds are... the odds are, Mr Dundee, the next time... the next time, it'll be a place of some love and warmth like our planet Earth.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] There is a theory that Earth and sun and galaxy and all the known universes are only a dust mite on some policeman's uniform in some gigantic super-world. Couldn't we be under some super-microscope... right now?
- Control Voice: [opening narration] God looked upon his world and called it good. But man was not content. He looked for ways to make it better and built machines to do the work. But in vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Out of every disaster a little progress is made. Man will build more robots and learn how to make them better. And, given enough time, he may learn how to do the same for himself.
The Inheritors (Part 1) [2.10]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] In the troubled places of the world, the devil's hunter finds rare game. For man-made savagery is only the instrument for a secret terror stirring from its dark place of ambush...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Man looks up at the stars and dreams his futile dreams. Child of the universe, his toys are ignorance. His games: fantasy. Not even the master of his own fate, it is the devil's puppeteer who stretches his fingers to answer the question: What will happen next?
The Inheritors (Part 2) [2.11]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The earth, tumbling grain of sand in the darkness of unending space, plays host to a strange and awful guest: unsought, uninvited, possessor of fearsome power, purveyor of dark deed, a relentless traveler on the road to its mysterious goal...
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The Inheritors are on their way. In a universe of billions of stars, there are places of love and happiness. On this earth, in this spot, magic settled for a moment, wonder touched a few lives and a few odd pieces fell smoothly into the jigsaw of creation.
Keeper of the Purple Twilight [2.12]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] There is no limit to the extension of the curious mind. It reaches to the end of the imagination, then beyond into the mysteries of dreams, hoping always to convert even the dreams into reality for the greater well-being of all mankind.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] The curious mind cannot be chained. It is a free mind endlessly searching for the greater freedom that must eventually make every living being joyfully complete within himself, therefore at peace with himself and his neighbors.
The Duplicate Man [2.13]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] Since the first day that Man stared up at the stars and saw other worlds, there has been no more haunting question than this: What will we find there? Will there be other creatures and will they be like us? Or when that ancient dream comes true, will it turn into a nightmare? Will we find on some distant frozen planet an alien life of unimaginable horror?
- Control Voice: [closing narration] In all the universe, can there be creatures more strange than the species called Man? He creates and destroys. He fumbles and makes mistakes. But the thing which distinguishes him is his ability to learn from his mistakes.
Counterweight [2.14]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] The great unknown: limitless heavens crowded with sparking mysteries, challenging man's curiosity. But the heavens are not oceans. Man cannot push a boat into its currents and set sail for the next horizon. The heavens are a mystery only science can solve as it penetrates the unknown.
- Harvey Branson: The greatest danger? I don't know, there's so many. Maybe the worst are the ones we make for ourselves by seeing things that don't exist except in our own imagination.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Panic button pressed. Passengers returned. One side always in the sunlight, the other always in darkness; the known and the unknown. Frightening to each other only when they are both unknown... and misunderstood.
The Brain of Colonel Barham [2.15]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] With the world growing more crowded, the great powers strive to conquer other planets. The race is on. The interplanetary sea has been charted; the first caravelle of space is being constructed. Who will get there first? Who will be the new Columbus?
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Progress goes on. One experiment fails, but even out of failure, valuable lessons are learned. A way will be found, someday, somehow. It always is.
The Premonition [2.16]
[edit]- Control Voice: [opening narration] On the fabulous spawning grounds of man's ever increasing knowledge of science and technology, ancient half-forgotten legends seemingly have no place. Except one: the legend of the Gordian knot. A knot so intricate and convoluted that no man could untie it, for there are problems so perplexing that they're seemingly impossible to solve when man ventures to the outer limits of his experience.
- Control Voice: [closing narration] Man is forever solving the most perplexing problems as he ventures ever further into the unknown. But where are the outer limits of his ingenuity? Will he ever encounter a problem, a gordian knot which he cannot ultimately cut?
- Control Voice: [opening narration] The persistence of Man's curiosity led him into new worlds. Without conquering his own, he invaded the sub-world of the microscope and the outer-world of space. It is said turnabout is fair play... but is it?
- Control Voice: [closing narration] A few days, a week, a month, will the earth be visited by a stranger from the universe? A warm, compassionate stranger to tell us of wonders beyond imagination, of life beyond comprehension, of secrets from the treasure house of stars.
External links
[edit]
- The Outer Limits quotes at the Internet Movie Database