Episode
The Outer Limits: Glyphic
Overview
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.
Details
- Series
- The Outer Limits
- Season
- Season 4
- Episode
- Episode 9
- Air date
- 1998-03-20
- Runtime
- 45 min
Episode context
Glyphic is Episode 9 in Season 4 of The Outer Limits. It aired on 1998-03-20. The runtime is 45 min.
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Episode 8: Rite of Passage
The birth of a child is a joyful event, but for Shal and Brav, two young naive humans who live in a small commune in the woods, it is also a mystery and moment tinged with sadness. After Shal gives birth to a son, the first of the commune to do so, she and the baby are taken away by Mother, a wise alien who acts as a parent to the young people. When the aliens send Shal home without her baby, she asks Brav to help her to rescue the child. With the knowledge Shal has gained from her time with Mother, they break through the protective barrier set up by the aliens to discover a new and fascinating world. It is a dangerous trip, with stinging, snake-like crawlers lurking in the shadows. But, it is also a journey of discovery as Shal and Brav find evidence that lead them to believe that their real parents were killed by the aliens. They find their baby, and after a fight with an alien, escape into the forest.
Episode 10: Identity Crisis
Captain Cotter McCoy (Lou Diamond Phillips) is the first of a new breed of soldier. As part of a top secret program overseen by Dr. Greg Olander (Robert Joy), General Langston Chase (Dale Wilson), and Cotter's friend, Colonel Pete Butler (Scott Kraft), the contents of McCoy's brain can be temporarily transferred into an android version of himself. This process creates a virtually indestructible fighting machine with the smarts and experience of a human being. But, one day something goes wrong. During the transfer, the real McCoy's body is blasted with electricity, stopping his heart, inflicting serious brain damage and leaving Cotter's mind trapped in the android body. To make matters worse, the interface between his mind and the android body is flawed. McCoy's motor control is already beginning to break down and the interface will likely collapse within 12 hours.
More episodes from this season
Episode 7: Josh
Tabloid TV reporter Judy Warren (KATE VERNON) knows she's come across a big story when she sees the videotape shot by two tourists in a remote Alaskan park. The tape shows Josh Butler (Alex McArthur), a recluse who lives in a cabin near the park, bringing back to life a young girl who has died after a fall, a feat he accomplishes by generating a mysterious blue glow. But, she only discovers how big a story it is when her pursuit of the strange young man is cut short by a top-secret military unit that is also chasing him. It seems that the blue glow sent out electromagnetic pulses that knocked out two satellites orbiting 20,000 miles above the Earth and the Air Force wants to know what's going on. A battery of tests doesn't produce any answers, leaving the brass, lead by Col. Roger Tennent (Scott Hylands) and Major Samuel Harbeck (Larry Musser) to debate whether Butler is an alien or an angel - someone to be dissected or to be worshipped.
Episode 11: The Vaccine
It has been three months since the doomsday cult unleashed the genetically engineered Berlin C virus, and today most of the world is dead or dying. Among the living are a group of hospital patients and their nurse, Marie Alexander (Maria Conchita Alonso), who have survived because they were already under quarantine when the virus struck. They are running out of food and fuel when a soldier arrives with a new vaccine from the Center for Disease Control. But, there's only enough for three doses and it will take three days for the vaccine culture to develop enough to be effective. It falls to Marie to maintain order until the vaccine is ready, and to decide who will get injected.
Episode 6: Relativity Theory
Biologist Teresa Janovitch (MELISSA GILBERT) is a civilian among military men, traveling on the Resource Survey Vehicle Cortez to Tau Ceti Prime in search of minerals for an Earth that has squandered its own. Initial signs indicate that the planet is both uninhabited and rich in mineral resources, which could mean a million dollar payday for both the crew and the company that owns the Cortez. But on the first exploration, the crew is attacked by gigantic and apparently primitive aliens. After the command falls to Janovitch, she is overpowered by her crew: Sgt. Adam Sears (Jeremy Ratchford), a veteran of pacification missions on Earth, who favors annihilation of the new race and an ambiguous Corporal Charles Pendelton (Tim Guinee). Sears leads a patrol that hunts down and kills the aliens, in the process seizing a golden object that appears to be a religious totem. As he celebrates his slaughter, Janovitch examines his victims and makes a shocking discovery.
Episode 12: Fear Itself
For as long as he can remember, Bernard Selden (AYRE GROSS) has been haunted by a paralyzing fear. It started when he was six, when he set a fire that killed his four-year-old sister and today, at 27, the fear clings to him like a blanket. But, Dr. Adam Pike (Jeffrey Demunn) has hope for a cure. He has diagnosed Bernard's condition and believes that if he can isolate the part of the brain responsible for fear, the amyglada, he can cure him. The series of injections and radiation designed to build a layer of calcium around the amyglada produces stunning results; Bernard's fear recedes. He even starts a relationship with his neighbor Lisa (Tanya Allen). But there are side effects. Now, Bernard can use his brain to make others feel the kind of crippling fear he used to feel. He is still a prisoner of the past, haunted by images of Mr. Wilkes (Alex Diakun), the owner of the foster home where Bernard's sister died.
Episode 5: In the Zone
With its deadly lasers and hand-to-hand battles, 'The Octal' is a combat sport for a new generation of athletes - but Tanner Brooks is no longer a young man. Although he's promised his wife Jessica that this will be his final tournament, Tanner is desperate to go out a winner. Dr. Michael Chen has a way to make that happen. Through an experimental treatment that taps the power of the human nervous system, Chen accelerates Tanner's reflexes and perceptions. To Tanner, everything in the Octalbegins to move in slow motion ... and Tanner quickly becomes unbeatable. However, there are side effects: Jessica notices that Tanner is tired, haggard and his hair is going gray. But, when Tanner's body begins to blur and fade out of existence, Tanner and Jessica must choosebetween one last moment of glory ... their love for each other ... and oblivion.
Episode 13: The Joining
When a transport ship crashed and wiped out the colony on Venus, Capt. Miles Davidow (C. Thomas Howell) was the sole survivor. But, after he's rescued by a team that includes his fiancee, Kate Girard (Amanda Tapping) and Scott Perkins (Jeffrey Jones), it soon becomes clear that Davidow did not escape unscathed. Removed from the high radiation atmosphere of Venus, his body is reacting to the Earth's air like that of a chemotherapy patient. When doctors give him the radiation his body seems to crave, strange things start to happen. Davidow's body begins to spawn duplicate parts - a hand, a torso and more from wounds that miraculously heal. In spite of this, Miles and Kate get married while he's still in isolation, but his time on Venus and the strange creatures he encountered there have had a profound change on Miles.
Episode 4: In Another Life
Mason Stark hates his life. A year ago, he lost his wife Kristin to a mugger's bullet and he still blames himself for not doing more to protect her. And today, he was fired from his job. With a gun in his hand and a severance package on his desk, Mason finds himself torn between suicide and psychosis - between killing himself and killing his co-workers. But before he can do either he's pulled into another dimension, into a world where there are hundreds of Mason Starks, each with a different life and a different character. The version of himself that brought Mason here is a powerful, manipulative man - we know him as Stark - who, in this dimension, runs the same company that fired Mason. Stark explains that he built a machine, the Quantum Mirror, to explore all those different versions of himself, only to have his experiment go horribly wrong because he pulled a murderous version of himself, a man we know as Mace, into his reality.
Episode 14: To Tell the Truth
Dr. Larry Chambers (Gregory Harrison) helped build the colony on the Janus Five. He and fellow scientist Amanda Harper (Kimberly Huffman) run computer simulations that show the planet's star will flash over in a matter of days, emitting waves of deadly radiation, so Dr. Chambers urges evacuation. This is not a popular recommendation, especially among the colony's leaders who include council chairman Franklin Murdock (William Atherton), security head Montgomery Bennett (Alan Scarfe) and Amanda's father, Ian Harper (Ken Pogue). They point out that Chambers has been wrong before - the colony had to be moved at great cost after he warned of deadly volcanic activity - and suggest that his judgment has been clouded by the death of his wife Elise. When that doesn't stop Chambers, Murdock and Bennett discredit him by falsely accusing him of being one of the aliens who originally inhabited the planet.
Episode 3: Hearts and Minds
The mission for Captain Taverner and his squad of North American Federation (NAF) soldiers is simple: search and destroy invading aliens on a distant planet to prevent them from stealing a mineral which is a vital source of energy for earth, and a vital source of profit for the NAF. To guard against infection from the hideous bug-aliens, the soldiers are forced to inject special genetic drugs; however, the mission becomes complicated when Lieutenant Rosen is wounded in a firefight with the aliens. Rosen begins to hallucinate, experiencing disturbing images of the aliens, and when she discovers that her druginjector has malfunctioned, she begins to suspect that the drugs do more than protect the soldiers from infection. Ultimately, Rosen must take command and risk the lives of her soldiers on the hunch that their mission may have more to do with human politics than alien enemies.
Episode 15: Mary 25
Charlie Bouton's (Tom Butler) last project for the Innobotics Corporation was a sexy female companion robot named Valerie 23. It almost put the company out of business when it went berserk and attacked someone. So, his bosses are skeptical when he and scientist Melburn Ross (Michael Shanks) introduce Mary 25 (Sophia Shinas), a nanny robot adapted from the earlier model. In order to overcome their doubts, Charlie proposes letting the robot take care of his own children - a move that is met by serious resistance from his wife Teryl (Cynthia Geary) and his children Brad and Brook. From the beginning, there are problems. Unlike the human nanny, Carmen, Mary doesn't grasp the subtleties of child care and Melburn must fine tune her. But, Melburn sees that the problems go beyond Mary's programming. Charlie is smitten with his inorganic creation and has begun to abuse Teryl - a woman with whom Melburn was once romantically involved.