Episode
The Outer Limits: Small Friends
Overview
When he was young, Gene Morton killed a man who tried to steal the credit for his brilliant research. Now working on a prison assembly line fixing the busted tape decks of fellow inmates, his chances at parole have been sabotaged by his own honesty and sense of guilt. Although it's a lonely life, late at night, after lights-out, Gene brings out his small friends, a swarm of microscopic machines that he made from prison scrap and keeps in a matchbox.
Details
- Series
- The Outer Limits
- Season
- Season 5
- Episode
- Episode 3
- Air date
- 1999-02-05
- Runtime
- 45 min
Episode context
Small Friends is Episode 3 in Season 5 of The Outer Limits. It aired on 1999-02-05. The runtime is 45 min.
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Episode 2: Donor
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.
Episode 4: The Grell
The Grells were rescued from their dry and dying planet by humans, only to be turned into slaves on earth. Now the aliens are rebelling against their masters, fighting a guerilla war against a government lead by men like High Secretary Paul Kohler (Ted Shackleford).
More episodes from this season
Episode 1: Alien Radio
Stan Harbinger (Joe Pantoliano) is a top-rated talk show host with a flair for the outrageous and a reputation as a skeptic's skeptic. Assisted by his producer Trudy (Cynthia Nixon), Stan takes special delight in shooting down callers who claim to have alien encounters, especially people like Eldon DeVries (Alan Zinyk), who believes his body has been taken over by aliens. However, when Eldon commits suicide by setting himself on fire in front of Stan, things begin to go wrong for Stan. A plan to syndicate the show is threatened by protests from UFO believers, angry at Stan's role in Eldon's death.
Episode 5: The Other Side
Dr. Neal Eberhardt (Ralph Macchio), a former boy genius gone bitterly toseed, studies brain-damaged and comatose patients hoping to learn how the brain reroutes itself. Despite having a revolutionary new machine to work with - the Neural Intercortex Stimulation Array or NISA - Dr.Eberhardt is getting nowhere. To make matters worse, his valued assistant Vince Carter has just quit. But suddenly, Neal has a breakthrough.
Episode 6: Joyride
Theodore Harris (Cliff Robertson) first time in space, in 1963, didn't go quite as planned. Alone in his Mercury capsule, he panicked and aborted the mission when a mysterious violet light penetrated the cockpit and began to envelop his body. In the investigation that followed, no evidence could be found to support his story, leaving a blot on Harris NASA record and his life in ruins. Now at age 63, he knows he can never make amends with his estranged wife Madelaine (Pamela Parry), but he feels that he could clear his name if he could just get back to where he saw the light.
Episode 7: The Human Operators
For as long as Man (Jack Noseworthy) can remember, he has lived aboard Ship as it floats through space. And for just as long, Ship has been his master, instructing him to do the repairs that keep Ship working and torturing him whenever he shows any signs of free will. But when Ship orders him to repair the Artificial Intelligence module Man's Father (Noah Heney) smashed years earlier in a final, fatal act of defiance, Man learns Ship's secrets...
Episode 8: Blank Slate
Hope Wilson (Robbie Chong) knows there's something different about the bruised and breathless man who stumbles into the homeless shelter she runs with her mentor, Jack Parsons (Larry Musser). He looks like a junkie, but his hands are soft and his fingernails manicured. Tom Cooper (Dale Midkiff) doesn't know who he is, where he is and why two well-dressed men, Vincent (Michael Tiernan) and Cole (Brian Jensen), are chasing him. He only knows that the small metal case that he defends so fiercely contains five vials that hold all his memories, reduced to crystal form, as well as a specially designed injector that can delete or restore those memories.
Episode 9: What Will the Neighbors Think?
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...
Episode 10: The Shroud
When Marie Wells (Samantha Mathis) and her husband Justin (Robert Wisden) can't have a child on their own, they turn to the fertility clinic at the Tilford Institute for help. There, Dr. Gail Cowlings (Sara Botsford) uses in-vitro fertilization to implant an embryo in Marie's uterus. What Marie doesn't know, but Justin does, is that the embryo was actually created from DNA lifted from the Shroud of Turin...
Episode 11: Ripper
In Victorian London, someone is killing prostitutes, someone the police have dubbed "Jack the Ripper." On the face of it, John C.V. York (Cary Elwes) is a likely suspect. A once-respected doctor who sunk to absinthe and laudanum addiction after his misdiagnosis killed the young daughter of a Duke. He retains a connection to polite society thanks to the devotion of Lady Ellen Chamberlain (Clare Sims), who loves him and hopes to marry him. But, he is also a habitue of the seedy district where the killings have taken place and has the medical knowledge to make the precise, surgical cuts that are the Ripper's modus operandi...
Episode 12: Tribunal
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...
Episode 13: Summit
Deep space. A small planetoid. The sight of an intergalactic summit between two warring worlds. Diplomats from both Earth and Dregocia, a distant planet, are dispatched to the neutral ground to work out a peace accord.