Episode
The Outer Limits: Down to Earth
Overview
The true believers have gathered once again for the North American UFO Convention where there are typically squabbles, petty betrayals and egotistical grandstanding. Max Buford has in his possession what appears to be afragment from an alien spaceship. Max's arrival causes a flurry of activity, as the fragment's true origins are thrown into question.
Details
- Series
- The Outer Limits
- Season
- Season 6
- Episode
- Episode 10
- Air date
- 2000-04-21
- Runtime
- 45 min
Episode context
Down to Earth is Episode 10 in Season 6 of The Outer Limits. It aired on 2000-04-21. The runtime is 45 min.
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Episode 9: Stasis
In the year 2123, with all but nature destroyed and resources scarce, society has been divided into three kinds of people. There are Alphas, like Larissa, who work half of the time and spend the rest in a state of suspended animation called stasis. There are Betas, like Eric, who alternate work and ""sleep"" modes with the Alphas. And then there is the Elite, who form a privileged aristocracy that rules over the Alphas and Betas. In the face of increasing pressure from stasis-jumpers of the Resistance, the Elite insists that extreme measures are necessary for survival of the species. Their plan, however, doesn't account for the power of the human heart. Larissa and Eric have fallen in love even though their only contact, other than furtive holographic messages, is when they trade places in the stasis pod they share.
Episode 11: The Inner Child
Anne Reynolds is a cold young woman, estranged from her mother, Laura, haunted by memories of her dead father and terrified of intimacy of any kind. Then one night, while repairing a flat tire she is attacked by a mugger. Severely wounded, she dies on the operating table only to come back to life five minutes later. However, it soon becomes clear that something inside her has changed. Anne learns she was one set of Siamese twins and her mother agreed to an operation that killed her sister, Marie, while allowing Anne to live. Now the remnants of Marie are starting to assert themselves changing Anne.
More episodes from this season
Episode 8: Simon Says
Gideon Banks lost his wife Liz and son Simon in a horrific car accident some twenty years ago. At the time of the accident he was involved in something called the Neural Archiving Project - NAP for short. The technology was developed to create smart computers - transferring human engrams to computers. The company eventually gave up on the technology, but Gideon didn't. After years of quietly perfecting it, he built a small robot, from parts he stole from Concorde Robotics, where he now works. Zoe, Gideon's niece, discovers Gideon's secret, the robot contains actual neural engrams from the real Simon. She becomes worried not only about Gideon but also about the robot that sounds and acts a lot like her little cousin used to.
Episode 12: Glitch
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.
Episode 7: Seeds of Destruction
Macroseed, a cutting edge biotechnology company, chooses the small farming town of Hobson to test and develop TX-40. This is a new genetically- engineered strain of fast-growing corn that, it hopes, will increase yields and make the company millions. Linda, the veterinarian in Hobson, begins to wonder about the safety of TX-40 when Old Man Rivers brings in a dead cat from his field that has horrible mutations, including a giant tumor which sprouts a fifth leg.
Episode 13: Decompression
Senator Wyndom Brody has just won the New Hampshire primary, upsetting a heavily favored opponent, and he's flying to South Carolina to press his campaign for the Presidency. As the plane files south, it's hit by lightning. The plane and its passengers appear unaffected, but a mysterious woman appears in Brody's private quarters and warns him the strike has damaged the airplane, which will crash on landing, killing him and six others. She explains she is a projection from the future, a virtual time-traveler sent here to save him because his presidency is the key to preventing an apocalyptic future. If he is to live he must shoot out the emergency exit and allow himself to be sucked out of the plane by decompression, whereupon he will be saved by the stranger's sophisticated technology.
Episode 6: The Beholder
Patrick Tarloff, a university English professor, lost his eyesight in a childhood accident and now, at age 28, he has regained it through a cutting-edge operation. But when the bandages are removed, he sees more than just the world that has been dark to him for more than 20 years. He sees a mysterious woman, a vision that his neurosurgeon Dr. Angus McCadden and his psychologist, Dr. Louise Burroughs, assure him is only a hallucination. But then Patrick sees her again, communicates with her, touches her. Her name is Kyra, she writes in glowing letters that float in the air, and she needs his help to go home.
Episode 14: Abaddon
It's late in the 23rd century and the aging interplanetary hauling vehicle Pequod is on a ten-year reclamation project on behalf of The Company, the corporation that has run North America since 2102. The crew is tucked away in hyper-sleep when the ship comes across a mysterious object floating in space. Awakened from their artificial slumber, they retrieve the pod and are shocked to discover the body of Virgil Nygard, executed 150 years earlier for leading his militia in the slaughter of more than a million people. They are even more shocked to discover that Nygard is alive.
Episode 5: Breaking Point
When Andrew McLaren is fired from his job at Anderson Technology, he suspects that he's being let go because the company president doesn't want to give him credit for his work on the CPS-1200, an as-yet untested time machine. Defiant, Andrew decides to take a trip in the machine. When he reaches his destination, two days in the future, his head is throbbing with a migraine and he is shocked to find that the police are looking for him. Fleeing the lab, he returns home to discover his wife lying in a pool of blood and a man fleeing the scene in a car. Shocked at his discovery, Andrew is determined to use his time machine to change what happened.
Episode 15: The Grid
When Scott Bowman gets an urgent message from his brother Peter, he decides to drive back to their hometown of Halford, Washington to see what is wrong. When he gets there, he discovers that Peter is dead and his wife Eilleen has been charged with his murder. But that's not the only shock awaiting Scott. The town where he grew up has been transformed. Antenna towers dot the landscape and people act strangely, as if they are under some kind of sporadic mind control.
Episode 4: Manifest Destiny
The UFS Mercury is in route to the planet Trion to do scientific tests in preparation to establish a colony when they get a distress call from a battleship, the UFS Rhesos. It was only weeks ago the the Rhesos dropped bombs on Trion, killing the local flora and fauna, making it ready for colonization. When the crew of the Mercury boards the Rhesos, they quickly realize that things are not as they should be.
Episode 16: Revival
Ezra Burnham and his daughter Sarah are old hands at the business of faith healing. Ezra, a preacher who lost his faith when his wife died, is the front man, the one who lays his hands on the deaf and lame. But Sarah is the key to the act, working backstage and communicating with Ezra through a tiny earphone about the plants she's scattered through the audience. It's all going well until one day a strange young man in a wheelchair approaches Ezra near the end of a revival meeting. Luke is not a plant, but when Ezra lays his hands on him, he not only rises from his wheelchair, he begins to float six inches off the ground. After the meeting, Luke and his mother Serna approach Ezra with a proposition. If Ezra will teach Luke the secret of the revival circuit, Luke will continue to work his mysterious magic at Ezra's side.