Mark Holcomb and David C. Holcomb

Television series episode guides abound in print and on the Web, and the original incarnation of The Outer Limits has inspired more than its share of them. From Gary Gerani's prototypical listing of episode specifics in issue four of Starlog to David J. Schow's groundbreaking, multi-part explication in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine (which formed the basis for his seminal 1986 book The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, co-authored with Jeffrey Frentzen), this unique series can at long last be called well documented. This is a heartening turn of events when one considers the series' general obscurity from the time of its cancellation in 1965 to its mid-1980s revitalization, when Schow's book and MGM-UA's initial videocasette release of the episodes brought it renewed interest.

But few of the seemingly myriad Outer Limits episode guides—particularly those that dwell solely on technical and/or practical aspects—explore the individual films in any depth. Paradoxically, few television shows merit this sort of exploration more so than The Outer Limits, yet most authors (Schow and Frentzen excluded) attempt little beyond generalizations about its moody production values or misguided diatribes on its supposedly weekly monsters. This is understandable, to a degree, for The Outer Limits—both as individual films and as a thematic whole—is a dense and often confounding experience that eludes simple summarizing. As any dedicated follower well knows, and as any intelligent casual viewer can sense, there's more going on in any one of these episodes than in most other series' combined.

It is, in part, this lack of careful consideration that led us to add our own perspective to the fray. This extended Outer Limits episode guide is intended neither to detail the history of the series (Schow and Frentzen have done so already, thoughtfully and conclusively), nor to clutter the ether with yet another list of players, producers and technicians that any decent online movie database could provide. Nor do we propose to convert the uninitiated: if you are not at least marginally passionate about the series and familiar with its episodes, you'll most likely be lost three paragraphs in—if you aren't already. Our goal is instead both more personal, for the series is intensely meaningingful to each of us, and more broad: by revealing what these often brilliant and troubling films have meant and still mean to us, we hope to underscore their importance as complex works of art. We'll look in detail at the moral and psychological implications of a select group of the episodes, and hopefully stumble upon some heretofore undisclosed insights into the series, its creators and, possibly, ourselves. If we succeed in this goal, then, the pages that follow will be an extension of The Outer Limits itself: lofty, groping, honest—sometimes clumsily so—and altogether human.

We would have liked to have covered each of the series' scant 49 episodes, but doing so would have taxed our focus and, in some cases, our interest: what, after all, is there to say about "The Probe"? Instead, we chose to cover those episodes that have had a lasting impact on us as individual viewers (and, we believe, on the medium of television), as well as those that have been, for one reason or another, overlooked. Some entries, like "The Man Who Was Never Born," would undeniably fit into the first category; yet much has already been written about this exemplary episode, whereas little has been said about "The Guests," say, or "Fun and Games." We want to give these films their due. In an attempt to further categorize an essentially uncategorizable group of films, and as a kind of critical shorthand, we've also developed a (hopefully) useful method of rating the episodes. Each review includes one of the following three icons:

	The important episodes that ensure The Outer Limits a lasting place in television history. These are the classics, and each one contributes to the series' permanent, broadening effect on the medium.
	Episodes that are interesting, but perhaps not seminal. These entries may not live up to the best of The Outer Limits, but each one achieves something uniquely intriguing and characteristicly profound.
	These episodes are inconsistent with the series' established themes and style. Far from the worst The Outer Limits has to offer, they are simply problematic in structure or intent, or both.

One of the many recurring themes in The Outer Limits is that of the clarifying effect of dreams. Aabel, the misguided, insectoid Erosian from Anthony Lawrence's "The Children of Spider County," equates dreaming with spiritual and physiological fertility, and refers to the human soul as a "dream machine." Perhaps this is what The Outer Limits does best: it reminds us to dream of our better selves in the face of cosmic and intrinsic uncertainty. We truly hope to do justice to this important series, for it represents not only a creative high watermark for television, but also a time when that medium caught, for the briefest of moments, the fashion of dreaming.

Copyright © 1998–2001 Mark Holcomb & David C. Holcomb. All rights reserved.