Year: 1999
Genre: Sci-Fi, TV series
Country: Canada, United States
Language: English
Guest stars: Joe Pantoliano, Cynthia Nixon, Ralph Macchio, Roddy Piper, David Kaye, Malcolm McDowell (voice), Bruce Harwood, Tabitha St. Germain, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, Marcia Cross, Michael Ironside, Kevin Conway, Kevin Nealon, Daphne Zuniga, Daniel Baldwin, Nathan Fillion, Amanda Plummer (in a clip from a previous season)
Eye candy: Nixon, Leslie Hope, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Susannah Hoffman, Polly Shannon, St. Germain, Cross, Jenny Levine, Sarah-Jane Redmond, Zuniga, Jessica Steen, Angeline Ball, Megan Gallagher
Run time: 16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor: Alliance Films
The Outer Limits is a great TV series to have lying around your house. I now have the first five seasons, and I often throw in a disc when there’s nothing on television and I have no movies to watch. A rare occurence, but it’s nice to know that regardless of what season and what disc I choose, I will be entertained and get at least two good sci-fi episodes out of four. That being said, the DVD sets are getting weaker as they go on. Not because the episodes are getting worse – they are as good as ever. But there is much less nudity on the Season Five DVD set (out August 3rd from Alliance Films) than there was in Season One. It was pretty exciting to flip through the episodes of season one to see if, say, Alyssa Milano got naked (she did). Now, no one gets naked.
The vast number of guest stars on this show makes it a virtual certainty that someone in every episode is recognizeable. Whether that person is a former star (Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid, for example) or a future star (Marcia Cross, Desperate Housewives, or Cynthia Nixon Sex And The City), they’re in there. Much like The X-Files, which got weaker and weaker the more they focused on aliens, so too did The Outer Limits. The episodes that take place in space are pretty lame. But the ones that take place on Earth, about a scientist serving a life sentence in prison, or a doctor trying to revive brain-dead patients, or a murderer involved in full-body transplants, they are fantastic.
I can’t sit down and watch all 16 hours of this show at one time. It’s overwhelming, and there are enough bad space-themed episodes to make it irritating. But for the most part, the show remains excellent despite the lack of nudity. That’s really the only bone I have to pick with The Outer Limits Season Five. There are episodes that cry out for nudity, but there is none. One episode in particular, where a self-aware spaceship voiced by Malcolm McDowell, gets the human operator of his ship to have sex, over and over, with the smoking hot human operator of another self-aware ship, so they can have a kid to keep the spaceships alive. The gorgeous operator of the other ship is Polly Shannon, and the episode features constant sex. But no nudity at all. How chicken. Other than that though, The Outer Limits is great.