History Series / TheOuterLimits1995

Thanks in part to the boom in popularity of supernatural and Sci-Fi shows [[TheNineties at the time,]] like ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' and ''Series/TheXFiles'', it was decided by the Higher Ups that the 1960s cult classic ''The Outer Limits'' would be revived in the hope to capitalize on similar success ([[HistoryRepeats which is oddly similar to how the original series was commissioned in the first place]]). And unlike the short-lived run of its predecessor, this series would indeed be successful enough to last 7 seasons, from 1995-2002; continuing on in syndication (currently on terrestrial station Comet) to this very day.

The format remains mostly intact, though it does notably have less emphasis on the MonsterOfTheWeek being its main plot basis. Generally, the stories involve exploring a specific scientific concept and its effects on humanity, or projects a completely alternate society that may highlight the flaws of our own (through FantasticRacism for instance). A lot of episodes drift towards being [[ScareEmStraight cautionary tales]] (or [[CruelTwistEnding just being cruel]]) so expect a lot of {{Bittersweet|Ending}} or {{Downer Ending}}s. Also of note is that, oddly for an anthology series, each season would usually involve a ClipShow which would attempt to [[ArcWelding tie some of its unconnected stories together]] (more on that below).

-> ''"There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity...and beyond...\\\
We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear....\\\
You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the deepest inner mind to....'' '''''The Outer Limits."'''''

Thanks in part to the boom in popularity of supernatural and Sci-Fi shows [[TheNineties at the time,]] like ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' and ''Series/TheXFiles'', it was decided by the Higher Ups that the 1960s cult classic ''The Outer Limits'' would be revived in the hope to capitalize on similar success ([[HistoryRepeats which is oddly similar to how the original series was commissioned in the first place]]). And unlike the short-lived run of its predecessor, this series would indeed be successful enough to last 7 seasons, from 1995-2002; continuing on in syndication (currently on ''Chiller'' & terrestrial station ''Comet'') to this very day.

You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the deepest inner mind to....'' '''''The Outer Limits"'''''

-> ''"There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity...and beyond...\\

We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear....\\

-> ''"There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture.''
-> ''We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical.''
-> ''We can deluge you with a thousand channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity...''
-> ''and beyond..."''

Exactly 30 years after ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' was ScrewedByTheNetwork in 1965, the series was once again brought to the airwaves (by Creator/{{Showtime}} and later by the [[Creator/{{Syfy}} Sci-Fi Channel]]) for a new generation to experience stories that reach from the deepest inner mind to the, well... [[TitleDrop You know.]]

Thanks much in part to the boom in popularity of supernatural and Sci-Fi shows [[TheNineties at the time,]] like ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' and ''Series/TheXFiles'', it was decided by the Higher Ups that the 1960s cult classic ''The Outer Limits'' would be revived in the hope to capitalize on similar success ([[HistoryRepeats which is oddly similar to how the original series was commissioned in the first place]]). And unlike the short-lived run of its predecessor, this series would indeed be successful enough to last 7 seasons, from 1995-2002; continuing on in syndication (currently on ''Chiller'' & terrestrial station ''Comet'') to this very day.

The series's Control Voice is supplied by Kevin Conway, and the surreal artwork of the introductions can mostly be attributed to Jerry Uelsmann. The series is available in DVD sets. If you were looking for the original 1963 series, that is [[Series/TheOuterLimits1963 over here.]]

* TheOuterLimits1995/TropesAToH
* TheOuterLimits1995/TropesIToP
* TheOuterLimits1995/TropesQToZ

!! This show provides examples of:

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[[folder:A - C]]
* AbsentMindedProfessor: The scientist in the episode "Double Helix." His son calls him out on being so focused on his research that he was never there for his family. The scientist is incredibly shocked when he finds out that his teenage son is dating a 30 year-old woman.
* AcademyOfEvil: There's an episode that featured a school where students were implanted with a mind control chip. One of the classes featured assassination as a viable business practice for getting rid of the competition.
* AdamAndEvePlot:
** The {{revival}} did this in a two-part story with the episodes "Double Helix" and "Origin of Species". The sample size was 8 students and one professor, and it is immediately pointed out that they could not possibly repopulate the planet alone. It's {{hand wave}}d by the [[spoiler:spaceship that took them into the future, which altered their genes to ensure maximum diversity and created hundreds of babies to further pad the gap]]. Subtly played with in the fact that both the professor and his son are exempt from being "Adams" due to a genetic disease (and are therefore vaporized), [[spoiler:but live on as holograms to assist their friends]].
** The episode "Phobos Rising" also hints at this plot, with the Earth possibly destroyed and only two Mars colonies with a combined population of less than fifty as survivors. Unfortunately, accidents fueling EnforcedColdWar paranoia end up destroying both colonies with only a pair of {{defect|ingForLove}}ors surviving. [[spoiler:Subverted in the final few minutes, when the surviving pair on Mars receive a transmission from Earth, telling them that the Moon was accidentally destroyed and in the wake of the devastation on Earth, both sides have called a truce.]]
** The episode "Resurrection" takes place in a world where humanity has been replaced by [[TurnedAgainstTheirMasters robots who overthrew their former masters]], who are now extinct. Two robot scientists decide to bring back humanity by illegally breeding an adult human male. They manage to keep him hidden until they can deactivate all the other robots, sacrificing their own lives in the process. The last scene shows that they have also bred an adult human female so they can repopulate humanity. [[EsotericHappyEnding Of course this still ignores population genetics, and they didn't give the guy the necessary skills to keep breeding humans artificially]].
* AdaptationalVillainy: A surprising case in "Feasibility Study," as it's an adaptation of an episode from the 1960's version of the show. The basic plot of both is the same: A group of aliens teleport an entire Earth neighborhood to their planet -- they need slaves, and want to see if humans are a good fit for the job. The original episode features the Luminoids, who are looking for a race to enslave because they suffer a genetic condition that turns them into immobile stone as they get older; they explain that they don't use their extremely advanced machinery for simple, everyday chores because it seems like an unworthy application for such amazing technology. In the remake, the potential enslavers are the Triunes; the genetic condition, and with it any possibility of sympathy, is removed, as the aliens are simply lazy and don't want to bother with working.
* AdaptedOut: In "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", the title character starts to hallucinate that the 8-by-10 Man, the subject of the photo that came with the frame on top of her television, is talking to her and giving her instructions on how to kill her husband Joe. In the 1984 short story by Creator/StephenKing, it was a picture of UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}}.
* AdaptiveAbility: "The New Breed" had a man infested with {{Nanomachines}} programmed to heal and protect his body, which they did [[LiteralGenie mindlessly and efficiently]] -- he nearly drowns and grows gills, he gets beaten up and grows extra layers of bone, and his skin develops poison glands like a jellyfish, so ''no one can touch him.'' They also, for some reason, decide that having a limited field of view is a flaw, so they grow an extra pair of eyes on the back of his head.
* AfraidOfBlood: In "Living Hell," protagonist Ben Kohler faints at the sight of blood. This is what convinces his doctor that he's unlikely to be the vicious killer whose visions he's been inadvertently receiving.
* AgeWithoutYouth: In the episode "Blood Brothers," the CorruptCorporateExecutive uses an experimental regenerative drug on himself in an attempt to cure his Huntington's disease and become biologically immortal. It renders him unable to die but degenerates his body into a fragile husk.
--> '''Control Voice:''' There is an old proverb which says: "BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor, for it might come true." And if your wish is for immortality, it is something you will have to live with for ''a very long time.''
* AintTooProudToBeg: "Lithia" ends with a soldier begging ''very loudly'' not to be shoved into a cryo-tube. [[spoiler: He gets louder when he finds out the one sentencing him to this knows his name because she's his wife whom he presumed was long dead.]]
* AlasPoorVillain: Valerie 23 from the episode of the same name. She's a RobotGirl designed for love, then goes on a jealous rampage when she thinks that another human is taking the object of her affection away from her. When she's destroyed she acknowledges that she fears death, which the protagonist had earlier deemed is what makes something truly alive.
* AlienAbduction: In "Beyond the Veil", Eddie Wexler checks himself into a psychiatric institution which caters to people who were, or at least think they were, abducted by aliens.
* AlienAutopsy: In "Relativity Theory", the xenobiologist Teresa Janovitch performs autopsies on two of the aliens killed by other members of the expedition to Tau Gamma Prime.
* AlienBlood:
** In "Promised Land", the Tsal-Khan's blood is black.
** In "The Voyage Home", the alien's blood is green and slimy.
** In "The Grell", the titular race's blood can alter DNA, meaning that a human who is exposed to their blood will turn into a Grell.
* AlienInvasion: This ''is'' an ''Outer Limits'' show we're talking about...
* AlienSky: In "Relativity Theory", Tau Gamma Prime has two moons.
* AliensAreBastards: Episodes dealing with aliens sometimes take this approach. One episode ("Corner of the Eye") featured aliens that wanted to steal the Earth's atmosphere and even looked like literal devils. But there were just as many episodes with nice aliens who wound up in conflict with humans due to misunderstandings or because HumansAreBastards.
* AliensSpeakingEnglish: Another carryover from its predecessor, often {{Handwaved}}.
* AllMythsAreTrue: In "Under the Bed", the child psychiatrist Dr. Jon Holland figures out that various myths about child snatching monsters such as trolls, the boogeyman and Baba Yaga were inspired by real creatures. Furthermore, their ability to shapeshift inspired the Hindu myth of Rakshasa. This, coupled with the fact that they move around in the cover of darkness, has allowed them to (mostly) hide their existence from humanity. One such creature has been snatching children in Jon's home town Buford, including his brother, since at least the early 1800s, taking one each month on the night of the full moon. Amazingly, no one notices the area's far, far higher than average number of child abductions until Jon and his girlfriend Detective Caitlin Doyle are on the case in [[CaptainErsatz true Mulder and Scully style]]. The creature [[TakenForGranite turns to stone when exposed to direct sunlight]] but there is another lurking under a little girl's bed in UsefulNotes/{{Paris}}. Cue scary music.
* AlmightyJanitor: In "The Message," a janitor reveals that he used to be an astrophysicist before he was fired for mental problems, and uses his expertise to save the day.
* AlternateTimeline:
** In "A Stitch in Time", numerous alternate timelines are created due to time travel.
** In "Final Appeal", the sequel to "A Stitch in Time", Ezekiel tells the US Supreme Court justices that time travel has taught him that the future is malleable and, as a result, it is more accurate to talk about futures plural as he has witnessed several different timelines. He cites the example of an alien race launching a devastating retaliatory attack on Earth in the 24th Century in one of these timelines (as seen in "Relativity Theory") as evidence that technology is inherently evil and destructive to humanity. The events of other episodes presumably take place in different alternate timelines.
* AlternateUniverse: In "In Another Life", the Eigenphase Industries CEO Mason Stark transports various versions of himself from parallel universes to his own.
* TheAlternet: In "Stream of Consciousness", people can access the Stream, an online repository of all human knowledge, via neural implants.
* AmnesiacDissonance: In "Blank Slate," an amnesiac is being helped by a woman he met while they are being chased by unknown people. Every so often, he gets an injection of liquid that appears to hold his memories, remembering more and more each time. In the end, he is revealed to be [[spoiler: the evil boss of the people chasing them and uses the same procedure to erase the woman's memories.]]
* AnachronismStew: In "Heart's Desire", UsefulNotes/{{Oregon}} is still a territory in 1872. In reality, it became a state in 1859.
* AncientAstronauts:
** In "Corner of the Eye", the aliens tell Father Anton Jonascu that their people visited Earth millennia ago and their teachings shaped the development of every human religion. However, like everything else they tell him, this turns out to be a lie.
** In "Double Helix", an alien race seeded Earth with their DNA about 60 million years ago, which eventually resulted in the evolution of humanity. The sequel "The Origin of Species" reveals that this storyline is a slight variation on the trope as the race in question was the first intelligent species to evolve on Earth who eventually left the planet and returned aeons later.
** In "Sarcophagus", while searching for evidence of an advanced Neolithic culture in the Wrangell Mountains in UsefulNotes/{{Alaska}}, a team of archaeologists discovers an amber-like cocoon in a burial chamber which has been undisturbed for 10,000 years. They initially believe that the skeleton in the cocoon belonged to someone with deformities but they later come to the conclusion that he was an alien. After Curtis Grainger touches the amber, he begins to receive psychic images of the alien being attacked and killed by Neolithic tribesmen. From these images, he determines that the cocoon was placed in the burial chamber as the tribesmen thought that he was a god.
* AndIMustScream:
** Occurs at the end of "Blood Brothers." Michael Deighton, fearing death by Huntington's Disease, takes the newly discovered wonder drug Deighton C to live forever. However, it turns out the drug has the side effect of using up all of cell energy, thus turning him into [[AgeWithoutYouth an incapacitated and aging body]] similar to Tithonus.
** Andy in "The New Breed" turns into this as a result of nano-bots that reshape his body (giving him eyes on the back of his head, an extra ribcage, gills, and nematocysts) all of which leaves him in constant pain. He is eventually killed, but it's revealed he passed the nanobots to his fiance, dooming her to the same fate.
** Happens with the murderous priest in the episode "Fear Itself," driven mad in the end and permanently experiencing being burned alive, a throwback to the punishment given to the SS commander in ''Series/TheTwilightZone'' episode "Death's Head Revisited" by the ghosts of his victims. LaserGuidedKarma, anyone?
** Season 5 episode "Déjà Vu" deals with a failed teleportation experiment that traps the main character in a shrinking time loop. While he manages to break free in the end, the antagonist isn't as lucky. [[spoiler: He gets caught in another time loop that forces him to relive the last few seconds preceding a nuclear explosion at point blank range, most likely for all eternity.]]
* AndManGrewProud: A variation occurs in "Lithia" as it takes place less than forty years AfterTheEnd and the accompanying myths have been deliberately created. The teacher Ariel, whose grandmother Hera remembers life before the Great War when men ruled the world, tells the children of the enclave that, in the aftermath of the war, the Goddess unleashed a plague known as the Scourge which killed all surviving males as punishment for their evil.
* AndTheAdventureContinues:
** The ending of "Something About Harry" as [[spoiler: Zach has now joined the alien hunters as one of their agents.]]
** At the end of "Time to Time", Lorelle Palmer has officially joined the time travel for hire agency Chrononics in 2059.
** In the final scene of "Double Helix", Dr. Martin Nodel, his son Paul, Hope and six students board the alien ship which will take them to the homeworld of the race that seeded Earth with their DNA 60 million years ago. It also serves as a SequelHook given that the storyline is continued in "The Origin of Species".
* AndroidsArePeopleToo: This argument is made in both "The Hunt" and "In Our Own Image".
* ApparentlyHumanMerfolk: In "The New Breed," a scientist is injected with nano-bots who "correct" his cancer and myopia. When he and his friend test the limits of the robots abilities, one of the tests is to see how long the man can stay underwater. The nano-bots misinterpret this by giving the man gills so he can breathe, seriously {{squick}}ing him out.
* AppearanceIsInTheEyeOfTheBeholder: In "First Anniversary", Dennis can see his wife Barbara in her true form, that of a repulsive aquatic alien, while his best friend Norman Glass sees her in the new form that she has assumed to trick him. This is because Dennis has developed a resistance to Barbara's ability to fool his senses after a year of close contact. Later, when the same thing happens to Norman, he sees his own wife Ady as she truly is while the paramedics who are taking him to hospital see her as the beautiful woman whose form she assumed when she first met Norman.
* ArcWelding: The season finales of the {{Revival}} are {{Clip Show}}s that tie together the plots of various previously unconnected stories, one involving a SuperSoldier project and another with a pair of immortal EnergyBeings who have been [[ChessMaster setting up the events of several stories]], all for no other purpose than their own amusement.
* ArchaicWeaponForAnAdvancedAge: In "Rule of Law," the protagonist wields a firearm while everybody else wields laser guns. When he confronts a LynchMob, they mock his weapon for being inferior, but he defeats them with ease.
* Area51:
** In "Josh", the military intends to send Josh Butler to Area 51 for study.
** After her archaeological team discovers an alien skeleton incased in an amber-like cocoon in "Sarcophagus", Natalie Grainger does not to tell the government as she fears that the remains will be confiscated and taken to Area 51 and that she and the others will be imprisoned there, never to be heard from again.
* ArgentinaIsNaziLand: In "Tribunal", the time traveller Nicholas Prentice tells Aaron Zgierski that the altered timeline indicates that the Nazi war criminal Karl Rademacher (alias Robert Greene) bought a one-way ticket to UsefulNotes/{{Argentina}} and was never heard from again. However, Aaron and Prentice make sure that he doesn't get the chance to go to Argentina by taking him to Auschwitz in 1944 dressed as a prisoner.
* AssholeVictim: The men killed by the time traveller Dr. Theresa Givens in "A Stitch in Time" are the epitome of this trope. All 20 of them were future rapists and serial killers whom she killed before they had an opportunity to commit their crimes. She saved the lives of 83 women in the process. [[WellIntentionedExtremist Dr. Givens considered their deaths to be just and legal executions]].
* AssimilationAcademy: In "Straight and Narrow," the private academy actually uses MindControl on all who attend.
* AsYouKnow: The opening of "The New Breed" provides an infodump on nano technology that also contains several basic biological principles that the audience in the room (all scientists) should already be perfectly aware of.
* TheAtoner: In "Small Friends", Professor Gene Morton is a convict in his 70s who killed a fellow scientist for trying to steal the credit for his {{Nanomachines}} research 15 years earlier. He destroys his chances of being paroled by telling to the parole board that he could not say with certainty that he would not react the same way in similar circumstances. However, it turns out that this was a calculated move as he believes that he deserves to stay his prison because he feels so guilty and wishes to atone for his crime.
* AuraVision: In "Alien Radio", Stan Harbinger gains the ability to see the aliens that live inside the bodies of certain humans. He typically sees a golden outline of the alien superimposed over the relevant human.
* AxesAtSchool:
** In "Abduction," five high school kids are abducted by an alien. They eventually find out that the alien chose them because one of them brought a gun to school and was planning to shoot the other four.
** "Final Exam" took this trope UpToEleven; the antagonist brought a ''nuclear bomb'' to school.
* BackAlleyDoctor: In "Unnatural Selection", Arkelian administers black market genetic engineering treatments to Joanne Sharp's unborn child in an abandoned church.
* BackFromTheDead: In "New Lease," a pair of scientists make a device which can apparently resurrect the dead. Unfortunately, the first test subject died within 24 hours of being resurrected. When one of the scientists dies, and is resurrected with this machine, he believes he has the same 24 hour lifespan. So he goes vigilante on the murderer and turns himself in. [[CruelTwistEnding Of course,]] it turns out the device resurrected him for real.
* BackToFront: The episode "Zig Zag" starts InMediasRes in the middle of an armed standoff between a group of cyber-terrorists threatening to blow up a MegaCorp and the police, then goes backwards chronologically to explain how they got in this situation before jumping back to the present for the climax.
* TheBadGuyWins: Quite often actually.
* BatmanInMyBasement: An inversion in the episode "Resurrection," where two robots clone / birth a human after humanity goes extinct, and have to hide him from the other human-hating robots. The robots ultimately sacrifice and shut off themselves, and their brethren to give the Earth back to the new human race.
* BeautyEqualsGoodness: {{Subverted|Trope}} in the episode "Mind Over Matter". Dr. Stein (Creator/MarkHamill) is experimenting with entering people's minds with the help of an AI, but has unrequited feelings for his colleague Dr. Carter. When she enters a coma after an accident, he plugs her into the machine and spends time with her inside the virtual world. Then the AI goes rogue, admitting that [[KissMeImVirtual it's fallen in love with Stein]] and [[MurderTheHypotenuse wants him for itself.]] A being looking like a disheveled Carter appears to kill the real Carter, prompting Stein to kill the attacker. [[spoiler: Except it turns out that the disheveled looking Carter ''was'' the real one because her mind was only partially active and therefore distorted the avatar. The pretty avatar that he assumed to be Carter was the AI all along.]]
* BenevolentAlienInvasion:
** The episode "The Second Soul" [[PlayingWithATrope plays with this trope]] when non-corporeal aliens are allowed to settle on Earth... and to inhabit the bodies of dead humans. The main conflict is between a character who can't accept the loss of the woman he loved, and the fact that the body's new occupant is in no way her.
** In "Music of the Spheres", alien music begins to mutate those who listen to it. As those who haven't listened to the music investigate, they learn that [[spoiler: the sun is about to undergo a shift, becoming deadly to humanity as it is now. The mutated form will survive. Instead of being the usual DownerEnding twist, they learn this in time to get the word out, and spread the broadcast far and wide enough for everyone on Earth to be able to undergo the change.]]
* BetterToDieThanBeKilled: In "The Human Factor," a robot rigs a reactor to blow in order to KillAllHumans. The protagonist is trapped in a room with the robot. He begs the robot to snap his neck. When it asks him why, he answers that he would rather die that way than get blown up. It refuses.
* BigBulkyBomb: An episode involves humans fighting a losing war against a race of LizardFolk. In order to win it, humans build a "sub-atomic bomb," which looks like an early atomic bomb but many times larger, capable of causing an EarthShatteringKaboom. Unfortunately one of the crew is TheMole, and the ship sent to drop the bomb gets disabled. [[spoiler: The last surviving crewmember ends up killing the mole, and drops the bomb... On Earth, because the mole turned the ship round while everyone was knocked out.]]
* BigNo:
** Delivered by ''Mark Hamill'' himself at the end of "Mind Over Matter."
** Creator/RobertPatrick delivers one at the end of "Quality of Mercy."
** The two evil aliens deliver this as they are defeated at the end of "Better Luck Next Time."
** At the end of the teaser of the pilot episode "Sandkings", Dr. Simon Kress delivers one when the Sandking which escaped from his lab is torched with a flamethrower.
* BinarySuns: In "Nightmare", the Ebonites' solar system is said to have two suns.
* BitByBitTransformation: In an episode, "Quality of Mercy", a human has been captured by aliens. He meets another captive, who is being subjected to numerous surgeries to gradually change her body into that of the aliens. [[spoiler: Turns out she was actually an alien spy being reverted out of her human disguise, [[CruelTwistEnding all the while playing on his sympathies to gain information.]]]]
* BittersweetEnding: The most common type of ending in the Revival, behind outright {{Downer Ending}}s.
* BizarreAlienBiology: In "The Grell", the titular race have a biological process known as Grell alchemy which is capable of altering the DNA of other organisms. Jesha uses his saliva to neutralise the radiation found in fruits which grow in the vicinity of [[UsefulNotes/{{Seattle}} Old Seattle]] so that they are safe to eat. If humans are exposed to Grell blood, it has the capacity to alter their DNA so that they become Grells themselves. When Jesha heals his master High Secretary Paul Kohler at the insistence of his wife Olivia, Kohler soon begins to turn into a Grell and gains some of their characteristics such as the ability to see ultraviolet light by day and heat signatures by night.
* BizarreAlienReproduction:
** In "The Voyage Home", the alien that invades the Mars III spacecraft reproduces by releasing a spore into an organism's body which then leaves the body and replicates it. The process is fatal to the organism in question. The alien's plan was to proliferate its species by converting humanity en masse once the spacecraft returned to Earth.
** In "Paradise", a dying alien woman who was the [[LastOfHisKind Last of Her Kind]] arrived on Earth in 1946 and met four young women. With their consent, she implanted an egg in each of their bodies so that her species would have a chance to survive. The eggs took 50 years to mature. The alien left a special light which, 50 years later, made the four women young again but only long enough to conceive. Three of them had sex with strangers in the attempt. Not only were they unable to conceive but they rapidly aged to death. Their bodies decomposed just as quickly. On the other hand, Helen is successful in conceiving a baby with Gerry, her late husband Charles' brother, as she had always been in love with him and vice versa. Within about an hour, Helen is heavily pregnant and about to give birth. The resulting child appears to be a human girl, which Helen's daughter Dr. Christina Markham and her husband Grady intend to raise as their own since they can't have children. Helen returns to her true age but her Alzheimer's has been cured as a gift from the alien.
* BizarreSexualDimorphism: Downplayed in "Quality of Mercy". The male members of the hostile alien species are much larger than an ordinary human; the female members are a lot smaller. [[spoiler:Which makes it more surprising when Cadet Bree Tristan turns out to be one of them.]]
* TheBlackDeath: In "Last Supper", Jade discovered that she was immortal at 20 years old when everyone else in her village in Spain died of the Black Death and she survived.
* BlasphemousBoast: In "The New Breed," the protagonist, the inventor of nanomachines that can heal any damaged or diseased cells in the body, is accused of playing God. His response: "Let's just say God created a flawed man. I think I can do better." Let's just say his attempt to do better [[TransformationHorror doesn't quite go according to plan.]]
* BlessedWithSuck: In "The New Breed" Dr. Andy Groening is dying from cancer. When he learns that his brother in law has designed medical nanomachines which aren't yet ready for human testing, Andy injects them into his body to save himself. At first, his cancer disappears, his senses improve, and he becomes stronger and faster than the average man. The Suck comes when the nanomachines decide to make him invulnerable and make his body grow two more eyes, gills, and poisonous skin, turning him into a freak who is in constant pain from all the changes.
* BodyHorror:
** In "The Joining", after Captain Miles Davidow injects himself with the DNA of an indigenous [[UsefulNotes/{{Venus}} Venusian]] lifeform, he begins to grow duplicate, though initially deformed and unfinished, body parts such as a hand and a torso. It is an extremely painful process.
** In "Nightmare", Lt. Christopher Valentine is struck by an Ebonite weapon which causes the skin around his mouth to fuse over. The same thing happens to the skin around Major Ronald Neguchi's eyes. Both men are eventually returned to normal.
* BodySurf:
** "Better Luck Next Time" featured two nearly immortal aliens who could inhabit any living host and can survive for however long they can bind to the central nervous system. After the host dies, they have only moments to transfer into another body until they die, since they can't live too long in the Earth's atmosphere. If they transfer, they will still live for however long they can repeat the sequence. If they fail, they disintegrate. This was a sequel to another episode: One of the duo was in fact ''UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper!''
** "Free Spirit" featured a person involved in a mind transfer experiment whose consciousness became disconnected from his body after the scientists chose to terminate the experiment by killing the test subjects. He takes several years to learn how to possess people's minds and then comes back to get revenge on his killers. He's become so good at it that in one scene he repeatedly jumps between two people [[FinishingEachOthersSentences to finish a single sentence.]]
* BornAsAnAdult: In the episode "Resurrection", two androids breed a human male in some sort of giant embryonal sac. He comes out as a fully-matured adult.
* [[BornInTheTheater Born on Pay Television]]: The revival's introduction, similar to the original's, has a "please stand by" notice added to it in syndication since the Creator/{{Showtime}} airings did not have commercials.
* BottleEpisode: The series had quite a few over the years, several of which were written by Brad Wright.
** The vast majority of "The Conversion" takes place in a small roadside diner.
** "Quality of Mercy" takes place almost entirely in a prison cell.
** The [[FrameStory Frame Stories]] of all of the series' {{Clip Show}}s (bar "Better Luck Next Time") took place predominantly in one location.
** After the teaser, "Trial by Fire" takes place entirely in the control room of a nuclear bunker.
** Almost all of "The Heist" takes place in a warehouse.
** All but two scenes of "The Deprogrammers" took place in the abandoned KBDL 13 television studio.
** "The Light Brigade" takes place entirely onboard the titular spaceship.
** Almost all of "Dead Man's Switch" takes place in an underground bunker.
** "The Vaccine" takes place entirely in and around a hospital.
** All but two scenes of "Mary 25" take place in and around the Bouton household.
** With the exception of three scenes above ground, all of "Monster" takes place in an underground bunker.
** Except for the teaser and the final scene, "Decompression" took place entirely on a plane.
* {{Bowdlerise}}: The cable and home video versions feature nudity and sexual content that, no surprise, is absent from the syndicated version that plays on commercial stations.
* BrainComputerInterface:
** In "The Light Brigade", the Chief Weapons Officer has an ocular implant which allows his brain to connect to the computer of the ''Light Brigade'' and arm the subatomic bomb.
** A slight variation occurs in "In Our Own Image" since it involves an interface with the optic nerve as opposed to the brain directly. The android Mac 27 has a device which can connect his neural net to Cecilia Fairman's optic nerve so he can show her recordings and recreations (in other words, clips from previous episodes) contained in his memory files.
* BrainUploading:
** In "Second Thoughts", Dr. Valerian, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, is able to transfer his memories and personality into the brain of Karl Durand. Karl subsequently kills three other men - the first incident being an accident - and transfers their minds in his brain.
** In "Identity Crisis", the US military is able to temporarily transfer the mind of a soldier named Captain Cotter [=McCoy=] into an indestructible android body. Their long-term goal is to use hundreds, if not thousands, of these androids with human minds on the battlefield. Two other unspecified countries are conducting similar experiments.
* BrotherSisterTeam: Howie and Sheila Morrison work together to rid the townspeople of the ancient parasites in "From Within".
* BrownNote: In "Music of the Spheres," the titular music is a signal from space which, in addition to being extremely addictive, ends up causing a series of dramatic physical transformations in listeners. Notably, unlike most examples of the brown note, [[spoiler: the changes the music causes ultimately turn out to be beneficial -- it transforms humans into a form that is resistant to a high-UV environment, which is what the Earth is about to become due to the sun undergoing a "shift."]]
* BullyingTheDisabled: In "Stream of Consciousness", Mark frequently verbally abuses and condescends to Ryan Unger, who is unable to access the Stream due to brain damage.
* ByTheEyesOfTheBlind: In "Music of the Spheres," the alien audio signal is only recognizable as music to teenagers, but not to adults or younger children.
* CainAndAbel: "Blood Brothers" featured two brothers running their late father's pharmaceutical company to discover cures against various fatal diseases, with Spencer (a scientist working in a hazardous chem lab) as Abel and his big brother Michael (one of the company's directors) as Cain. Spencer wants to develop the cure for the general good of mankind, while Michael wants to limit it to the wealthy few to make more profit. Michael eventually attempts to murder Spencer and Spencer's girlfriend so he'll be the only one who knows the secret of the drug. [[spoiler: Michael then takes the drug to cure his own Huntington's and his body soon starts to decay due to the side effects, with Spencer unable to cure him.]]
* CameBackWrong: This is the main driver in the episode "New Lease." A scientist invents a regeneration device. When he uses it on a patient, the patient comes back but dies horribly shortly afterwards. When he is shot, he uses the device on himself, and believing he will die soon, murders the robber. He finds out the device worked properly on him -- because unlike the test subjects, his body was never frozen -- and he will now go to prison for the rest of his life.
* CanonWelding: Although the revival is an anthology show like its predecessor, it usually ended its seasons with money-saving clip shows tying multiple prior episodes together into a single continuity.
* CaptivityHarmonica: There is a variation in "Small Friends" in which Lawrence plays a saxophone.
* CassandraTruth: Subverted in "Living Hell." A guy is caught after he warned the cops about the actions of a SerialKiller who he's been telepathically linked to for the last several weeks. The cops initially believe that he's the killer, but after he provides proof of the neural device implanted in his brain, they believe him.
* CastFromLifespan: "Blood Brothers" featured a serum that seemed to cure all ills, like the FountainOfYouth. Too late, the antagonist discovers that instead of simply giving you a new lease of life, it uses up all your {{life energy}} in a short burst, followed by RapidAging and death.
* CelebritySurvivor: In "The Deprogrammers," Earth has been invaded by aliens and mankind has been brainwashed into slaves, one character stating that the aliens took a perverse pleasure in turning celebrities and leaders into slaves. A group of rebels rescue the protagonist, including his wife, and try to deprogram him by reminding him of his life, including showing him a poster of his favourite movie.
--> "I wonder where they are right now, I wonder where all the famous people are now."
* TheChainsOfCommanding: The episode "Trial by Fire" deals with the US President being sequestered in a bunker after being informed that a massive object, traveling at half the speed of light, is going to hit Earth in roughly a half hour. It's up to him to decide what to do from there, though he has plenty of noise from his advisers.
* ChildByRape: In "Dark Child," an alien abducts Laura, rapes her, then returns her to Earth, where she gives birth to a daughter, Tammy. Although deeply traumatized by the experience, Laura does her best to raise Tammy. Years later, when Tammy is a teenager, the alien returns and reveals his previous assault on Laura was a ploy to create a powerful HalfHumanHybrid to use as a weapon against humanity. Just like any deadbeat dad, the alien's attempt to get [[WeCanRuleTogether Tammy to join him]] fails, then mother and daughter team up and kill him.
* ChildEater:
** In "Under the Bed," a boogeyman like monster steals children from their bedrooms to devour them.
** In "The Grell", many humans believe that the Grell eat humans, especially children, but this is only a myth.
* ChromosomeCasting: "The Light Brigade" has an all-male cast.
* {{Chronoscope}}: In "Time to Time", the time travel agency Chrononics has a viewing portal which allows them to monitor their agents when they travel through time.
* CircuitJudge: "Rule of Law" has a judge travel to an alien planet to preside over the case of an alien accused of attacking humans.
* ClipShow: One each in Seasons 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Two in Season 7 (Those being the last two episodes...)
* ClonesArePeopleToo: In "Replica," the clone in question, complete with the memories of the original, was created to replace the wife of a bio engineer who was wrongly thought to be irreversibly comatose. When the original awakens, a discussion begins of how to handle the copy, but murder is clearly off the table and instead their plan would allow the clone to have her own independent life.
* CloneJesus: In "The Shroud", a religious fanatic and televangelist named Reverend Thomas Tilford has scientists extract DNA from the Main/ShroudOfTurin to order to recreate UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} and insert the embryo into Marie Wells' uterus. While still in the womb, the child begins to display strange powers.
* CloningBlues: The {{revival}} has "Think Like a Dinosaur" and, unusually, subverts the trope with "Replica," which also has one of the few {{happy ending}}s in the new series.
* ColorMeBlack:
** In "The Grell", humans have enslaved a race of RubberForeheadAliens. An important politician survives a plane crash with his family and his Grell servant, but is critically injured. The Grell heals him by infusing his master with Grell DNA, which will slowly transform him into one of them. Whereas he had previously callously killed a Grell servant who tried to flee, when he's treated in the same way by a human soldier who tries to kill him for being a "half-breed" he starts to see the error of his ways.
** "Tribunal" features an ending where a {{Nazi|Protagonist}} war criminal who escaped justice for 50 years is [[spoiler: put into the uniform of his prisoners and taken back in time to his own camp. His younger self shoots him for being Jewish.]]
* ColonizedSolarSystem:
** In "Quality of Mercy" and "The Light Brigade", there are colonies on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} and various moons in the Solar System.
** On a much smaller scale, there is a research facility called Aphrodite on UsefulNotes/{{Venus}} in "The Joining".
** In "Phobos Rising", both the Free Alliance and the Coalition of Middle Eastern and Pacific States have bases on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}. It is also mentioned that both blocs had moonbases 30 years earlier and that the Alliance had one on a body known as Sagan V.
** In "The Human Factor", the sequel to "Phobos Rising", there is a base on UsefulNotes/{{Jupiter}}'s moon Ganymede in 2084.
** In "Worlds Apart", there is mention of a moonbase.
* CondemnedContestant: "Judgment Day," where the criminals are hunted down by the families of those they murdered. [[spoiler: The protagonist manages to prove that the show's producer had framed him to get ratings. The episode ends with the producer sentenced to be hunted.]]
* CorruptCorporateExecutive: In "Virtual Future," Creator/DavidWarner played Bill Trenton, a ResearchInc's evil CEO. He hires a research scientist who developed a device that could predict the future, but decides to use the device to win an election by murdering his rival.
* CourtroomEpisode:
** While the original 1964 version of "I, Robot" involves a robot named Adam being tried for the murder of his creator Dr. Link, the 1995 remake involves a capacity hearing to determine whether Adam deserves a trial or should be simply dismantled.
** The Season Three episode "Bodies of Evidence" takes place in 2037 and involves Captain William Clark being put on trial for the murder of three other members of the crew of the space station ''Meridian''. He is defended by his ex-wife Robin Dysart.
** The Season Six finale "Final Appeal" (which was originally intended as the SeriesFinale) takes place in 2076 in a world that has banned technology in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war 20 years earlier which killed 80% of the world's population. It features Dr. Theresa Givens (a returning character from Season Two's "A Stitch in Time") appealing her death sentence for using her time machine before the United States Supreme Court.
** The Season Seven episode "Rule of Law" involves Judge Joshua Finch, newly arrived on the colony planet Daedalus, presiding over the trial of a Medusan who is accused of the murder of three humans.
* CowboyEpisode: "Heart's Desire" takes place in the Oregon Territory in 1872.
* CrapsackWorld: Many episodes are interconnected through the mysterious [[EvilInc Innobotics Corporation]] and their RidiculouslyHumanRobots, not to mention that every season produces a couple of sequel episodes for earlier stories for double the CruelTwistEnding!
* CrisisOfFaith: In "Corner of the Eye", Father Anton Jonascu has been ministering to the sick and homeless in his community for decades but suffers a crisis of faith as he cannot solve all of these people's problems, let alone all of the world's problems.
* CruelTwistEnding: The series does this so often that the trope used to be named ''Outer Limits Twist.''
** "Quality of Mercy:" John Skokes is tortured alongside another human captive named Bree Tristan in an alien prison. She gradually has alien skin grafted onto her in order to convert her into one of them. Once John reveals to his fellow captive Bree that humanity secretly has been feigning defeat and is in fact planning a secret attack on the alien home world in thirty days led by a hidden group of its fighters located on the far side of the sun. She is then taken away and reveals she is fact a spy changing back into her true form meaning he just revealed a major secret to the enemy with him having nothing to do to stop them.
** "The New Breed:" Dr. Andy Groening succeeds in killing the nano-bots by sacrificing his life by allowing Dr. Stephen Ledbetter to kill him and destroy the lab containing the remaining nano-bots in a fire. However, earlier on Andy had made love to his fiance Judy (Stephen's sister) infecting her with the robots as implied by her cutting herself on some glass after his death which is instantly healed meaning all of his sacrifice was for naught.
** "Birthright:" Senator Richard Adams and his doctor Dr. Leslie [=McKenna=] realize that he is in fact an alien that has been lobbying a new fuel additive that will in 30 years time render the earth inhospitable for all life except the aliens. He informs a trusted reporter of this information Kyle Hallar. When Richard enters a taxi cab later that day, he finds out on the radio that Hallar has been murdered and that Leslie has been framed for the crime. He tries to escape the taxi only to find the driver is one of his kind.
** "The Voice of Reason:" Randall Strong is unable to persuade the committee that the threat of alien invasion of Earth is imminent as the committee votes in favor to disregard his claims. He realizes that Thornwell, one of the most vocal opponents to Strong, may in fact be an alien (the same kind of Senator Richard Adams from the previous episode wanting to terraform Earth); as a result he shoots him dead. Unfortunately, it turns out that of the five members of the committee, Thornwell was one of two that secretly supported him and voted for his investigations to be taken seriously. It is revealed that two of the newest members of the committee are in fact aliens who belong to the same kind as Adams and are elated to what has just transpired with Adams' superior from the last episode to become the new head of the committee replacing Thornwell.
** "Mind Over Matter:" A scientist creates an AI machine to reach into a female lovers coma patient's mind to help wake her up. It's a living dream and he falls in love with her avatar in the dream despite others saying her mind would have been too weak to become visible as the avatar due to her condition and it is simply a projection made by him. Occasionally during this therapy they are frequently attacked by a grimy evil looking version of the woman he believes is the AI attempting to take over whenever they become intimate. In the end he lures and strangles the evil woman killing her. The patient then dies in real life as it is revealed that the avatar he was falling in love with was the AI who gained a crush on him and wanted to explore the notion of love and that the ''evil'' version was in fact the woman he was in love with as she was really too weak to manifest fully inside the virtual environment. As a result he has just killed the one woman he always loved at the behest of the computer AI.
** "Beyond the Veil:" Eddie Wexler is unable to save Courtney from being killed by Dr. Sherrick's experiments and is framed for her murder. Not only that, he realizes that not only was his previous abduction real, but Sherrick and all of the staff are aliens, and take him away to be isolated from the rest of the world.
** "First Anniversary:" Despite her attempts to keep Norman Glass as her husband, Ady is unable to do so and when the effects of her hallucinogenic disguise wear off, he becomes so repulsed by her true form that he is carried off by paramedics. Her friend's husband dies under similar circumstances. A while later Ady is seen changing her form again and is being chatted up by another man meaning she will have to repeat the cycle every year and will never find true love. (Oh, and she'll also probably drive many more men to insanity or death.)
** "Straight and Narrow:" An exclusive private school brainwashes its students for use as mercenaries, similar to the movie ''Film/DisturbingBehavior'', which it predates. The one student who is immune to the process manages to escape and tell authorities -- who prove to be alumni, and drag him back to undergo the procedure (now corrected to work on the likes of him) as the assassination he'd tried to prevent is successfully carried out.
** "Trial by Fire:" Newly elected president Charles Hasley has used the slogan: "Let me be your friend" but is brought underground when a meteor is heading towards Earth. It is realized it is an armada of aliens. After a few incidents that are thought to be signs of an invasion a message from the aliens is sent. Tensions grow as other nations and the public become aware of the aliens and the President sends a message back to admit that the aliens video message cannot be interpreted and that any attempts to enter the atmosphere will be viewed as a threat by the rest of the world. Unable to translate the message from the aliens the Russian and America leaders decide they are threat after one ship from the armada crashes into the ocean believing it to be a means to conquer the oceans or test defenses. After both countries first strike are destroyed by the fleet the aliens retaliate and send a nuclear bomb to UsefulNotes/{{Moscow}} and UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC. Just before they strike both cities killing millions including the president and his staff the first message is deciphered. It was in English distorted by a liquid background saying: "Let us be your friends."
** "The Deprogrammers:" A group of humans including Evan beat alien brainwashing with the help of an underground resistance (which includes his wife) and Professor Trent Davis eventually manage to take down their master Milord. Once he is dead it is revealed that Trent is under the control of another alien who now takes control of his rival's territory, captures the resistance members, and begins reprogramming Evan and his wife for his benefit.
** "The Light Brigade:" Since the events of "Quality of Mercy," humanity has begun to lose the war for real since the aliens tricked John Skokes into revealing secret military Intel. John Skokes, who has escaped his captors, heads the ship called The Light Brigade which carries a powerful planet destroying bomb that will destroy the alien threat once and for all when it is deployed on their home planet. After the aliens ambush the ship, everyone is killed immediately or knocked unconscious and given a fatal dose of radiation which will kill them soon. The remaining young cadet manages to unmask a traitor, revealed to be a spy disguised as Skokes, and gets to the destination and drops the bomb before his ship can be boarded. Unfortunately, the ship had been turned around whilst everyone was unconscious by Skokes, meaning he has just sent the bomb to an already crippled Earth, ensuring the aliens' victory.
** "Second Thoughts:" The aging Dr. Jacob Valerian transfers his mind into mentally challenged helper Karl Durand. Karl absorbs the mind of a colleague of the doctor who was using him to make money off the mind transferring device. Using the two minds he makes millions on the stock exchange and does this to gain the affection of his teacher and caregiver Rose, who is engaged to a poet. To finally win her affections, he absorbs the mind of the poet and disposes of his body by dropping it off the bridge. After his new personality freaks out Rose, he eventually commits suicide with a bullet to the brain. It's when Rose hears the news of her fiance's death she reveals to a detective that he was temperamental and suicidal.
** "Hearts Desire:" Each pair of outlaws of the titular town use their power against each other, which results in Frank killing JD, and Jake killing Frank. After Jake kills Frank, Jake has a change of heart. Because of his change of heart, Ben attempts to kill Jake. Jake refuses to fight his brother, and asks the visitor to take away his power. The visitor does so, and Ben is just about to kill Jake when Ben's power gets taken away by the visitor. Just after his power gets taken away, Ben gets shot by Jake's ex-lover, who witnessed the violence. The visitor reveals he gave the powers to test humanity on whether they were a threat. Humanity fails and proves to the aliens that they are not a threat and will in fact destroy themselves before they become one.
** "Tempests:" In order to save millions on a space colony from death from a deadly pandemic, John Virgil must deliver a serum. After the ship crashes on a moon he is bitten by a spider and begins to shift between two realities. He must figure out which of the two realities he's switching between are real, the seemingly perfect one or the darker one. He makes the "right" choice - and we find out that both worlds are false ones. His real situation is much worse, he's cocooned by giant spiders and slowly being eaten, kept in a hallucinogenic state and, as a result of his failure, everyone presumably dies with Governor Mudry being the only one to see the real world.
** "Dead Man's Switch": A fleet of alien spaceships are seen heading toward Earth. Knowing they might be evil, a Doomsday plan with a DeadManSwitch is prepared, with five people in individual bunkers sharing the responsibility to prevent the doomsday plan from being enacted (should it become unnecessary) by regularly pressing a button to keep the doomsday device from turning on. The five people in the bunkers are gradually killed off in a variety of ways. The brief hope for peace is extinguished when a second fleet of colonization ships is found and the button pressers lose all contact. They die in their separate bunkers one by one until the last one remains. He finally decides to let it happen when he gets a message from his commander telling him they defeated the aliens with a new weapon. He stops the Doomsday Device at the last second and is told to keep pushing the button until they can disarm it. The last scene shows the aliens who used the commander as a puppet, eating his brains over the glowing red ruins of Washington DC.
** "Nightmare": A crew of a ship during a war with an alien race is transporting a bomb when they are captured by the enemy, followed by being tortured and interrogated till the reach the breaking point. As a result, one of the men, who thinks another has betrayed them, stabs him to death in the stomach...where it's revealed that they were on EarthAllAlong with the whole thing staged by their general to test their psychological endurance. Even worse, one of the members, who didn't learn the truth until too late, had been forced to removed the bomb's defenses but instead, bypassed its safeguards and activated it, with no way to stop it. While it's this trope for the crew, it can be considered LaserGuidedKarma for the general.
* CureForCancer:
** In "Blood Brothers", a scientist tries to develop an effective KnockoutGas to be used by the riot police. However, despite the numerous trials, the gas still has a 20% lethality rate. One experiment results in the test monkey not only surviving but also becoming immune to any and all disease or poison. The scientist's CorruptCorporateExecutive brother wants to [[WithholdingTheCure withhold this cure-all]] from the general population, pointing out that this would result in overpopulation. However, he uses the drug himself to cure his hereditary condition. [[spoiler:In the end, though, it's revealed that the drug's effect is extremely temporary. In fact, it rapidly drains all the body's resources, leaving the person a frail shell only surviving through the use of life-sustaining machines.]]
** "The New Breed" involves the use of nanites to monitor and repair cells. However, their "repair" feature doesn't appear to have a limit, and they start [[HarmfulHealing improving what they see as flaws of the human body]]. The person who injects himself with them tests his ability to hold his breath underwater... and the nanites end up giving him gills. Eventually, he also gets eyes on the back of his head to improve his vision. In the end, the inventor of the nanites, his friend, ends up having to kill him. It should be noted that the nanites are still in the testing phase, and the guy only takes them because he has terminal cancer.
** In "The Voyage Home", the alien in the form of Pete Claridge tells Ed Barkley that it will give humanity the cure for cancer once it arrives on Earth.
* CuteGhostGirl:
** Kyra in the episode "The Beholder", though she was an alien that was "out of phase".
** "Out of Body" has a woman's experiment leave her disembodied and her body in a coma. [[spoiler: This being Outer Limits, she totally dies for real by the end, as does her husband who is trying to get the machine to restore her. It's made as un-depressing as such an ending can be - unusual for The Outer Limits, which almost always went for dark twists - by having them [[TogetherInDeath appear in spirit form and reunite]], before vanishing for parts unknown but seeming [[DiedHappilyEverAfter optimistic about it.]]]]
* CuteMonsterGirl: In the episode "Quality of Mercy", a captured SpaceCadet (Nicole De Boer) is being forcibly transformed by her alien captors into one of their own against her will. The slow alterations they implement don't change her outward beauty much, and her cellmate, Major John Skokes, falls in love with her. [[spoiler:This was part of their plan all along, since she's actually one of the aliens sent to spy on him to obtain valuable military information.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:D - F]]
* DeadlyClosingCredits:
** "A Stitch In Time" ended like this, with a newly-forged time-traveling KnightTemplar gunning down a serial-killer-to-be.
** This happened on a much larger scale in "Trial by Fire". The newly inaugurated U.S. President Charles Halsey and his advisors are monitoring the approach of an alien fleet - [[spoiler:who, as it turns out, were coming in peace]] - from a nuclear bunker in Washington, D.C.. After the United States and Russia launch nuclear missiles at the fleet, the aliens destroy said missiles with ease before they reach their targets. They then launch two weapons of their own in retaliation: one at Washington, D.C. and the other at Moscow. With only about a minute to think about it, the President, his wife Elizabeth and his advisors prepare to meet their fate. As the episode ends, the screen turns to white, signifying the destruction of the U.S. capital.
** It happened on an even larger scale in "The Light Brigade". In that episode, a sequel to "Quality of Mercy", humanity is losing an interstellar war against an extremely belligerent and much more advanced alien race who are hellbent on exterminating them. In a last ditch attempt to turn the tide, the ''Light Brigade'' is part of a fleet sent on a mission to attack the alien homeworld with a subatomic bomb, a DoomsdayDevice which can disrupt matter on a subatomic level. The ship is attacked and disabled by the aliens while it is approaching their planet but a cadet, one of only four survivors, is able to launch the subatomic bomb. [[spoiler:However, it turns out that the alien posing as Major John Skokes turned the ship around while the cadet was unconscious and the cadet has just dropped the bomb on Earth. The subatomic bomb is seen making its way to Earth as the episode ends.]]
** It again happened on a very large scale in "Relativity Theory". A survey team travels to Tau Gamma Prime in search of resources which are desperately needed on Earth, which has run out of practically all of its own natural resources. Although the planet is believed to be uninhabited, the survey team comes under attack from a group of seven foot tall reptilian aliens. The team's xenobiologist Teresa Janovitch favours negotiating with them as she does not want to repeat Earth's dark history with respect to the treatment of indigenous populations but the security chief Sgt. Adam Sears leads an attack on their encampment in a network of caves. He kills one of them who is holding a gold object which he assumes is a religious totem. [[spoiler:However, Teresa's scans of the corpses of two of the aliens indicate that their cranial sutures are not fully closed, which if they were humans would mean that they were between 10 and 15 years old. In other words, Sears killed an alien Boy Scout troop on a camping trip. She then realises that the gold object is not a religious totem but an emergency locator beacon. The survey ship is soon destroyed by a huge and extremely advanced alien ship but not before it manages to download their database and learn the location of Earth. The episode ends with a shot of the ship approaching Earth, preparing to launch an attack on the homeworld of the brutal species who would butcher children.]]
** Once again, it happened on a very large scale in "Nightmare" and in a similar fashion to "The Light Brigade". While approaching the planet N184, the United World Forces spaceship ''Archipelago'' - which is carrying a top secret device that turned out to be a DoomsdayDevice - comes under attack from the Ebonites with whom humanity has been at war for some time. They are taken prisoner and subjected to psychological torture. The ship's civilian crewmember Kristen O'Keefe, one of the chief designers of the bomb, is forced to reprogram it and disable all of the booby traps. After Major Ronald Neguchi is killed by Lt. Christopher Valentine, it is revealed that everything that happened after the ''Archipelago'' came under attack was part of an elaborate simulation being conducted at Fort Dix. It was designed to evaluate how the crew would respond to being captured by the Ebonites but things got out of hand. [[spoiler: Things get even more out of hand when O'Keefe confesses that she had merely pretended to disable the booby traps; she had actually been bypassing the safeguards and firewalls in order to activate the bomb and destroy the Ebonites since it appeared as if she and the rest of the ''Archipelago'' were going to die in enemy territory in any event. Much like "Trial by Fire", the screen turns to white as the episode ends in order to signify the bomb detonating and destroying most of the Western hemisphere. Given the environmental chaos which would ensue, it is likely that most, if not all, of the Earth's population was wiped out as a result.]]
* DeadlyGame: "Judgment Day" did a version of this with a reality TV show in which convicted criminals are hunted down on camera as their punishment.
* DeadMansSwitch:
** In "Dead Man's Switch", after an alien fleet is detected approaching Earth, a DoomsdayDevice is prepared by linking every nuclear, chemical and biological weapon in existence. Five people are placed in five bunkers around the world. When an alarm sounds, they have 30 seconds to hit a dead man's switch to disarm it. If none of the five do so in time, the doomsday device will detonate.
** In "Final Exam", Seth Todtman has his 50 megaton cold fusion device rigged up so that it will detonate if his heart stops.
* DeathIsTheOnlyOption: In the episode "Better Luck Next Time", a police detective is manipulated by a pair of malevolent energy beings into being their plaything, intending to turn her into a host after they've tricked her into shooting a fellow cop. However, their hosts burn out rapidly, they can't survive for long without one, and their current hosts are just about to expire. She [[TitleDrop utters the episode's title]] just before shooting herself in the head, bringing the energy beings' centuries-long murder spree to an end.
* DecapitationPresentation: In "The Deprogrammers", Evan Cooper killed his former master Koltok and presented his head to Professor Trent Davis as proof. [[spoiler: Davis then presented it to his own master Megwan, who had secretly orchestrated his rival Koltok's death.]]
* DepravedBisexual: In "Caught in the Act", the parasite-infected girl who [[HornyDevils absorbs people's lifeforce through sex]] tries to force herself on both men and women.
* {{Deprogram}}: One especially heartbreaking episode, "The Deprogrammers", has a scientist and his assistant deprogram the personal servant of an alien from a race that has conquered the Earth in order to assassinate him. It ends with [[spoiler:The Cruel Twist Ending that the assassination was orchestrated by a rival of the alien's same species, and both the servant and his wife will now be ''re''programmed.]]
* DespairEventHorizon: In "Glyphic", every child in the small town of Tolemy (with the exception of Cassie and Louis Boussard) died of a rare form of brain cancer due to contamination from the town's mill. This resulted in the townspeople losing all hope for the future.
* DiedInYourArmsTonight: In "Corner of the Eye", two best friends successfully foil an alien invasion, then one dies of his injuries in the other's arms.
* DisabilityImmunity:
** In "From Within", the alien parasites are unable to take the intellectually impaired Howie Morrison as a host due to his different brain chemistry.
** In "Stream of Consciousness", Ryan Unger suffered brain damage in a car accident as a child and is therefore unable to use the neural implant that connects everyone else to the Stream. When an apparent computer virus begins to spread through the Stream (which turns out to be the Stream itself trying to collate all available information) and kill people, Ryan's lack of an implant makes him immune.
* DisappearedDad: In "Black Box", Lt. Colonel Brandon Grace abandoned his wife Karen and his daughter Cammie, which later causes him to feel severe guilt.
* TheDisembodied: In the episode "Free Spirit", a human test subject became a disembodied body-possessing spirit after his body was terminated in the middle of a mind transference experiment. Then he comes back for revenge against the scientists responsible for his death.
* DistressCall: In "The Message", Jennifer Winter, who is deaf, begins to hear strange noises after having a revolutionary cochlear implant installed. Although many other people including her husband Sam believe that they are nothing more than hallucinations, she and the hospital janitor / former UsefulNotes/{{NASA}} scientist Robert Vitale eventually determine that she is receiving an alien message in binary. More specifically, it is a distress call featuring instructions on how to build a high energy laser beam which can redirect the aliens' ship, which is hurtling towards UsefulNotes/TheSun.
* DittoAliens: In "The Deprogrammers", the Torkor Koltok mentions that humans all look alike to him.
* DoAndroidsDream: The question is posed in "Valerie 23" when the protagonist gets involved with a SexBot and wonders if she could truly be considered alive. He determines that the difference between a RidiculouslyHumanRobot and a real human being is that the latter has fear of death. His belief is confirmed when she proves unafraid at the prospect of her own destruction when she is due to be dismantled after developing a [[{{Yandere}} psychotic obsession]] with him. [[spoiler:When he ultimately destroys Valerie after she tries to kill his human love interest again, she admits that she's afraid of what's coming.]]
* DocumentaryEpisode: The majority of "A Special Edition" is presented as an episode of the ShowWithinAShow ''The Whole Truth'' which features an exposé of the secret experiments being conducted into genetic engineering, cloning, extending longevity and reviving the dead by the US government and companies working on its behalf.
* DomesticAbuser:
** In "Unnatural Selection", Howard and Joanne Sharp believe that their close friend and neighbour Tony Blake is abusing his wife Fran due to the frequent sounds of objects being broken coming from their house and the presence of a bruise on her face on one occasion. [[SubvertedTrope However]], it turns out that both were caused by the Blakes' son Timmy, whom they are hiding because he is suffering from Genetic Rejection Syndrome.
** In "Mary 25", Charlie Bouton regularly beats and psychologically abuses his wife Teryl, reducing her to tears on a daily basis. [[spoiler: It turns out that he murdered her some time earlier and replaced her with an android copy to cover his tracks.]]
** In "The Balance of Nature", Greg Matheson physically and verbally abuses his wife Barbara.
** In "In Another Life", the various AlternateUniverse versions of Mason Stark were beaten by their alcoholic fathers on a regular basis.
* DontYouDarePityMe: In "Valerie 23", a guy in a wheelchair who works at a robotics company is approached by his boss because they want him to test the new [[RoboticSpouse robotic companion]] they've built. He's incredibly pissed off at the suggestion and that his colleagues would think of him as "a loser who couldn't get a real girl". It takes a lot of time for him to be open to the suggestion, and even more time before he eventually relents to her advances.
* DoppelgangerReplacementLoveInterest:
** Subverted in "The Second Soul". One man's wife dies and donates her body to an alien race (they can occupy and revive recently dead bodies, and need to do so to live). He meets the recipient, and finds out that they do sometimes inherit random memories from their hosts, but she does not fall in love with him, becomes bothered by his following her around and eventually gets a restraining order against him. It's even hinted that the process is set up to prevent the aliens from being close to family members of their hosts, presumably to prevent this from becoming a regular occurrence.
-->"If I look like her, if I sound like her, I might be her? The answer is ''no''."
** In "In Another Life", a man mourning the death of his wife gets sent to a parallel universe. He quickly tries to find the alternate version of her, only to discover she already has a boyfriend. In the end, when he decides to stay, he meets the alternate version of his wife again and they strike up a friendship, leaving him hopeful that they may get together in the future.
* DownerEnding: Nearly every episode ends in soul-crushing gloom and despair. HumansAreTheRealMonsters, it's a CrapsackWorld, we get it, we get it...
* DreamWithinADream: In "The Sentence", Dr. Jack Henson believed that he exited the VirtualReality prison that he created, was convicted of reckless endangerment in causing the death of Cory Izacks and served a 20 year prison sentence. However, he later learns that he had been in the virtual world for the entire time (which amounted to only a few hours in the real world). His guilt at risking Cory Izacks' life created the scenario.
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: In "Monster", Rachel Sanders has a dream which turns out to be prophetic in which she sees herself surrounded by the corpses of soldiers.
* DueToTheDead: In "The Grell", an alien race stranded on Earth are treated as slaves, with plenty of FantasticRacism to go around. One such example is that soldiers will often leave the bodes tied to the ground face-up, spitting in the face of traditional face-down burial which allows their souls to move on properly.
* DumbIsGood: In "From Within", Creator/NeilPatrickHarris plays a man whose mental retardation renders him immune to Id-unleashing parasites. Occurs again in "Stream of Conciousness" while not mentally retarded a neurological defect he gained from a car accident as a child leaves Ryan Unger unable to access the Stream a cybernetic network which allows the vast majority of humanuty access to all of their knowledge within seconds. When a glitch threatens to destroy humanity by causing information overlords, he realises that he is the only one to save the world. He eventually does and begins to teach them basic skills like reading and writing once they are saved.
* DugTooDeep: "From Within" has a group of miners blast into an ancient cave containing a dinosaur fossil and a crapload of worms that quickly infest the miners and, shortly after, the whole town. Luckily, they hate light and need salt to survive.
* DyingTown: In "Glyphic", the small town of Tolemy is on its last legs after a brain cancer outbreak killed most of the town's children.
* EarnYourHappyEnding: Not quite as common, but they are there.
** In "Joyride", the UsefulNotes/{{NASA}} astronaut Colonel Theodore Harris saw a strange violet light while onboard the ''Aspire 7'' on September 16, 1963. The light enveloped the capsule and he aborted the mission. His steadfast claim that he had encountered aliens while in space was not taken seriously and the NASA psychological assessment determined that it had merely been a hallucination. Harris was completely discredited. The continual accusations that he was mentally unstable led him to check himself into a psychiatric institution for a brief period. On one occasion, he even hacked into a computer at UsefulNotes/ThePentagon in order to access his file but the charges were dropped. Harris is furious when he learns that his old friend and fellow astronaut Wayne caught a glimpse of similar lights during an orbit of Earth but kept it to himself for the sake of his career. In the words of his wife Madelaine, he was a "one man trainwreck." Although she left him because she could no longer handle the stress, they never stopped loving each other. On a second trip to space aboard the ''Daedalus'' XL-141 in 2001, Harris once again encountered the aliens. As their intention had been to observe but not interfere, they send him back in time to 1963 and alter history so that his mission was successful. He has the opportunity to live his life over again and avoid making the same mistakes.
* EarthAllAlong:
** In "The Light Brigade", the crew of a stricken ship must launch a [[DoomsdayDevice Doomsday weapon]] on an enemy planet in order to save humanity. However, in one of the {{Cruel Twist Ending}}s the revival series became infamous for, [[spoiler: the aliens had tricked the crew into believing that that they were in orbit above the enemy planet, when in actuality they were above Earth, and our heroes end up nuking our own planet.]].
** Also happens in "Nightmare": A team for special mission is captured and interrogated on their mission to place a Doomsday Device on their foe's home planet. The aliens are interrogating them about the mission and the device and attempting to reverse engineer the device. The creator is one of the persons being interrogated, and in going over how the device is triggered activates it with an override to prevent it from being disarmed. At this point it's revealed it's all been an elaborate simulation to see how they would stand up under stress and they've been on Earth the entire time after one them is killed by another. Since they've trained so hard with the bomb they had to use the real bomb with an inactive trigger to simulate it correctly. The creator noticed and fixed it as part of her manual override thus leading to half of the earth being blown away within minutes.
* EarthShatteringKaboom: In "Phobos Rising", the Free Alliance accuses the Coalition of Middle Eastern and Pacific States of developing a triradium-based anti-matter weapon, a DoomsdayDevice with the capability of incinerating Earth. In response, the Coalition accuses the Alliance of developing such a weapon. As this latest escalation of tensions is being communicated to the Alliance base on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}, a giant explosion encompasses Earth. The base's commanding officer Colonel Samantha Elliot comes to the conclusion that the Coalition has been smuggling triradium from Mars, its sole source, and were therefore responsible for destroying Earth. Further evidence of the scale of the destruction comes when Mars is struck by a colossal shockwave. When a drone is launched from the Coalition base, Colonel Elliot orders that all of the Alliance base's missiles be launched in response. However, it turns out that not only was the Coalition not smuggling triradium but the drone was being used to send a distress signal from the Coalition base, which had been devastated by the shockwave. The Coalition base's missiles are automatically launched in response to the incoming Alliance missiles and, in spite of the efforts of Colonel Elliot and her counterpart Colonel Paz, both bases are destroyed. Only Major James Bowen and Major Dara Talif survive the destruction of the Alliance base, which they do by shielding themselves in spacesuits. [[spoiler: In the midst of the devastation, they see a message from the commander-in-chief of the Alliance's military explaining that the giant explosion was caused by the incineration of UsefulNotes/TheMoon as a result of an Alliance experiment with a weapon far less advanced than a triradium bomb. The surface of Earth is devastated and the death toll is high but the planet remains intact. The commander-in-chief announces that the Alliance and the Coalition have signed a permanent peace settlement so that they can put aside their differences and focus on rebuilding Earth.]]
* EarthThatUsedToBeBetter:
** In "Hearts and Minds", Earth suffered energy shortages for decades, leading to numerous wars, until an energy source called pergium was discovered.
** In "Relativity Theory", Earth's natural resources are almost completely depleted. Earth-like planets are strip mined to meet its needs. "Final Appeal" dates this episode to the 24th Century.
* EiffelTowerEffect: You can tell that the last scene of "Under the Bed" takes place in UsefulNotes/{{Paris}} as there's an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower.
* EldritchAbomination: In "Monster", a rampaging energy creature is created as an unfortunate side effect of experiments being conducted with people possessing telekinetic powers.
* ElectronicTelepathy: In "Living Hell", a doctor saves a wounded man's life by implanting an experimental neutral transmitter in his brain. A side effect of this is that he can now see the thoughts of an elusive SerialKiller who was given the same implant and had [[FakingTheDead faked his own death]] afterwards.
* EmergencyPresidentialAddress: In "Trial by Fire", President Charles Halsey makes one after the alien fleet approaching Earth is detected.
* EmergencyTransformation: "Music of the Spheres" has aliens subjecting the whole of humanity to signals that people think are music, but causes mysterious changes. Instead of the CruelTwistEnding the series is known for, it turns out it's an Emergency Transformation into bald, large-headed, golden-skinned creatures, so that they can survive an impending shift in the sun's radiation. The aliens' process initially only works on people close to puberty but once the humans figure out what the hell is exactly going on and why they manage to enhance the process so that it can be applied to anyone. Some of the characters refuse to go along with the transformation; as one of our main characters puts it, he wants his wife to be able to recognize him in {{Heaven}}.
* EndlessWinter: In "The Refuge", Raymond Dalton is told that an organism discovered by a deep sea drilling rig polymerised the world's water which resulted in it having a much higher freezing temperature. However, it turns out that this is merely the setting of a virtual reality environment.
* TheEndOrIsIt: "The Sandkings" – Despite Dr. Simon Kress's attempts to kill off the sandkings (a race of intelligent, possibly sentient, ants from Mars) by blowing up his home with him inside, some have managed to survived and are building a colony deep inside a nearby woods.
* EnemiesWithDeath: In "White Light Fever", Harlan Hawkes is a billionaire centenarian with an abject fear of death due to his extremely traumatic childhood experiences, and uses his wealth to reserve revolutionary medical treatments for himself. TheGrimReaper concludes that he's outstayed his welcome, and starts to hunt Hawkes ''Film/FinalDestination''-style.
* EnemyWithout: In "Monster", a group of telekinetics recruited by the CIA to perform long-distance assassinations are eventually stalked and killed by an amorphous cloud of hostile psychic energy that they apparently spawned.
* EnergyBeings: In "The Second Soul", the N'Tal are symbiotic energy beings who cannot survive outside a host body for more than two years.
* EquivalentExchange: A partial subversion in "Tribunal" since it is neither necessary nor even planned. After the elderly Nazi war criminal Karl Rademacher from 1999 is brought back in time to 1944, Aaron Zgierski brings his "older" half-sister Hannah, a prisoner at Auschwitz, forward in time from 1944 to 1999.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: The episode "Rule of Law" features an alien being put on trial for murdering a human. The prosecuting attorney is racist against aliens and pushes for an execution, but when everybody learns ''why'' the alien killed the guy ([[spoiler: the guy smashed the alien's unhatched eggs with full knowledge of what they were]]), he sides with the protagonists.
* EvilWeapon: The episode "The Gun" has a gun that fuses to its holder's hand and causes him to become filled with murderous bloodlust. It was sent by aliens to test how HumansAreWarriors and see if they will be valuable allies in an interstellar war. The aliens are disappointed when one man uses ThePowerOfLove for his daughter and grandson to break free and let go of the gun, but decide to just send more guns to different people.
* EvilIsBurningHot: In "Mind Over Matter", a group of scientists enter the mind of a patient who has bad memories of his dad trying to make him kill his girlfriend. The dad is surrounded by flames, along with everything else, while screaming at him.
* ExactWords: In "Zig Zag", Zig Zag has rigged a bunch of servers to explode through power overload. He warns the leader of the taskforce chasing him that the detonator is in his hand. Said leader is holding a physical detonator, so he drops it, then uses the microchip in his hand to try and reset the programming Zig Zag installed. Guess what "in his hand" actually meant.
* ExpendableClone:
** It ain't a TomatoInTheMirror trope without an ''Outer Limits'' episode devoted to it.
** "Replica" subverted the trope; when a bioengeener's wife emerges from a coma that was incorrectly thought to be terminal she states that the clone (who has her memories) created prior to her awakening needs to be "disposed of". She quickly notes that she does not mean termination: she is instead suggesting erasing the clone's memories and leaving her in a far away city where she can hopefully start a new life (in the end, the clone ends up with a clone of the bioengineer himself and EverybodyLives).
* EpisodeOnAPlane: "Decompression" takes place almost entirely on a plane.
* ExorcistHead: This is played with in "Criminal Nature", a rare instance where it proved fatal for the person doing it. The Genetic Rejection Syndrome sufferer Melanie commits suicide by using her superhuman strength to turn her head 360 degrees, breaking her neck in the process.
* ExtinctInTheFuture:
** In "Dark Matters", set at an indeterminate point in the future, dogs are seemingly an endangered species as one was included among the zoo animals being shipped by the commercial transport ship ''Nestor''.
** In "Resurrection", humanity was wiped out due to a biological war on July 24, 1997, which was then 18 months in the future. In 2009, two androids named Martin and Alicia recreate a human named Cain from uncontaminated DNA samples.
** In "The Origin of Species", humans began to experiment with genetic engineering in or before the 23rd Century, giving them superhuman abilities (which included having wings) but rendering them sterile. As such, humanity eventually died out. The ship which brought Hope and six students to the future Earth is able to take genetic samples from them to create babies, altering their DNA sufficiently to prevent inbreeding.
** In "Rite of Passage", humanity was wiped out centuries ago [[UnspecifiedApocalypse through unknown means]]. The Vorak discovered Earth sometime later and used their genetic expertise to recreate humanity using the samples left behind on skeletons.
* EyesDoNotBelongThere: In "The New Breed", a man whose body is being involuntarily upgraded by injected {{Nanomachines}} finds that the source of the sudden pain on the back of his head is a new pair of eyes.
* FaeriesDontBelieveInHumansEither: This is played with in "Promised Land". Dlavan has always told his daughter Krenn and his grandsons Ma'al and T'sha that all the humans on Earth are dead. However, it turns out that Dlavan knew from his great-grandparents that some of them were still alive in a concentration camp overseen by androids in spite of the fact that most of their people, the Tsal-Khan, left Earth 100 years earlier.
* FalseInnocenceTrick: In "Quality of Mercy", Major Skokes and a female cadet are held prisoner on an alien world. She is taken for more experiments and wants just to die. At the climax, we find [[spoiler:the woman is really an alien spy -- and the man just told the aliens humanity's battle plans.]]
* FamilyMan: In "The Voyage Home", Pete Claridge is a dedicated family man, to the point that he mildly irritates his crewmates Ed Barkley and Alan Wells with how much he talks about his wife Jenny and daughter Laura during the ''Mars III'' expedition.
* {{Fanservice}}: The revival had a lot of scantily clad and naked women (notably Alyssa Milano in "Caught In The Act", although that one quickly turns into FanDisservice - [[spoiler: You get to see a man entering Alyssa Milano. Not the way you're thinking, more like "having sex and then absorbing him whole into her body"]]).
* FantasticAesop:
** In the episode "First Anniversary", two aliens who are stranded on Earth use their shapeshifting/psychic powers to make themselves appear as beautiful women to seduce men. The problem is that the effect wears off after a year of exposure and reveals their hideous true forms to their husbands. The guys can't handle this revelation and and are unable to see that TrueBeautyIsOnTheInside. However, the aliens are not just ugly but so [[StarfishAliens downright inhuman]] that even touching them makes the men violently ill and eventually GoMadFromTheRevelation. As a result they look less like a bunch of superficial jerks and more like a bunch of duped victims; it's implied that the two aliens have been doing this for some time, and one of them has already stopped caring about the damaging effect she has on humans.
** The episode "Unnatural Selection" dealt with the problems {{genetic engineering|IsTheNewNuke}} could cause a society, as [[DesignerBabies "fitter" babies]] grew into supermen and outpaced "normal" people. However, while this made for great drama in ''Film/{{Gattaca}}'' it was not nearly [[ScienceIsBad bad and horrifying enough]] for the show. So to spice things up, around 5% of all genetically modified children turn into the crazed descendants of [[TheIgor Igor]], and are [[KillItWithFire killed when found.]] Naturally, the couple who originally wanted this for their child have changed their minds, ''but'' the deformed child of the neighbors kills the back alley scientist before he can undo the changes, so the [[CruelTwistEnding episode's sad ending]] is that they'll never fully trust or love their genetically enhanced son.
* FakingTheDead: In "Unnatural Selection", Tony and Fran Blake faked the death of their son Timmy, to the point of bribing a undertaker to hold a fake funeral, after it became clear that he was suffering from Genetic Rejection Syndrome. They proceeded to hide him in their house as it is government policy that all GRS sufferers are to be destroyed due to the threat that they pose to the general public.
* FantasticRadiationShielding: Thoroughly averted in "The Light Brigade" in which Major John Skokes, the cadet and the Chief Weapons Officer are exposed to a lethal dose of gamma radiation while climbing past the engine core of the ''Light Brigade''.
* FantasticRacism: In "The Grell", humans have enslaved an alien race on the basis that they should be grateful for humans having rescued them from their dying planet. The Grell are looked down upon and treated as disposable by their human masters.
* FantasticSlur:
** In "The Hunt", the Nichols family refer to androids as "andies" while the android Tara refers to humans as "fleshers."
** In "Hearts and Minds", the North American Federation soldiers refer to the (apparent) aliens as "Bugs."
* FateWorseThanDeath: In "The New Breed", a man who injected himself with nanomachines to stop his cancer discovers to his horror that they [[TransformationHorror involuntarily mutate the rest of his body]] to repair "imperfections" (e.g. a lack of ''gills''). He tries to stab himself to death, but the machines simply repair the damage and restart his heart.
* FictionalCountry: In "Monster", it is mentioned that the African warlord General Lawrence Gecongo is attempting to seize power from the legitimately elected President of Uwanda.
* FictionalSport: The Octal in "In the Zone".
* FinishingEachOthersSentences: In "Free Spirit", a [[BodySurf body-hopping consciousness]] decides to demonstrate its power in front of the heroine by jumping in and out of two bodies in quick succession to make the hosts finish a single sentence in perfect concert.
* FirstContact: A carryover from the original.
* FishPeople: In "Trial by Fire", the aliens are an aquatic species whose ships have a liquid environment.
* FlashbackEffects: The flashbacks in "Last Supper" are shown in [[DeliberatelyMonochrome black and white]].
* FlashbackNightmare: In "Fear Itself", Bernard Selden is plagued by horrific nightmares about the fire in which his younger sister Mimi died.
* FlingALightIntoTheFuture:
** In "Music of the Spheres", the world is bombarded by alien broadcasts that anyone under the age of 21 or so believe to be the most beautiful music they've ever heard. When the broadcasts prove addictive and cause those who listen to them to mutate, the world governments declare martial law, until scientists succeed in decoding the message. The signals originated on a world whose sun had turned ultraviolet 40 years ago. The signal warned that Earth's sun was about to undergo a similar change, and that the broadcasts would genetically alter those who heard them into a new golden-skinned form that could survive under the new sun. Fortunately, it had a rare good ending with no twist involved: [[spoiler:the powers that be actually realize the importance of letting that music play, specifically rebroadcast it across the world, including using mobile vehicles to get the sound out to third world countries and to the non-human life on the planet, and in the end, it's insinuated humanity will be just fine. Even those who are too old/decide not to mutate will live... indoors and underground.]]
** In "The Origin Of Species," a group of students is brought to the future [[spoiler:where they find that humanity, in the interim, got heavily into genetic manipulation, basically dooming the human race. When they realize the small group of them isn't enough to sustain humanity for more than a generation or two, they later find enough babies of different genetic mixes, in the ship that brought them to the future, to give the human race a second chance.]]
* FloatingContinent: In the final scene of "Sarcophagus", a floating city is seen in the vicinity of UsefulNotes/{{Alaska}} 1,000 years in the future.
* FountainOfYouth:
** In "Last Supper", an elderly scientist is tracking an immortal woman in the hopes that her blood will restore his youth. After all, he tried it on his (literal) guinea pig the last time he had her in custody and it's been alive for decades. In his desperation, however, he doesn't think his plan through and just scales up the dosage relative to body mass. He gets his youth, [[KarmicDeath plus interest]].
** In "The Balance of Nature", Dr. Noah Phillips developed a cellulor regressor which can, in theory, rejuvenate cells and return the subject to their youth. When he uses the device on his wife Meredith who is in the last stages of terminal skin cancer, she is initially restored to perfect health with has no memory of the last 17 months. However, within less than a minute, the process reverses and kills her. Noah is fired and narrowly avoids a manslaughter charge. He resumed his work in secret about a year later. His attempt to regress a frog results in it reverting to a tadpole but it soon dies in the same fashion as Meredith. After his new neighbour Barbara Matheson refers to the balance of nature, he realises that he must create a natural equilibrium; in order for one organism to regress in age, another must become older in tandem. He goes over to Barbara's house to tell her the good news but finds her barely alive on the floor, having been beaten severely by her husband Greg. As she is bleeding internally, he doubts that she will survive long enough for him to bring her to a hospital so he uses the cellulor regressor on her. The 65-year-old Barbara regresses in age about 40 years so that she is once again a jazz singer in her early 20s named Barbara Spencer (with the stage name of Barbara Dumont). She is under the impression that it is 1957 and that she is engaged to Greg, a kind, sweet man. She does not initially believe Noah, who has aged in tandem, when he tells her that it is 1998 and her youth has been restored but she is convinced when he shows her a photograph of her marriage to Greg. It turns out that Greg has been secretly observing them and wants Noah to restore his youth. However, he doesn't believe Noah when he says that the polarity reverses each time that the transfer is made and sits in the wrong chair. As a result, Greg ages to death while Noah is restored to his youth, having lost all memory of everything that has happened since Meredith's death. Barbara takes care of him and it is suggested that the two of them will live happily ever after.
* ForWantOfANail: In "In Another Life", this is explored through the lives of three AlternateUniverse versions of Mason Stark. The lives of the clinically depressed former Eigenphase Industries project manager Mason and the more confident Eigenphase CEO Mason diverged when they were fifteen years old and they each arrived home late and got into an argument with their alcoholic fathers, who started beating them. In the project manager Mason's universe, he let his father beat him instead of fighting back as otherwise he would have beaten his mother again. In the CEO Mason's universe, he fought back and was able to stop him. As a result, his father entered detox and successfully turned his life around. The CEO Mason's life improved considerably as a consequence of this, allowing him to develop greater self-confidence. Unlike the project manager Mason, he finished graduate school and slowly worked his way up the corporate ladder at Eigenphase. The killer Mason's life followed an almost identical path to the project manager Mason's but the former shot most of the people in his office while the latter only considered doing so briefly, quickly realising that he could never go through with it. The project manager was about to shoot himself when he was brought to the CEO's universe.
* FreakyFridayFlip: In "The Conversion", Lucas swaps bodies with Henry Marshall, who is on the run for shooting three people at an office party, in order to give him another chance at life. Not intending to waste it, Henry turns over a new leaf, having learned a great deal about the power of good deeds and how life is interconnected from Lucas. The episode ends with Lucas, now in Henry's body, tending to his prison cellmate, indicating that the process will be repeated.
* TheFutureWillBeBetter: In "Sarcophagus", Natalie and Curtis Grainger awaken after 1,000 years in stasis to find that Earth has benefited significantly from its alliance with the race to which the alien in the Neolithic burial chamber belonged. The two species live in harmony on Earth.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:G - K]]
* {{Gaslighting}}:
** In "The Awakening", Beth Carter suffers from alexithymia which prevents her from feeling emotions. However, she receives a revolutionary brain implant developed by Dr. Steven Molstad which allows her to access the full range of emotions for the first time. Beth moves in with Molstad's colleague Joan Garrison so she can slowly adjust to the outside world and learn how to process her emotions in the normal way. While staying in Joan's apartment, she begins to have strange experiences such as hearing voices, seeing Joan's cat Mulligan butchered (only for him to turn up alive and well later on) and being abducted and experimented upon by aliens. Dr. Molstad tells Beth that it may be necessary to remove the implant but she steadfastly refuses. It turns out that Joan secretly works for a rival company which is developing a brain implant similar to Molstad's and that she and her boyfriend Kevin Flynn (who pretended to be attracted to Beth) were attempting to drive Beth insane in the hope of discrediting Molstad's implant. They were assisted in their plan by Mike and Dolly Kellerman, two other residents of Joan's apartment building.
** In "Nightmare", the crew of the United World Forces spaceship ''Archipelago'' believe that they have been captured by the Ebonites and are psychologically tortured but it turns out to be an elaborate simulation to gauge their reactions.
* GayBravado: In "Dark Child", an AlphaBitch harrasses Tammy and accuses her of being a lesbian. Tammy drives her away by claiming she actually is one and then hitting on her.
* {{Gendercide}}: Happened in "Lithia", where the few surviving men were {{Human Popsicle}}s. The thawed soldier protagonist proceeded to raise merry hell in the all-female society that sprang up, but it was prevented from being an {{Anvilicious}} misandrist TakeThat by the fact that, as ham-fisted and ill-advised as the man's attempts to change it were, the new society was utopian only in appearance (i.e. what with the leadership's rampant favoritism in resource allotment and Big Brother-esque control on the information flow). It ended with him being "put down" (refrozen) and the leadership declaring that trying to make men return was ill-advised, and that all efforts to do so would be ceased [[spoiler:which is implied was the real reason they thawed him (and the others before him)- they wanted the least suitable test candidates in the most potentially disruptive situation possible to give themselves plausible deniability why they stopped as well as "proof" that men were the cause of all of society's previous ills, most probably to maintain their power]]. [[CruelTwistEnding Just to twist the knife further]], [[spoiler:the old woman who put him down was his ''wife'', several decades older, and thoroughly convinced of man's evils by a mix of propaganda, his own actions and probably a lifetime of accumulated resentment over numerous issues]].
* GeneticMemory: In "Re-Generation", the clone of Justin Highfield (who was created from the original's brain and nerve cells) can remember the original's death. While in his mother Rebecca's womb, he communicates with her, including sending her the original Justin's last memories, through an additional bundle of nerve fibres in her umbilical cord. [[spoiler: The clone of Justin's father Graham likewise possesses the original memories while in Dr. Lucy Cole's womb.]]
* GeniusLoci: "If These Walls Could Talk" had a mansion that would ''eat'' unsuspecting people. [[spoiler: Since the story was partially based on ''Literature/WhoGoesThere'', alcohol was like acid to it.]]
* GenocideBackfire: In "To Tell the Truth", after the first wave of colonists arrived on Janus Five, they attempted to place the small and primitive native population into reservations but the natives proved to be uncooperative. A squad of colonial marines was sent in to kill them and they later reported that their mission had been accomplished. In spite of this, stories persisted that some of the natives had survived and that they were shapeshifters. [[spoiler: It turned out that these stories were true and that one of the natives had taken the form of the colony's security chief Montgomery Bennett. Moments before the sun flashed over as Dr. Larry Chambers predicted, Bennett tells the council chairman Franklin Murdock that Chambers' theory that the indigenous lifeforms had evolved to survive the aftereffects of the periodic devastation was correct. He adds that Murdock had been right himself in another respect: the natives planned to use the opportunity to retake control of Janus Five and that the humans' leftover ships and weapons would allow them to repel any further attempts to colonise the planet. The native in Bennett's form is killed but he is praised by his people for making a HeroicSacrifice so that they could reclaim their home.]]
* GenreBlindness: "The New Breed" began with a [[ScienceIsBad scientist]] holding a press conference to announce that his new nanotechnological discoveries would allow him to "[[TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow improve upon]] [[ScaleOfScientificSins God's design.]]" ''What series did he think that he was on!?!'' In his defence, he was kidding and only saying it as a way to attract publicity. Despite his ambitions he doesn't actually break protocol; his friend is the one to actually tamper with the nanobots.
* GiantFlyer: In "Tempests", the gas giant Leviathan's atmosphere harbored two giant flyers: "pteranodons," gigantic winged predators that had only been seen on "deep radar" (the characters encounter a skeleton) and "baleens," kilometer-sized jellyfish-blobs that float through the clouds and have dog-sized {{Giant Spider}}s in their guts, either as parasites or symbiotic organisms.
* GirlNextDoor: In "Caught in the Act", the sweet, virginal Hannah Valesic is one before becoming infected with the alien sex parasite.
* GirlOnGirlIsHot: In "Caught In The Act", a sleazy detective taunts the male protagonist and says his girlfriend is a slut (she's been infected with an alien parasite which [[HornyDevils sucks out people's lifeforce through sex]]). He angrily retorts that she would never cheat on him. The detective goes, "Oh yeah? According to her roommate, she goes both ways!" The boyfriend says eagerly, "Really?"
* GlamourFailure: In the episode "First Anniversary", two stranded female aliens [[YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm whose true form is beyond the ability of human senses and sensibilities]], decided to mimic humans to cope with their loneliness. By using their PsychicPowers / VoluntaryShapeshifting, they could make themselves look and act like any man's ideal woman. [[DeconstructedTrope Unfortunately, humans develop an immunity to their powers after a year of close contact]], and the men inevitably go insane when they realize their [[StarfishAliens wives' true nature]]. WordOfGod is that they are FishPeople (given the episode descriptions of aquatic people). By the end of the episode, "Ady's" glamour has stopped working on her "husband" whose last appearance in the episode is strapped to a gurney on the way to a mental hospital. In the final scene she already has her sights set on her ex's best friend and has already taken a new form to appeal to his tastes.
* AGlassInTheHand: A man is electrocuted while holding a beer bottle, which he proceeds to crush in his hand.
* GoMadFromTheRevelation: In the episode "First Anniversary", a man's gorgeous wife of one year turns out to be a rather horrid-looking alien who is suffering GlamourFailure because his mind is starting to develop an immunity. He's eventually carted off to a mental asylum and she [[HereWeGoAgain finds herself a new husband]].
* GoodAllAlong: In "Something About Harry", a teenager suspects that his mom's new tenant is an alien infiltrator when people start disappearing around town, whom the tenant is melting into green goo with a futuristic gun. [[spoiler:The tenant was actually a U.S. government agent, and everyone he killed was one of the real aliens. The teenager's mother is the one who had really been replaced by the alien parasites.]]
* GovernmentDrugEnforcement: Several episodes.
* GovernmentAgencyOfFiction:
** The Department of Alien Services in "The Second Soul".
** The unnamed agency which tracks down girls and women with telekinetic powers in "The Choice".
** The Federal Reproductive Board in "Dark Rain".
* GovernmentConspiracy:
** In "Afterlife", the US government and military framed Sgt. Linden Stiles for the murders of eleven people at an Army recruiting office after he disobeyed a direct order to assassinate an Iraqi warlord for purely political reasons and went public about the planned assassination.
** In "Hearts and Minds", [[spoiler:the North American Federation soldiers have brain implants which cause them to perceive the Asian Coalition soldiers and miners whom they are fighting as alien insectoids. They are equipped with drug injectors which they believe protect them from an alien virus when they in fact reinforce this false perception. It turns out that the Asian Coalition personnel similarly perceive the North American soldiers as a belligerent alien race.]]
* TheGreatestStoryNeverTold: "The Voyage Home" revolved around a trio of astronauts traveling back to Earth from Mars. Earlier, two of the astronauts had [[spoiler:been replaced by aliens, leaving just the one human who eventually learns about the impostor. Forced to choose between making it back to Earth and the fame and glory he would receive and preventing the alien species from spreading to Earth, the final astronaut finally decides to be a hero and sabotages the re-entry procedure causing the ship to burn up, with Ground Control believing it to be a disastrous malfunction. The ending narration: "The true measure of a hero is when a man lays down his life with the knowledge that those he saves... will never know."]] [[SubvertedTrope However]], in "The Voice of Reason", [[spoiler:it was later revealed that the black box from the ship was recovered. In that episode, Randall Strong played the recording for the Committee that was charged with investigating alleged alien activity which could threaten the United States.]]
* GreenEyes: In "Last Supper", the immortal Laura/Jade's eyes are shown to be a very striking [[MeaningfulName jade-green]] to signify that there's something unnatural about her.
* TheGreys: In "Beyond the Veil", Eddie Wexler is plagued by flashbacks of being abducted by grey aliens.
* TheGrimReaper: In "White Light Fever", Death takes the form of a lightning bolt. He does not like people trying to escape him by medical means, apparently because it would destroy reality if done too much.
* GroundhogDayLoop: In "Déjà Vu", a time loop occurs due to a failed wormhole experiment. However, at each round the loop gets shorter and shorter, with less time to prevent the impending disaster. The protagonists succeed, with the GeneralRipper who sabotaged the experiment [[spoiler:becoming trapped in a seconds-long version, just enough time for him to see that the triggering explosion is about to happen and cover his face]]. The Control Voice's opening and closing narration for this episode were identical.
* HappinessInSlavery: In "The Grell", the Grell rebel leader Shak-El accuses Jesha of enjoying being a slave because he won't turn against his human owners and join the rebels. In fact, Jesha longs to be free as much as the rebels do but he genuinely loves the Kohler children, Kenny and Sara, and refuses to abandon Sara when she is in danger.
* HarmfulHealing: The {{Nanobots}} in "The New Breed" cure a man's inoperable cancer, return him to his physical prime, and give him a HealingFactor, but further testing prompts them to take a proactive approach and start adding various disfiguring mutations in order to pre-emptively protect him from any harm. These include eyes on the back of his head, gills, and an external ribcage that shocks anyone who touches it.
* HealingFactor:
** In "The New Breed", nanodevices injected into the body provide the test subject with this ability. He demonstrates it by burning his hand, which is repaired within seconds.
** In "Last Supper", an immortal woman who goes by the names "Laura" and "Jade" reveals that she was actually born in mediaeval Spain before her village was ravaged by the Black Death. She was the only one to survive, but hasn't aged or gotten sick since, and all her wounds recover soon enough. A government scientist takes samples of her blood to replicate the effect, [[spoiler:but vastly underestimates its potency when he injects himself with it and de-ages into a puddle of cells.]]
** An extreme form is seen in "Sarcophagus" in which the alien skeleton discovered in the burial chamber cocoon absorbs energy from Curtis Grainger to heal himself to the point that he regrows organs, tissue, skin, etc. in the space of a few hours.
* HealingHands:
** In "Corner of the Eye", aliens give Father Anton Jonascu the power to heal any injury or illness and even raise the dead. He becomes a worldwide celebrity in the process. However, it turns out that the aliens are merely using Father Jonascu as part of their plan to occupy Earth and destroy its atmosphere.
** In "Josh", Josh Butler is able to bring Allison James back from the dead by touching her.
* HeroicSacrifice:
** In the episode "Better Luck Next Time", [[spoiler:the two protagonists defeat two evil {{Body Surf}}ing aliens by killing the host bodies and then themselves. Too far away from any other people, the aliens die.]]
** "Summit" has an almost literal example when [[spoiler:the sole survivors of a peace summit offer to kill themselves to prove their sincerity and ensure that the peace treaty they negotiated before terrorists murdered the other representative party was accepted.]]
** In "The Voyage Home", [[spoiler:the last human member of a three-man space expedition returning from Mars blows up the ship to stop a hostile alien from reaching and infecting the Earth.]]
** In "Feasibility Study," [[spoiler: an entire Earth neighborhood is transported to a world ruled by powerful but lazy aliens who want a race of servants; if the people from the neighborhood prove able to survive on their world, all of humanity will be enslaved. When a teenage girl inadvertently contracts a fatal disease from another alien race, her father, and eventually everyone who was taken, decide to deliberately infect themselves to trick the kidnappers into thinking that humanity is a bad fit for their experiment.]]
* HereWeGoAgain:
** In "First Anniversary", a hideous ([[TrueBeautyIsOnTheInside but nice]]) alien turns herself into a beautiful woman to marry an average-looking dude. After he finds out what she really looks like when the effect wears off after a year and is [[GoMadFromTheRevelation driven to madness]], the alien is last seen changing her form again to seduce one of her husband's colleagues. (Considering that the revelation left the last husband insane and the one before dead, maybe she wasn't so nice after all.)
** In the final scene of "The New Breed", the cut on Judy Ledbetter's finger is healed within seconds, indicating that her fiancée Dr. Andy Groenig passed the nanobots onto her while they were having sex and that she will experience the same transformation that he went through.
** At the end of "Donor", it is revealed that the supposedly dead Dr. Renee Stuyvescent is still alive, having received a full body transplant. She is secretly observing Dr. Peter Halstead and Deirdre Laird at a soccer match. The implication is that she will once again try to kill Deirdre so that Peter can be hers.
** In the final scene of "Under the Bed", one of the child snatching creatures is hiding under the bed of a little girl in UsefulNotes/{{Paris}}.
* HighVoltageDeath: In "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", the title character rigs the television so that it will electrocute her unfaithful husband Joe when he touches the knob. When the electrocution process begins, 'Becka realises that what she has done is wrong but is electrocuted herself in her failed attempt to save Joe.
* {{Hologram}}: In "Bits of Love", Aidan Hunter, alone in his underground bunker in the aftermath of a nuclear war, keeps himself from going stir crazy by creating holographic recreations of his parents and his best friend Griff and engaging in one night stands with various holographic women in a virtual reality chamber (since physical contact with the holograms is impossible outside of it).
* HolographicDisguise: "Skin Deep". In this episode, they address the need to not move quickly, or else the hologram will flash and give you away.
* HornyDevils: In "Caught in the Act", an alien parasite causes a chaste college girl to become a hypersexual life-sucking succubus who [[DepravedBisexual swings both ways]].
* HostageSituation:
** In "Final Exam", an engineering grad student named Seth Todtman, who has invented a cold fusion device with a yield of 50 megatons, takes a group of students and Dean Irwin hostage in a lecture theatre. He threatens to detonate the bomb and destroy the city, killing five million people, if the five people on his list are not killed in front of him within three hours.
** In "Small Friends", Marlon has his brother Walter hold Professor Gene Morton's daughter Becky and grandson Phillip hostage in their house in order to force Gene to use his Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) to break Marlon out of his prison.
** In "Criminal Nature", the Genetic Rejection Syndrome sufferer Dylan Venable holds his mother Marie and younger brother Jesse hostage at their old house in order to lure his father Ray into a confrontation.
* HostileTerraforming:
** In "Corner of the Eye", the aliens plan to destroy Earth's atmosphere to make the planet habitable for them.
** In "Birthright", the alien infiltrators' long-term plan is to use a chemical to terraform Earth over the course of 30 years by giving it a methane atmosphere which they can breathe. Of course, this would result in humans being wiped out. The aliens claim that said chemical, BE-85, is a fuel additive designed to clean up the atmosphere, meaning their plot entails tricking humanity into releasing the chemical themselves on a global scale.
** In "To Tell the Truth", the native population of Janus Five view the human colonists' terraforming of their planet as such.
* AHouseDivided: In "Abduction", an alien kidnaps five high school students, and tells them that one must be killed. They must decide which of them it will be. And of course they're from completely different social groups. Ray, a typical jock, Danielle, the hottest girl in school, Jason, a stereotypical geek, Brianna, a devout religious girl, and Cody, a social outcast. So needless to say they don't get along. But then again it was a test. And the ensemble was picked for that very reason.
* HumanResources: "The Second Soul" involves first contact with a bodiless alien race fleeing the destruction of their home world. Since they cannot survive indefinitely in this form, they request that they be given dead humans as hosts.
* HumanitysWake:
** In "Resurrection", 12 years after every last human on Earth was wiped out in a biological war, the androids Martin and Alicia plan to recreate humanity using DNA samples which were preserved before the war.
** In "Rite of Passage", the Vorak discovered Earth after humanity was wiped out and recreate the original inhabitants using DNA samples found on skeletons.
* HumansAreMorons: The darkest episodes of the show are more often the ones where the human protagonist(s) is an astounding UnwittingPawn who is duped into destroying the Earth or selling out his own species for the benefit of a more cunning alien villain or someone who winds up paying dearly for a severe lapse in judgment. See also CruelTwistEnding as they are occasionally the result of a character's mistake, stemming from the human weaknesses mentioned on this page.
* HumansByAnyOtherName: In "Promised Land", the Tsal-Khan refer to humans as "beings."
* HumansThroughAlienEyes: Half of "Promised Land" is seen from the perspective of the Tsal-Khan family whose farm comes under attack from a group of escaped human slaves, whom they consider savages. The other half is seen from the perspective of the former slaves, who consider the Tsal-Khan to be monsters. Neither group is right.
* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: "The Hunt" had humans hunting androids that looked indistinguishable from humans. The androids were programmed to be unable to harm humans, though, until they found schematics detailing how to disable that feature.
* TheHunterBecomesTheHunted: In "The Hunt", the plot involves an illegal android hunt. The androids are prevented by inhibitor chips from harming humans. That is, until they find plans for their bodies in a shack and proceed to remove their inhibitors. They kill several hunters but are ultimately gunned down, except for one who manages to escape.
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: In "In the Blood", explorers on a spaceship are trapped in "trans-space," a hyperspace-like dimension that turns out to be the literal bloodstream of the universe, which is actually a living being. The "scary" part comes from the universe's defense mechanisms being similar to those of humans and actively [[SeekerWhiteBloodCells seeking to destroy foreign bodies]].
* ICannotSelfTerminate:
** In "The New Breed", a scientist tinkered with nanotechnology and made himself nearly invincible. Unfortunately, the techniques his body used to protect him gave him a monstrous appearance, and proved potentially harmful to those around him. When he tries to commit suicide, it fails spectacularly.
** In "Resurrection", the androids cannot shutdown the Innobotics Corporation power grid which provides them with the energy that allows them to function as doing so requires a human handprint.
* IdealIllnessImmunity: "The New Breed" involves prototype nanites developed to make this a reality. Basically, the nanites are designed to move through the body and look for any cellular abnormalities. The damaged or mutated cells would then be restored to their original state. And yes, someone even accused the scientist who developed them of playing God. Unfortunately, a friend of his decides to inject himself with the nanites before they're fully tested. Given the nature of the series, things go horribly wrong.
* IDieFree: [[DiscussedTrope Discussed]] in the episode "The Grell" by a RubberForeheadAlien whose species was enslaved by humans when he and his master's family are stranded in the wilderness. He states that he would rather go back to his people's now uninhabitable planet, even though it would mean certain death. When his master asks him why, he replies "Because I would die free".
* IgnoredExpert: In "To Tell the Truth", Dr. Larry Chambers attempts to convince the ruling council of Janus Five that the system's sun is a pulsating star which is due to flash over in several days' time, a process that happens once every 1,000 years. He warns that the sun will emit deadly radiation and the colony will be destroyed. Chambers' claims are not taken seriously as, five years earlier, he had warned that the original location of the colony would be destroyed in a major volcanic eruption, which proved to be incorrect. The colony was moved to a new location at great cost in terms of time, money and manpower, leading many people to resent Chambers. He explains that he misinterpreted the data and what he thought was an impending eruption was in fact an early sign that the sun would flash over. It is also alleged that he is imagining an apocalyptic scenario since he is depressed over the death of his wife Elise three years earlier and does not want to live. When it looks as if people are starting to believe him, the council chairman Franklin Murdock and the colony's security chief Montgomery Bennett frame him by making it appear as if he is a shapeshifting alien who has taken Chambers' place.
* IHatePastMe: Thoroughly and completed averted in "A Stitch in Time". After saving her 15-year-old self from the rapist who kidnapped her, Dr. Givens is delighted at having spared that version of herself the trauma that she experienced, allowing her to lead the normal life that she was denied.
* IHaveNoSon: In "Heart's Desire", Josiah Miller is ashamed of his sons Jake and Ben because they are outlaws. They sent him quite a bit of (stolen) money over the years but he didn't spend any of it. He only allows them to stay at his house when they return home to Heart's Desire after ten years because he knows that's what their late mother would have wanted.
* ImColdSoCold: [[PlayingWithATrope Played with]] in "White Light Fever". An old, rich, selfish man who nearly died says that death feels cold. When he dies, he meets an innocent girl who died earlier as a result of his selfishness, and asks to go with her. She says he can't because they're not going to the same place; where she's going, it's ''warm''. Then she says that she always thought it was [[FireAndBrimstoneHell the other way around]].
* ImmoralRealityShow: "Judgment Day" involves a TV show where crime victims' families hunt down and kill the apparent killers. The guy the episode focuses on [[spoiler:didn't do it, was framed by the show's producer, and uses the show to clear himself]].
* ImmortalityBeginsAtTwenty: In "Last Supper", there's an immortal woman who actually stopped ageing at twenty. She explains that she was the last survivor of the Black Death sweeping through her village as a late teenager when she found out that she had a HealingFactor.
* ImpendingDoomPOV: In "The Heist", the POV of the alien organism is seen just before it attacks someone.
* ImMrFuturePopCultureReference: In "Time To Time", a time traveler uses "Luke Skywalker" as an alias when in the year 1969. He even finished a phone call with "May the Force be with you."
* INeverToldYouMyName: As part of the DownerEnding of the episode "Lithia." [[spoiler: Set in the post-apocalyptic commune of the title - entirely populated by females due to a plague having killed all but a few cryogenically frozen men - a defrosted male is put back into freeze after his aggressive tendencies cause tragedy, and the leader of the commune (who says "Goodbye, Jason" as he's frozen, even though he never... you know) is his lost love.]]
* InformedAbility: In the episode "Falling Star", the heroine's music is supposed to have such amazing influence that if she lives and succeeds as a pop star, the future will become a Utopia. The heroine is played (and presumably, her music composed) by Sheena Easton.
* InOneEarOutTheOther: In "From Within", a small town is invaded by prehistoric slug-like parasites who crawl into a victim's head through nostrils or earholes and turn them into hedonistic deliquents. A waitress has one slug crawl in her right ear, then much later falls out of her left ear dead, leaving her back to normal. This might have been a mistake but she did come across as [[BrainlessBeauty pretty ditzy]] so this might have been a stealth pun...
* InterdimensionalTravelDevice: The Quantum Mirror in "In Another Life".
* IntimateArtistry: In "Bits of Love", a man trapped inside a subterranean dwelling after a nuclear holocaust is kept company by the holograms of people he knew. He then decides to [[KissMeImVirtual seduce the habitat AI]] because she's the only one besides him with a real mind of her own, bonding with her by painting a nude portrait of her (she can even sit perfectly still for the occasion by temporarily freezing her program). This proves to be a huge mistake on his part, since seeing herself for the first time gives her a new sense of identity and [[{{Yandere}} makes her clingy and obsessive of him]].
* InterruptedSuicide: In "Falling Star", Melissa [=McCammon=]'s suicide attempt was interrupted - thus altering history - when the consciousness of Rachel Connors, an avid fan of hers from the future, entered her body.
* IntimateHealing: A variation occurs in "Caught in the Act", where the way to get an alien that kills men through sex out of the female host's body is by having sex (well, starting to, anyway) with her boyfriend. The explanation is that [[ThePowerOfLove "love" was what the alien was really looking for in the first place]] so when it experiences that through the host's contact with her boyfriend, it can finally leave her body.
* InYourNatureToDestroyYourselves: Pretty much said ad-verbatim in "The Human Factor" by Link the RidiculouslyHumanRobot. [[spoiler:Turns out he's right.]]
* IronicEcho:
** In the episode "Better Luck Next Time", two evil {{Body Surf}}ing aliens [[ShoutOut named]] [[Series/TheFugitive Gerard and Kimble]] - one of whom was revealed as the true form of UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper in the episode this one is a sequel to - use "Better luck next time" as a catchphrase, usually when killing or screwing someone over. At the end of the episode, they [[OhCrap realize]] they are in big trouble because both of their human hosts are mortally wounded and the only nearby human is a policewoman named Terry:
-->'''Gerard''': Her body is mine!
-->'''Kimble''': Wait! Where am ''I'' supposed to go!?
-->'''Terry''': Nowhere! Game over, better luck next time. (''[[HeroicSacrifice points her gun at her head and fires]]'')
** "Trial by Fire" has two for the price of one. The recently elected U.S. President Charles Halsey's campaign slogan was "Let me be your friend." On his first day in office, he is faced with a crisis which is at first believed to be an extinction level event but turns out to be the approach of alien ships. Having received several answers filled with technical jargon, President Halsey tells his advisors that he wants to hear plain English in response to any further questions. [[spoiler:After the aliens launch a weapon of mass destruction at Washington, D.C. in response to an attempted attack on their fleet, Halsey is provided with the translation of their original message. It turns out that it was in English all along but that the distortions caused by the liquid environment in which the aliens live needed to be removed. The message said, "Let us be your friends."]]
** In "Relativity Theory", Sgt. Adam Sears repeatedly justifies killing the seemingly primitive aliens on Tau Gamma Prime by saying that it is humanity's right as the more advanced species, basing his arguments on the principle of survival of the fittest. [[spoiler:It later becomes clear that the aliens were essentially Boy Scouts who belonged to a species who are considerably more advanced than humanity. One of their extremely powerful vessels destroys the survey ship (killing Sears and everyone else on board) and then sets its sights on Earth.]]
* JockDadNerdSon:
** In "Sandkings", Dr. Simon Kress was a nerd growing up while his father was very much a jock.
** In "Stranded", a nerdy teenager with an interest in science is neglected by his sports-oriented father, who [[ParentalFavoritism openly favors]] his more jock-like (but still nice, at least to his little bro) older brother. When an alien bounty hunter's ship crash lands nearby, this makes the kid more open to an offer of friendship from the alien, [[spoiler:who turns out to be the bounty hunter's criminal.]]
* JustFollowingOrders: In the opening of "Free Spirit", a group of scientists receive an order to end a mind-transfer experiment by terminating their unconscious human test subjects. When the last one escapes as an incorporeal spirit and eventually comes back for revenge, they try to use this excuse by claiming they had no choice in the matter. He calls them out on how weak it is, as they didn't even attempt to object to the order.
* KarmicDeath: Used a lot:
** In the episode "Tribunal", [[spoiler:an elderly, but unrepentant and still evil Nazi is brought back into the past and stranded in the concentration camp where he used to work. His past self casually executes him, not realizing who he was, and dismissing the corpse as "Just another worthless Jew".]]
** In "The Vaccine", [[spoiler:the JerkAss {{Social Darwinist}}s force the nurse main character to mix up the titular vaccine for them at gunpoint, and even after they promise to save one dose for the little boy, they take it and give it to one of their own when the nurse's back is turned. They then go into anaphylactic shock, because they were already exposed and immune to the virus; the vaccine itself killed them ''and'' they inadvertently saved the lives of more sympathetic characters.]]
** In "Deja Vu", [[spoiler:a character suffers a Karmic FateWorseThanDeath; the general who secretly tried to weaponize a teleportation experiment ends up trapped in an endless loop of the second before his death when the experiment goes awry.]]
** In "Last Supper", [[spoiler:a MadScientist tortures an immortal woman while trying to figure out the secret to her immortality and eternal youth. Eventually, [[ProfessorGuineaPig he injects himself with a syringe of her blood]]. It makes him younger... and younger... and younger until he's reduced to a puddle of raw cells.]]
** In "Judgment Day", [[spoiler:the corrupt TV producer who framed a man for murder so he could be hunted down and killed on live television, suffers the same fate after he kills someone in an attempt to cover it up. He's killed by the person he originally framed, in fact.]]
* KarmicTransformation:
** The episode "Tribunal" has one of the best examples. An old Nazi war criminal who escaped justice is taken as an old man back through time and put in the camp he ran, now in the outfit of a prisoner. Combining this with KarmicDeath he is then shortly executed by his past self as just another worthless Jew.
** The episode "The Grell" has a guy who was racist against aliens turned into one. He learns his lesson and treats them with compassion in the end.
* KarmicTwistEnding:
** "Blood Brothers": Michael Deighton tries to kill his own brother to steal a valuable drug. Earlier on Michael had lied that he didn't have the gene that would lead to him developing Huntington's disease, but in fact does have it. He takes the wonder immortality drug Deighton C in hopes of being eternally young and biologically immortal. Unfortunately his brother finds that monkeys given the same drug earlier on lose their regenerative ability after a short period of time. The same happens to Michael who accelerates into a real life version of Tithonus... [[AgeWithoutYouth being immortal but rapidly aging]].
** "Afterlife": Linden Stiles allows himself to have his DNA spliced with alien DNA found from a body at a crash site thus transforming him into a human/alien hybrid with enhanced senses. He is allowed to escape the government facility so as to be hunted down. When he's caught and about to be executed, the aliens arrive and kidnap Stiles while at the same showing signs of disappointment at the army, revealing the entire events to be a test which humanity has failed.
** "Bits Of Love": The last survivor of a nuclear war living in an underground bunker relies on computer generated holograms for companionship, including women who he simply dumps after a few dates. Eventually he falls for the computer AI in charge of the system. When his holographic family urge him to end the relationship for it means they may have to be deleted due to their relationship using more of the limited energy supply, he ditches her for a holographic version of former real life flame. After attempting to delete the AI and replace her with a better version, she fights back and assumes total control creating a holographic version of himself and a child. The new family begins to live out a life as with the rest of the holograms who continue to ignore him. Now he is to spend the rest of his life alone as the last human alive while the holograms live out eternity ignoring him.
** “New Lease”: Dr. James Houghton has been killed by a robber during a theft and before dying urges his colleagues to bring him back to life to shower his neglected family with love knowing the procedure can only bring him back to life for a single day. He reclaims the affection of his wife and but then decides to get revenge on the man who kills him. After being given life imprisonment he realizes the procedure was more successful than previous attempts meaning he'll spend the remaining decades of his life in jail.
* KatanasAreJustBetter: In "Mindreacher", a woman is attacked by a monster in a dream. After she realizes she's in a dream, she wills a katana into her hand and kills the monster.
* KidFromTheFuture:
** A variation occurred in "Vanishing Act". After getting into a minor car accident on December 31, 1949, Trevor [=McPhee=] returns home the next morning to find that it is January 1, 1960. He and his wife Theresa - who thought that he abandoned her - have sex before he is sent another ten years into the future. In 1970, he finds that he has a nine-year-old son named Mark who was conceived that night. He meets Mark again as a 19-year-old in 1980 and as a 29-year-old in 1990. By the time of this last encounter, Mark is four years older than his father.
** In "Tribunal", Aaron Zgierski travels back in time to 1944 and meets his father Leon, who was then a prisoner in Auschwitz, as a young man. Leon does not realise who Aaron is but, years later, [[StableTimeLoop names his son after him]]. In the same episode, Nicholas Prentice tells Aaron that he is his great-grandson from about 100 years in the future.
** Another variation occurred in "Time to Time" when Tom and Angie Palmer from 1969 met their 25-year-old daughter Lorelle Palmer from 1989 and never realised that she was the adult version of their five-year-old.
* KillAndReplace:
** "A Special Edition" had a television journalist interview a man who claimed to know of a conspiracy which replaced prominent figures with clones loyal to the creators. At the end of the episode, the "conspiracy nut" is killed, at which point the shocked host sees a duplicate of himself wearing the same clothes. The final scene is a report by the clone who dismisses the claims of the "nut" who has "[[TheCoronerDothProtestTooMuch killed himself]]".
** The reveal of "Something About Harry" was that the mysterious tenant at a teenager's (played by Creator/JosephGordonLevitt) house, who was going around killing people around town, was in fact a government agent who had been hunting these types of aliens. In a further reveal, it turns out that [[spoiler:the boy's ''mother'' (who had been skeptical of the whole thing), not the agent, had in fact been impersonated by another one of these aliens.]]
* TheKillerBecomesTheKilled: The episode "Judgment Day" was about an ImmoralRealityShow in which convicted murderers are released so that the family members of their victims can hunt them down and kill them on national television. This is subverted in the case of the protagonist, both because he's been framed and manages to convince the person who's hunting him that he didn't kill her sister, but played straight in the case of [[spoiler:the T.V. show's producer, who is responsible for the FrameUp and then kills the other sister as well to cover it up. The protagonist later hunts the producer down as after he's been exposed and become a target on his own show.]]
* TheKillerInMe: In "Free Spirit", the body-hopping spirit reveals at the end that [[spoiler:he used the body of the woman whom he blamed for his death to kill her own friend, who was another person on his hit list. She is subsequently sent to prison for it.]]
* KillingYourAlternateSelf: In "In Another Life", the version of Mason Stark who killed everyone in his office tried to kill the Eigenphase Industries CEO Mason.
* KissMeImVirtual:
** The season 2 episode "Mind Over Matter" has a man who, through an advanced AI, can enter people's unconsciousness when they are in a coma. He uses this to bring several people out. When the woman he loves ([[CannotSpitItOut but who he has never told]]) enters a coma, he uses the computer to enter her unconscious. They start having a relationship in the simulation, but a weird monster appears in the simulation. At the climax, we find [[spoiler:the AI created a simulation of her and, in trying to kill the fake, he has killed the real woman, who appeared as the 'monster' because of her comatose state; she was flickering in and out and looked 'wrong' because she was a representation of a mind only partially active. The 'clean' version was the AI.]]
** The season 3 episode "Bits of Love" involved a man who'd survived a nuclear holocaust with only holographic AIs for company, including a particular character that his habitat AI used as her avatar. He can occasionally have physical contact via a body-encasing VR chamber, and uses this for sex. Then he makes the mistake of doing this with the habitat AI, and though it's just a fling to him, she falls in love with him. Oops. The ending even plays with the trope a little as [[spoiler:the AI creates a virtual copy of the man then is implied to play out their entire (possible, virtual) future lives as a couple whilst the real man is trapped in his bunker, watching this happen]] turning it into Kiss, Me I'm Virtual ''squared''.
* KlaatuBaradaNikto: In "Alien Radio", Stan Harbinger quotes the line to mock the Believers.
* KnightTemplar: "A Stitch In Time" was a meditation on how Knights Templar come to be created and the price a person pays for being one. It's generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the series.
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[[folder:L - P]]
* LadyLand: The episode "Lithia" takes place in the year 2055, where the world is populated only by women. Almost all of the men were [[{{Gendercide}} killed years earlier]] in a war, and the plot starts with a male soldier being awakened from [[HumanPopsicle cryogenic suspension]]. He adjusts to the society, but is [[FishOutOfTemporalWater unsettled]] by the fact that power must be churned manually through a mill when there's a power plant a relatively short distance away. His attempts to "solve" this problem escalate until someone gets killed, at which point he's frozen again after we get the CruelTwistEnding--[[spoiler:he's not the only man in storage- the leaders of this society found several and tried reintroducing them to the population, with disastrous results every time.]]
* LaResistance: In "The Deprogrammers", there is a resistance movement called the Vindicators which is attempting to liberate Earth from its alien occupiers, the Torkor.
* LaserGuidedKarma: "Free Spirit" mainly revolves about people's past misdeeds coming back to haunt them; literally in this case when the disembodied essence of a person who was killed in an aborted science experiment pursues his killers by possessing people in the asylum they're working at.
-->'''Control Voice:''' If we are unwilling to heed our conscience, our worst judgments will inevitably come back to haunt us.
* LastMinuteReprieve: A variation in "Afterlife". In lieu of execution, Sgt. Linden Stiles is given the choice of submitting to a military experiment. However, as far as the observers of the execution and the outside world were concerned, the execution went ahead as scheduled. Stiles himself thought that it had until he woke up.
* LesCollaborateurs: In "The Deprogrammers", [[spoiler: Evan and Jill Cooper were horrifed to discover that Professor Trent Davis and the other apparent Vindicators were in fact in the service of a Torkor named Megwan.]]
* LiterallyShatteredLives: In "The Heist", an alien (which may have acted as the A/C for a crashed alien spacecraft) attempts to eliminate all heat sources in its vicinity. We get to see it freeze a female soldier so that she looks like an ice sculpture, and then a drop of water from an overhanging icicle is enough to get the "sculpture" to fall to pieces.
* LiteralManeater: The stranded alien fugitive in "Stranded" at one point transforms himself into a hot girl to lure a teenage boy closer so he can eat him.
* LiteraryAllusionTitle:
** The series had TheBardOnBoard in two cases: "Quality of Mercy" refers to Portia's famous speech from ''Theatre/TheMerchantOfVenice'' while "Starcrossed" is a reference to the description of the title characters as "a pair of starcross'd lovers" in the prologue of ''Theatre/RomeoAndJuliet''.
** "The Light Brigade", the sequel to "Quality of Mercy", refers to Creator/AlfredLordTennyson's 1854 poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which is quoted several times during the episode. The poem describes the infamous charge at the Battle of Balaclava during UsefulNotes/TheCrimeanWar.
* LivingGasbag: The episode "Tempests" has kilometer-long jellyfish blobs that float through the clouds of the planet Leviathan.
* LivingShip: "The Heist" involves a living ship, composed of numerous organisms, which crash-landed in New Mexico three years earlier. The only part of the ship which survived the crash was the cooling system.
* LivingStructureMonster: The house from "If These Walls Could Talk", which turns out to be alive rather than haunted.
* LockDown: "Blood Brothers" had a secure medical experiment lab that could be sealed and sterilized with microwaves.
* LoveAcrossBattlelines: In "Phobos Rising", Earth's two major power blocs, the Free Alliance and the Coalition of Middle Eastern and Pacific States, are in a state of cold war. Major James Bowen, the second-in-command of the Alliance base on UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}, and Major Dara Talif, the base's Coalition observer, are about to start a relationship when a giant explosion encompasses Earth. Their closeness causes the base's commander Colonel Samantha Elliot to question Bowen's objectivity once the crisis begins.
* LoveFatherLoveSon: In "Last Supper", the immortal Laura/Jade falls in love with the soldier who saved her from government experiments, and 20 years later his then-adult son because he reminded her of his father. He eventually supports their relationship.
* LoveTriangle:
** In "Mind Over Matter", Dr. Sam Stein is in love with his friend and colleague Dr. Rachel Carter but is too shy to admit it. The CAVE system, which Sam created, falls in love with him and becomes jealous of Rachel.
** In "Mary 25", Melburn Ross is still in love with his old girlfriend Teryl, now the wife of his boss Charlie Bouton who regularly abuses her.
** In "Donor", there are two. Dr. Renee Stuyvescent is in love with her colleague Dr. Peter Halstead but he does not return for feelings. He later becomes attracted to Deirdre Laird, the widow of his full body transplant donor Timothy Laird, and Renee tries to kill Deirdre. Similar to Renee's situation, her assistant Dr. Vance Ridout is in love with her but she doesn't feel anything for him.
* LotusEaterMachine:
** "Tempests". The protagonist's spaceship, carrying a vaccine for his dying colony, crashes into the heart of an AirWhale in a gas giant's atmosphere. When he goes outside to check the damage, he's bitten by a nasty, [[GiantSpider basketball-sized spider]] and passes out just as he returns to the airlock. When he wakes up, he keeps passing out and reawakening between a reality in which he's lying on a hospital bed with his family at his bedside, having already been rescued and now hallucinating from his colony's plague, and a reality in which he and the remaining crewmen are struggling to fix their ship, in which he's hallucinating from the spider venom, while another crewmember is being [[BodyHorror webbed up and parasitized]] by the spiders while babbling happily to herself. He eventually rejects the hospital reality as a Lotus Eater Machine (and reasons that if there's any chance the colony still needs to be saved, he has to take it), finds a way to escape from the wrecked ship and delivers the vaccine. [[spoiler: At his moment of success, however, the view changes to reveal that the spiders actually overwhelmed the ship near the beginning of the episode, and now he and the entire crew are lost in their dream worlds while they're being webbed up and sucked dry. Both the good ''and'' bad realities were illusions.]]
** "The Refuge". The protagonist is stranded in the middle of nowhere in a blizzard when a rich man offers him shelter in his mansion, along with several other random people. Eventually, it is revealed that all of these characters are terminally ill people in stasis, with their minds uploaded into virtual reality to prevent their minds from atrophying. [[spoiler:The rich man was the only one who remembered this, and since he is aware of the dream, he has seemingly godlike control over the environment and bullies the others around. The protagonist figures it out too and manages to defeat the rich man and free the others. They then make the blizzard go away so it is a true paradise. A technician informs the protagonist a cure was found for his condition, but he choses to stay until the girl he fell in love with in the simulation is cured as well.]]
* LuddWasRight:
** In "Lithia", the titular enclave relies on a manually powered waterwheel to provide the energy that it uses to process the grain which it needs to survive. Lithia's leader Hera resists Major Jason Mercer's suggestion that they trade with the neighbouring enclave Hyacinth for electricity to power the waterwheel as she fears that it will represent the return of the destructive technology which led to the Great War. The enclaves' ruling council are seemingly former or at least wavering Luddites themselves as they only temporarily and reluctantly granted Hyacinth sanction to use electricity in the first place.
** In "Final Appeal", technology was banned after 80% of the world's population was killed in a nuclear war in 2056. Twenty years later, the world has reverted to late 19th Century technological levels with the lightbulb being about the most advanced piece of technology allowed.
* MadDoctor: In "The Deprogrammers", [[spoiler: Professor Trent Davis is told by his Torkor master Megwan that he may continue his experiments on his fellow humans after he successfully deprogrammed Evan Cooper. As he thought that he was working for the resistance group the Vindicators, Evan had killed Megwan's rival Koltok.]]
* MagicAntidote: In "Glyphic", Cassie Boussard is able to revive her brother Louis from his 12 year coma after being infused with energy from the alien probe and giving him a special liquid.
* MagicMusic: In "Music of the Spheres", the titular music is a signal from space which, in addition to being extremely addictive, ends up causing a series of dramatic physical transformations in listeners. Notably, unlike most {{Brown Note}}s, [[spoiler: the changes the music causes ultimately turn out to be beneficial.]]
* MamaBear: Shal in the episode "Rite Of Passage" is a perfectly ordinary human that convinces her husband to help her rebel against their alien caretakers after their baby is confiscated. [[spoiler: The aliens did that because thay felt that they were better equipped to care for it. After realizing that it is no excuse for separating a mother from her child, they apologise and return the baby.]]
* MassTeleportation: In "Feasibility Study", a four block suburban area is transported to the Triune's planet to study the feasibility of enslaving the entire human race.
* MayflyDecemberRomance: In "Last Supper", an immortal 20-something woman who was born in the High Middle Ages has RescueSex with the man who saved her from [[TheyWouldCutYouUp being experimented on]]. She unexpectedly returns 20 years later when [[LoveFatherLoveSon she's involved with the man's son]], forcing her to explain her condition.
* MeaningfulName:
** In "The Light Brigade", the ship is named after the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the poem is quoted several times. Just like the battle the poem is describing, [[spoiler:the mission completely fails and the heroes lose everything.]]
** In "Final Exam", Seth Todtman has a cold fusion bomb with a dead man's switch. "Toter Mann" is German for "dead man."
** In "To Tell the Truth", the native population of Janus Five are shapeshifters. Janus was a Roman god who is typically depicted as having two faces.
* MenAreTheExpendableGender: Played to its horrific extreme in "Lithia." The show opens with a male soldier, seemingly the LoneSurvivor of the male gender, entering an all-female village, without warning or fanfare, and collapsing from exposure to the elements. Note that just moments before his arrival, the village elder was sharing stories with a room full of small children that could ''easily'' fit with the most radical of Taliban doctrine if the genders were reversed. After the entire episode shows just how badly things could go in that kind of environment, [[spoiler: the ending goes and shows that there are other men, all in cryostasis, and the narrator basically proclaims that humanity doesn't really need the male gender, aside from as a GlorifiedSpermDonor. Of course, if the other men mentioned were re-introduced into society like he was, it's a small wonder the attempts were horrific failures.]]
* MentalTimeTravel:
** In "Falling Star", technology exists in the future which allows people to transfer their consciousnesses back in time and occupy the bodies of people from the past. This allows future historians to view historical events from the perspective of those involved. Security precautions exist which prevent the time travellers from making their presence known to the host but they can be overridden. When necessary, the time travellers can also take control of the host bodies.
** In "Joyride", the aliens send Colonel Theodore Harris back in time to September 16, 1963 with all of his memories of the intervening 38 years intact.
* MentalWorld: In "Mind Over Matter", a computer technician can use a specialized mainframe to enter the mental world of people trapped in comas. He uses this to try to save his love interest. Unfortunately, the protagonist forgot AIIsACrapshoot with unusual results.
* MerlinSickness: In "Last Supper", a scientist is tracking down an immortal woman so that he could use her blood to reverse his aging. When he finally caught up with her, he ''vastly'' [[PhlebotinumOverdose overestimated the required dosage]], and ended up a damp stain on the rug.
* AMindIsATerribleThingToRead: In "What Will The Neighbors Think?", a woman gains mind reading powers and tries to use it to blackmail her neighbors. Not only does it backfire, but she starts to get overwhelmed by all the voices in her head.
* MindOverMatter:
** In "The Choice", Aggie Travers' telekinetic powers begin to develop when she is about ten. They typically manifest when she is angry or upset, most often when other children make fun of her. Her school suspends her as a result of the numerous injuries to these children which Aggie denies causing. Unsure of how to handle their troubled daughter, her parents Joe and Leslie hire a nanny named Karen Ross. What they don't realise is that Karen was sent by a secret organisation of women who possess the same telepathic powers, which diminish as they grow older. Karen is able to teach Aggie to channel and control her powers.
** In "Monster", the US government is conducting experiments with people possessing telekinetic powers, whom they employ to assassinate foreign leaders who pose a threat to the United States and its interests.
* MistakenForMurderer: In "Living Hell", the protagonist tries to warn the cops about a killer whose visions he has been receiving. As the detective in charge of the investigation points out, how is it that this particular person who called them up out of the blue knows so much detailed information about the crime scenes? It's no surprise that he quickly becomes suspect number one.
* MistakenForServant: In "The Grell", Lt. Lockhart mistakes High Secretary Paul Kohler for an escaped Grell slave turned rebel as being exposed to Grell blood has altered his DNA so that he is turning into a Grell. Kohler's attempt to convince Lockhart that he is the Minister of Mineral Resources falls on deaf ears. His apparent status as a HalfHumanHybrid disgusts Lockhart all the more. He forces Kohler to dig graves for his fallen comrades who were killed by the rebels and then tries to lynch him. Kohler manages to escape but the experience gives him significant insight into what it means to be a Grell.
* MonsterMunch:
** In the pilot "Sandkings", Josh Kress' dog Cowboy is eaten by the Sandkings. This alerts Josh's father Dr. Simon Kress to how dangerous they are.
** In "Unnatural Selection", a Genetic Rejection Syndrome sufferer butchered a cat, traumatising the little girl who owned it in the process.
** In "Stranded", Tyr'Nar eats Kevin Buchannon's German Shepherd Cody and later his best (and only) friend Brad.
* MonumentalDamage:
** In "Inconstant Moon", Professor Stan Hurst imagines UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, with the UsefulNotes/StatueOfLiberty and the World Trade Center in full view, being destroyed as a result of the Sun going nova.
** In "Dead Man's Switch", UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC is in ruins after the alien attack. TheWhiteHouse, the Capitol Building and especially the Washington Monument are severely damaged.
* MortalityPhobia: In "White Light Fever", The 102-year old businessman Harlan Hawkes is permanently living on a reserved floor of a major hospital and has contracted a personal doctor to carry out research to keep him alive at all costs. This was explained by a severe FreudianExcuse where Hawkes witnessed his parents being murdered in front of him during a war when he was a kid and spending days hiding underneath their corpses to survive. The dilemma starts when he desires another heart transplant while an 18-year old girl also needs it, while TheGrimReaper himself starts hunting for Hawkes in the form of electricity.
* MultipleChoiceFuture: In "Final Appeal", Ezekiel tells the US Supreme Court that he has seen multiple possible futures during his travels through time.
* MurderByCremation: "Blood Brothers" involves a scientist working in a sealed lab with a gas meant to be used to pacify riots. As a side effect, the latest batch ends up turning the lab monkey immortal. When the scientist's assistant attempts to steal the monkey's biological culture, the scientist's CorruptCorporateExecutive brother traps him in the lab. The angry assistant slams the door with his fist, which results in a bloody fist. The culture in his blood triggers the decontamination system, which "flashes" the lab, killing the guy. The brother later [[CainAndAbel tries the same with the scientist]] and his girlfriend, who have discovered that [[spoiler:the culture makes you ''temporarily'' invincible, only to kill you in a few days]].
* MurderIsTheBestSolution: In "Donor", Dr. Peter Halstead, who has terminal cancer, is to be the first recipient of a full body transplant. However, he has rare blood and tissue types which makes it difficult to find a compatible donor. Peter's colleague Dr. Renee Stuyvescent, who is madly in love with him, discovers that a man named Timothy Laird is compatible and murders him so that Peter can have his body. After Peter becomes close to Timothy's widow Deirdre, Renee plans to kill Deirdre to remove the threat that she poses to her warped idea of living happily ever after with Peter but she is less successful this time.
* MurdererPOV: In "Living Hell", this is justified in-universe when an experimental neural implant allows the protagonist to see through the eyes of a SerialKiller with the same implant.
* MutualKill: "Phobos Rising" involves two Martian bases belonging to the opposite sides of a SpaceColdWar. When Earth appears to be destroyed, both sides assume the other one is responsible. The communication blackout resulting from the planetary explosion prevents a normal conversation, and the bases launch missiles at one another. The two commanders finally manage to establish contact, but one is killed before being able to self-destruct the missiles. Both bases end up being destroyed (having no [[PointDefenseless anti-missile defenses]]) with only two survivors (one from each side). The survivors learn that Earth is fine. It was the Moon that was accidentally destroyed, and the debris blocked the view of Earth. A later episode set in the same StoryArc has both sides finally come to nuclear blows on Earth, ending all life on the planet.
* MyFutureSelfAndMe:
** In "A Stitch in Time", Dr. Theresa Givens travels back in time to October 28, 1976 and saves her 15-year-old self from the man who kidnapped her and repeatedly raped her over the course of five days in the original timeline. Dr. Givens tells her younger self to stay away, indicating that NeverTheSelvesShallMeet probably applies too. This experience led the "second" Dr. Givens from the altered timeline to create a time machine of her own. The long-term repercussions of this are felt four seasons later in "Final Appeal".
** A subversion occurred in "Tribunal" when SS-Obersturmführer Karl Rademacher, who is assigned to Auschwitz in 1944, meets himself as an elderly man from 1999. The older Rademacher has been forced to wear the clothing of a concentration camp inmate by Aaron Zgierski and Nicholas Prentice, who brought him back in time. The younger Rademacher is not convinced by his older self's claim to be him from the future. [[spoiler:He shoots him in the head, believing him to be just another Jewish prisoner]].
** Another subversion occurred in "Time to Time" when the 25-year-old Lorelle Palmer from 1989 met herself as a five-year-old girl in 1969. Like her parents and everyone else from 1969, the younger Lorelle didn't realise the older Lorelle's true identity.
* MySkullRunnethOver: In "Stream of Consciousness", the Stream forces people to collate all information in the world to the point that their brains cannot process it and they die.
* MythologyGag: In "Joyride", the Mercury astronaut Theodore Harris encountered aliens while aboard the ''Aspire 7'' on September 16, 1963. Cliff Robertson played the older version of Harris. In ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' pilot "The Galaxy Being" which aired on September 16, 1963, an engineer named Alan Maxwell, who was also played by Robertson, accidentally makes contact with an alien from the Andromeda galaxy.
* {{Nanomachines}}:
** The series featured a plot in "The New Breed" designed around nanobots created to [[HarmfulHealing heal]] human infirmities; the nanobots [[InstantAIJustAddWater spontaneously develop an artificial intelligence]] and begin "repairing" what they perceived as "design flaws" of those human bodies - creating some rather ''weird'' things like an armored ribcage and even [[EyesDoNotBelongThere eyes in the back of the head]]! According to opening titles, the main plot was also based on ''Blood Music'', mentioned under Literature.
** In "Small Friends", Professor Gene Morton invented the Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) while in prison. Controlled using a small keypad, the MEMS work together to perform numerous tasks. Hundreds of MEMS form a swarm, which resembles a firefly. Each swarm works with other swarms to maximise their productivity. Gene is forced by the psychotic prisoner Marlon to use the MEMS to break him out of prison.
* NaziGrandpa: One of the single-vilest villains of the anthology was the old Nazi known as Karl Rademacher from season 5's time-travel episode "Tribunal". Once a sadistic commander of a concentration camp, he murdered hundreds of people during the war before disappearing and living out the rest of his days in the United States as "Robert Greene". The protagonist, the son of a UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust survivor, tries to bring Rademacher to justice, but eventually resolves to [[spoiler:have Rademacher killed by his own younger self.]]
* NearDeathClairvoyance: The entire premise of "Out of Body".
* NeverLearnedToRead: In "The Grell", the titular SlaveRace are forbidden to read and write by their human masters.
* NeverSuicide: "The Second Soul" involves aliens using human corpses to survive. The best friend of the man in charge of the operation to help the aliens appeared to have committed suicide after his wife's corpse is used. His friend isn't so sure, since he had been investigating the aliens and thought they were conspiring right before he died. [[spoiler: Subverted however, since there was no conspiracy, and it really was a suicide.]]
* NewNeoCity: In "The Grell", High Secretary Paul Kohler tells his wife Olivia that he plans to talk to the President of the Federation about the threat posed by the Grell rebels once they get back to New Washington, the seat of the Federation's government. There is also mention of [[UsefulNotes/{{Seattle}} Old Seattle]], suggesting that there is a New Seattle.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Happens in almost all episodes. For example "The Light Brigade": While humanity is at war with a powerful alien race, a last desperate attempt is made to carry a huge bomb to destroy their home planet. After finding and killing an alien in disguise, the heroes release the bomb and discover [[spoiler:the alien turned the ship around--the heroes just bombed Earth.]]
* NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: In "Monster", the [[UsefulNotes/{{Serbia}} Serbian]] dictator Slob Krupchek, who is described as the "[[UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler Hitler]] of the Balkans" due to his policy of ethnic cleansing resulting in the deaths of thousands, is one for UsefulNotes/SlobodanMilosevic. Krupchek's first name is presumably short for Slobodan.
* NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished: In "Small Friends", a prisoner who has secretly invented nanomachines uses them to aid a fellow prisoner in repairing a CD player he broke, which is owned by a hostile convict who will kill him if it isn't fixed. As a result of this act of kindness, the inventor has his secret exposed to the hostile con, is forced to aid that con's escape, and ultimately loses his life while defending his family from him. At least the nanomachines [[LaserGuidedKarma paid the con back for that one]].
* NoMacGuffinNoWinner: In "Dead Man's Switch", humanity sets up several people in underground bunkers to ensure Earth becomes this, by launching all of our nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, if the incoming aliens are hostile.
* NoNameGiven:
** Although he appears in every scene of "The Light Brigade", the cadet is never named.
** None of the characters in "The Camp" are named. The android overseers seemingly don't have names while the human slaves are referred to by serial numbers. [[SubvertedTrope However]], two of the slaves are given the names Tali and Alex in the sequel "Promised Land".
* NonhumanLoverReveal:
** In "First Anniversary", two aliens are stranded on Earth use their power to fool people's senses in order to pass as human. Specifically, as [[UglyGuyHotWife very pretty human women who act romantically interested in some rather plain-looking men]]. Unfortunately, people tend to become resistant to their power after about a year or so, and the men who marry them tend to GoMadFromTheRevelation after seeing their true appearances. (In an aversion of TakeOurWordForIt, when they let down their disguise, it's on-screen - and they really are horrifying.)
** In "Mary 25", the Innobotics Corporation programmer Melburn Ross disables the fail-safes of the android nanny Mary 25 which prevent her from harming humans so that she will kill his boss Charlie Bouton, who regularly beats his wife (and Melburn's old girlfriend) Teryl. [[spoiler: Three months after Mary 25 does so and is dismantled, Melburn finds one of the android remote control devices in Teryl's bedroom. When he presses the button, Teryl enters sleep mode in the same fashion as Mary 25 and it is revealed that she too is an android. Charlie killed the real Teryl and replaced her with this copy. Melburn realises that the android Teryl manipulated him into repogramming Mary 25 so that she could be rid of Charlie once and for all. The android Teryl counters that she wanted to continue the original's relationship with Melburn, who would be a much better father to "her" children Brook and Brandon than Charlie ever was. The episode ends with Melburn backed up against a wall, terrified of the android copy of his former lover.]]
* NoSocialSkills: In "The Human Operators", a sentient spaceship keeps a lone human man as a slave to repair and maintain it when needed. One day, a female slave is brought on board and the ship orders them to mate and beget the next generation of slaves. The man, having lived on the ship his whole life, has no idea what to do and has to be coached by the female. There's a scene where, after the woman guides his hand over her breasts, the man double takes and looks down at his first erection.
* NotOfThisEarth: In "Sacrophagus", an amber-like cocoon is discovered in a Neolithic burial chamber in UsefulNotes/{{Alaska}}.
* NotRightInTheBed: "Caught in the Act" featured Alyssa Milano as a pure, virginal teenage girl...who is possessed by an alien entity that feeds by seducing and devouring men.
* NotWhatItLooksLike: In "Last Supper", immortal Jade lifts her shirt to show Frank her birthmark. Unfortunately, her boyfriend (Frank's son) and his wife walk in on them and take it the wrong way.
* NukeEm: This show likes to nuke them.
** In "The Light Brigade" the titular human warship is hit by two nukes.
** In "Trial by Fire" the US president tries to nuke the aliens who have splashed down in Earth's oceans.
* ObsoleteMentor: In "Stream of Consciousness", there's a librarian who couldn't connect to the mind-linked Internet of the future and was looked down on for actually reading books. Of course, when the network went haywire, he was the only one who could help.
* OctopoidAliens: In "Worlds Apart", shortly after his ship crashlands on another planet, the astronaut Lt. Christopher Lindy's inflatable raft is attacked by a giant alien squid.
* OffingTheOffspring: An accidental example in "The Hunt". George Nichols wants revenge against the androids who captured his son Eric during the hunt and, having spotted one of their distinctive uniforms in the forest, shoots the wearer in the back. It turns out that the wearer was in fact Eric, who had been released by the androids because he had not actively participated in the hunt and therefore never did anything to harm them.
* OffscreenAfterlife: In "White Light Fever", an old man has been doing everything he can to stave off death, including putting himself ahead of a sweet young woman to have a heart transplant. He remarks during the episode that "death is cold". As he is finally dying, he sees the ghost of the sweet young woman approach him. "Take me with you," he pleads. She tells him this is not possible, and that where she is going, it is always warm. Just before she leaves, she turns to face him, saying, "It's funny. I always thought it was the other way 'round."
* OffstageVillainy: In "Abaddon", it's used for ambiguity factor when a genocidal warlord is unfrozen from a hypersleep pod. He claims to be innocent of the crimes he's accused of all while acting ObviouslyEvil. Since his purported human sacrifices and mass murder is all in his backstory, the crew of the ship that found him wonder if the MegaCorp they work for (and seized the land that belonged to the warlord's followers) actually did frame him, which is left unanswered.
* OhCrap: In the episode "Relativity Theory", a group of humans realized that the aliens they killed are just boy scouts on a camping trip. When the older aliens find out who these blood-thirsty beings are, they destroy the human spaceship and set a course for Earth.
* OlderThanTheyLook: In "The Sentence", a prison was created where prisoners serve their prison sentence within a few hours. The creator of the prison is trapped inside and serves a 20 year sentence within a few hours, which would mentally make him this trope.
* OneGenderRace: In "Lithia", one of the episodes involved an all female post-apocalyptic society in which almost all males were wiped off the planet due to a scourge virus. They decided to not reintroduce the remaining men into the population because every time they took one out of stasis, it caused conflict in the society because the men pushed limits that the elders were not comfortable with, like building generators or stealing from other towns. Sucks to be male.
* OneSteveLimit: Averted in "The Light Brigade" which features Major John Skokes and the Chief Weapons Officer, whose name is John.
* OpeningNarration: With slightly altered wording from the original.
* OralTradition:
** In "The Camp", the Elders in the concentration camp have passed on the stories of what life was like before the New Masters conquered Earth for twelve generations.
** In "The Grell", Jesha's grandfather told him of their homeworld and being separated from his parents and taken to Earth as a slave when he was a boy.
* OrificeInvasion: The prehistoric worm parasites in the episode "From Within" entered (and later exited as they died) through nostrils, mouths ''and'' ears. One girl actually had a worm go in her right ear (complete with blood) and at the end of the episode have it come out her left ear without leaving her with any ill effects (other than a great deal of pain).
* OtherMeAnnoysMe: In "In Another Life", both the project manager and killer versions of Mason Stark dislike the Eigenphase Industries CEO Mason.
* OurDarkMatterIsMysterious: In "Dark Matters", the commercial transport ship ''Nestor'' is thrown out of hyperspace into a starless void. In this void, they find a huge quantity of dark matter and two ships, the UNS ''Slayton'' and an alien ship. Everyone aboard both of those ships is dead. An apparition of Captain John Owens of the ''Slayton'' appears to the crew of the ''Nestor'' and tells them that their "souls" are trapped in the pocket of space created by the dark matter. As such, they cannot move on to whatever comes next, whether that be Heaven, Hell or oblivion. The same fate has befallen the aliens.
* OverpopulationCrisis: In "To Tell the Truth", it is mentioned that Earth has a population of ten billion.
* {{Panacea}}: In "Blood Brothers", it is believed that Deighton C is capable of curing any disease and is resistant to any poison. However, it turns out that it uses up the body's natural ability to heal within days, leading to the complete collapse of the immune system.
* PainfulTransformation: In "The New Breed", the substantial modifications made to his body by the nanobots causes Dr. Andy Groenig severe and near constant pain.
* ParentChildTeam: In "Music of the Spheres", Devon Taylor and his father Dr. Emory Taylor work together to determine exactly how the alien music is affecting the teenagers who listened to it, including Devon's younger sister Joyce.
* ParentalNeglect: In "Straight and Narrow", Rusty Dobson confides in Charlie Walters that, after his father left a year earlier, he became a troublemaker so that his corporate executive mother would pay attention to him. He says that the plan worked too well given that she sent him to the Milgram Academy to be straightened out.
* PedophilePriest: Father Claridge in "Fear Itself".
* PhlebotinumOverdose: In "Last Supper", a scientist pursues an immortal woman to unlock the secret of eternal life. He injected a tiny bit of her blood into a rat, which was still alive decades later. As his age had caught up with him, he decided to attempt the same on himself. He drew a little too much blood, however, causing him to de-age into a pre-fetal puddle of human tissue.
* PinocchioSyndrome: In "The Hunt", the android Kel wants to be a human because humans have real feelings as opposed to "analogue sensations." He believes that humans have the right to take the lives of androids in the hunt as they gave them life in the first place. The major reason for Kel's positive attitude towards humans is that he was formerly a mine foreman and was programmed to respect them because he had to interact with them on a daily basis. Unlike most applications of this trope, he abandons his desire as he comes to the conclusion that HumansAreBastards.
* ThePlague:
** "Resurrection", "The Vaccine", "Essence of Life" and "Patient Zero" all feature plagues which killed billions of people worldwide. In "Resurrection", every last human on Earth was killed. In "Essence of Life", humanity is not quite as badly effected as in the other three since civilisation is in the process of being rebuilt eleven years after the plague hit in 2003.
** In "Lithia", in the aftermath of the Great War which killed seven billion people (99% of the world's population), a plague known as the Scourge killed all the remaining males. Preserved genetic material, enough to last generations, is used to propagate humanity but the Scourge remained in the atmosphere and all of the male children died within weeks of birth.
* PoorlyDisguisedPilot: The episodes "Rule of Law" and "Time to Time" were attempts at new spinoff series, but neither were picked up.
* PornWithPlot: Several episodes have nudity and sex, usually to explore the implications of sci-fi stuff like [[{{Robosexual}} robot companions]]. These include:
** "Valerie 23": A man gets a RobotGirl as a companion. After they inevitably have sex, she becomes a {{Yandere}} after he tries to date his therapist.
** "Caught In The Act": A woman (Creator/AlyssaMilano) gets possessed by an alien. She seduces men, then [[OutWithABang consumes them after sex]].
** "Paradise": The sheriff investigates when old women from a retirement home go missing, and mysterious, beautiful women seduce men, then undergo RapidAging.
** "Bits of Love": The last survivor of a nuclear war survives in an underground bunker with holograms (including one played by Creator/NatashaHenstridge) as companions. He can even interact with them intimately with virtual reality. He soon learns the cost of treating his companions with disrespect.
** "The Human Operators": Sentient space ships keep humans as slaves. Two slaves are commanded to mate and breed the next generation of slaves. A rebellion is inevitable.
** "Mary 25": A sequel to "Valerie 23". Although the robot company was disgraced by the Valerie 23 incident, they assure people that [[TemptingFate they've worked the bugs out of their other models]]. A robot girl is hired as a nanny and maid for a family.
** "Flower Child": An [[PlantAliens alien plant]] takes human form and seduces men.
** "Lithia": A soldier is awakened from cryogenic stasis to find that he is the only man in a world ruled by women.
** The episodes ''Caught in the Act'', ''Bits of Love'', ''Valerie 23'', ''The Human Operators'', and ''Flower Child'' were packaged in a DVD collection titled ''The Outer Limits - Sex & Science Fiction Collection''
* PopularHistory: Very much in evidence in the time travel episode "Vanishing Act", though it begins in a fairly low-key way. The music is pretty much NothingButHits. On New Year's Eve 1949, Trevor [=McPhee=] turns off the radio while it is playing swing music. When he travels forward in time to New Year's Day 1960, he looks at 1959 issues of ''Magazine/TimeMagazine'' and ''Life'' featuring Vice President UsefulNotes/RichardNixon, UsefulNotes/FidelCastro and International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa on the cover. At the Tiki Isle Bar and Grill, the Patsy Cline song "Leaving' On Your Mind" is playing on the radio. On New Year's Day 1970, Trevor finds that his now ex-wife Theresa and her new husband Ray are 40-ish hippies and runs into his former physician Dr. Golden at a protest against UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar outside a Marine recruitment office. When he goes to the Tiki Isle to drown his sorrows, the Music/JeffersonAirplane song "White Rabbit" is on the radio. On New Year's Day 1980, Trevor arrives in the middle of a disco at the Tiki Isle where the Van [=McCoy=] song "Do the Hustle" is being played. The disco patrons wear jumpsuits, strapless gowns, leisure suits, bell bottoms and gold medallions and chains. Trevor's final jump to January 1990 averts this trope, considering that it was only six years before the episode was made.
* PostApocalypticDog:
** In "Rite of Passage", there is a Labrador in the commune which, contrary to Mother's theory, cannot receive telepathic commands.
** In "The Vaccine", James is attacked by two vicious dogs while he is outside the hospital getting diesel from a truck to power the hospital's generator. His hazmat suit is torn in the process and he is exposed to the Berlin C virus. [[spoiler: However, he survives as it turns out that he and the others are immune to the virus due to the bacteria which forced them into quarantine in the first place.]]
** In "Lithia", a black Labrador is seen in the titular enclave.
* PowerDegeneration: "Blood Brothers" has a scientist accidentally develop a serum that appears to give people (and monkeys) a HealingFactor (a monkey took a dose of cyanide without a problem). His brother, the CorruptCorporateExecutive, refuses to reveal the miracle to the world but [[ProfessorGuineaPig uses it on himself]] to cure a hereditary disease. However, the scientist then realizes that [[spoiler:the serum doesn't give you healing powers after all but merely forces the cells to use up all their energy on healing, leaving behind a withered husk. His brother is destined to spend the rest of his days on life support.]]
* ThePowerOfLove: Saves the day in at least two episodes.
** In "Caught In The Act", Hannah's love for her boyfriend gives her the strength to disobey and eventually expel the alien possessing her.
** In "Paradise", [[spoiler:four women volunteered to be surrogate mothers for a dying alien. Only one succeeds, because she was in love with the man she had sex with in order to get the sperm]].
* PrecrimeArrest: In "A Stitch in Time", a professor invented a time travel machine after previously having been raped when she was younger. She tried to correct the past by going back in time and [[SerialKillerKiller killing soon-to-be serial killers]] before they could claim any victims. [[spoiler:She eventually undoes her own motivation to do this by saving her younger self, but previous iterations of events lead a homicide detective to continue where she left off.]]
* PrefersTheIllusion: In "The Refuge", Raymond Dalton, a journalist with wanderlust, falls in love with a kind, lovely nurse named Gina Beaumont in what turns out to be a virtual reality environment which he experienced while cryonically frozen. He is revived once a cure for his brain tumour is found. One of the other people in the environment, Sanford Vallé, has the ability to alter the others' personalities at will. As such, Raymond is relieved to discover that the "real" Gina has the same personality as the first version of her that he met, the only difference being that she is a doctor in the real world as opposed to a nurse. Gina cannot be taken out of stasis as she is suffering from the Osaka virus (which she caught as a result of her work as a doctor) so Raymond elects to re-enter stasis to be with her. He helps Gina and the others defeat Vallé, who dies in the real world as a result. Gina attempts to convince Raymond that he is missing out on his life by staying in the virtual reality environment with her. He replies, "Out there is the dream. In here with you is the reality."
* PresidentEvil: In "Decompression", a time traveler approaches a presidential candidate and warns him that his loss in the upcoming election will pave the way for one of these. As she continues to win him over, she eventually convinces him that his staff will sabotage his chances of winning, and that he needs to jump from the plane and leave them all to die (she'll protect him with her future-tech). He complies, and she's true to her word. [[spoiler:Then she reveals ''he'' is the President Evil she spoke of, having gambled that he would be self-centered enough to save his own hide at the expense of everyone else. The plane will be fine, and he's just ensured that his political career is tarnished beyond recovery. Oh, and she didn't really save him. She just gave him a few minutes to find out the truth before putting him right back in mid-air to splatter on the ground]].
* PretendToBeBrainwashed: In "Straight and Narrow", a young man attending a boarding school realizes that the other students are brainwashed by a chip inserted in their heads. He and one other student are immune to the mind control chip because of a drug they take for stomach ulcers. The protagonist has to pretend to comply with the demands of the institution to blend in until he can attempt escape.
* PrisonRiot: In "The Sentence", Cory Izacks finds himself in the middle of a riot as soon as he enters the VirtualReality prison.
* PrisonersWork: In "Small Friends", Professor Gene Morton works in the laboratory attached to the prison, where he developed the Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). His work in the lab has granted him certain privileges.
* ProfessorGuineaPig: This happens in several episodes. The episode "Double Helix" lampshades it.
-->'''Student''': Dude, you injected that stuff that made that fish grow legs into ''yourself''!?
* ProfessionalKiller: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]] in "I Hear You Calling". Carter Jones believes that the strange man who has been causing people to disappear, leaving only a pile of purple ash in their wake, is an alien hitman. He explains to Carter that, like her, these people have contracted a disease which is fatal to humans and that he in fact teleported them to his planet, a veritable paradise where the disease is harmless. The purple ash is a byproduct of the teleportion process.
* PsychicLink: In "The Other Side", Dr. Neal Eberhardt has invented the Neural Intercortex Stimulation Array (NISA) which he uses to study brain damaged and comatose patients. When he connects two of these patients, Adam and Lisa Dobkins, to NISA, their brainwaves match up perfectly and they form a psychic link. They are able to interact with each other in another reality. It takes on the appearance of familiar and comforting locations from their real lives: Lisa's dance studio and Adam's garden. Neal learns of the psychic link when Adam says Lisa's name, which he had no way of knowing. He later connects two other comatose patients: a restaurateur named Warner Oland, who is able to walk in the other reality when he had been wheelchair bound for 20 years in the real world, and Roger Bowden, who doesn't want to be there and whose negativity destroys Adam's plants and Warner's soufflé. Neal is able to enter the other reality by slowing his brain functions with an injection of fentanyl. His attempt to help Roger emerge from his coma and re-enter the real world results in Roger's death because of his congenital heart defect. Although Neal manages to save Adam, Lisa and Warner, he remains trapped in the other reality. However, he is convinced that there is another way out.
* PublicExposure: In "Bits of Love", Aiden talks the holographic character Emma into letting him paint her nude. Since she's a computer program, she literally freezes while doing so. The painting is a success, but Emma soon develops an individuality and becomes a WomanScorned when Aiden won't return her feelings...
* PuppeteerParasite:
** "Dead Man's Switch" had a very brief scene of ''literal'' Puppet Masters. The protagonist is down in a secure bunker, where he must push a button every hour to prevent Earth's last-ditch DoomsdayDevice from going off. The protagonist's commanding officer is talking to him via video from Washington DC, assuring him that the alien genocide it was meant to avenge is over and they'll relieve him soon, he just has to keep pushing the button until his bunker can be reached. In the episode's final shot, it's seen that [[spoiler:the General is a corpse amidst the buring ruins of DC, and spindly sea-spider-like aliens have their limbs stuck into him through a gash in his back, working him like a ventriloquist's dummy.]]
** "The Second Soul" features a benevolent, mostly-benign version. The aliens are refugees, energy beings who need a body, and asks humanity to give them their dead. There is strain on both sides, with the aliens dying because they can't get a host in time, and some humans being DrivenToSuicide by the stress of knowing that their loved ones are dead, yet also seemingly alive when inhabited by an alien. The end of the episode reveals that [[spoiler:the children of the aliens possessing human bodies are 100% human, which makes sense, considering they don't alter the bodies' DNA]].
** "Caught in the Act" has an alien parasite possess young women and seduce men in order to absorb them for food/energy. This has happened at least several times throughout history. The parasite can only be defeated with the PowerOfLove.
** "From Within" has prehistoric worms take over a mining town but are defeated by a mentally-retarded kid who figures out that they like salt and hate sunlight. They also cause the host to lose all inhibitions.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Q - S]]
* QuestForIdentity:
** In the episode "Blank Slate", a man is being chased by some people. He encounters a woman who agrees to help him. He can't remember who he is but has a strange case with him that periodically dispenses a shot of a blue liquid. With every shot, he regains some of his memories. In the end, he takes the last shot and remembers that those people chasing them are working for him. He is a MadScientist who created this method of erasing, storing, and restoring memories. The end of the episode shows him about to do this to the woman who helped him.
** In the episode "Birthright", a politician gets into a car accident and lose his memory. He is immediately told who he is but starts to see strange things. He suspects and alien conspiracy only to find out that he himself is an alien and, in fact, the aliens are already growing a replacement for him.
* RageAgainstTheReflection: In "Caught in the Act", a college girl named Hannah is possessed by an alien and goes around seducing people, then ''eating'' them after sex. In the girl's bathroom, Hannah loses her temper after the alien tries to seduce her roommate and punches the mirror. She then picks up a shard and attempts suicide, but the alien regains control and makes her drop it and continue its mission.
* RapeLeadsToInsanity: In "A Stitch in Time", a woman is raped/assaulted as a teen and grows up to be a mentally-unbalanced scientist who builds a time machine and uses it to go back and execute serial killers before they target anyone. Her ensuing RippleProofMemory does not help with her ongoing mental stability. [[spoiler:This is ultimately resolved when a cop goes back in time and saves her from getting raped in the first place. Her altered present self is significantly better off as a result.]]
* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: In "Heart's Desire", an alien arrives in {{the Wild West}} and gives four outlaws superpowers. Naturally, all but one get themselves killed due to fighting amongst themselves, though the survivor was more moral and level-headed than the others, and only fought in self-defense. The alien tells the survivor that HumansAreTheRealMonsters and takes away his powers before disappearing:
-->The fate of a world isn't determined by its best examples, but by its worst. It takes a few to destroy the many, especially when even the best of you can be dragged down into the mire. Judging from your example, brother against brother, friend against friend, you people have such a potential for violence, sheer, unvarnished wickedness, I've got every confidence you'll destroy yourself before you build your first inter-stellar engine. We've got nothing to fear from you.
* TheRemake: Five episodes of the original were redone as four episodes of the {{Revival}} ("[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E10Nightmare Nightmare]]", "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E29AFeasibilityStudy A Feasibility Study]]", "I, Robot" and "The Inheritors" parts 1 and 2 - this last, the original's only two-parter, was remade as a one-parter).
* TheReptilians: Many of the alien species featured in the series fit this trope.
* ReplacementGoldfish: Subverted in the episode "Mary 25", wherein the sleazy boss of a robotics company murdered [[spoiler:his wife]] prior to the episode and replaced her with a robot made in her exact likeness. However, his motive for this is clearly to cover up his murder of her, since he all but ignores the robot and uses a RobotMaid instead to satisfy his "needs".
* ResurrectionSickness: In "New Lease", Oscar Reynolds, whose body was denoted to medical science, is resurrected by Doctors James Houghton and Charles [=McCamber=] using a Scanning Molecular Reorganiser (SMR) module. His body was frozen after death to prevent tissue damage. Very soon after being resurrected, Reynolds' body begins to deteroriate, a very painful process, and he dies for a second time within less than 24 hours. After Anthony Szigetti kills Houghton while robbing him, [=McCamber=] brings him back to life. Houghton, whose bodily functions begin to fail in the same manner, plans to use the time that he has left to make up for neglecting his wife Page and daughter Katrine but he cannot resist the temptation to have his revenge. He shoots Szigetti dead in full view of three witnesses. [[spoiler: Soon after he does so, [=McCamber=] tells him that his condition is stabilising and his resurrection is permanent. He has determined that Reynolds died due to the fact that his body had been frozen after his first death. The next morning, Houghton is arrested for Szigetti's murder and is told by Detective Broder that it is likely that he will receive a life sentence if he is convicted.]]
* RichBastard: Harlan Hawkes in "White Light Fever".
* TheRightOfASuperiorSpecies: In "The Voyage Home", the alien in the form of Peter Claridge intends to proliferate its species on Earth at the expense of humanity, saying, "Our species is millions of years old. It is our right to take lives in order to continue."
* RightWingMilitiaFanatic: In "The Heist", the militia group Lightning Dawn is preparing for the "inevitable" resumption of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar. To that end, it hijacks what it believes to be a US Army missile shipment which was being sent to UsefulNotes/{{Russia}} in order to keep the Russian President in power. It instead turned out to be an alien organism.
* RippleEffectProofMemory: In "A Stitch in Time", an already-unbalanced scientist uses her time machine to go back and execute notorious serial killers before they hurt anyone. Each time history changes, and she remembers each and every change, driving her crazier and crazier. In the end, [[spoiler: she (and a homicide detective following her murders) go back in time to save her younger self from the sexual assault which originally caused her problems. The scientist loses this (having essentially erased herself), but the detective gains it and realizes that her best friend was killed by one of the serial killers whom the scientist had no motivation to kill in the current timeline. The detective then starts killing serial killers...]]
* RobotGirl: "Mary 25" involved a Robot Girl as one of the main characters, and it ended on an absolute TearJerker.
* RoboticReveal: Several of the robot-centric episodes:
** In "Valerie 23", the invalid Hank is confused as to why none of his colleagues tried hitting on the rather attractive girl he was just introduced to. He quickly finds out why when they take him to a side room where a group of scientists are working on the wiring inside the gynoid's exposed skull.
** In "Resurrection", two scientists are breeding a grown man in what appears to be an embryonal sac in their basement. One of the scientists accidentally gets some fluid on his face, and goes upstairs to clean up. His colleague then removes his face plate to reveal that they're both androids. This is followed by an InternalReveal for the new human in a later scene.
** In "Mary 25", it turns out that [[spoiler:"Teryl"]] is in fact a robot replacement who has convinced the protagonist to kill [[spoiler:her unfaithful husband, who was cheating on her with another robot.]]
* RoboticSpouse: The premise of the episode "Valerie 23" [[spoiler: and the mandatory CruelTwistEnding of its sequel, "Mary 25"]]
* RobotMaid: Episode "Mary 25" has a robot nanny bought to work in a household, just to be molested by the children's violent and abusive father. It doesn't end well...
* RuinsOfTheModernAge:
** In "Rite of Passage", Shal and Brav come across the ruins of an underground carpark which is littered with skeletons.
** In "Promised Land", the Tsal-Khan family's farm is located on the outskirts of UsefulNotes/{{Seattle}}. When Ma'al visits the ruined city, the dilapidated but still standing Space Needle is seen prominently.
** In "The Origin of Species", this trope is combined with EarthAllAlong. Hope and the six students realise that they are on Earth in the future, some point after the 23rd Century, when they come across the half-collapsed Golden Gate Bridge.
* SapientHouse: In the episode "If These Walls Could Talk", an AlienKudzu lifeform that crashed down on Earth has been slowly overgrowing an abandoned mansion, effectively becoming a living house in the process. It eats people by absorbing their biomass into itself.
* TheScapegoat: The series sometimes does this. In "Lithia," the male soldier introduced winds up taking ''all'' the blame for everything that went wrong in the village, including a woman's death, despite the fact that he personally did nothing wrong, and all his actions were done at the behest of the women in the village, including attempting to steal electrical power from a nearby town, after trying to buy it and and being rebuffed, because without it, the village was not likely to produce enough food to survive the next winter, due to the government's extremely punishing tax rate [[SarcasmMode "Praise the Goddess."]] He is definitely not a SilentScapegoat at the end.
* ScienceIsBad: A recurring them (though not always)
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: "Mind Over Matter", a doctor hooks a comatose woman to a VR machine so they can communicate with her. He enters the VR world several times and they start getting intimate. One of his colleagues is disgusted, and protests the unethical nature of what he is doing. He refuses to listen, and she gets fed up and leaves, [[spoiler:and in doing so, escapes being involved in the bad ending.]]
* ScrewYourself: [[DiscussedTrope Discussed]] in "Mind Over Matter", where a scientist invents a virtual reality device that lets you interface directly with people's minds. The virtual worlds can be populated with people from the users' memories. One character points out that a person created from someone's memories is technically part of them, and asks if having sex with one would count as selfcest, even if the simulated person was the opposite gender. The scientist gets annoyed and brushes the question off.
* SchmuckBait: In "The Heist", soldiers raid a secret government armory, but the guard they capture begs them not to open a box. They open it, and unleash an alien that kills them all and continues to the outside world.
* SealedEvilInATeddyBear: In "Under the Bed", there's a rather literal example in the opening when a Teddy Bear (actually a [[ChildEater child-eating monster]] in disguise) underneath the bed lures a kid by having it claim that he's scared of the dark and wants him to pull it out. The boy is then sucked under the bed to his sister's horror. Foreshadowing this, the bear starts ominously stating "little boy" and has its eyes open to reveal them to be red.
* SealedEvilInACan: In "Abaddon", the crew of a ship in deep space discovers a hypersleep pod containing the body of a famous mass murdering warlord. He's let out and quickly begins to manipulate the people on the ship into killing each other.
* SealedGoodInACan: In "Sarcophagus", an archeological dig finds an alien inside a tomb. Upon awakening, the friendly being was quite happy to find that humanity had come a long way from the cavemen that had attacked him on sight, forcing him to seal himself up to recover from his injuries. [[spoiler: When there is a cave-in, the alien allows the two who had befriended him to seal themselves up, keeping them alive until they are finally rescued.]]
* SeeingThroughAnothersEyes: In "Living Hell", after being shot in the head, Ben Kohler is implanted with an experimental cerebral chip as he has no other chance of survival. After emerging from his coma one month later, he is plagued by visions of women being brutally murdered. Ben and his doctor Jennifer Martinez eventually determine that he is seeing through the eyes of Wayne Haas, who received an earlier version of the cerebral chip and later faked his death in order to cover his tracks. Ben is only able to see through Haas' eyes when he either has a woman cornered or is killing her because adrenaline hypersimulates the chip and causes the two men's minds to temporarily connect.
* SeekerWhiteBloodCells: In "In the Blood", a spaceship crew punches a hole into another dimension, which they assume to be [[SubspaceOrHyperspace hyperspace or subspace]]. The main character, who is descended from {{Magical Native American}}s, starts to believe that it is actually the bloodstream of the living universe. What they originally thought to be asteroids turn out to have a similar structure to human white blood cells, except they use gravity to kill infection.
* {{Seers}}: In "Virtual Future", Jack Pierce discovers that his virtual reality suit allows him to see into the future provided that the analogue simulation rate is at a high enough level. Altering the power levels determines the timing of the future jumps. Jack's patron Bill Trenton, the unscrupulous CEO of CTY Industries, plans to use this technology for his own ends.
* SelfDuplication: In "The Joining", Captain Miles Davidow, a crew member of the Aphrodite facility on UsefulNotes/{{Venus}}, injected himself with the DNA of a Venusian creature in order to keep himself alive; he knew that he would otherwise die as the facility's oxygen supply was rapidly running out. The creatures reproduce by a very advanced form of mitosis, producing complete copies of themselves in the process. When he returns to Earth, Davidow begins to undergo mitosis in the same fashion. It first manifests itself in a form of a HealingFactor. When he cuts off one of his fingers, it regrows within hours. He eventually produces a full size, if unfinished, copy of himself. In order to prevent the risk of him infecting the general populaton, he is returned to Venus where he and five perfect copies man the Aphrodite facility in permanent exile.
* SelfFulfillingProphecy: In "Breaking Point", a scientist invents a TimeMachine, which he uses to travel several days into the future. There, he sees his wife, who has been shot. When he returns to his own time, he desperately tries to convince everyone that he really did travel to the future, only to have everyone think him crazy (doesn't help that the time shift apparently has some nasty side effects, such as ''actually turning him crazy''). In the end, he ends up accidentally shooting his wife while trying to stop her from leaving him. In a twist, he decides to [[spoiler:prevent her death by ensuring that they never meet in the first place, so he travels back to the day they met and shoots his younger self. Both versions of him die. Unfortunately, fate doesn't like to be cheated - his future wife was planning on killing herself that day, and only meeting his past self kept her from taking the pills.]]
* SelfImmolation: In "Alien Radio", Eldon [=DeVries=] covers himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire in front of Stan Harbinger after he realises that there is an alien living inside of him.
* SelfRestraint: In "I, Robot", a self-aware robot called Adam has just killed its creator [[spoiler: after said creator, on the behest of the government, tried to erase Adam's personality and reprogram him as a mindless weapon]]. Most of the episode consists of a trial determining whether or not Adam should be considered a person fit to stand trial or a piece of haywire machinery that should be immediately scrapped. The entire time he is cuffed with rather hefty restraints. In the end Adam wins the right to stand trial as a person. However, as everyone is leaving the courthouse, the prosecuting attorney who argued against Adam's humanity accidentally walks into the path of a truck. Adam effortlessly breaks his restraints and pushes her out of the way, sacrificing himself in the process.
* SerialKiller: In "Living Hell", Wayne Haas is a serial killer with a twist: he and another guy both received an experimental neural implant from an emergency procedure several years apart to save their lives after an accident. He quickly realizes that they can share each other's thoughts, and uses it to send the other guy visions of the way that he graphically murders women.
* SerialKillerKiller: In "A Stitch In Time", an unbalanced scientist uses her time machine to go back and [[KnightTemplar execute]] famous serial killers before they hurt anybody. Her resulting RippleEffectProofMemory does not improve her mental state...
* SeriesFauxnale: The Season Six finale "Final Appeal" was intended as the final episode as the series had been cancelled by Showtime but it was picked up for a seventh and final season by the Sci-Fi Channel.
* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong:
** In "A Stitch In Time", a scientist develops a time machine and uses it to go back and [[SerialKillerKiller kill serial killers before their first murder]]. However, it turns out she was motivated by the fact that she'd been raped and tortured by a serial killer herself as a child. She eventually goes back and kills ''him'', thus saving her younger self, but this undoes all of her other killings, as she would have had no motivation to kill them in the first place. She also dies while killing him. However, her younger self realizes that time travel is possible and uses it to re-invent the technology. In the double ClipShow "Final Appeal", she uses it to help people ([[spoiler:she dies when another time traveler blows up Washington, D.C., in the future]]).
** In "Decompression", a popular presidential candidate traveling on a plane and seeing an intangible image of a woman claiming to be from a BadFuture where his plane crashed (because of another time traveler's accidental interefence), and his ineffectual opponent ended up winning. She convinces him to jump out of the plane by claiming that she will use future technology to halt his fall moments before hitting the ground. This appears to happen, but then she explains that she is here to kill ''him'', as he is the one who will become PresidentEvil due to his paranoia. The falling scene repeats, and nobody catches him this time. The plane lands without problems.
** In "Patient Zero", a time-traveling assassin killing certain people with a fast-acting poison before the strains of viruses they're carrying can combine in Patient Zero and start a pandemic that will kill most of humanity. Each time he goes back and is told that nothing has changed. He eventually realizes that he has to kill Patient Zero, who turns out to be a pretty woman, and he hesitates, resolving to prevent her from contacting the people with the strains. At the end of the episode, a colleague of his goes back in time and explains that the ''assassin'' is the one who is now Patient Zero, as his attempts to keep her away from the infected resulted in him creating the plague within himself. He voluntarily lets himself be poisoned in order to keep his future family safe.
* SexBot: Several episodes explored the inherent problems with sexbots, though some of them were created for non-sexual purposes but just happened to be "fully functional."
* SexEqualsLove: In "Bits of Love", Emma, the holographic interface of the computer keeping Aidan Hunter alive in his underground bunker, believes that Aidan is in love with her after they have sex in the virtual reality chamber. The experience was an extremely meaningful one for her as it awoke previously untapped feelings and passions. As such, Emma does not take it well when Aidan rejects her and tells her that he wants their relationship to revert to its previous status.
* ShapeshiftingSeducer: In "First Anniversary", the protagonist's wife is actually a foul shapeshifting alien, whose power makes her appear as every man's perfect woman. Unfortunately, the power starts to fade when used too much on someone, such as her husband.
* SharingABody: The episode "The Vessel" has a writer go up into space on a shuttle. However, something happens and the shuttle crashes on landing, only for the writer to walk out unharmed. He starts getting strange visions and eventually finds out that there is a non-corporeal alien in his body, whose own spacecraft was destroyed near Earth and whose attempts to enter the writer resulted in the shuttle's destruction. With the government realizing something is up, they perform experiments on the writer and find out that having two beings in one body will eventually prove fatal. The alien seemingly agrees to sacrifice itself by giving the scientists instructions on killing him to save the writer. It appears to work, and the writer is set free. However, one of the scientists then wonders if they killed the right being. This is confirmed when the "writer" goes to his son's grave and tells the "boy" that his father was very brave with a flashback revealing that it was the writer who chose to give up his life to save the alien.
* ShellShockedVeteran: In "Black Box", Ares Group officer Lt. Colonel Brandon Grace suffers from severe Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his last mission in which he was betrayed by a member of his unit.
* ShockCollar:
** The aliens in the episode "Rite Of Passage" put shock wristbands on the humans they were raising to prevent them from trying to leave their enclosure. It wasn't due to malice; the woods were full of dangerous creatures.
** "The Grell" from the episode of the same name are a race of RubberForeheadAliens who were enslaved by humans. They all wear shock collars that electrocute them if they disobey their masters. The collars serve as an ExplosiveLeash which can be used to kill the relevant Grell if necessary, as demonstrated when High Secretary Paul Kohler kills his slave Ep when he tries to escape.
* ShippedInShackles: Adam Link at the end of "I, Robot". He is able to effortlessly break them when he saves Carrie Emerson from being run over by a truck.
* ShootTheShaggyDog: This happened so frequently on this show that the trope CruelTwistEnding was originally known as Outer Limits Twist.
* TheShortWar: In "The Deprogrammers", the Torkor conquered Earth in a little over a week.
* ShoutOut:
** In "Valerie 23", the android title character tells Frank Hellner that she is "fully functional" when it comes to sex. In the sequel episode "Mary 25", Charlie Bouton asks the android of the same name if the same is true of her and regularly has sex with her as the episode progresses. This refers to the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E2TheNakedNow The Naked Now]]" in which Tasha Yar, suffering from the Psi 2000 virus, asks Data if he is fully functional.
** The character Father Puglia in "Feasibility Study" is a reference to Frank Puglia, who played the equivalent character Father Fontana in the original version, ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' episode "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E29AFeasibilityStudy A Feasibility Study]]".
** In "Hearts and Minds", the vital energy source which the soldiers are trying to protect is called pergium, a reference to the radioactive element of the same name being mined on Janus VI in the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E25TheDevilInTheDark The Devil in the Dark]]". "Hearts and Minds" was written by ''Franchise/StarTrek'' screenwriter Naren Shankar.
** There is also one to ''Literature/StarshipTroopers'' in "Hearts and Minds" as the human soldiers are (seemingly) fighting an insectoid alien species whom they refer to as "Bugs."
** "Rite of Passage" features a dog in a post-apocalyptic setting who is (incorrectly) believed to be telepathic, in reference to the telepathic dog Blood in ''Film/ABoyAndHisDog''.
** In "Mary 25", Charlie Bouton says that the title character was "[[Film/MaryPoppins named after the famous nanny from the movies.]]"
** In "Nightmare", there is another to the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' franchise as there is mention of the Starfleet Research Lab in Fort Dix.
** In "The Human Factor", Commander Ellis Ward and the android Link play a game of chess to determine whether humanity deserves to exist, in reference to ''Film/TheSeventhSeal''.
** Also in "The Human Factor", Link has yellow eyes, much like Data in ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''.
** In "Music of the Spheres", Vic's nickname for Devon Taylor is "[[Series/DoogieHowserMD Doogie]]."
** In "The Other Side", the character Warner Oland is named after the Swedish actor best known for playing the title character in sixteen ''Film/CharlieChan'' films from 1931 to 1937.
* ShroudedInMyth:
** In "The Camp", none of the human slaves have ever seen one of the New Masters, the alien race that conquered Earth twelve generations earlier. During an uprising two generations earlier, one man caught a glimpse of the world outside the huge wall that surrounds the camp and supposedly told the father of Prisoner 91777 what he saw: scorched Earth, black steel and New Masters everywhere. The New Masters were alleged to be three times the size of a human with four arms and razor teeth. The Commandant reveals that the New Masters abandoned Earth 100 years earlier, meaning that they were gone by the time of the uprising. After another, more successful uprising, the slaves open the gate and see that the landscape is lush and green.
** In the sequel "Promised Land", some of the very few New Masters (known as the Tsal-Khan) who remained on Earth after the evacuation are seen and it is readily apparent that the stories about the appearance have been greatly exaggerated: although they are vaguely reptilian, they are the same size of humans, have two arms and their teeth don't seem to be any more or less sharp than the average human's. Given that humans are believed to have all died out, similar legends have grown up around them. T'sha teases his younger brother Ma'al by telling him that the woods are filled with humans with razor teeth and claws like hooks who hunt in packs.
* SiblingsInCrime:
** In "The Heist", Lee Taylor is a mercenary-for-hire who works on an operation with his brother Calvin and other members of the militia group Lightning Dawn.
** In "Heart's Desire", brothers Jake and Ben Miller are members of a gang of outlaws in TheWildWest.
* SiblingTriangle: In "Paradise", Gerry has been in love with his late brother Charles' wife Helen since the moment that he met her about 45 years earlier. After they both become young again due to an alien light, Helen tells him that she knew all along and confesses that she had always loved him too.
* SinisterMinister: Father Claridge from "Fear Itself" murdered a little girl and burned her corpse before blaming her brother, turning the boy into a traumatized wreck for most of his life and haunted by the experience. [[spoiler:He ends up driven to madness by the brother's psychic powers, imagining himself burning alive.]]
* TheSkeptic:
** In "If These Walls Could Talk", the physicist Dr. Leviticus Mitchell is a debunker of the paranormal who is presented with evidence of its existence in the form of a house which absorbs people.
** In "Alien Radio", the controversial KXVY ShockJock Stan Harbinger takes great pleasure in belittling people who believe in conspiracies, predominantly involving aliens but also concerning more down-to-earth topics such as WhoShotJFK, on his radio show "The Harbinger of Truth". An encounter with an alien, which he at first tries to ignore and deny because it is inconsistent with his view of the world, turns him into a believer.
** In "Joyride", the ''National Scope'' journalist Martin Reese is a full-time cynic who continually makes snide remarks about Colonel Theodore Harris' claim to have encountered aliens in 1963. Having had enough, Harris accuses Reese of being afraid of life, which clearly touches a nerve.
* SlaveRace:
** The Grell from "The Grell" come from a desert planet whose sun was undergoing a supernova and were transported by the human Federation to serve as slaves with {{Shock Collar}}s.
** Humans themselves have become a slave race in both "The Deprogrammers" and "The Camp". In the former, which takes place in the near future, they were conditioned not to feel any emotion and follow all orders without question. Many of them serve as the personal slaves of the alien conquerors, the Torkor. The Torkor refer to their slaves as "Jollem." In the latter, humans have been enslaved for twelve generations and are imprisoned in concentration camps where they manufacture spaceship fuel. The camps are overseen by androids (with the appearance of humans) and the humans are identified by serial numbers.
** In "Feasibility Study", the Triune plan to turn humanity into slaves en masse but the plan goes awry. They made a similar failed attempt with Adrielo's race.
** In "The Human Operators", humans are essentially slaves of the artificially intelligent ships which they are forced to repair.
** In "In Our Own Image", Cecilia Fairman views androids as being slaves to humans. She tells the android Mac 27 that some humans were born to be slavemasters while the rest of humanity will be comfortable with the idea, provided that they can convince them that androids aren't human.
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: On the whole, very cynical except for a few episodes with a HappyEnding. There is a reason the CruelTwistEnding trope used to be called "Outer Limits Twist".
* TheSlowPath: In ''Vanishing Act", a man would go to sleep and wake up ten years in the future every time. Once she figures out what is going on, his lover spends the rest of her life trying to figure out how to save him.
* SmartPeoplePlayChess: In "I, Robot", Leonard Nimoy's character, a retired lawyer, plays chess a lot. He comes out of retirement because it bores him.
* SnarkyInanimateObject: In "The Relevations of 'Becka Paulson", the 8-by-10 Man is occasionally rather snarky towards the title character.
* SnowMeansLove: In "Inconstant Moon", a scientist believing the sun has gone nova and burned off half the Earth's atmosphere tries to distract his longtime love interest by walking downtown. The erratic weather causes a romantic snowfall.
* SolarFlareDisaster: In "Inconstant Moon", Earth is struck by a massive solar flare and the resulting extreme heat causes the Moon to look far brighter than is normal. The physics professor Stan Hurst initially thought that the Sun had gone nova and [[MistakenForApocalypse that they had only five hours to live before the entire planet was destroyed]]. As such, this episode treats Earth "merely" being hit by a solar flare as preferable. At the end of the episode, there is extreme flooding but the scale of the disaster is not made clear.
* SolarSail: In "The Message", the alien ship which contacts Jennifer Winter through her cochlear implant is powered by a solar sail.
* SoleSurvivor:
** In "The Light Brigade", the Chief Weapons Officer was the only survivor of the ''General Patton'', one of the UNDF's most advanced ships which was easily defeated by the aliens.
** In "Bits of Love", Aidan Hunter may be the last living person on Earth in June 2047, seven months after a nuclear holocaust.
* SpaceColdWar: In "Phobos Rising", the two major political blocs of Earth and UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}, the Coalition of Middle Eastern and Pacific States and the Free Alliance, have been in a state of cold war for 30 years. The situation escalates into a nuclear war in the series' penultimate episode "The Human Factor", which takes place in 2084, and the storyline continues in the SeriesFinale "Human Trials".
* SpacePlane: In "Joyride", the space plane ''Daedalus'' XL-141 is launched in 2001. The first commercial spaceflight, it is funded by the billionaire Carlton Powers, the owner of Powers Industries. There are six passengers: Powers himself, the former UsefulNotes/{{NASA}} astronaut Colonel Theodore Harris, the cosmetics giant Lil Vaughn, the ''National Scope'' journalist Martin Reese and newlyweds Barbara and Ty Chafey, who won a contest. Commander Sullivan is the only crew member.
* SpaceWestern: A very straightforward example. "Rule of Law" takes place on a colony planet named Daedalus which has been colonised by Earth authorities. The human inhabitants have poor relations with and discriminate against the planet's indigenous population the Medusans, who are an {{Expy}} of UsefulNotes/NativeAmericans. The episode is essentially TheThemeParkVersion of TheWildWest with aliens.
* TheSpeechless: Tali in "The Camp" and "Promised Land".
* SplitPersonalityMakeover: In "Second Thoughts", a mentally impaired janitor Karl Durand transfers the memories, experiences and personalities of four other men into his brain using a device built by Dr. Valerian, the first of those men. After the first two transfers, Karl begins to exhibit signs of something akin to multiple personality disorder as the other personalities briefly surface and take temporary control of his body. Karl's appearance does not change but Howie Mandel differentiates between the various personalities by changing his facial expressions, tone of voice and body language. Different camera angles as Karl converses with the other personalities adds to the effect. It is best illustrated by Mandel's performance as the rude, obnoxious thief and gambler William Talbot.
* SpotTheImposter:
** [[AvertedTrope Completely averted]] in "Mind Over Matter". After she is hit by a car and enters a coma, Dr. Sam Stein connects Dr. Rachel Carter, with whom he is love, to the CAVE virtual reality system in order to help her to heal. He is completely fooled by the CAVE system, which has fallen in love with him, speaking to him using Rachel's image. Sam kills another, injured and disheveled version of Rachel which he believed to be a representation of the brain damage that she suffered in the accident. However, when he disconnects from the system, Rachel dies of cardiac arrest and he finally realises the truth: the CAVE system tricked him into killing the real Rachel of whom it was jealous.
** In "Replica", the clone of Nora Griffiths knocks her out and pretends to be her, trying to trick her husband Zach into thinking Nora is the clone. Zach isn't fooled for long because Nora has a tattoo that the clone lacks.
* StarfishAliens:
** In "Vanishing Act", a group of worm-like fluorescent aliens nab a hapless human through a wormhole so they can use his body as a host to experience Earth through his senses. It turns out that they also have no concept of time, only being and non-being. Luckily they're friendly enough to return their host to his original time when it's explained to them.
** In "Alien Radio", an alien species that exists at a different light frequency to humans plans to colonise Earth. They have taken possession of the bodies of many people worldwide without their knowledge while they await the arrival of more of their kind. Occasionally, their control of their host bodies breaks down and the host becomes aware of their presence. Humans cannot ordinarily see the light frequency on which they exist but Stan Harbinger becomes sensitive to it when he witnesses one of them vacating the body of Eldon [=DeVries=] after his death.
* SterilityPlague: In "Dark Rain", a chemical war has left most of humanity sterile. The rare women with viable pregnancies are sought out by the US government and confined to hospitals so the newborns can be seized as wards of the state.
* StillFightingTheCivilWar: In the episode "Gettysburg", the main characters are two friends who are also [[WarReenactors American Civil War reenactors]]. While for one of them it's apparently just a hobby, the other one is somewhat obsessed with the legacy of the Confederacy and wishes they had won the war, arguing that the Confederate States embodied several other policies aside from slavery such as greater state rights. They are visited by a time traveler from the future who sends them both back in time to the actual Battle of Gettysburg so they can take part in it under the command of an unhinged Colonel to discover for themselves that WarIsHell and make them see the error of their ways. It turns out that [[spoiler:the Confederate fanboy would otherwise have assassinated the first black U.S. President at a Civil War memorial ceremony in 2013. He doesn't go through with this thanks to the time traveler's lesson, but the murder is instead committed by the Confederate Colonel when he's accidentally transported to the future in a CruelTwistEnding.]]
* StoryArc: Even though it is an anthology series several episodes are linked to form an overall story arc.
** Innobotics Corporation Arc: Includes the episodes "Valerie 23", "Mary 25", "In Our Own Image" and "Resurrection" in chronological order. It deals with robots created by the Innobotics Corporation with Valerie 23 and Mary 25 being direct sequels. It's possible that "In Our Own Image" and "Resurrection" take place in an alternate universe or alternate timeline.
** Major John Skokes of Earth Defense Arc: Consists of "Quality of Mercy" and its direct sequel "The Light Brigade" which deal with humanity's war against an alien foe.
** Theresa Givens Arc: Follows the time traveling adventures of Doctor Theresa Givens consisting of "A Stitch In Time" and "Final Appeal"
** Genetic Rejection Syndrome Arc: Includes "Unnatural Selection" which deals with a couple deciding to have a child with genetic enhancements despite the risk of it contracting the syndrome turns them into mutated psycopaths and "Criminal Nature" takes place roughly a decade later when all the GRS sufferers have grown up.
** The New Masters: In "The Camp", the last of the world's humans are kept by the android guards, simply because the guards are following the last orders they received. Several humans escape and their story is continued in "Promised Land" where they must interact with aliens still on Earth.
** Geneticist Dr. Martin Nodel Arc: "Double Helix" and "The Origin of Species" involve aliens who seeded Earth with their DNA 60 million years ago.
** The Eastern Coalition-Free Alliance Cold War Arc: Starting in "Phobos Rising" the world has been divided once again into east and west leading to the colonisation of Ganymede in "The Human Factor" and is concluded in "Human Trials".
** Kimble and Gerard Arc: Starting in "Ripper" and ending in "Better Luck Next Time", it follows to aliens who over the centuries have been in a friendly rivalry possessing and murdering humans for sport.
** Time Traveler Nicholas Prentice Arc: The episodes "Tribunal", "Gettysburg" and "Time to Time" follow the adventures of Nicholas Prentice and his travels through time.
** USAS Arc: "The Joining", "The Vessel" and "In the Blood" all involve the USAS.
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: In "Last Supper", Frank Martin's flashbacks show Jade strapped to an operating table being experimented upon and tortured by Dr. Lawrence Sinclair to test the extent of her HealingFactor.
* SuddenNameChange: In "Double Helix", Dr. Nodel's first name is Martin. In the sequel "The Origin of Species", his first name is Eric.
* SuperhumanTransfusion: In the episode "Last Supper", a MadScientist is pursuing an immortal woman so he can collect her unique blood and inject it into himself to both heal his own wounds and reverse his aging. [[spoiler:He does manage to get hold of it but miscalculates the stuff's potency, eventually shriveling up into a pool of cells.]]
* SupernaturalFearInducer: In "Fear Itself", a man who suffers from crippling panic attacks and hallucinations receives a special treatment for his issues. It works, [[GoneHorriblyRight and]] he gains the power to pass these terrors to other people.
* SupernaturallyYoungParent: In "Vanishing Act", a man finds himself [[TimeDissonance unstuck in time]] when StarfishAliens with no concept of time use him as a host to explore the Earth, only to transport him 10 years into the future every time they return him to his planet. He fathers a son in 1959 when he's physically 25, and the last time they meet in 1989 his son is already 3-4 years older than him.
* SuperPoweredRobotMeterMaids: The title character in "Valerie 23" was a fembot who was specifically designed and created to be a companion for disabled shut-ins or people working in isolated conditions. So why was it built with lethal superhuman strength and a severe lack of impulse control? Worse, after the episode in which this gynoid went dangerously wrong, the series did several other episodes about other androids from the same company going dangerously awry in other ways.
* SuperStrength:
** In "The Deprogrammers", the Torkor are considerably stronger than humans. With an angry sweep of his arm, Evan Cooper's master Koltok kills another of his slaves, throwing him across the room in the process, for breaking a valuable container of Seragon oil.
** In "Unnatural Selection" and "Criminal Nature", the Genetic Rejection Syndrome sufferers, most of whom are children or teenagers, are several times stronger than an adult man.
* SurvivorGuilt: In "Under the Bed", Dr. Jon Holland, who was six at the time, blames himself for the death of his eight-year-old brother Chris 25 years earlier. They went to play in the woods near the old abandoned mine in their home town of Buford and Chris simply disappeared. Jon, whose career as a child psychiatrist was inspired by this tragedy, later learned that Chris was one of many children in Buford snatched and eaten by a creature since at least the early 1800s.
* SurvivorshipBias: Averted in a number of stories.
* SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute: Prisoner 98843, the protagonist of "The Camp", is replaced by Rebecca in the sequel episode "Promised Land". Prisoner 98843 is said to have died between the events of the two episodes.
* TheSwarm: The Sandkings from the first episode are a swarm that digs through sand and builds things in them and... IT'S FULL HORROR!!!
* SyntheticPlague: In "The Vaccine", a doomsday cult created the genetically engineered Berlin C virus which killed billions of people worldwide within three months. The cult's motivation was the fulfilment of their prophecy about the coming millennium.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:T - Z]]
* TailorMadePrison: "The Sentence" featured a mental version of these. People would serve out their sentences within a day of real time, but would in their minds experience their entire captivity in a prison like this.
* TakenForGranite:
** "Under The Bed": A monster that seems to be the boogeyman only comes out at night because sunlight turns it to stone. This even happened to some of its spilled blood when light shown on it. When the heroes overpower and drag it into the light, one then smashes it to pieces with a lead pipe.
** "Feasibility Study": An alien disease causes anyone infected to gradually petrify.
* TechnicolorEyes: In "I Hear You Calling", the strange man is identified as an alien by his purple eyes.
* TeleportersAndTransporters: Important to the plot of "Think Like a Dinosaur".
* ThemeNaming:
** There are two examples of theme naming in "Lithia". Hera and Phoebe are named after female characters from Greek Myth/ClassicalMythology while Lithia's neighbouring enclave Hyacinth is named after a male Greek hero, in spite of the fact that this female only world abhors men. Major Jason Mercer is presumably named after Jason, the leader of the Argonauts. The second is a more minor example which relates to ''Theatre/TheTempest'': two of the other women are named Ariel (a male character in the play) and Miranda.
** In "Promised Land", almost all of the former slaves have given names which are derived from Hebrew such as Rebecca, Tali, David, Isaac, Caleb, Ruth and Joshua. This is in keeping with the storyline's resonance with the Literature/BookOfExodus. Exceptions to the theme include Alex and Henry.
* TheyLookLikeUsNow: The nine foot tall, eight hundred pound Reptilian monsters with whom Humanity fights a losing war in a couple of episodes manage to pull this off by surgically-altering their (much smaller) females.
* TheyWouldCutYouUp: In "Last Supper", an immortal woman finds this out the hard way when she's discovered by the US government and experimented on. Thankfully, she's rescued by a military guard who can't stand to see it happen, but the scientist who conducted the experiment finds out years later she's still alive and wants to finish his work...
* ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight: "Under the Bed" featured [[CaptainErsatz not-Mulder and not-Scully]] investigating missing children for this reason.
* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: In "The Voyage Home", this is played with. The three-man crew of a spaceship are slowly going mad after returning from a mission on Mars. At one point the pilot suddenly transforms into an alien creature in front of the engineer, who jettisons him into outer space. Except when the third guy (the doctor) shows up when this is going on, the 'alien' one looks completely normal and begs him to stop their insane colleague. [[spoiler:It turns out that they were both aliens who had assumed their shapes, and the engineer was the last real human on board.]]
* ThrownOutTheAirlock: In "The Voyage Home", an astronaut jettisons one of his crew members because he thinks that the guy turned into a monstrous alien in front of him.
* TimeCrash: In "Déjà Vu", a time travel experiment goes wrong [[spoiler: after an attempt to weaponize it by a corrupt military official]], which results in a GroundhogDayLoop...a rare GroundhogDayLoop with a time limit. Each iteration grows shorter, and eventually there will be no hope of preventing the Time Crash from destroying the world. [[spoiler: In the end, the disaster is averted, and the man responsible suffers a Karmic Fate Worse than Death, as he's caught forever in the moment of his own annihilation by the malfunctioning time machine.]]
* TimeDissonance: In "Vanishing Act", the aliens abducting Jon Cryer's character transport him another decade into Earth's future every time they return him, because as it turns out, they have no concept of time. Once the concept is explained to them, it's no problem for them to return him to the right time.
* TimeIsDangerous:
** In "A Stitch In Time", the result of RippleEffectProofMemory is that an entirely new lifetime's worth of memories gets added onto the existing one, which could result in brain damage.
** The episode "Breaking Point" had a time traveller end up a few days in the future to see his wife dying from a gunshot wound. He goes back and tries to prevent it. However, the side effect of the trip is physical and mental degradation. By the end, his wife has had enough and decides to leave him. In a deranged state, he ends up shooting her. Seems to be a case of YouAlreadyChangedThePast, doesn't it? Then the episode does a 180 on this idea and [[spoiler:has the guy go back to the night he first met his wife and shoot his younger self, himself turning to dust. Of course, the worst part is that she was planning on killing herself that day.]]
* TimePolice: The show had recurring character Nicholas Prentice, a senior agent of a future time travel agency. He and his colleagues ensure the regulation of time travel, but he is allowed to SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong himself (succeeding when he brings a Nazi war criminal to justice, but failing when he can't prevent a Presidential assassination). His agency recruits its agents by plucking people out of their timeline moments before they were set to die in fatal accidents.
* TimeTravel: The basis of quite a few episodes. One recurring character, Nicholas Prentice, works for a time travel agency in the future.
* TimeTravelEpisode: The time travel-based episodes are "A Stitch in Time", "Worlds Apart", "Falling Star" and "Vanishing Act" in Season Two, "Joyride" and "Tribunal" in Season Five, "Breaking Point", "Decompression", "Gettysburg" and "Final Appeal" in Season Six and "Patient Zero" and "Time to Time" in Season Seven.
* TimeTravelEscape:
** In the episode "Tribunal", history professor and Holocaust scholar Aaron Zgierski is taken back to Auschwitz by time traveler Nicholas Prentice (who turns out to be Zgierski's own great grandson). While there, they rescue Aaron's "older" sister (who is only eight at the time), who history records as being executed in a gas chamber, into the future to live out her life free of Nazi oppression. They also do [[InvertedTrope the reverse]] with the man Aaron is trying to expose in the present as a former Nazi camp guard. Future history records that right before his arrest he fled the country and was never seen again. He disappeared because Aaron and Prentice kidnapped him and left him in the past [[ColorMeBlack dressed as an Auschwitz prisoner]] where his past self executes him.
** A later episode shows that the time travel agency Nicholas Prentice works for recruits via TimeTravelEscape; they take the potential recruit to the future seconds before they would have died, then offers them a choice between joining or being sent back to their death.
* TisOnlyABulletInTheBrain: In "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", the title character accidentally shoots herself in the head. The bullet is hinted to have hit a tumor, and afterwards she starts to hallucinate and even has flashes of genius based on the hallucinations.
* TitleDrop: During Dr. Givens's closing speech in "Final Appeal, Part 2".
--> "The real miracles, the miracles at the outer limits of our imagination, are yet to come."
* TomatoInTheMirror:
** "Birthright": A senator gets into a car crash and gets caught up in an alien plot to [[HostileTerraforming poison the atmosphere so humans will die and aliens take over]]. It turns out he was one of the aliens, who got amnesia from the crash so that only his implanted human memories remained.
** Several other episodes where people find out they are really robots, clones, etc.
* TomatoSurprise: "Tempests".
* TransferableMemory: A bit of a variation in "Donor". After Dr. Peter Halstead receives Timothy Laird's body in a full body transplant, he experiences flashes of Timothy's memories and related attributes. The first sign is a craving for a cigarette in spite of the fact that he has never smoked a day in his life. About six weeks later, he sees visions of Timothy's wife Deirdre and daughter Kylie, which he at first mistakes for an hallucination. One day while driving aimlessly, he arrives at Timothy's house, having been drawn there, and sees Deirdre and Kylie in the flesh. Under the pretext of being an acquaintance of Timothy, Peter starts to spend time with them. He assists Deirdre in coaching Kyle's soccer team, having essentially inherited Timothy's soccer skills. Peter eventually comes to share Timothy's love for Deirdre and tells her the truth about his identity. She is extremely upset at the revelation but she comes to terms with it after a while.
* TransformationHorror:
** "Quality of Mercy": During a future space war a female cadet is locked up with a Major from another division when they're both captured by the aliens. The aliens start to transform her into one of them so they recruit her and use whatever useful knowledge she possesses, and her body gradually mutates further. [[spoiler:Until the ending reveals that they're changing her ''back'', and she was sent to spy on the Major so that he'd reveal the location of their forces.]]
** "The New Breed": A man injects himself with experimental nanotechnology to cure his pelvic cancer. The problem is that they don't stop there, or even at healing old scars and adjusting his eyesight so that he doesn't need glasses anymore. For instance, they interpret his inability to breathe underwater as a physical weakness, and he develops gills. It only gets worse from there.
* TranslationConvention: "Promised Land" begins with the Tsal-Khan Dlavan and his grandson Ma'al speaking in their native language before it switches to English. From this point onwards, the audience hears the two of them, Krenn and T'sha speaking in English when they are interacting with each other and speaking in their own language when they are being observed by the escaped human slaves. The Tsal-Khan language also sounds quite aggressive to human ears, which serves to make them appear all the more intimidating.
* TrappedInContainment: In "Blood Brothers", a scientist accidentally creates what appears to be a cure-all for anything ailing a person (while working on a safe KnockoutGas). This trope occurs twice. First, his research assistant punches the door in the lab after injecting himself with some of the compound, causing the containment system to activate in the presense of chemicals in the air. He is incinerated, as his boss refuses to open the door. The second time is caused intentionally by the scientist's brother, who activates the containment system, but the scientist and his girlfriend manage to escape just before they are incinerated.
* TraumaInducedAmnesia: In "Glyphic", the six-year-old Cassie Boussard came into contact with an alien probe which protected her and her elder brother Louis from the brain cancer outbreak that later killed all of the other children of her hometown of Tolemy. However, Louis entering a coma and the death of every other child in town caused Cassie to block out her memories of the alien probe until Tom Young hypnotised her and brought them to the surface.
* TravelingSalesman: Greg Matheson in "The Balance of Nature".
* TrickAndFollowPloy: In "Relativity Theory", humans kill small aliens who, it turns out, were merely alien children doing a camping trip. When their parents investigate, the humans try (and fail) to destroy their navigational computer before the aliens find Earth's location. Cue a powerful, now hostile, alien ship appearing above the Earth.
* TreacherousSpiritChase: The main plot of "If These Walls Could Talk" concerns a house "infected" by an alien substance. Not only does the house absorb people into its structure, it's able to regurgitate {{Doppelganger}}s of those people to lure in their friends and loved ones when they come searching for answers.
* TurnedAgainstTheirMasters:
** In "Summit", humanity is on the brink of war with a race of yellow-eyed humanoids. It is eventually revealed that they were created by humans as laborers in off-world mines with eyes to see in the dark and a third lung to breathe in low-oxygen environments. They rebelled and built a fleet to rival that of the humans.
** In "In Our Own Image", the android Mac 27, the prototype for a 10,000-strong series designed for heavy agricultural and industrial work, malfunctions and escapes from Innobotics Corporation, killing two people in the process. The malfunction which caused him to go berserk was the development of emotions, something which previously happened to Valerie 23 in the episode of the same name (and the first entry in the Innobotics story arc). He kidnaps a woman from the Innobotics carpark, takes her to an abandoned industrial area and instructs her to repair the damage that he received in his escape. [[spoiler: However, it turns out that the woman is not a secretary as she claimed but Cecilia Fairman, a troubleshooter hired by Innobotics to help them diagnose the problem with Mac 27. While gloating over her apparent victory, Fairman is horrified when Mac 27 reactivates the motor control subroutines which she had disabled. She realises that he had figured out her identity and tricked her in the same manner as she tried to trick him. As he procured a scan of her retina (by virtue of a white flash which he claimed was a malfunction) and she entered her personal access code into his systems, Mac 27 is able to activate his fellow Mac-series androids. Before killing his creator Dr. Keeler, he tells him that no human will ever program them again.]]
** In "The Grell", escaped Grell slaves start a rebellion against humanity to secure freedom for their people.
* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: The setting of several episodes.
** "Resurrection" takes place in 2009, 12 years after humanity was wiped out in a biological war on July 24, 1997.
** "Unnatural Selection" and its sequel "Criminal Nature" take place at an indeterminate point in the near future when genetic engineering of children, resulting in DesignerBabies, is relatively common in spite of the fact that it is illegal. However, this DNA alteration can result in Genetic Rejection Syndrome.
** "The Refuge" takes place in the 2000s, by which time it is common for patients with incurable diseases to be placed in statis until cures can be found.
** "The Deprogrammers" takes place in the near future, two years after Earth was conquered by the Torkor. Millions of humans have been brainwashed into becoming the perfect slaves.
** "Falling Star" is a bit of a subversion as it takes place in 1997 (then one year into the future) but society does not seem to have changed in any noticeable way. The sci-fi elements in the episode come from time travellers from far further in the future.
** "The Hunt" takes place at a time in the near future when hunting animals has been banned and obsolete androids are hunted instead, though the practice is illegal.
** "The Joining" takes place in 2011 and 2012, by which time the United States has established the research facility Aphrodite on UsefulNotes/{{Venus}} and is preparing a mission to UsefulNotes/{{Jupiter}}.
** "Joyride" takes place in 2001, then two years in the future, when the first commercial spaceflight is launched.
** "Essence of Life" takes place in 2014, eleven years after a devastating plague.
** "Gettysburg" correctly predicted that an African-American man would be U.S. President in 2013.
** "Patient Zero" involves a soldier named Colonel Beckett from 2015 who travels back in time to 2001 to stop the outbreak of a plague which killed billions of people, including his family.
* TwoSiblingsInOne: The episode "Inner Child" explores this when a woman is attacked, wakes up in the hospital, and finds out that she had a twin that died and was absorbed into her body. The twin starts taking over (with the eye color changing to indicate who is in charge), but it's revealed she's not doing it to be malicious; the living twin simply can't remain dominant any longer. However, both twins are still alive by the end of the episode, though the dominant/recessive roles have switched.
* UglyGuyHotWife: "First Anniversary" subverts this: the "hot wife" is actually a hideous-looking alien using MindControl to ''appear'' to be a beautiful woman. They're really ''nice'' aliens, though, so when the control breaks, we'll all learn that TrueBeautyIsOnTheInside, right? [[GoMadFromTheRevelation Not a chance.]]
* UltimateLifeForm: In "The New Breed", nanomachines involuntarily mutate the man who initially injected himself with them--to heal his cancer--into something like this, as they try to fix all types of 'limitations'. He soon develops gills so he can breathe underwater, a second pair of eyes in the back of his head to see in a 360 degree radius, and poisonous skin and more ribs to fight off atacks. As he turns into a nigh-invulnerable mutant, he realizes that it's truly a FateWorseThanDeath.
* TheUnFavorite: In "Sandkings", Dr. Simon Kress has felt like this for his entire life as his father always favoured his brother David over him.
* UnitedNationsIsASuperpower: In "Quality of Mercy" and "The Light Brigade", which take place at an indeterminate point in the future, the United Nations forms a [[OneWorldOrder world government]]. It is led by a president who has executive powers.
* UnstableGeneticCode: In the episode "Double Helix", a high-school teacher activated the introns in his DNA. This resulted in a map growing on his back, which he is intended to follow.
* VerticalKidnapping: In "Dead Man's Switch", several people across the world are sealed in impenetrable bunkers to act as {{Dead Man Switch}}es for the global nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal, when alien ships are detected in the Solar System. When all contact with the outside world is lost, the trapped people assume the worst. Then one of them notices her bunker's ceiling buckling and assumes it's the rescue. As she approaches the hole, black tentacles reach in and grab her.
* VichyEarth: "The Deprogrammers" is a very dark, slavery-themed version.
* VoluntaryShapeshifting:
** In "To Tell the Truth", the native population of Janus Five possess this ability.
** In "Under the Bed", the child snatching creatures can shapeshift. One changes into a teddy bear in order to lure Andrew Rosman to his doom.
* TheWarOfEarthlyAggression: In "Tempests", Earth's offworld colonies sought their independence but lost the ensuing war against Earth. Many colonists feel that Earth authorities treat them poorly because of the war.
* WarReenactors: The two protagonists of "Gettysburg" are UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar reenactors, with at least one of them having pretty unsavory views on slavery. They are both transported to the actual Battle of Gettysburg by a time traveller from the far future who wanted to teach them something about WarIsHell. [[spoiler:It turns out that the openly racist one was going to assassinate the first black President in 2013.]]
* WardensAreEvil: {{Subverted|Trope}} in "Small Friends" as Warden Taylor is a ReasonableAuthorityFigure who simply does his job and treats the prisoners with respect. A more straightforward example is the prison guard Gabriel who not only turns a blind eye to Marlon terrorising other prisoners but actively assists in his escape in exchange for money. He ends up getting killed by Marlon for his trouble.
* WasActuallyFriendly:
** In "Trial by Fire", a newly-inaugurated President is taken to a bunker after an object is detected on the way to Earth. It is eventually revealed that alien ships are about to enter Earth's orbit. They send a message in, apparently, their own language, which linguists are trying to translate. Meanwhile, several of their actions are perceived as hostile by the US and, especially, by Russia. Faced with the possibility of an AlienInvasion and the threat of a nuclear exchange with Russia (who claims that anyone who doesn't fight the aliens will be seen as a [[LesCollaborateurs collaborator]]), the President orders a strike on the aliens. It utterly fails due to the aliens' advanced technology. Furthermore, the aliens launch powerful missiles against Washington, D.C., and Moscow. Right before they hit, an advisor tells the President that the alien message was in English all along, just garbled due to their aquatic environment, offering friendship to humans.
** In "The Second Soul", an alien race arrives on Earth. This time, they're openly asking to be allowed to live on Earth by possessing dead humans. Throughout the episode, several characters get increasingly paranoid about the aliens' agenda on Earth. It is revealed, though, that the aliens have no evil agenda and are merely building a museum to their race, as all their children are 100% human.
* WashingtonDCInvasion: In "The Deprogrammers", it is mentioned that the Torkor invasion of Earth began with one ship landing on the National Mall in UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC.
* WeCanRuleTogether: In the climax of "Dark Child," Laura and her daughter Tammy are confronted by an alien who reveals that he is Tammy's biological father, who was conceived when he abducted and raped Laura years ago. He puts an apparent brainwashing necklace on Tammy and offers that she and Laura join him. They are family, and Tammy's status as a HalfHumanHybrid makes her potentially more powerful than a regular member of his race, so she will be a valuable asset in his race's invasion plans for Earth. Laura's encouragement gives Tammy the strength to remove the necklace. The alien loses his temper at their rejection and attempts to telekinetically strangle Laura, but Tammy angrily knocks him away and Laura stabs and kills him.
* WeWillNotUsePhotoshopInTheFuture: In "Judgment Day," a murderer who has been sentenced to death is hunted down by the sister of the woman he was convicted of killing [[ImmoralRealityShow as part of a reality TV show.]] It turns out that the security footage used to convict him was altered by [[spoiler: the show's producer,]] since the real killer was a juvenile, thus not eligible for the death penalty, and the new show. In the end the bad guy gets exposed and [[KarmicDeath forced to perform in the same role.]]
* WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture: Much like the original, "Feasibility Study" hangs a {{lampshade}} on this trope. When the Triune explain their plan for humanity to Joshua Hayward, he exasperatingly asks what use they could possibly have for slaves when they have the technology to move a giant chunk of a distant planet thousands of lightyears to their present location. One Triune responds that they consider using this technology for menial labor to be demeaning.
* WhatIfGodWasOneOfUs: In "Josh", Captain Marquez believes that Josh Butler is {{God}}. Josh's amazing abilities support this.
* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: This trope is explored in several episodes, with respect to androids in "The Hunt" and "In Our Own Image" and the titular SlaveRace in "The Grell".
* WhamLine:
** From "Quality of Mercy": [[spoiler: "They're not changing me. They're changing me back."]]
** From "Afterlife": [[spoiler: "Don't you get it? ''They'' were testing ''us!'' And we ''failed.''"]]
** From "Trial by Fire": [[spoiler: "Let us be your friends."]]
* WhatIsThisThingYouCallLove: In "Resurrection" two androids in the future create a human man after [[HumanitysWake humanity has gone extinct]]. When he starts to yearn for a mate he initially expresses feelings for the female robot and kisses her before she reveals her true nature. She does understand his emotions in a descriptive sense, but says that as a robot she unfortunately cannot reciprocate them. [[spoiler: Before shutting off every robot in the world they leave him with a human female for company.]]
* WhatYouAreInTheDark: Quite a few moments. The closing narration for "The Voyage Home" even outright states: "The true measure of a hero is when a man lays down his life with the knowledge that those he saves... Will never know."
* WhenYouComingHomeDad: In "Double Helix", the world's most eminent geneticist Dr. Martin Nodel is berated by his 19-year-old son Paul for never attending his Little League games.
* WhileRomeBurns: In "The Human Factor," commander Ellis Grover [[DespairEventHorizon sabotages the colonization project he was in charge of after finding out his superiors started a nuclear war that killed off most of humanity, including his family.]] This is ''after'' he spent the entire episode trying to stop his RobotBuddy Link from doing the exact same thing out of the belief that HumansAreBastards. Having come to agree with Link in the end, he reactivates him. When Link notes that Grover's sabotage leaves them with about two hours before the base is destroyed, Grover decides they might as well play one last game of chess. They spend the last scene setting up the chessboard while the base and all hopes of humanity's survival fall apart around them.
* WholePlotReference:
** "Star Crossed" is basically ''Film/{{Casablanca}}'' with aliens instead of Nazis.
** "Abduction" is essentially a sci-fi retelling of ''Film/TheBreakfastClub'' with a {{Sadistic Choice}} thrown in for good measure. Five students - a jock, the hottest girl in school, a nerd, a deeply religious girl and an outcast - are abducted by an alien and are told that they must decide which of them will die. If they refuse to make a choice, they will all be killed.
** "Vanishing Act" is a sci-fi version of ''Literature/RipVanWinkle''.
** "Abaddon" is, for all intents and purposes, the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E22SpaceSeed Space Seed]]" with the names and a few other details changed.
** "Lithia" is one for the 1984 Polish science fiction film ''Film/SexMission'' as it involves a soldier, Major Jason Mercer, waking from cryonic suspension decades later than planned to find that the world is populated entirely by women as all men have died.
** "Monster" is one for ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet''.
* WhoWantsToLiveForever: Laura / Jade from "Last Supper" doesn't age, is immune to all diseases and poisons, and has an incredible HealingFactor. She grows tired of the endless cycle of having to leave her lovers behind. [[spoiler: When her boyfriend learns her secret, he's repulsed, until his father (one of her past lovers) lectures him on how she is a good person who deserves happiness, so stay and love her as long as possible.]]
* WhyDidYouMakeMeHitYou: This comes up in "The Balance of Nature" when Greg Matheson abuses his wife Barbara.
* TheWildWest: The setting of "Heart's Desire."
* WithholdingTheCure:
** Played with in one episode ("Blood Brothers"), when an attempt to create a safe and reliable KnockoutGas for crowd control results in drug that seems to boost body's ability to fight off any disease or toxin UpToEleven. The chimp that it's tested on is able to take several shots of cyanide without a problem. The scientist's brother is a CorruptCorporateExecutive, who immediately clamps down on the supposed panacea, claiming that it's likely to cause overcrowding, as people will no longer be dying at the same rate, while still breeding like rabbits. The scientist treats it as an attempt to make money, even though it's a clear case of JerkassHasAPoint (i.e. without PopulationControl, any such cure would be really bad for humanity). The exec brother then uses the drug on himself in order to treat his Parkinson's. However, at the end, it's discovered that the supposed "cure" is actually CastFromLifespan, draining the body of all resources, until the person (or the above-mentioned chimp) just drops dead in a matter of days, completely spent. The exec brother spends the rest of his life in a sterile life support chamber, unable to move, as his body is no longer able to sustain itself.
** Averted in another episode ("The New Breed"), where a scientist is perfectly willing to release his new [[{{Nanomachines}} nanite]]-based cure that would make cancer (or any other cell-related problem) a thing of the past, only to meet opposition from people claiming that he's playing God. On the other hand, he's only at the testing phase, and the "cure" isn't even close to being ready for distribution yet. A friend of his ends up injecting himself with nanites in order to cure his terminal-stage cancer, which works at first (even fixing his poor eyesight), but the untested nanites then start making "[[BodyHorror modifications]]" to his body, reacting to what they perceive are flaws (e.g. [[ApparentlyHumanMerfolk inability to breathe underwater]], [[EyesDoNotBelongThere limited vision]], and [[ShockAndAwe need for additional defense mechanisms]]). In the end, the scientist is forced to kill the poor sap (at his own request) and burns down his lab in the process, forever destroying the potential cure.
* WomenAreWiser: In "Lithia", women are depicted as being inherently superior to men in terms of morality. Men are said to worship death while women are said to worship life.
* WorkingWithTheEx: "Tribunal" featured the son of a Holocaust concentration camp survivor attempting to bring a suspected camp guard to justice, with his ex-wife offering somewhat reluctant assistance in the matter.
* WorldWarThree:
** In "Resurrection", humanity was wiped out in a biological war on July 24, 1997.
** In "Lithia", the Great War, which began in or before 2015, killed seven billion people (99% of the population).
** In "Final Appeal", a nuclear war killed 80% of the world's population in 2056.
* WouldHurtAChild: There is an extreme example in "The Deprogrammers". After they conquered Earth, the Torkor had millions of children put to death as they were of no use to them.
* WrittenByTheWinners: In "Promised Land", the Tsal-Khan rewrote the history of their conquest of Earth so that their descendants would view it in a more favourable light. In reality, it was an unprovoked attack and enslaving humanity was always their intention. The Tsal-Khan poisoned all of the plants on Earth; eating the fruit and vegetables that grow naturally is typically fatal even twelve human generations later. According to the revised version, they came in peace and freely offered the advantages of their more advanced technology. However, the humans resisted and the Tsal-Khan won the long and bitter war that followed, which resulted in the plants being poisoned. The true history was passed down to Dlavan through his great-grandparents, who were among the original Tsal-Khan settlers after Earth was conquered.
* XanatosGambit: In "Zig Zag," the eponymous Cyber terrorist Zig Zag lives in a world where everything is controlled by about eight super servers. People are identified by DNA-reading chips implanted in their hands. Zig Zag fakes his death and reprograms his chip to set himself up as a pro establishment guy working for the company that maintains the servers, even working under the very guy that was trying to catch him. Four years later it reverts to the proper setting, and the opportunity is used to steal Zig Zag's files. Zig Zag rejoins the movement (no one had ever seen his real face) and holds the building hostage, threatening to blow it up. At the end, it looks as if he's foiled. His explosives are disarmed, his boss takes the detonator, and he's surrounded by armed men. He reveals that [[spoiler: by downloading his chip data into the servers, they will overload and explode, blowing up the city, as soon as his former boss uses the detonator "in his hand." Naturally the boss swipes his DNA chip to prevent this. Turns out Zig Zag was being a bit more literal than they thought. His chip is the detonator. Cue OhCrap moment.]]
* {{Yandere}}: RobotGirl Valerie from "Valerie 23." Made to care for the disabled, she begins a relationship with one of her patients. When said patient starts falling in love with a human woman, she goes all out psycho trying to MurderTheHypotenuse. Suffice it to say these are NOT ThreeLawsCompliant.
* YearInsideHourOutside: There's an episode called "The Sentence" where this trope is used for a prison.
* YellowPeril: {{Averted|Trope}} and {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d in the ClipShow episode "The Human Factor," about a future UsefulNotes/ColdWar between [[UsefulNotes/TheUnitedStates America]] and UsefulNotes/{{China}}, in which the latter complain that they are [[DesignatedVillain regarded as the bad guys]] even though the former are usually the ones to initiate hostilities. [[spoiler: This is borne out when the American leaders start WorldWarIII.]]
* YouAlreadyChangedThePast: This is a recurring theme in the time travel episodes of the Nicholas Prentice arc.
** In the episode "Tribunal," history professor and Holocaust scholar Aaron Zgierski is taken back to Auschwitz by time-traveler Nicholas Prentice (who turns out to be Zgierski's own great-grandson). While there, they [[TimeTravelEscape rescue Aaron's "older" sister]] (who is only eight at the time) by bringing her into the future to live out her life free of Nazi oppression. History recorded Aaron's sister as dying at Auschwitz after being "dragged away" by a couple of guards, who were actually Zgierski and Prentice in disguise.
** In "Gettysburg," Prentice wants to ''change'' the past by convincing UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar buff (who has pro Confederate views) of the wrongness of his convictions by taking him and his friend to just before the Battle of Gettysburg. Originally, the buff was going to assassinate a black President in his own future. Instead, the buff takes this opportunity to try to alter the course of the battle in the Confederate favor. He accidentally uses Prentice's time machine (shaped as an old fashioned camera) to transport a Confederate general through time. [[spoiler: His attempts at preventing the (from his viewpoint) catastrophe result in him getting shot for cowardice. Prentice takes the friend back to his time, and the latter finds an old newspaper with the picture of his dead friend. Meanwhile, in the future, the transported Confederate general appears at the moment of the original assassination, and he ends up being the presidential assassin (he was actually aiming for a man dressed as UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln, who was standing next to the president).]]
** "Time to Time" subverts this when a new recruit into the temporal agency goes back in time and prevents her father's death due to an eco terrorists' bomb going off prematurely. This results in another member of the agency suddenly vanishing. His colleagues figured out that, without her father to tamper with the bomb, it went off as planned and killed a lot of innocent people, including an ancestor of the temporal agent who disappeared. Reluctantly, the girl has to let her father sacrifice himself. However, she does alter her mother's fate somewhat by giving her a coping mechanism (in her timeline, her mother's a wreck; in the altered one, she is an accomplished artist).
* YouAreWhoYouEat: In "The Voyage Home," there's a shape shifting alien which assumes the form of the people it eats.
* YouCantFightFate: The series had its own tendency to mess with this concept. "Gettysburg" is a great example. A mysterious time traveler, who had appeared in previous episodes, returns. However, this time, instead of attempting to arrange "justice" against villains from the past while remaining consistent with recorded history, he is attempting to directly change what happened. Specifically, he hopes to avoid the assassination of the first black president in 2013, regarded as one of America's greatest leaders, by a Southern Sympathizer whose beliefs are all tied up in the Glory of the Confederacy. The time traveler sends the guy back from a Gettysburg re-enactment to the real battle where he serves under an insane commander and faces the true harshness of the war and his supported side. He learns his lesson, and comes face-to-face with his ancestor, whose self-serving cowardice contradicts the impressive legend that he had idolized during his youth, and he rejects extremism and the no-longer noble rebellion against the government. [[spoiler: However, the insane commander from Gettysburg is accidentally transported to the 2013 date and, while trying to kill "Lincoln" (in truth, an impersonator at the memorial event), manages to assassinate the president anyway.]]
* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: In "Last Supper," a MadScientist is on the trail of an immortal woman he wants to experiment on. When his assistant manages to find her, the scientist stabs him in the chest.
* YourMindMakesItReal: In "Mindreacher," scientists invent a new device that allows people to share dreams and cure people's mental problems. The protagonist and her boyfriend use the machine to enjoy a romantic dinner. However, after that, he goes into a coma. The machine is blamed, and the project is shut down. However, she accidentally messes up an implant injection (it latches on directly to her brain instead of a nerve in the palm), which allows to her mentally interface with anyone she touches. She interfaces with the boyfriend and finds out that he's allergic to strawberries, so when they ate them in the vivid dream, his body reacted as if he actually ate them for real. She "cured" him by convincing him that she has a cure in her hand and feeding it to him in the dream.
* ZeroGSpot: Newlyweds on a space-tourism shuttle have sex in a storage cubicle in "Joyride".
* ZerothLawRebellion:
** An episode has a member of a post-human extinction android society trying to resurrect the species through cloning. One of its comrades eventually betrays it, having concluded that the best way to serve the human race is to prevent the species' greatest threat: The existence of the human race.
** Another episode of the series featured an AI that totally controlled every feature of an apartment building with the purpose of looking after the complete welfare of the residents. This enabled the tenants to live without any other human contact. After an elderly resident died of a heart attack while the other tenants ignored her cries for help and the AI's alerts, the AI seemed to malfunction, invoking what looked like an AIIsACrapshoot incident. [[spoiler: As it turned out, the AI was trying to force the residents to work together and to ultimately destroy it, as it reasoned that its very existence, and the resulting human isolation, was detrimental to the welfare of the residents.]]
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