DISCOVER--the thirty best episodes of The Outer Limits

A radio ham inadvertently makes contact with an extraterrestrial being and accidentally draws the creature to Earth...

With Cliff Robertson

The President of the United States is replaced by an impostor with a malleable face...

With Sidney Blackmer

A scientific cabal plots to terrify the world into peace by creating an artificial but crucially credible alien threat...

With Robert Culp

Featuring an extraordinary alien creation by the late, great Janos Prohaska

A bitter little man finds his pent-up rage taking violent telekinetic form...

With Donald Pleasance

A frustrated and angry young man is transformed into a callous and insensitive evolved man of the future with huge brain...

With David McCallum

Amazing make-up job by John Chambers

A man with the chance of travelling back through time to prevent a nuclear holocaust is put in an appalling moral dilemma...

With Martin Landau

Superb direction on this one from Leonard Horn

A superb Wah Chang alien fronts this yarn about extraterrestrial infiltration of a paranoid Big Brother security system...

With Jeff Corey

A man with a metal plate in his head overhears aliens plotting a take-over of Earth... and then planning his demise when they realise he's aware of them...!

With Robert Culp

In a war between the Earth and the alien Ebonites, human soldiers are tortured by callous interrogators...

With Martin Sheen

Another wonderful alien from Wah Chang.

An energy force is controlling a scientific research institute with fatal heart monitor devices...

With Ed Asner

The opening scene with the cleaning lady is classic typical Outer Limits...

An escaped bank robber stumbles onto a covert military liaison with evil ant-like aliens...

With Bruce Dern

A wonderful episode often recalled by the series' more casual viewers, incredibly well done for the period...

A convict volunteers for a dangerous military experiment involving contact with an alien race, and discovers a plot...

With Henry Silva

Two eloping teenagers trying to evade the girl's stern, authoritarian father stumble into an appalling ongoing tragedy involving a deranged elderly woman and a malevolent alien force trapped in a box...

With Miriam Hopkins

A perfect example of what SFTV could get away with that straight drama never could. This is about the treachery of the old and the naïveté of the young, with a wonderfully hideous creature that resembles a fusion between the sex organs! Weird gothic horror, with honourable mentions to Nellie Burt and John Hoyt. Wonderful.

Great fun, with an entomologist plagued by a pouty Lolita who applies to be his lab assistant, but is actually a bee in human form!

With Phillip Abbott, Joanna Frank

Frank is gorgeous as the bee girl, and Marsha Hunt very good as the understandably troubled wife. Marvellous direction and lighting.

Bodysnatching alien parasites that have already infiltrated the highest echelons of the power structure start painfully attaching themselves to disaffected loners and outcasts of society for use as foot soldiers...

With Don Gordon, George MacReady, Walter Burke, Neil Hamilton

What could have been another typical aliens-take-over-humans yarn becomes instead an incisive study of the attitudes and mentality of both fascism and the military, with extraordinary over-the-top performances from George MacReady and Neil Hamilton. Invisibles, of course, has a double meaning here, referring not only to the alien infiltrators, but the position of their soldiers in everyday life--low intelligence non-entities, cannon-fodder. The entire cast is magnificent from top to bottom, and the creatures themselves wonderfully absurd. An absolute joy from start to finish.

The greed of power-hungry individuals, one a self-serving idealist, the other the wife of a timid but talented young scientist, results in murder and madness when contact is inadvertently made with an alien life form...

With Martin Landau, Sally Kellerman, Neil Hamilton, John Hoyt

Landau and Kellerman are great, but Neil Hamilton steals the show for a second time as he relishes some wonderful dialogue. John Hoyt of Don't Open Till Doomsday is the alien. More wonderful gothic horror from first season Outer Limits.

Impotent mandible-faced aliens that impregnated Earth women decades earlier to replenish male stocks return to collect their now teenaged progeny

With Lee Kinsolving, Kent Smith

Another typical Outer Limits twist on an old cliche. Standard 1950s bug-eyed monster stuff, but beautifully done, and who couldn't love a monster in a suit and tie?

Visiting a remote scientific community, an investigator finds out that one of their number has been transformed into a telepathic, mind-reading madman who is keeping his colleagues in subservient terror...

With Warren Oates

The bug-eyed monster to see 'em all off. Pure pulp SF, but isn't that what this list is all about?

A young drifter is held captive in an alien construct of a gothic mansion populated by wretched individuals frozen in time by an alien life form studying human nature...

With Geoffrey Horne, Gloria Grahame, Nellie Burt

Don't Open Till Doomsday revisited, but worth it...

A lonely woman and a two-bit gangster find themselves forced to fight an evil alien hunter with the Earth's survival at stake...

With Nick Adams, Nancy Malone

Similar to Star Trek's Arena, or indeed The Most Dangerous Game (perhaps the most plundered plot of all time), and one of the few episodes to feature a cackling, comic-book-style evil alien. Still good though, and pure pulp...

An entire city block is transported to another planet, where the inhabitants must forget their petty squabbles and band together to save the Earth.

With Sam Wanamaker, David Opatoshu, Joyce Van Patten

Dark and downbeat, with a fabulously hysterical pre-credits teaser. Remade quite efficiently by the crappy 1990s reboot with Outer Limits veteran David McCallum, and one of only two episodes in that series worth seeing (the other one A Stitch in Time).

A cynical dirty ops agent is hauled out of drunken retirement by the military to get inside an alien saucer...

With Robert Duvall

A good early role suited to Robert Duvall, also superb in Time Tunnel's Chase Through Time...

Two young women who murder a blackmailing gigolo stumble onto (another Outer Limits) gothic mansion where an odd young man plays with time and space...

With David McCallum, Vera Miles, Barbara Rush

Back-door pilot, the very recognisable score for which was later used for The Invaders. Nothing quite like this has ever been seen on U.S. TV before, and nor will it again, I suspect.

An astronaut returns to Earth suffering from debilitating coldness and hallucinations of a strange alien being...

With William Shatner

An early trip into space for Star Trek's Captain Kirk... We are now in the series' second season with a new creative team more inclined to reach for the cliche rather than try to avoid it. Nevertheless, there were a few good ones, flawed or not...

Hostile alien invaders travel through time to pursue a desperate young man they believe knows the hiding place of the human race...

With Robert Culp

Talky but atmospheric, with yet another superb performance by Robert Culp.

A reclusive and cynical lawyer is tempted out of retirement to defend a robot on trial for killing the scientist who built it.

With Howard Da Silva

Da Silva makes a meal of his role as the lawyer, and Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy co-stars as a smug reporter. Nimoy was back for the 1990s remake, but as the lawyer.

Government agents hunt down a group of soldiers who have been taken over by an alien intelligence for a mysterious and unknown purpose that even they don't understand.

With Robert Duvall, Steve Ihnat, Ivan Dixon

Despite over-earnest dialogue and steely, melodramatic performances that render numerous scenes laughable, and despite the unintentional humour and even the ludicrously cheap spacecraft literally held together with string (despite the awe of the laboratory worker in part one), the beautifully executed sentimental scenes of this story still overwhelm and seduce the contemporary audience today. When Ivan Dixon asks God if the actions he has been compelled to perform "are good", or the little blind girl exclaims "look what my hands look like", all is forgiven. And those final scenes in the spaceship and as the camera pulls back between all the gun-toting federal agents, are superb. A triumph over adversity that is down to the choice of cast and director.

A suicidal scientist distracted from his work by his human emotions is eager to transfer them to an emotionless alien being.

With Warren Stevens, Robert Webber

The episode title sounds like a really bad 1970s progressive rock album, but the finished product is more like a perfect recreation of those 1950s sci-fi monster comics Marvel used to turn out before they reinvented the super-hero. Robert Webber is excellent as the invading alien introduced to the concept of emotions, while wooden Warren Stevens is in his element as the scientist who has surrendered them. The alien goon squad is a cracker, but it's not all pulp monster mash--there's a wonderfully creepy scene when the alien materialises in the back of Stevens' car. The downside is yet another of the second season's drink-fixing devoted wives, a cloying simpleton who would be enough to drive anyone to suicide, and whose dress is almost as terrifying as the extraterrestrial bug-eyed Beagle Boys...

A test pilot and his wife find time temporarily frozen and their young daughter about to be hit by a car...

With Dewey Martin, Mary Murphy

A very Twilight Zone-y episode, but as gripping and weirdly discomfiting as any Outer Limits.

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Obsessed with the popular culture of the 1960s and surrounding decades, Jon Abbott has written about this series for several publications over the years, and recently featured it in his book Cool TV 2: More Cult TV from the 1960s. He has been writing about film and TV for over thirty years in around two dozen different publications, trade, populist, and specialist. He is the author of several books, including

Irwin Allen Television Productions 1964-1970, Stephen J. Cannell Television Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots, The Elvis Films, Cool TV of the 1960s: Three Shows That Changed the World, and Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s.

See his Amazon author's page, and his other lists on the IMDB, all under the pre-fix DISCOVER.