Tempests (The Outer Limits)

Infobox Television episode
Title = Tempests
Series = The Outer Limits


Caption =
Season = 3
Episode = 9
Airdate = 7 March, 1997
Production = 53
Writer = Hart Hanson
Director = Mario Azzopardi
Photographer =
Guests = Eric McCormack as John Virgil, Burt Young as Captain Parker, Charlene Fernetz as Corinne Virgil, Marie Stillin as Governor Mudry, Kenneth Welsh as Dr. Vasquez, Lee Taylor as Colonel Lynne
Episode list = List of "The Outer Limits" episodes
Prev = Heart's Desire
Next = Awakening

"Tempests" is an episode of "The Outer Limits" television show. It first aired on 7 March, 1997, during the third season.

Introduction

A spaceship crashes while on a mission of mercy. One of the crew is bitten by a strange spider-like creature and begins to hallucinate — unable to tell what is real, and what is fantasy.

Opening narration

"What is freedom but the ability to make choices? Between courage and cowardice, duty and love, or even... heaven and hell. The nature of the choices we make define us as human beings. We choose the world we inhabit."

Plot

Commander Virgil find himself between two realities. An effect from a poisonous spider bite after his ship crash landed on a moon and he attempted to fix it. He finds himself shifting from the "bad" reality where his stuck on the moon trying to survive with his crew mates and apparently hallucinating from poison, and the "good" reality where he is with his family and heralded as a hero and hallucinating due to a virus called Ellycia C.

In the end Virgil makes a choice to save his people in the "bad" reality saying goodbye to the "good" reality. The captain manages to fire him on an escape pod. As he flies through space he manages to get a transmission from his wife. As he claims: "I save them." Reality shifts again...

The truth of everything is that Virgil is in fact taken over by the spiders as so have the rest of the crew.

Analysis

In the "bad" reality a clue is given as to what exactly the spider does. It doesn't just deliver a poison, it in fact takes over the hosts body. Removing it at that point means death. Whenever the governor is shown in the "bad" reality the spider is webbing her more and more making it look like a cocoon of sorts. It also at a certain point that the governor begins to say that she "sees" it.

Apparently the spider creates two realities so its victims cannot escape from it.

Closing narration

"Each of us creates his own world. We conjure paradises from our hopes, and nightmares born of fear. But what if they are both illusions?"

External links

*
* [http://www.scifi.com/outerlimits/episodes/season3/309tempests.html "Tempests"] at Sci Fi