6.7 /10 2 Votes
Episode no. Season 1Episode 1 Production code 1 ← Previous— Next →"Valerie 23" Music director Mark Mancina | 7.4/10 IMDb Directed by Stuart Gillard Original air date 26 March 1995 Initial release 1995 Episode number 1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar The Inheritors, Soldier, Ryan vs Dorkman, Doorways, Johnny Fedora and Alice Blu | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"The Sandkings" is the first episode of the revived 1960s science-fiction television series The Outer Limits, based on the short story Sandkings by George R. R. Martin, first published in Omni Magazine in August 1979. The episode premiered on 26 March 1995 on Showtime and features three generations of the Bridges family, which was used to promote the new series. At 92:38 minutes, "The Sandkings" is twice the normal length of other episodes in the series.
Contents
- Sandkings part 1
- Introduction
- Opening narration
- Plot
- Closing narration
- Aftermath
- Differences from the original story
- Awards nominations
- References
The episode garnered five Gemini Award nominations. One of these was in the category of Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series for Beau Bridges' leading role as Simon Kress, which also garnered nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series and the CableACE Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series.
Sandkings part 1
Introduction
A scientist steals specimens of Martian life from his subterranean workplace laboratory to illegally continue research on an aborted, classified government project at home.
Opening narration
Some of man's greatest achievements have been motivated by a driving need for love and acceptance. What happens when that need for recognition, becomes a desire to be revered, and then worshiped...like a god?
Plot
Dr. Simon Kress' (Beau Bridges) research for the government on Martian life is aborted because one of his specimens escaped his lab and almost made it to the surface. However, Kress does not agree with the abandonment of the project and decides to continue his experiments in his barn. He steals some sand containing Martian eggs from his lab and creates a makeshift incubator to hatch more of the Martian lifeforms. Kress' obsession with the project causes his relationship with his wife Cathy (Helen Shaver) to break down.
The sandkings evolve into two distinct groups, a white group and a red group, and they settle on opposite sides of their glass enclosure. Kress comes to believe that he is a god to his sandkings when the white group builds a sand structure that resembles his face. He smashes the sand structure of the red group who didn't do the same, one of them getting loose and stinging him. He kills his former supervisor Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) by tossing him into the enclosure, where the sandkings then devour him. Later, he finds himself in the basement with the red sandkings, who have made a nest with the face of Stockley. He breaks a gas pipe to cause an explosion in an attempt to kill all of the sandkings. In the ending of the episode, a colony of sandkings is shown surviving in the wilderness.
Closing narration
Increasingly, modern science pursues powers traditionally reserved for the Almighty. But those who encroach upon the province of the gods realize too late that the price for entrance...is destruction.
Aftermath
The Sandkings thrived after their escape from Kress' home laboratory. Fragments from the episode are included in the final episode of season one, "The Voice of Reason". There, clips from "The Sandkings" are used to support an argument that the Earth is undergoing a number of different alien invasions. Later in the episode, two alien conspirators acknowledge, in private conversation, that the Sandkings could become a serious problem in about thirty years, assuming that they could survive in a methane-based atmosphere, which the aliens intended to gradually transform from the Earth's human-friendly one.
In the sixth-season episode "Final Appeal", we discover that the Sandkings plague has been eradicated, which took "the better part of a decade" to complete.