Episode no. Season 2
Episode 21 Written by Chris Dickie Original air date 21 July 1996 | Directed by Jonathan Glassner Production code 43 | |
"Vanishing Act" is an episode of The Outer Limits television series. It first aired on 21 July 1996, during the second season.
Contents
Introduction
Trevor McPhee makes a quick trip to the shops, but after a strange experience he returns home to find that ten years have passed.
Plot
An alien race that has no concept of time uses wormholes to find planets with living creatures and enter them as hosts. When the host is asleep, they use a wormhole to abduct them and transport them to their home world where they can learn everything the host has experienced. However, since the aliens have no concept of the passage of time, they aren't realizing that each time they return their host — Trevor — home, they are returning him 10 years later each time (due to the effects of relativistic time dilation), putting him further out of touch with everything he loves. At the end they remove the connection and send him back to the night he first left; he has his life back, and nobody knows what happened, except Trevor, who retains the memory of his experiences.