User reviews

John de Lancie, whom we may know best as "Q" on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," has a weapon that is beyond anything we can conceive. He picks out violent types at gun shows and offers this to them at a bargain price. It's unregistered and sold out of the back of a truck. Unfortunately, for a young woman, her prisoner husband kills her on the day he has been let out. He has one of de Lancie's guns and as he fires it, it gets fused to his arm with cables and a kind of clear plastic skin. He cannot remove it from his hand. He, however, becomes more and more obsessive and full of blood lust as he chases his dead wife's sister and his little boy. There has been conflict between this woman and her father (Stacy Keach) and it centers around guns and violence. The gist of the story is the effort of these two heavyweight gun people to ultimately face off against each other. Of course, gun rights people may see this as heavy handed, but in the end it's not as big an indictment as you might think. It has a reality to it that may be satisfying. It also has a neat conclusion that works quite well. John de Lancie is really quite an imposing figure, "Q" or no "Q."

I greatly enjoy The Outer Limits series. The episodes are typically good and often terrific science fiction or supernatural stories about an individual protagonist and his or her choices in life. In this very poorly written episode (really bad dialogue, and everyone is just a stereotype), there's no true protagonist. A blatantly obvious anti-gun message is the protagonist, if there really were one. There's no debate about guns and what humans do with them. The message is clear from the writer that he or she believes that guns are bad bad bad, and bad bad bad people are the ones who use guns. I don't know why the producers of this show let this loser of an episode make it to production. I give the episode two stars as credit for Stacey Keach and his good acting, even though he just played a stereotype that fit the antigun message.