Demon Hand

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Lore & Background

Trent (Robert Culp) is a man with no memory of his life before the previous ten days. His left hand has been replaced by an advanced computer shaped like his missing hand and protected by some transparent material. Three fingers are missing; the computer tells him they must be reattached before it can tell Trent what is going on. Trent is being hunted by a handful of humanoid aliens called the Kyben; they have the missing appendages. The action takes place in a large rundown office building (the historic Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles) which the Kyben have sealed off from the world. For reasons unknown to him, Trent was sent into the past via a "time mirror", located in the building. A captured Kyben tells Trent that both of them are from a thousand years in the future. In that future, Earth has been conquered by the Kyben, but all the surviving humans except Trent have mysteriously vanished. The aliens are being obliterated by a "radioactive plague" that is killing all of the Kyben occupation force, a plague apparently unleashed by the humans in a last-ditch effort to repel the invasion.

In Their Own Story

Trent defeats all of his Kyben hunters by ripping off the medallion-shaped devices they wear to anchor them in the past. Trent successfully destroys the mirror and recovers the missing fingers, one by one. When the computer is whole, he learns the terrible truth: He is not a man, but a robot. Brain-scans of the human survivors have been digitally encoded onto a gold-copper alloy wire wrapped around the solenoid in his thorax. Immune to disease, he must protect his precious cargo for 1,200 years, after the Kyben invasion, by which time the plague will have dissipated. Then he will resurrect the human race. Trent had thought he was a man, as he and Consuelo Biros (Arlene Martel), a woman who works in the building, had begun to develop feelings for each other. With the truth revealed, she leaves him, pity mixed with horror in her eyes. Trent is left to face 1,200 years of lonely vigil. The closing narration states: "Like the Eternal Man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh, one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love. Without friendship. Alone; neither man nor machine, waiting. Waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility. Movement, but not life."

Reader's Guide

The episode won the 1965 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology. Ellison's story outline depicted a sprawling, cross-country chase between the Kyben and Trent (then named Mr. Fish). Because this would have been prohibitively expensive, producer Ben Brady suggested that Ellison contain most of the action in a single structure when he went to script. Ellison agreed, realizing that by forcing the plot into an enclosed space, the change from a linear pursuit to a vertical climb — ascending as the action developed — would make for heightened tension. Most of this episode was shot in the Bradbury Building, the same location used for the final scenes of Blade Runner and a closing scene in the 1950 film noir classic, D.O.A. Ellison's friendship with Robert Culp dated from the production of this episode. He found Culp to be very intelligent, quite a contrast to Ellison's opinion of most actors, whom he described as "dips — strictly non compos mentis." When Culp first met Ellison at the Bradbury building location for filming, Ellison introduced himself in a loud voice and told the actor that he had written the episode just for him. Culp also stated that he felt it was one of the best-written episodes of television in the history of the medium.

Did You Know?

• The episode was first transmitted in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on Friday, 28 March 1980, and was the first episode of The Outer Limits the BBC chose to broadcast.
• The music group Cabaret Voltaire sampled bits of dialogue from the episode for several songs, including 'Stay Out of It' from The Voice of America (1980).
• A graphic novel adaptation, illustrated by Marshall Rogers, was published by DC Comics in January 1986 as the fifth title of the DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series.
• Harlan Ellison clarified in a 2001 exchange with a fan that The Terminator was not stolen from 'Demon with a Glass Hand', but from his other Outer Limits script, 'Soldier'.
• The episode was announced to be adapted as a motion picture in June 2014.