10 Awesome Sci-Fi TV Twists You Never Saw Coming
6. The Outer Limits - The Enemy Is Human, Not Alien (And They're Being Experimented On Too)
Much like its original inspiration The Twilight Zone and the later series it inspired Black Mirror (as well as many pretenders to the throne, cough cough Dimension 404 and Tales from the Darkside), half the appeal of The Outer Limits was waiting for each episode’s outrageous twist ending. Yes, sometimes they ended up a little over the top, particularly in the show’s darker-but-also-campier Tales from the Crypt-style nineties revival. However some of this series’ more effective offerings see the show pull off incredible twists, as evidenced in season 4’s 1998 episode, Hearts and Minds.
An unsparing satire of jingoistic patriotism and the xenophobia it entails, the episode sees soldiers given an experimental drug to help them slaughter monstrous enemy aliens—only for them to discover the enemies they’re killing are humans and the drug is simply a hallucinogen designed to rob of them of any conscience.
Surely they’ll be able to reveal this to the enemy, and join forces to take arms against their common enemy, the military industrial—oh, nope, they’re all killed when the enemy forces are given the same drug and assume they’re monstrous aliens.
It’s a brutal shock so effective that Black Mirror couldn’t resist an homage to it in one recent instalment, season three’s Men Against Fire.