Plot
Mason Stark, a project manager for a company called Eigenphase, hates his life. A year ago, his wife Kristin was killed by a mugger's bullet; Mason still blames himself for failing to protect her. His depression continued to worsen, and today he was fired from his job. Mason is given a generous severance package, but in the privacy of his office he produces a gun — and contemplates killing either himself, or his coworkers. Rejecting murder, he puts the gun to his head. But right before he can pull the trigger, Mason becomes disoriented and vanishes, finding himself in a parallel universe — one where dozens of duplicates of himself are imprisoned in an Eigenphase lab. His counterpart indigenous to this universe is the CEO of the company.
The CEO version (Stark) explains to Mason that he built a machine called the Quantum Mirror, to explore all those different versions of himself. However, his experiments quickly turned to disaster — one of their counterparts is actually an insane killer (Mace), who murdered Stark's entire family. And Mason — the first version we met — has been enlisted to stop the killer. To Mason's surprise, Stark tells him that for whatever reason, he is actually the closest version to Mace, which makes him the most qualified to understand the murderer. To that end, Stark promises to reunite Mason with Kristin — specifically, her counterpart in this universe — as his reward.
Mason quickly learns that things are not as they seem. He is confronted by Mace, who he learns is actually much like himself, apart from one fundamental difference: Mace made the choice to burst out of his office and murder all of his coworkers at Eigenphase. Now that Mace has found himself in another universe, he has decided to put things the way he thinks they should be — by murdering all of the counterparts of the people he originally killed. Mace claims that he knows the truth about why they, and all of their counterparts, were brought here: Stark, the Mason of this universe, for all of his wealth and power hates his own life as well — and was looking for a version of himself who was happy, and whom he could replace. (Mace appeared happiest of all the duplicates, so he was chosen.) Once Mason stopped Mace, Stark would not honor his promise and instead send Mason back to his own universe.
Mason reluctantly teams up with Mace to return to Eigenphase and confront Stark. A fight breaks out, and two of the Masons — the murderer Mace and the CEO Stark from this universe — are trapped in the Quantum Mirror, which activates, sending them to other universes...
- Mace appears in Mason's universe from the beginning of the episode. He is trapped to continue Mason's original action and shoots himself in the head. His coworkers, who hear the gunshot, investigate and discovering the body, wonder why he is so badly scarred...
- Stark is sent to Mace's universe, right after Mace had killed his co-workers. Over his protests that he is not the murderer, Stark is shot to death by police.
In the end, Mason is left to take Stark's place as CEO of Eigenphase. He meets the local version of Kristin, and the two strike up a friendship...
Read more about this topic: In Another Life (The Outer Limits)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)