| Series: | The Outer Limits |
| Season: | 1 |
| Episode: | 1 |
| Production: | 1 |
| Director: | Stuart Gillard |
| Guests: | Beau Bridges as Dr. Simon Kress Helen Shaver as Cathy Kress Dylan Bridges as Josh Kress Kim Coates as Dave Stockley Lloyd Bridges as Colonel Kress Patricia Harras as Debbie |
| Episode List: | List of The Outer Limits episodes |
| Next: | Valerie 23 |
"The Sandkings" is a 1995 Canadian-American television film based on the 1979 novella Sandkings by George R. R. Martin, and the first episode of the revived 1960s science-fiction television series The Outer Limits. It premiered on 26 March 1995 on Showtime and features three generations of the Bridges acting family: Beau, his father Lloyd, and son Dylan. Kim Coates and Helen Shaver also star.
The episode garnered five Gemini Award nominations. One of these was in the category of Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series for Beau Bridges' leading role as Simon Kress, which also garnered nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series and the CableACE Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series.
Dr. Simon Kress' (Beau Bridges) research for the government on Martian life is aborted because one of his specimens escaped his lab and almost made it to the surface. However, Kress does not agree with the abandonment of the project and decides to continue his experiments in his barn. He steals sand containing Martian eggs from his lab and creates a makeshift incubator to hatch more of the Martian lifeforms, which are dubbed "sandkings." Kress' obsession with the project causes his relationship with his wife Cathy (Helen Shaver) to break down. The family dog, Cowboy, is eaten by sandkings after stepping into their territory, having been awoken by their digging.
The sandkings evolve into two distinct groups, a white group and a red group, and they settle on opposite sides of their glass enclosure. Kress comes to believe that he is a god to his sandkings when the white group builds a sand structure that resembles his face. He smashes the sand structure of the red group who did not do the same, one of them getting loose and stinging him. He kills his former supervisor Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) by tossing him into the enclosure, where the sandkings then devour him. Later, he finds himself in the basement with the red sandkings, who have made a nest with the face of Stockley. He breaks a gas pipe to cause an explosion in an attempt to kill all of the sandkings. In the ending of the episode, a colony of sandkings is shown surviving in the wilderness.
The Sandkings thrived after their escape from Kress' home laboratory. Fragments from the episode are included in the final episode of season one, "The Voice of Reason". There, clips from "The Sandkings" are used to support an argument that the Earth is undergoing a number of different alien invasions. Later in the episode, two alien conspirators acknowledge, in private conversation, that the Sandkings could become a serious problem in about thirty years, assuming that they could survive in a methane-based atmosphere, which the aliens intended to gradually transform from the Earth's human-friendly one.
In the sixth-season episode "Final Appeal", we discover that the Sandkings plague has been eradicated, which took "the better part of a decade" to complete.