THERESA GIVENS, PhD, in the Outer Limits (1995) episodes A Stitch in Time and Final Appeal , was a time traveler. She perfected time travel, and used it in a futile attempt to assuage a deep psychic pain from an outrageous personal violation that happened to her when she was a child. But after that, she made the mistake of jumping to a future time line. Where she then found herself on trial for her life. Contents [hideshow] 1. Time lines of Theresa Givens, PhD 1.1. Time Line No. 1: Vigilante 1.2. Time Line No. 2: Researcher 1.3. Time Line No. 3: Defendant/Appellant Time lines of Theresa Givens, PhD Time Line No. 1: Vigilante Theresa Givens was born in the year 1961. On October 28, 1976, a particularly vicious criminal whose name is unrecorded (or more accurately, was never connected with her case), kidnapped her. He held her captive in his basement for almost a week, during which time he repeatedly raped her and beat her almost to death. How she escaped, she never revealed to anyone. But a year later she entered a psychiatric hospital for an attempt at rehabilitation.That attempt succeeded--sort of. She could at least function, but only on high doses of antidepressants.In 1989, she joined the staff of the National Security Agency and worked on a project that was near and dear to her heart: time travel. The days of human beings, she asserted, were like a string of pearls. Change one, and all the others must change. More to the point was how she could achieve time travel. As she would explain later: time qua time does not pass independent of human percept. The developing human brain forms a specialized part of the cerebral cortex, called the tempore discernus, at seven months' gestation. Before then, an unborn child exists with no consciousness of time at all. But at that critical stage, a seven-month developing child can actually control an energy field that can serve as a portal between present and future--or between present and past.Dr. Givens had her own purpose in mind for her time machine. So she stalled the project, until finally a frustrated United States Senate canceled funding. So she resigned from the NSA and took a job at a leading university. And there she completed her time machine and used it for her own purpose.That purpose: to travel back into time and kill certain serial murderers of women before each had committed his first murder. She would find out who these men were by reading of their executions. Once she determined that, she would research the circumstances of their first murders. Then she would go back, carrying a 9-mm gun, and say to each, On [such-a-date] you were executed for the willful murder of [however-many] women. And I am here to carry out that just and legal sentence. Then she would shoot each man twice in the chest to knock him down, then once through the forehead as the coup de gr