VR.5

- Season 1

(1995)

A tech wizard with tragic past discovers that she can use her top of the line photo-realistic VR tech to bring people into her VR world via phone and see or alter their subconsciousness. She uses this on her date to see if he is a creep.

On her first VR assignment for the Committee, Sydney must find an unhappy and spiteful teenage genius - who after making a momentous discovery has run away from the top secret weapons research establishment where he worked - before he can do any harm. During her search, Sydney must try to deal with her own sense of solitude.

Sydney investigates the mind of Janine, a cashier at her workplace whom she discovers is stealing. Sydney herself gets pulled into the excitements and thrills of these criminal activities.

Sydney is assigned to to subconsciously prod Jackson Boothe, a troubled employee of the Committee, into returning to work. In doing so, Sydney discovers that Booth is an assassin, and he murders Sydney's Committee contact, Dr. Frank Morgan.

Oliver Sampson becomes Sydney's new contact for the Committee, and he pushes her into trying to trace who hired Boothe. Sydney discovers that Dr. Morgan's corpse has been cryogenically preserved.

Sydney is kidnapped by a faction of the Committee who brutally question her to discover her secret. She manages to contact Duncan for help, and he enters into VR in search of her. Oliver is somehow in possession of the journal of Sydney's father, but is he on Sydney's side?

Oliver instructs Sydney to make a VR link to a test pilot in a psychiatric hospital. The pilot keeps seeing fire and hates his father. Sydney enters the hospital disguised as a patient, and plants false memories of child abuse into the pilot's subconscious mind. These memories, however, may or may not be Sydney's own. Furthermore, Sydney frantically tries to decipher her father's journal and discovers that he was a member of the Committee.

Sydney enters VR to probe the mind of a self-confessed traitor scheduled for execution to find out why he did it. She discovers he was being blackmailed by people who held his son hostage, and in the process, Sydney must come to terms with her anger towards her own father.

Sydney decides to take a holiday from her work at the Committee and returns to her childhood home in Pasadena. The previous inhabitants claim the house is possessed by demons, while his daughter insists an angel saved her life during a fire. As Sydney explores the house, she gradually remembers bits and pieces from her past, and also discovers a secret room where her father conducted his early VR experiments.

When an armed man takes hostages in an air traffic control tower, Sydney is ordered to establish a VR link. In the process, she discovers a cover-up over the reason for a crash several years earlier: the crash was actually caused by a bomb planted by the Committee in an attempt to assassinate Oliver.

An increasingly careless and disillusioned Oliver assigns Sydney to an unknown contact. This contact turns out to be Oliver's former lover, Alex, who may know the whereabouts of Sydney's father.

Duncan awakens in a mirror universe - an alternate reality perfectly opposite to the one he knows.

Sydney and her sister Samantha are reunited and, along with Duncan, they enter VR5 to discover what really happened the night of the car crash. It turns out there was no car crash: Sydney's memories were altered by her father to protect her from the Committee. A faction of the Committee is after Sydney. Oliver is assigned to murder Sydney but rebels. Sydney goes into VR7 to rescue her mother from her coma.