[2] "Through all the legends of ancient peoples — Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Semitic — runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death ... the hero who strides through the centuries ..."(Narrator Vic Perrin mistakenly says "Sumerican" instead of "Sumerian".)
In this deadly game of hide-and-seek, Trent enlists the help of Consuelo Biros (Arlene Martel), a woman who works in the building.
In a desperate attempt to find a cure for the plague and to extract whatever knowledge is stored in the hand/computer, the Kyben have followed him back in time with the missing fingers.
Eventually, Trent defeats all of his Kyben hunters by ripping off the medallion-shaped devices they wear to anchor them in the past.
Immune to disease, he must protect his precious cargo for 1,200 years, after the Kyben invasion, by which time the plague will have dissipated.
Ellison agreed, realizing that by forcing the plot into an enclosed space, the change from a linear pursuit to a vertical climb — ascending as the action developed — would make for heightened tension.
He found Culp to be very intelligent, quite a contrast to Ellison's opinion of most actors, whom he described as "dips — strictly non compos mentis."
"In addition to "Demon With A Glass Hand", Ellison wrote other stories set against the backdrop of the "Earth-Kyba War."
He adapted five of these – "Run For the Stars", "Life Hutch", "The Untouchable Adolescents", "Trojan Hearse", and "Sleeping Dogs" – into the graphic novel Night and the Enemy (1987), illustrated by Ken Steacy; "Life Hutch" would later be subsequently adapted (by Philip Gelatt) into an episode of the Netflix adult animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots.
Some media outlets had previously reported that "Demon with a Glass Hand" was the basis of a settlement that Ellison received after it was allegedly plagiarized for The Terminator.
Harlan Ellison clarified in a 2001 exchange with a fan at his Web site: "Terminator was not stolen from 'Demon with a Glass Hand', it was a ripoff of my OTHER Outer Limits script, 'Soldier'.
The music group Cabaret Voltaire sampled bits of dialogue from "Demon with a Glass Hand" for several songs: This episode was first transmitted in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on Friday, 28 March 1980.