I usually hate time travel stories, because of the paradoxes, and because we know the outcome in advance. But this story is not like that. I first saw this episode as a child, back in the 1960s, and it was as good as I remembered. An astronaut from 1963 flies through a time warp into the future. A desolate future of a dying Earth.
A mutant brings him up to date, and they decide to try and stop this future from ever happening. The performances were wonderful in this rendition of Beauty and the Beast, and the make-up was great. And the consequences of time travel are still awful for those involved. Trying to save the Earth's future from the world-ending outcome of a scientist's deadly experiment does not result in a happy ending for all concerned.
The ending almost makes me cry. By changing the past events, Martin Landau's character Andro has saved the future, but has also prevented himself from being born, and he disappears during the flight back to the future. The woman who was to have given birth to the man who would have destroyed the Earth is left crying alone, without the Beast she had fallen in love with, in a spaceship she doesn't know how to operate, heading for the future Earth.
When I first saw this episode, I imagined her orbiting and dying of hunger. But now I imagine that the inhabitants of future Earth rescue her from a lonely fate, and she goes on, learning to live with her broken heart.
A mutant brings him up to date, and they decide to try and stop this future from ever happening. The performances were wonderful in this rendition of Beauty and the Beast, and the make-up was great. And the consequences of time travel are still awful for those involved. Trying to save the Earth's future from the world-ending outcome of a scientist's deadly experiment does not result in a happy ending for all concerned.
The ending almost makes me cry. By changing the past events, Martin Landau's character Andro has saved the future, but has also prevented himself from being born, and he disappears during the flight back to the future. The woman who was to have given birth to the man who would have destroyed the Earth is left crying alone, without the Beast she had fallen in love with, in a spaceship she doesn't know how to operate, heading for the future Earth.
When I first saw this episode, I imagined her orbiting and dying of hunger. But now I imagine that the inhabitants of future Earth rescue her from a lonely fate, and she goes on, learning to live with her broken heart.