This is a disjointed episode with enormous plot holes so huge that they keep me from scoring this episode as high as I would have otherwise. I've almost always enjoyed any show about time travel-from The Time Tunnel to Quantum Leap and more-and have indeed speculated about what I would do if I could go back to some other time-various scenarios for different types of adventures.
This show starts with two men in a big room with a massive machine. A man high up tweaking dials on the machinery, is trying to get a good picture on his screen of the other man on the floor below and behind him. Later he is able to do so, with the picture moving from real fuzzy to clear just like when viewing someone in a camera and twisting the focus dial. Way too much attention on this when it didn't seem to matter at all to the script.
The men were having a long debate about the concept of changing history and the merits of the world at present-Cold War, 1963 era, etc. It seems the man on the floor was Paul Driscoll (Dana Andrews) and he was going to use the time machine he invented to go back and change history. He chose three places/times.
First was Hiroshima, Japan just hours before the first atomic bomb hit that city. Second was Berlin in 1939, and third was aboard the Lusitania less than an hour before the torpedo hit it in 1915.
All three attempts failed. Now Paul has decided to get out of the horrible world he knows and go to where everything is wonderful-Homeville, Indiana in 1881, and stay there forever.
Almost as soon as he arrives, he sees a newspaper headline about President Garfield and the date, and knows that tomorrow in his new world is the day that Garfield was shot, leading to his death two months later, thanks largely to the incompetent doctor that headed his medical team-but that's a story for another episode. Knowing what happened before, Paul says there's noting he can do to save the president so he doesn't try.
He meets a young, pretty schoolteacher (were there ever any others in the movies or TV?) at his boarding house. He and she hit it off, but he suddenly remembers in the book he read about this town that the school had a horrible fire on that very day that killed many of the children, started by a fire from a kerosene lantern that fell from a runaway wagon.
He again tells himself there's nothing he can do.
He leaves his room to go outside. On the street is a peddler of the famous alcohol-filled wonder medicines designed to cure all that ails anyone. He lights a kerosene lamp and hangs it on the back of his wagon just before making his sales pitch to the people. Paul tells him he needs to unhitch his horses from his wagon.
When the man asks why, instead of a good answer, or telling him, "I'll give you a dollar if you just do it for 20 minutes," or something, he proceeds to try to unhitch them himself. The peddler grabs his whip to drive away Paul and when the whip hits the horse next to him, the horses start running and this leads to the lantern falling off onto the front of the school, causing the very fire Paul was there to prevent.
So Paul goes back to his own time, realizing that's where he belonged all the time.
The biggest problem I had was the total illogic of the peddler wanting his lantern lit at 2 p.m. On a bright sunny July 3 afternoon. He wasn't about to read something to the people. As we saw his show, there was absolutely no use for the lamp at all. Then there's the problem of why Paul didn't just say, "I'll give you $1 if you let me borrow your lantern for 15 minutes." The lantern was the problem, not the horses being hitched. It would have been far easier for him to have just gone over and blown out the lantern. Had he done so, with the medicine tonic show over, the man probably wouldn't have bothered to relight it. I won't worry about the awkward way the lantern flew off the wagon and started the fire, but that's another weak point to blame on the director.
The other three times Paul traveled to seem like pointless, worthless times to go. He could have gone to prevent Lincoln's assassination, or Garfield's or McKinley's for that matter. He could have tried to stop the Titanic Disaster, or any of a dozen other 20th Century disasters where some warning might have saved hundreds of lives.
Instead he picks Hiroshima. As any novice student of WWII knows, the Americans brought about an end to WWII with the dropping of two atomic bombs. Hiroshima was first, Nagasaki second. It still took three more days before Japan decided to surrender. If Paul had somehow been successful in warning the Japanese to evacuate the city, the bomb would have killed no one (or a few) and merely destroyed empty buildings. It had been estimated by the War Department that an invasion of Japan by US forces might have cost a million American lives. If Paul had really helped the Japanese, and they did not surrender after Nagasaki, he might have been responsible for the deaths of a million of his fellow citizens, prolonged the war for who knows how long, and possibly caused many more troubles we can only speculate about.
Paul's second stop in Berlin was to assassinate Hitler. But by 1939, the Nazis were well entrenched in power-Hitler wasn't the only fanatic. Most people today figure Hitler's micro-managing of the Nazi war effort, along with his blunders in doing so helped the Allies claim victory. If Paul had killed "Der Fuehrer" in 1939, a different Nazi leader would have been in charge and this might have had disastrous consequences for the world. Now killing Hitler in the early 20s-that might have kept his movement from being able to take over in the 1930s, but Paul didn't think of that.
His third trip back was to the Lusitania, sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. While it still took the US two more years to finally get into the war, had the Lusitania not been sunk-had Paul somehow convinced the captain to change his course-this could have changed the outcome of World War I. Even if his attempt here would have helped had it been successful, Paul was a historical idiot to think that he could just appear, an apparent stowaway, telling the captain to change course to avoid a torpedo, and that the captain would listen to him. The German government themselves had taken out full page ads in New York newspapers before the ship sailed, warning about an attack because of the war. The captain was in communication by wireless with British naval authorities, who had ordered him on which precise route to take, and what areas to avoid. In other words, the captain would have had plenty of reasons to throw this stowaway into the brig and to be suspicious that he was trying to get the ship to steer toward the U-boat that was going to sink it.
So while it was interesting to see the depictions of his travels, overall this episode just wasn't up to scrutiny at all-a 4.
This show starts with two men in a big room with a massive machine. A man high up tweaking dials on the machinery, is trying to get a good picture on his screen of the other man on the floor below and behind him. Later he is able to do so, with the picture moving from real fuzzy to clear just like when viewing someone in a camera and twisting the focus dial. Way too much attention on this when it didn't seem to matter at all to the script.
The men were having a long debate about the concept of changing history and the merits of the world at present-Cold War, 1963 era, etc. It seems the man on the floor was Paul Driscoll (Dana Andrews) and he was going to use the time machine he invented to go back and change history. He chose three places/times.
First was Hiroshima, Japan just hours before the first atomic bomb hit that city. Second was Berlin in 1939, and third was aboard the Lusitania less than an hour before the torpedo hit it in 1915.
All three attempts failed. Now Paul has decided to get out of the horrible world he knows and go to where everything is wonderful-Homeville, Indiana in 1881, and stay there forever.
Almost as soon as he arrives, he sees a newspaper headline about President Garfield and the date, and knows that tomorrow in his new world is the day that Garfield was shot, leading to his death two months later, thanks largely to the incompetent doctor that headed his medical team-but that's a story for another episode. Knowing what happened before, Paul says there's noting he can do to save the president so he doesn't try.
He meets a young, pretty schoolteacher (were there ever any others in the movies or TV?) at his boarding house. He and she hit it off, but he suddenly remembers in the book he read about this town that the school had a horrible fire on that very day that killed many of the children, started by a fire from a kerosene lantern that fell from a runaway wagon.
He again tells himself there's nothing he can do.
He leaves his room to go outside. On the street is a peddler of the famous alcohol-filled wonder medicines designed to cure all that ails anyone. He lights a kerosene lamp and hangs it on the back of his wagon just before making his sales pitch to the people. Paul tells him he needs to unhitch his horses from his wagon.
When the man asks why, instead of a good answer, or telling him, "I'll give you a dollar if you just do it for 20 minutes," or something, he proceeds to try to unhitch them himself. The peddler grabs his whip to drive away Paul and when the whip hits the horse next to him, the horses start running and this leads to the lantern falling off onto the front of the school, causing the very fire Paul was there to prevent.
So Paul goes back to his own time, realizing that's where he belonged all the time.
The biggest problem I had was the total illogic of the peddler wanting his lantern lit at 2 p.m. On a bright sunny July 3 afternoon. He wasn't about to read something to the people. As we saw his show, there was absolutely no use for the lamp at all. Then there's the problem of why Paul didn't just say, "I'll give you $1 if you let me borrow your lantern for 15 minutes." The lantern was the problem, not the horses being hitched. It would have been far easier for him to have just gone over and blown out the lantern. Had he done so, with the medicine tonic show over, the man probably wouldn't have bothered to relight it. I won't worry about the awkward way the lantern flew off the wagon and started the fire, but that's another weak point to blame on the director.
The other three times Paul traveled to seem like pointless, worthless times to go. He could have gone to prevent Lincoln's assassination, or Garfield's or McKinley's for that matter. He could have tried to stop the Titanic Disaster, or any of a dozen other 20th Century disasters where some warning might have saved hundreds of lives.
Instead he picks Hiroshima. As any novice student of WWII knows, the Americans brought about an end to WWII with the dropping of two atomic bombs. Hiroshima was first, Nagasaki second. It still took three more days before Japan decided to surrender. If Paul had somehow been successful in warning the Japanese to evacuate the city, the bomb would have killed no one (or a few) and merely destroyed empty buildings. It had been estimated by the War Department that an invasion of Japan by US forces might have cost a million American lives. If Paul had really helped the Japanese, and they did not surrender after Nagasaki, he might have been responsible for the deaths of a million of his fellow citizens, prolonged the war for who knows how long, and possibly caused many more troubles we can only speculate about.
Paul's second stop in Berlin was to assassinate Hitler. But by 1939, the Nazis were well entrenched in power-Hitler wasn't the only fanatic. Most people today figure Hitler's micro-managing of the Nazi war effort, along with his blunders in doing so helped the Allies claim victory. If Paul had killed "Der Fuehrer" in 1939, a different Nazi leader would have been in charge and this might have had disastrous consequences for the world. Now killing Hitler in the early 20s-that might have kept his movement from being able to take over in the 1930s, but Paul didn't think of that.
His third trip back was to the Lusitania, sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. While it still took the US two more years to finally get into the war, had the Lusitania not been sunk-had Paul somehow convinced the captain to change his course-this could have changed the outcome of World War I. Even if his attempt here would have helped had it been successful, Paul was a historical idiot to think that he could just appear, an apparent stowaway, telling the captain to change course to avoid a torpedo, and that the captain would listen to him. The German government themselves had taken out full page ads in New York newspapers before the ship sailed, warning about an attack because of the war. The captain was in communication by wireless with British naval authorities, who had ordered him on which precise route to take, and what areas to avoid. In other words, the captain would have had plenty of reasons to throw this stowaway into the brig and to be suspicious that he was trying to get the ship to steer toward the U-boat that was going to sink it.
So while it was interesting to see the depictions of his travels, overall this episode just wasn't up to scrutiny at all-a 4.