#05: Man Out of Time

Air Date: 10/17/77 written by Noah Ward Directed by Nicholas Colasanto

The title has a double meaning for this episode - it involves a man time traveling and also refers to a man who is running out of time. Think combining an episode of the old Time Tunnel series with a Logan's Run episode and you get the gist of this one. The time traveler in this case is a scientist named David Eakins (Paul Shenar), from the year 2118, which was the last year before the nuclear war took place. So, he's from a couple of centuries before Logan's time. He doesn't tell the trio of fugitives where he's really from because his mission is to find a way to stop the impending war; if he succeeds, then Logan and his friends would cease to exist. The trio helps the traveler, transporting him to an area which is supposed to contain his version of Sanctuary. They find a pleasant but primitive village, led by an older man named Analog (Mel Ferrer); names in this place tend to copy computer terms, but the people have no knowledge of computers. Their small temple of worship is actually an old computer console and computer room. Naturally, when the traveler and his friends try to explain or activate the computer console, their actions are regarded as sacrilegious.
This begins in an intriguing manner and generates a lot of interest in the first act as to where it's all going, but mostly falls apart once the main characters reach that benign village. It's very pedestrian from that point on and somewhat jumbled. The reveal that primitive people now look upon technology as a place of worship goes back to old sf stories from decades before. The story also becomes confused in that Eakins falls into despair when he finds this converted computer room, but I'm not clear on what he expected to find - he already knew that all remnants of his own Earth had been swept away by the war, so why the surprise? Why did it fall to Rem and his two buddies to activate the computer console and gain the needed information? Eakins should have been able to do this himself. It would have all been anti-climactic, but the final twist in the end, as a kind of epilogue, was unexpectedly downbeat and surprising. BoG's Score: 6 out of 10