episode #112 - No Time Like the Past

Air Date: 3/07/63    written by Rod Serling    directed by Justus Addiss

A late time travel tale from the TZ, in which Serling seems to rehash concepts from previous episodes and saddles the main character (Dana Andrews) with lengthy speeches to express his dissatisfaction with the modern world, mostly in regards to undesirable scientific advances.  Andrews' character vents to a colleague about our cesspool of a world and then proceeds to travel to various past time eras using his new invention (a time machine, natch) in several attempts to change the past. First he tries to warn a Japanese official about an impending atomic explosion in 1945. Then he tries to assassinate Hitler in 1939. Finally, he tries to warn a ship's captain that his ship is about to be torpedoed. He fails utterly at each turn. Convinced that the past cannot be changed, he falls back on plan B: settle in a quiet, peaceful town in Indiana before the industrial revolution, in 1881.  Inevitably, he is faced with the dilemma of preventing an event anyway, even in those quiet confines, and yet again he fails. His final analysis and the moral? "The past is sacred."
This episode is more dull than the usual TZ output on several fronts: already mentioned is the overwritten dialog for the main character played by Dana Andrews, which comes across as didactic and ponderous. But, beyond that, Serling manages to render the entire concept of time travel as a crashing bore. The usual thrill with time travel is the possibility of changing something and altering history. Serling not only renders the main character's repeated attempts as a waste of time and as redundant, but eventually batters home the point that this should never have been tried in the first place. In addition, at least one of the attempts - the one in Japan - was doomed to fail, as anyone with any sense could have foreseen; even if someone in charge in Japan believed the warning, there was nothing to be done about it, especially since the warning was apparently given only moments before the bomb hit. All that said, one can still kick back and relax with  such an episode on  a lazy Saturday.  BoG's Score: 6 out of 10


Trivia From the Zone: Buzzfeed didn't like this one much either, ranking it 33rd worst out of 156 episodes...