episode #30 - Town of Terror

episode #30 / Air Date: 04.07.67
written by Carey Wilber; Directed by Herschel Daugherty

Doug & Tony land in a cellar with sophisticated computer banks and are suddenly attacked by a man armed with a wrench. Doug knocks him down and appears to have killed him; but, the man gets up a minute later, behaving as if he's a zombie and then blows up. The two travelers make their way up to what turns out to be a quaint small town hotel and are greeted by the lady proprietor. But, she turns out to be an alien in disguise and immobilizes them with one touch. It's revealed that the aliens plan to remove Earth's oxygen, thereby killing everyone. For some reason, they chose a small town in Maine to effect their plan; it's a decade in the future, 1978.  Most of the town's populace are in a frozen state, the exception being a young couple.  

The strange part to this story is that, due to some of linkage to this area in Maine, the Time Tunnel complex also begins to become deprived of oxygen. The personnel begin to feel lightheaded and faint. I suppose this was one way to add some more tension to the plot. But, there are a lot of other perplexing moments throughout the episode, detailed in an IMDb review: when Tony first sees a seated alien from behind, he states that it's an android; the aliens are from the planet Andro and it almost seems like Tony has run into them before. The first zombie citizen encountered explodes; all others disappear and also revert to alien forms before disappearing - so it's unclear if these are controlled humans or disguised aliens. With all the aliens creeping around and attacking in the 2nd half of the episode, this was looking more like an episode of Allen's Lost in Space. The solution was a simple explosion. BoG's Score: 6 out of 10

Epilogue: Doug & Tony end up back on the Titanic, the site of their first episode adventure, suggesting that things have gone full circle and that the two travelers will be in a perpetual time loop...


Tunnel Trivia: the year in this episode - 1978 - is the same one in the 2nd episode, One Way to the Moon; the Epilogue in this one also pointed the way to the repeats which would follow this last episode, the first one being the adventure on the Titanic, Rendezvous with Yesterday