July 8, 2023- number 112

Spoilers

“No Place Like the Past”

Time travel is always a little wonky.

“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorem of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further, or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present, one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.”

Paul uses his time machine to go back into the past in an attempt to stop some terrible tragedies of history: he tries to warn the people of Hiroshima, he tries to assassinate Hitler, and he tries to save the Lusitania from being sunk to start WWI. He failed at all of them.

This is where this episode went off the time travel rails.

He came back to the present to his friend and colleague Harvey. He told him that he failed at his attempts and Harvey then stated that time was unable to be changed. It made me think that this episode was going to go along the theory of LOST with the “Whatever Happened, happened” style of time travel.

However, almost immediately after stating that the past was immutable, when Harvey discovered Paul’s plan to go back to 1881 and take up residence in a small town in Homeville, Indiana, Harvey immediately warned him that he could cause terrible dangers by changing even one little thing. This was in direct opposition to the immutable comment that Harvey made barely a sentence before.

This type of contradiction derails the concept of time travel immediately. There may have been ways to build tension without hinting that Paul could change the past. The very idea that nothing could be changed would create a distinct problem for one who knows everything. Unfortunately, I could not get past the implication that Paul ‘could have’ changed the past.

When Paul is trying to Paul the school house from burning, he wound up causing the problem himself, which does follow the LOST philosophy of time travel. However, it was so dumb because Paul knew the fire was being caused by a runaway wagon ejecting a lantern to the school. Paul tried to unhitch the horses from the wagon to prevent it from being able to move, and I am sitting watching this supposedly smart man do such a stupid thing. Why not just casually remove the small lantern from the back of the wagon. It was just hanging there. Or just blow out the flame. Both of those would have been a much easier attempt than unhitching the wagon from the horses.

The first act of this episode was pretty decent, but it really went downhill after that.