The Twilight Zone - No Time Like the Past

Continuing a string of great performances in the fourth season Dana Andrews’ lone Twilight Zone appearance is also a noteworthy effort. He is a physicist hoping to somehow alter the future by going back into the past, with each effort a miserable failure. Whether it be an attempt to encourage a movement of women and children out of Hiroshima before the bomb drops, hoping to assassinate Hitler from the balcony of a hired room in Berlin, or hoping to convince a captain to alter course before a submarine torpedo hits his British ship, Lusitania; each and every trip results in disappointment. Andrews’ Paul Driscoll just wants to deprive future generations from the mistakes of mankind, hoping to just stop awful things from happening. If his scoped rifle could just send that one key shot right into the sweet spot that kills Hitler, or somehow convince some member of the Japanese military / government into evacuating Hiroshima of its innocents, or talk the captain of a ship into altering course just a bit to avoid a torpedo, perhaps he contributed something in protecting folks from the effects of tragedy. You can definitely see that Serling’s script is anti-war from the get-go when Driscoll and his scientist colleague, Harvey (Robert F Simon), discuss their time travel machine and the potential ramifications of using it. 

We live in a cesspool, a septic tank, a gigantic sewage complex in which runs the dregs, the filth, the misery-laden slop of the race of men: his hatred, prejudices, passions, and violence. And the keeper of this sewer: man. He is a scientifically advanced monkey who walks upright, with eyes wide open into an abyss of his own making. His bombs, fallout, poisons, radioactivity everything he designs as an art for dying is his excuse for living. We live in an exquisite bedlam an insanity. Maybe all the more grotesque by the fact that we don't recognize it as insanity.

I think Peele could directly use what Serling wrote above for the frustrated Driscoll in a new season of his reboot Twilight Zone and it wouldn’t need any revision.

I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows at the dinner conversation featuring a banker articulating his stance that American flags should be buried deep in the lands throughout the world, speaking about how the Native Americans should just be cleared through [instead of keeping the lands they were inhabiting first] instead of catered to, that the Orient or Australia should have an American flag standing proud on their soil, speaking of wars and shed blood with a type of patriotic vigor until Driscoll counters with:

No, of course not. You'll go back to your bank, and it'll be business as usual... until next dinnertime, when you'll give us another vacuous speech about enlarging and strengthening countries by filling graveyards. Well, if THIS country shares your devilishly virile sentiments - as I dread it just might - then you're in for some gratifying times, Mr. Hanford. Believe me, there'll be a lot of graveyards for America to fill... and not just her own. We'll show how red our blood is, because we'll spill it. And we'll show how red our neighbors' blood is, because we'll spill that too. Chances are you won't have to spill any yourself, or to be there when all that I've spoken of comes to pass. I simply don't know whether to pity you because of said likelihood, or to envy you for it.

People can say what they want but Serling used his series as a political pulpit, his voice quite passionate and targeted. And unsubtle. Nothing about what Driscoll says is understated or subverted by hesitation or recoil. Yes, he hides what he knows from schoolmarm, Abigail (Breslin, from the TZ episode, Nick of Time), for a time, commenting under his breath but enough for her to hear about the unavoidable assassination of President Garfield in 1881, but his strong feelings against the use of war and violence, the devastation and tragedy that so often follows, are quite hard to swallow. The banker, quite vocal and upright at the dinner table, speaks of war and such until Driscoll brings his own experiences as rebuttal. The effects of bloodshed, burying the dead, and the picking up the pieces afterward; Driscoll understands this while the banker speechifies until cold, hard truth serves as a minor punch that won’t last much longer than a sting. Even trying to keep the stagecoach of a snake oil salesman (Malcolm Atterbury, who, funnily and ironically enough, was “Henry J Fate” in the TZ first season episode, Mr. Denton on Doomsday, selling his wares to gunfighters, knowing that his “magic potions” actually work!) from sending a lighted lantern into a schoolhouse to protect twelve children from injury to a blaze is unsuccessful. That Driscoll was in fact a participant, even if unwilling, in the cause of the fire, it is a reality that altering the past is just futile. He means well, but the past is the past.

I love time travel episodes because they often question “what if?” even as the results of changing the past never pan out quite as planned for those who go back in time. I couldn’t help but think of Walking Distance and Back There, Twilight Zone episodes of the past, when watching No Time Like the Past. Gig Young returning to the innocence of his youth because he’s reminded of better times, with Driscoll retreating to Homeville, Indiana, similarly, so he can escape the travails of his present while licking his wounds when attempts to change devastating events in time didn’t work. Much like Russell Johnson hoping to rescue Abraham Lincoln from assassination, instead tricked by Abe’s very assassin, John Wilkes Booth, Driscoll hoped to convince others to just listen to him to no avail. We were getting to the point in this series where past episodic content was starting to return, whole themes even used again, while the characters and certain situations were often molded and shaped in ways that might give newer episodes a slightly altered face, as if shaping the same clay into something somewhat different. I just think it is hard not to see similarities to past episodes when watching No Time Like the Past. I do think casting the caliber of actor as Andrews was a definite win. He just has that face that can tell you so much, if just the pain and ache in his eyes, the frustrations and annoyances of mankind’s many mistakes and how he wants to use the science he has for some good, as these failures just rest in how he walks and talks. His countenance is quite visibly wrought when folks of some authority just won’t take anything he says seriously, and yet for just a bit when first arriving at Homeville you can see some happiness, visiting a place he’s sure won’t leave him devastated in one way or another. And ultimately the sadness of having to leave when he realizes he can‘t have that romance with Abby or remain at Homeville because he doesn’t belong. It is all there in Andrew’s multi-faceted performance. Highly regarded an actor from past work in the likes of Laura and Curse of the Demon, Andrews doesn’t sleepwalk in the television medium. He left his mark in the Twilight Zone.

When I noticed that this episode was upcoming, I was excited because I had never seen this before and Andrews was the lead in it. Sadly, I should have already known about this episode. But I never see it mentioned because it is featured in the maligned fourth season. And it isn’t without its faults. The fuzzy trips back and forth and how Andrews comes and goes, with the needed items necessary when he arrives in the various times, aren’t elaborated with much detail—seemingly rushed in order to get in and out of these passages—but I never felt like the first half was as important to Serling as Andrews visit to Homeville. That always felt like it was where Serling was most inspired. Oh, the monologue of Driscoll about mankind and its failings as a species is definitely inspired. I could see all of this dialogue just hot off the press as Serling put it to script. That brilliant mind just spitting it out without much pause. I couldn’t help but feel Serling was really wanting to rip the species as a whole a new one. 4/5