No Time Like the Past
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| “No Time Like the Past” | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Twilight Zone episode | |||||||
 Scene from "No Time Like the Past" |
|||||||
| Episode no. | Season 4 Episode 112 |
||||||
| Written by | Rod Serling | ||||||
| Directed by | Justus Addiss | ||||||
| Guest stars | Dana Andrews : Paul Driscoll Patricia Breslin : Abigail Sloan Robert F. Simon : Harvey Malcolm Atterbury : Professor Eliot Marjorie Bennett : Mrs. Chamberlain John Zaremba : Horn Player |
||||||
| Production no. | 4853 | ||||||
| Original airdate | March 7, 1963 | ||||||
|
|||||||
| List of Twilight Zone episodes | |||||||
"No Time Like the Past" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
Contents |
[edit] Opening narration
| “ | Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the 20th 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. | ” |
[edit] Synopsis
Paul Driscoll uses a time machine with the noble intention to go back in time and alter past events (in such a way as to minimize the loss of human life). After failing to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, assassinate Adolf Hitler (in August, 1939 immediately before the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939), or change the course of the RMS Lusitania to avoid being torpedoed (by a World War I German U-boat), he accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to journey to the town of Homeville, Indiana back in the year 1881 (with the intention of escaping and living out a quiet, uncomplicated life). After reading in a history book that Homeville's schoolhouse will burn down because of a kerosene lantern thrown from a runaway wagon, he spots the wagon and attempts to prevent this event from occurring. But instead he causes the fire he intended to prevent. He returns to his own time, having learned not to tamper with the past.
[edit] Closing narration
| “ | Incident on a July afternoon, 1881. A man named Driscoll who came and went, and in the process, learned a simple lesson, perhaps best said by a poet named Lathbury, who wrote: 'Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow/what are you weaving? Labour and sorrow?/Look to your looms again, faster and faster/Fly the great shuttles prepared by the master/Life's in the loom/Room for it, room.' Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars.... in the Twilight Zone. | ” |
