Serling wrote this script based on a George Clayton Johnson’s bare bones, present-tense
treatment for a TV script, complete with an indication of where the commercial break
should go. For this episode, Serling filled in the flesh and
cut the fat from a bare bones, present-tense treatment by George Clayton Johnson. The treatment appeared in Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection of
scripts and stories, and in Volume 9 of Serling’s
collected Twilight Zone scripts, Johnson commented that “Rod took my idea
and went off to the races with it. He had a remarkable knowledge of what would and
wouldn’t work on television, and he took everything that wouldn’t work out of
‘Execution’. He worked like a surgeon; a little snip here, a complete amputation over
there, move this bone into place, graft over that one. When he was done, my little story
had grown into a television script that lived and breathed on its own.” Serling also
added a nice twist at the end that, for us, warranted the TV episode an Eloi Honorable
Mention.
Rod Serling wrote this script based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, but I’m uncertain
whether the story was published before Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection.
Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
The flight to the future is explained by scientific gibberish that contains a high concentration of mumbo jumbo, but the gist of it is that the speed of Allison’s plane (around 10,000 mph) added to the rotational speed of the Earth plus the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the sun plus the speed of the Solar System around the center of the galaxy plus maybe another speed or two, managed to bring his total speed close to that of light, which brought him to the future. Apparently, reversing his plane’s path is all that’s needed to return him to the past (ideally with Trirene beside him).
A self-defeating act paradox is set up nicely (if Alison stops the plague, then the citadel in the, future won’t be there to send him back to stop the plague), but the issue is never explicitly discussed and the ending of the film is inconclusive on the matter. Nevertheless, I commend the film for being the first to raise the issue of time travel paradoxes, albeit in the background.
Side note: The trio of stooges are also the first time travelers we’ve seen in film who fret over changing the course of history. Who woulda thunk?
Nowadays, we all know that Doc Doom is far too smart to think the most profitable way to use his time platform is by sending three of the FF into the past with orders to bring back Blackbeard’s treasure (while keeping the fourth member of their team captive). And yet, the story has a charm that stems from the causal loop of Ben Grimm’s presence in the past actually causing the legend of Blackbeard, which in turn caused Doom to send the loveable lunk back.
The plot suffers from Alpha Centauri syndrome, where the time traveler might as well be from Alpha Centauri as from the future, but seeing the emergence of Kirby’s high-perspective artwork gives this issue a boost. In addition, the story provides a powerful image of the pre-Vietnam cold war era and its prevailing assumptions about the roles of women in society.
In his blog, Fred Pohl wrote about how Heinlein’s agent gave permission for Pohl publish the novel in If and to cut “five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring” (and Pohl agreed to pay full rate for the cut words). But apparently, Heinlein “went ballistic” when he saw the first installment, so much so that when the book appeared as a separate publication, Heinlein made sure people knew who was responsible for the previous cuts by adding a note* that “A short version of this novel, as cut and revised by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If Magazine.”
* The version of
Heinlein’s note that Pohl recalled was much funnier than Heinlein’s actual note in
our timeline, but sadly, we have lost track of where we saw Pohl’s version.
The film draws in at least four important additional time travel tropes: suspended animation, a single nonbranching, static timeline (with the corresponding inability to go back and change it), experiencing the passage of time at different rates, and a trip to the far future. And according to the SF Encyclopedia, the film was originally conceived as a sequel to the 1960 film of The Time Machine.
My favorable impression is no doubt reflective of the time when I read it (the summer of 1970, nearly 13, while moving from Washington State to Alabama). Perhaps the fiction doesn’t hold up as well decades later up, but the issues of time that it brings up still interest me and it was my first exposure to the idea of a geographic timeslip. And, similar to Asimov, Hoyle served to cultivate my interest in the natural sciences.
Like the 1964 version, this version has a brief mention that it’s impossible to change events that have already happened, but unlike the original, the montage at the end of the film is mere chaos that no longer reinforces the idea of a single deterministic, nonbranching timeline. Despite that, I enjoyed the consequences of the villainous character running into himself, but at the same time, I dismayed at the discussion of how meeting yourself could instantly cause a disastrous explosion or implosion or maybe something-or-other (the audio was unintelligible at 1:12) would cease to exist. (I pray that the space-time continuum wasn’t in peril).
The story includes flashbacks and previously unknown explanations of the team’s previous trip to the ’40s in Avengers #56, and at the end of the story, Goliath uses Dr. Doom’s Time Platform to banish the Scarlet Centurion back to his time—and we think this is the only time travel that actually appears in the story (apart from the flashbacks). We don’t know what happens to the alternative 1968 (now known as Earth-689, but the traveling Avengers return to the universe that we all knew and loved in the 1960s (a.k.a. Earth-616), with their memory of the whole affair wiped by the Watcher.
The story has a kind of reverse grandfather paradox: [spoiler Lucy and Jamie’s great-great-grandparents are Sara and Tom (a boy who died trying to save Sara and George). So, initially, Lucy and Jamie actually have no grandparents (at least not on that side), and it’s only by Lucy and Jamie going back in time to save Sara and George (as well as Tom) that Sara and Tom live long enough to have offspring. So where did Lucy and Jamie come from initially in order to be able to go back in time and create the conditions so that they will be born? This is almost a single nonbranching, static timeline, except for the fact that initially, Sara, Georgie, and Tom did die (as evinced by what Lucy and Jamie see and hear in the graveyar), so Lucy and Jamie did change things. I think we need a new name for it, perhaps the grandchild paradox.[/spoiler]
“Oh, I don’t understand it,” said Jamie cheerfully, “but then I don’t understand television either. But when you’ve seen it working, you can’t help believing in it.”
Mikey: [waving] Bye-bye!
Tim and I saw this on Fathers Day Eve in 2012.
“Time isn’t circular,”
she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said.
“That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”