No Time Like the Past

"**No Time Like the Past**"
"No Time Like the Past"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 4; Episode 10
Directed by	Justus Addiss
Written by	Rod Serling
Production code	4853
Original air date	March 7, 1963
Guest appearances
	Dana Andrews ; Patricia Breslin ; Robert F. Simon ; Malcolm Atterbury ; Marjorie Bennett ; James Yagi; Tudor Owen ; John Zaremba ; Robert O. Cornthwaite ; Lindsay Workman ;
Episode chronology
← Previous; "Printer's Devil"	Next →; "The Parallel"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 4)
	List of episodes

Last updated April 06, 2024

"No Time Like the Past" is episode 112 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone . In this episode a man tries to escape the troubles of the 20th century by taking up residence in an idyllic small town in the 19th century.

Opening narration

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.

Plot

Disgusted with 20th century problems such as world wars, atomic weapons and radioactive poisoning, Paul Driscoll solicits the help of his colleague Harvey and uses a time machine, intent to remake the present by altering past events.

Paul first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915, to avoid being torpedoed by a German U-boat, but the ship's captain questions his credibility.

Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to the town of Homeville, Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. Upon his arrival, he realizes that President James A. Garfield will be shot the next day, but resists the temptation to intervene. He stays at a boarding house in town and meets Abigail Sloan, a teacher. At one of the boarding house's dinners, a boarder named Hanford vehemently espouses American imperialism. Paul delivers an angry rebuttal in which he accuses Hanford of speaking from ignorance of war and a certainty that he himself will not have to take part in any fighting, while dropping numerous allusions to wars that have yet to take place. Abigail is impressed and privately tells him that she shares his views, having lost her father and two brothers in the American Civil War. He kisses Abigail, but she becomes alienated when he refuses to explain his earlier remarks about future wars.

A passing remark from a local musician jogs a memory from Paul's vast historical knowledge: Homeville's schoolhouse will burn down because of a kerosene lantern ejected from a runaway wagon, badly injuring twelve children. He resolves to keep his vow not to change the past, but when he spies the lantern in question he tries to unhitch the horses. The resulting altercation with the wagon owner causes the horses to run wild, inadvertently causing the fire he intended to prevent.

Afterward, Paul tells Abigail that "the past is sacred" and belongs to those who are native to it. He knows too much of the future and fears that he will inevitably cause more mishaps like the schoolhouse fire because of it. He returns to his own time and declares that instead of continuing to fixate upon the past, he will now try to do something to positively impact the future.

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? Labor 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.'^[1] Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars in the Twilight Zone.

Notes

In the Twilight Zone radio drama series with Stacy Keach as the narrator, the first three time travel destinations perpetrated by Driscoll are inverted. He first attempts to board the Lusitania, then attempts to assassinate Hitler, and finally attempts to warn and evacuate Hiroshima. The rest of the story matches with the TV script.

Cast

Dana Andrews as Paul Driscoll
Patricia Breslin as Abigail Sloan
Robert F. Simon as Harvey
Malcolm Atterbury as Professor Eliot
Marjorie Bennett as Mrs. Chamberlain
James Yagi as Japanese Police Captain
Tudor Owen as Captain of 'Lusitania'
John Zaremba as Horn Player
Robert O. Cornthwaite as Hanford
Lindsay Workman as Bartender

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References

DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

↑ Quotation from the poem "Song of Hope." Lathbury, Mary Artemisia (1915). Poems of Mary Artemisia Lathbury, Chautauqua Laureate. Nunc licet Press. pp. 101–102.

External links

"No Time Like the Past" at IMDb

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[Lathbury1915-1] Quotation from the poem "Song of Hope." Lathbury, Mary Artemisia (1915). Poems of Mary Artemisia Lathbury, Chautauqua Laureate. Nunc licet Press. pp. 101–102.

[1]

v t e The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"