Post-58th Anniversary Viewing
The Time Tunnel
"Devil's Island"
Originally aired November 11, 1966
MeTV said:
The travelers materialize in 1895 on Devil's Island, where they try to help French captain Alfred Dreyfus [not] escape.
Tony and Doug tumble onto the beach of a tropic island set just as a group of prisoners is being brought in on rowboats from a ship. The new prisoners try to make a break for it, and the travelers are caught by a guard who'd been pursuing two who happened to look and dress similar and jumped into the lagoon to swim away. When Commandant Rubidoux (Oscar Beregi) gives the political prisoners an orientation speech, the guys try to tell the head of the guards, Lescaux (Theo Marcuse), that they're Americans and a mistake has been made. (The unexplained universal translation is working against them here.)
The guys are issued striped uniforms with strappy sandals and taken to the barracks, where the prisoners chain their own ankles to their beds. They acquaint themselves with some of their fellow Inmates: Claude Dumas (Alain Patrick), an Army officer who questioned French colonial policy; Andre Perrault (Steven Geray), the only survivor of a failed escape attempt into the jungles of Venezuela; and Henri Boudaire (Marcel Hillaire), an Army officer who tried to uncover graft. Trying to narrow down the date, the monitoring TT crew focuses on the uniform numbers, which were supposed to have been sequential. As the guys are working the next day, Tony gets on Lescaux's bad side some more while staging a diversion for Doug, and ends up having to bury an older prisoner who's been coughing and drops dead (Bob Adler). Doug slips away to force his way in to the see the commandant and holds him at stolen gunpoint to try to talk to him. The commandant acts reasonable, entertaining Doug's story of being part of a stranded scientific expedition...until Doug surrenders his weapon, at which point the commandant calls the guards, assembles the prisoners, and has him put in the hotbox.
Tony watches as Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Ted Roter), recently convicted of having sold secrets to Germany, is brought to the island in full uniform and given his own hut pending his appeal. This gives the TT crew the date they need: March 15, 1895; and they try to get a fix on Doug to save him from the hotbox (Ann claiming that ground temperatures at the Equator reach 150 degrees, which IMDb contributors dispute). By night, Boudaire uses an iron bar he's been hiding to pry open his and Tony's shackles, and they head to talk to Dreyfus, who was formerly Boudaire's superior officer. Boudaire offers to help Dreyfus escape, which the captain doesn't seem interested in, though he encourages Boudaire to do so for the good of France; while letting Tony borrow some water to slip to Doug.
Lescaux watches knowingly as Tony and Boudaire slip away from their labor to camouflage a boat that the latter has found, planning to have Perrault create a sail. TT works out how to retrieve Tony and Doug despite their distance in the barracks (before we see Doug let out of the hotbox), planning to try an experimental splitting of power. The two of them discuss how they know that Dreyfus can't escape (because history), but don't want to discourage the others from planning an escape while motivated to free him. TT does their retrieve attempt while Boudaire is starting to pry the shackles off the others, and accidentally pick him up instead...the other prisoners watching him vanish before their eyes.
While Kirk's explaining that it's 1968 and shows Boudaire Tunnelvision, Lescaux pops into the barracks for a surprise inspection and finds Boudaire gone. While Boudaire doesn't want to return, and Kirk and Swain debate having to send him back to the prison, the commandant assembles the prisoners, threatening to shoot them systematically until they snitch on Boudaire; and the guys try to tell him that it's part of their scientific experiment. Boudaire watches as the commandant and Lescaux discuss their trap, in which they plan to use the escape attempt as an opportunity to shoot Dreyfus. Boudaire goes back willingly, armed with information about how Dreyfus won't escape; that escaped prisoners should head for British Trinidad; and with a message for Doug and Tony to be in a specific spot at a specific time.
When Lescaux comes for a prisoner to shoot, the inmates, led by Doug and Tony, make their move, overpowering him and a guard. While Doug and Perrault truss up the commandant and free Dreyfus, Tony and Dumas take supplies to the boat. Boudaire reappears just as Dumas is learning that they can't take Dreyfus. Instead of backing Tony up, Boudaire convinces himself that his experience with the Tunnel was a bad dream. But as the prisoners assemble, Dreyfus declares that he won't go, as he considers his presence on the island to be a matter of duty. The guys work out without Boudaire's help that they've been falling into a trap, noting that the commandant's made aspects of their escape easy, including a temporary lightening of the guards. The prisoners proceed with the escape with Dreyfus's encouragement; the guys assure Dreyfus that he'll be exonerated; and then the guys use their paper-fueled TV hero fighting skills to take out a pair of guards waiting in ambush at a spot overlooking the beach that Dreyfus determined.
On the beach, as the trio of speaking prisoners are on the boat encouraging Tony and Doug to come with them, the travelers' clothes reappear before the prisoners' eyes, and the duo vanishes.
The Invaders
"The Innocent"
Originally aired March 14, 1967
IMDb said:
The aliens take David Vincent up into their spaceship and then attempt to prove they have nothing but peaceful intentions by showing him what they've done to a desert valley. But all is not what it seems.
At Clement Air Force Base, Capt. Mitchell Ross (Dabney Coleman), head of Project Hawk, questions Sgt. Walter Ruddell (Robert Doyle) about another batch of sighting reports having gone missing. When Ross is alone in the file room, an alien posing as an MP (Erik Holland) tries to abduct him at gunpoint. Ross shoots him with a pistol sitting in his open briefcase, through the case's lid; then sees the red glow emanating from the file nook that the MP stumbles into. Ruddell returns and the two of them find nothing but burn marks and the MP's gun.
The QM Narrator said:
In a decaying lobster port in Maine, David Vincent searches for a man who has seen the invaders: a fisherman named Nat Greely, who has taken one of their weapons--a strange, metallic disk. For a day and a half, Vincent has combed the tiny waterfront town, but Nat Greely has disappeared.
Ruddell appears with a subpoena to take David to see Ross; while a couple of fisher
them take notice (Frank Marth and Harry Lauter). Ross questions Vincent about his claims regarding how the aliens disintegrate and David guesses that the captain has seen it for himself. Ross wants Vincent to testify at a hearing. David takes a moment to note that he's given up his life in his pursuit of the invaders, including his business and a girl who wasn't in the premiere. At a marina, the pair of aliens, now in suits, visit the Greely boat, introducing themselves to Edna Greely (Patricia Smith) as Calvin Adams and Ed Poole, lawyers looking for the heir of a recently deceased family member. She suspiciously turns them away, quickly verifying that their story is false. The next to visit is David, telling Mrs. Greely that her husband is in danger and producing Ross's card as a reference. Cut to David paying a call on paranoid, shotgun-brandishing Nat Greely (William Smithers) in his warehouse hideout. After Greely is persuaded to meet David with the disc,
they pay another visit to the boat, now threatening young Nat Jr. (Johnny Jensen).
Informed by Edna, Nat reluctantly sets a trap for David to get chloro'ed and taken to see Magnus (Special Guest Star speaking of Michael Rennie), who shows Vincent a saucer parked in the back of his ranch home and takes him inside.
Magnus claims that
they want to change their approach and offers to take him on a trip. David is wedged into his seat as protection against acceleration and, after seeing the Earth becoming smaller in the viewport, loses consciousness as warned. When he awakes, he's shown Santa Margerita Valley, a place that he'd mentioned to Ross he'd been planning to develop. When taken outside, David finds that
they have redeveloped it into Rossmoor Leisure World, Laguna Hills, California, complete with 1964 World's Fair-style globe.
David is taken to a project headquarters building that he professionally considers to be beautiful, and is intrigued to learn that
they built a dam he was told was impossible, spearheaded by an old friend, who's there and now working with
them, Billy Stearns (Paul Carr);
they've even restored Billy's injured leg. Also there is Helen (Katherine Justice), the girl David left behind who was invented just for this episode. She takes him for a drive and gives him a sales pitch for how the aliens can improve the world. Smelling a cookbook, David questions the details of her story. She hurriedly drops him off while frantically calling out for Magnus. David's surroundings begin to fade, and we see that he's still braced into the chair, surrounded by Magnus, Sgt. Ruddell, and associates. Magnus declares that
they'll have to try a different method.
Magnus now wants David to call Ross before his testimony to disavow his own invasion warnings. Mr. Greely is brought in to tell David that they've got his wife and boy as leverage, and begs David to make the call. Stone-faced David complies, telling Ross that he and Greely know nothing and it's all been for publicity. Greely apologizes as he's being shown out. When David won't have a drink willingly, he's held down, TV Fu'ed, and the bottle's poured into his mouth. Outside, Greely is also TV Fu'ed and covered with liquor. The two of them are taken to a car that they're put into with Nat behind the wheel and pushed onto the obligatory curvy downhill road. Highly disoriented, David takes the wheel and manages to steer well enough to avoid the hairpin turns, eventually crashing into a lot at the bottom. A revived Greely pulls David out before the vehicle meets its OTVF.
The two of them show up at the AFB wanting to testify after all, only to find Ross now hostile toward them for undermining his credibility. When David sees and recognizes Ruddell, he tries to warn Ross. Ross sends his visitors on their way, but proceeds to call in a thorough background check on Ruddell.
The QM Narrator said:
A trip to a nightmare world. A committee disbanded. Another defeat, another hope lost for David Vincent...maybe. Or maybe it's a hope begun.
RIP, Chuck Mangione. Yeah, nothing personal, but I don't think he ever did anything I liked.
By way of era-appropriate tribute, here are his two charting singles thus far in our 50th anniversary timeline...one of them very current.
"Hill Where the Lord Hides"
(charted July 3, 1971; #76 US; #32 AC)
"Chase the Clouds Away"
(charted July 19, 1975; #96 US)
Right, I vaguely remember it. The plot had something to do with one of his students, I think.
He was trying to advise her about a blackmail situation, only to learn from Paul that it was a very common scam.
The last thing I want to see in Trek is the deconstruction of the positive future-- even DS9 took that too far for my tastes.
Utopia is meaningless if it's free, easy, and never challenged.
Philosophical question: Will the Prince of Darkness go to Rock'n'Roll Heaven or Rock'n'Roll Hell? Or is it just the same place?
