“Back There” (season 2, episode 13; originally aired 1/13/1961)
In which sic semper time traveller
I’m a sucker for time travel stories. My first favorite movie was Back To The Future, which was also the first movie I ever owned on VHS. (Remember VHS? Kids, ask your grandparents.) It’s a trope I keep coming back to as well, and while it can be handled badly, when it works, there’s a potential for cleverness and poignancy that few other genre concepts can match. Time travel captures a universal impulse, the same impulse that drives us to look up spoilers for movies on the ‘net, or skip to the back of the book, or look through old photographs and wonder how we might change them. As it exists, life is ordered but chaotic; events define their structure, and cause leads to effect, but nothing hardly ever seems to work out exactly as we’d like it to. I’m in my thirties now, and I find myself wondering how much better my life might be if I could walk through a door and be back in 1997. If I could get some kind of message to my past self, or if maybe I could just take over my old body, go back to college, actually pay attention to classes, maybe not eat quite so many bags of Oreos…
It’s a fool’s game, of course, because if I was to change the person I was then, who’s to say my life would be improved? Maybe I’d come back to the present to find myself stuck in a dead-end job, unable to write, married to someone who didn’t much like me. Or, and here’s where we get to this week’s first Twilight Zone episode, what if I couldn’t really change the past at all? No one really knows how all of this works, and it could be that a trip backwards would just result in a lot of nostalgic mooning, without an actual alteration. One of the biggest practical questions about time travel is how it could be possible to go back in time without creating a paradox, a sort of knot in reality that shouldn’t exist, but does anyway; the easiest way to solve this question is by suggesting that, no matter how hard you tried, you really wouldn’t be able to affect much of anything. You can’t go kill your grandfather. You could maybe give him a headache. This is a sensible solution, but in fiction, it has the unfortunate effect of reducing tension. If nothing the hero does matters, you can either play the story out as a sort tragic mystery (ala Twelve Monkeys), or… Hm. Actually, that’s the only option I can think of. The “Back There” approach certainly doesn’t work.
This is a weird episode, and because it’s not a very good one, the weirdness is just about the only thing to recommend it. Well, that and the appearance of Russell Johnson; if you’ve got a fetish for Gilligan’s Island cast-members in period clothing, this one’s for you. Johnson plays Peter Corrigan, a comfortable gentleman who spends his evenings playing cards and chatting with friends at the Potomac Club. At the start of “Back There,” we see Peter in an argument with another man about the possibilities of time travel, and it’s here where the weirdness starts. “Back There”’s biggest flaw is Rod Serling’s lazy script. It introduces the premise straight away, and it doesn’t waste much time in throwing its hero into the past, but we’re never given any good reason why Peter is the one chosen to go back to 1865. In the discussion which opens in the episode, the man lecturing Peter is the one who’s convinced that you can change the past. Peter is barely listening to him spout off. It’s like a prankster god was eavesdropping in on the conversation and decided to mete out some ironic punishment, but missed his target. If Corrigan gave a damn one way or the other—if he argued that you could change what had happened, or you couldn’t—then we’d have something to hang a hook on.
And this episode could really use a hook. Peter gets bored with cards and decides to leave, and after bumping into a nervous servant (who you realize immediately will reappear later on for some kind of twist), our hero steps outside, is overcome with some sort of dizzy spell/camera trick, and then finds himself nearly a century into the past, on April 14, 1865. There’s never any explanation as to how made the jump, or why he’s suddenly wearing period appropriate clothes. Normally, this sort of story works better without explicit justification. I’ve watched Groundhog Day a dozen times now, and I’ve never been disappointed that we don’t learn why Bill Murray keeps repeating the same day. That’s because specific reasons aren’t as important as character reasons. Whatever stuck Murray’s arrogant weatherman in a single day loop doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he has to find someway to deal with his predicament; and as the movie goes on, it finds ways to subtly suggest that the real point of all this is for Murray to find a way to be a better person. But this is never flat out stated. It happens organically, and that’s what makes the movie so terrific. It gives us just enough information to accept what’s going on, and no more.
Typically, The Twilight Zone doesn’t need explanations. We don’t need a shot of the factory where they build fortune-telling-devil-machines like the one in “Nick Of Time,” for example; these stories have their own internal logic, and that’s all that’s necessary. “Back There” tries to operate on this same principle, and it sort of works. I’m willing to accept that Peter could suddenly, and for no clear reason, be thrown back to the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. But the episode never gets enough connection with its character to make me give a damn. To his credit, Peter realizes what’s going on fairly quickly, and we don’t have to go through a lot of the usual TZ repetition of the premise—”But why isn’t there electricity? Why are you wearing a bustle? WHERE ARE THE TVS?”. As soon as he learns the date, Peter hurries to the police station to warn them of John Wilkes Booth’s impending attack, and his warnings fall on mostly deaf ears. The police put the crazy man in a holding cell, and a stranger arrives and offers to take care of Peter himself; he says he’s a medical doctor, and he has special expertise in dealing with cases like Peter’s. The cops shrug, hand over their temporary prisoner, and the doctor brings Peter back to his room, where he drugs him. Peter wakes up a few hours later when the one officer sympathetic to his warnings finds him and tries to question him. But it’s too late. The president has already been shot, and as crowds of mourners gather in the streets outside, Peter looks at the handkerchief the doctor used to drug him. On it are the monogrammed initials JWB.
This is silly. It’s silly, and it requires a lot of silliness for events to fall into place just so. Unless presidential security has changed drastically in the last century and a half, it makes no sense that the police would ignore Peter’s warning as completely as they do. He doesn’t scream, “I’m from the future and I know what’s going to happen!” He says, “Someone’s going to kill the president tonight,” and that’s the sort of statement people tend to pay attention to. In 1865, the Civil War had just ended, and there where hundreds of thousands of men and women with a very good reason to want Lincoln dead. At the very least, you’d think the lieutenant here would ask a few questions before smirking and dismissing Peter as a crazy person. And why the hell would John Wilkes Booth be hanging out a police station, anyway? I’ll admit, my history on the conspiracy surrounding the Lincoln assassination is a little fuzzy, but shouldn’t he be off getting himself prepared, instead of making a special effort to play Batman villain with a man whose already been dismissed and rendered harmless by his incarceration? It makes some sense that Booth might want to make absolutely sure Peter is out of the way before putting his plain into affect (although why not just kill him?), but the coincidence required for him to be close enough to just happen to hear Corrigan’s ravings is too large to swallow. It also betrays a certain level of backwards engineering; Serling knows that Booth is the man Peter would have to stop if he wanted to save Lincoln, and so, Serling makes Booth the main villain of the story, even though there’s no immediate reason he should be present. This also explains why Booth gives a fake name to the cops when taking Peter into custody. Maybe he does it to catch Peter off guard, because he doesn’t know how much information Peter really has; maybe he does it because, if possible, he doesn’t want the name Booth connected to a threat against the President. But he really does it so we can have a reveal near the end of the episode.
After Lincoln gets shot, and Peter learns that he can’t change the past, even though he never thought he could in the first place, our hero is returned to his own time. He goes back into his club to explain to the others that time travel is possible, and there he finds William, the servant we met earlier, is now one of the wealthy white dudes sitting at Peter’s table. He explains that his great-grandfather—the one officer Peter met in the past who was sympathetic to his warnings—exploited his premonition about the death of Lincoln to rise in power enough to make a lot of money, and that money was passed down through his sons, and so on. And so, we learn that you can change the past to a degree, you just can’t change the really important events. Except we don’t really learn that at all, since Peter’s efforts to stop Lincoln’s murder were haphazard at best. It’s not as if he had multiple opportunities to try different approaches to save the president. He had one shot, and he blew it as much out of his own clumsiness as out of fate. “Back There” has a certain eerie quality to it; there are memorable visuals (I especially liked the shot of the crowd that comes together after Lincoln is shot), and Jerry Goldsmith’s score is great, as Goldsmith’s scores nearly always are. But the story takes too many shortcuts, and never makes the extra step required to explain why we should care. Serling takes an iconic moment in America’s history, and then expects that’s enough to get us through the half-hour. It isn’t.
What a twist: Peter travels back in time, but can’t stop Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. He can, however, make some random guy rich.