So the other night I needed some unwind time and I queued up HULU+ on my big screen T.V. and watched the pilot episode of the single season science-fiction series The Time Tunnel.

The Time Tunnel was created by Irwin Allen, the television producer of such memorable fare such as Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Land of the Giants.

Episode 1: Rendezvous with Yesterday

Air Date: Sept 9 1966

Summary:

Senator Clark, arriving in a private jet because he is so budget conscious, lands in the middle of a great salt flat where he is met by Dr. Doug Phillips. The two men get into a limo and speed along the desert floor to a concealed ramp. The limo drops with such speed I expect that car had a new senator shaped ceiling decoration.  After driving through a tunnel, but this one has only regular time in it, the two men exit for the elevators of doom.

Dr. Phillips explains that the Tic-tock complex (yeah that’s a code name that will confuse the Reds) is eight HUNDRED floors deep. The good Doctor then takes the man who holds the purse string on the project and subjects him to an 800 story freefall drop. (Well, maybe the Senator is an extreme sports fan.)  Arriving with suits still pressed and miraculously free of vomit they now reach a security check point. (That elevator would stop a lot of people I guess) where in the interest of security the Senator gives up his briefcase. Without his briefcase of doom, he is deemed safe by the inept security chief and permitted to enter.

They cross internal bridges spanning massive shafts. Elevators can be seen going up and down, lights flash, and in the center is an enormous glowing set of spheres suggesting power generators, the look and feel of the scene shamelessly lifted from Forbidden Planet. They meet General Kirk – take that Star Trek, your Kirk is only a Captain ours is a General – who asks if the senator has seen anything like this? (Of course he has, in Forbidden Planet, what a silly question.)

Inside the main control room, they meet Dr. Anne MacGreggor – sadly without a Scottish accent — Dr. Ray Swain, colorless background scientist, and the hothead, teen heartthrob Dr. Anthony “Tony” Newman. The senator is unconvinced that the time travel project is worth the money. So far they made some animals disappear, while Tony is convinced that the animals have been moved through time but randomly and they are unable to track them. The senator, perhaps cranky from hitting the roof of the car and dropping over a mile in free fall, threatens to pull funding unless results are shown.

Did I mention that Tony was hot-headed?

While the senator is being given a larger tour, Tony sets up the Time Tunnel and runs into it, spoiling the forced-perspective effect, and vanishes amid a series of fireworks and smoke bombs.

Tony lands, literally falling out of the air, onto the deck of the *ah hem* RMS Titanic. With all of time and space, literally the entire universe, Tony not only hits the exact time, but even lands safe and dry and not just off to one side in the freezing north Atlantic. Learning that he is on history’s greatest metaphor, Tony tries to warn the Captain by exclaiming “This ship is the Titanic!” Despite having gotten off to such a good start he fails to convince Captain Smith that the ship will strike a ‘berg and sink and gets himself locked up as a madman.

Thanks to Tony’s radiation-bath technique, guess he wasn’t concerned about kids, the pit crew back at the tunnel were able to track him. Seeing his friend trapped on the Titanic, and no lovely heiress with a handy axe around to free him, Doug decides to go back in time and rescue Tony, even though the tunnel won’t be able to pull them back.

Doug’s plan, remember he’s a brilliant scientist, is it dress in period clothing, and take a copy of a newspaper about the disaster.  (HEADLINE: S.S. Titanic Wrecked on Maiden Voyage. d’oh!) No weapons, no high tech gear, just the period clothing (for god’s sake why?) and a newspaper.

Doug arrives, helps Tony overpower the *armed* guard, (and Cameron thought it was his idea to put guns on the Titanic) then, using the stolen arms, they take over the radio room and start broadcasting distress signals.

Let stop for a moment. This is a series about time travel and about scientist diligently pursuing that goal and no one, not one single person in the entire story, voices a word of concern about changing history. Doug and Tony may want to survive, but their attitude is one of excitement at preventing the disaster.

They are captured, Captain Smith is unconvinced by the newspaper, throwing it over the side, and orders the radio men – who in reality were employees of the Marconi Corporation – to transmit that “there is no trouble and to “*disregard all further distress calls from Titanic.*”  (Guess there won’t be any survivors after all now that the Carpathian is going to ignore the distress call transmitted around midnight.)

Using stock footage from A Night to Remember, they strike the iceberg and Smith is forced to admit that Doug and Tony knew what they were talking about, which becomes even more uncomfortable when they confirm that the lifeboat capacity of 750 means only 750 will be saved. (Historical note, Titanic’s population: 2224, lifeboat capacity 1178 total save: 710. Apparently the writers were not aware that many boats launched less than half full.)

Now with the Captain’s blessings, Doug and Tony rush about saving people and helping as best they can. Once the fires and explosions start taking their toll – hey history has no place in a time travel story – Doug and Tony are blown over the side.

Rather than let them die, freezing in the North Atlantic, the Time Tunnel pit crew push their buttons, subjecting Doug and Tony to another random jump.

The Senator promises to protect their funding until the men are rescued, and the project’s very careful plan for perpetual funding is a success. (Not really, but that’d make for a cool dark and cynical twist.) Next week, Doug and Tony land in a rocket bound for space.

Review: well, this has all the ear marks of an Irwin Allen SF production. Fantastic concepts tossed around like a science salad, but none of them are given any serious thought to what they mean or their potential implications.  The level of historical inaccuracies is simply staggering.  S.S. Titanic? Really? Not understanding that many boats were launched half full, getting Captain Smith first name wrong and not having a single other person correctly named, these are all easy easy things to research and fix. All these writes understood was there was a big ship, it bit an ice mountain, and it sank. Goood gods if Tony and Dough had a gun and wanted to stop the disaster all they need to do would be to take the bridge and turn the god damn ship. Yes, the crew would retake control and head back on course, it would have been a slightly different course and that all you need, just a couple of meters and there is no disaster. Shockingly, it gets worse from here.

Actual NY Times Front page, april 16th 1912