The Twilight Zone Recap: No Time Like the Past
Paul Driscoll has invented a time machine and convinced himself he can rid the world of the things that make it such a horrible place. He visits Hiroshima, then Berlin, then the Lusitania, but he cannot change the events of any of them. Finally he decides to settle down in a small town in Indana where he will be away from everything.
The only problem is that the very next day is the day that the president comes to visit and gets shot, and he will die a few months later from an infection he picked up when shot. Then he finds out a fire will break out and school children will die, but if he saves them he will change the world. He tries to not give in, but he eventually tries to help, and in so doing actually sets in motion the events that start the fire and does the damage. Perhaps time is not so fragile as we would believe. But that does not mean we can handle the events of time.
Paul returns to his time, convinced that we are not meant to live outside our own time, and convinced to try and make it better through his knowledge that he has gained. This would have been an excellent episode if he had returned to find that some small thing he did rippled through the years to upset his world even though the larger events didn't do anything. That would have made it excellent. As it is, it was just good.
