Lost In The Twilight Zone - No Time Like The Past

Special Lost Update - Season V - 03/11/2009

Submitted For Your Approval: As promised, tonight is a special Lost update, our destination, The Twilight Zone. We will visit the past, the present, and perhaps the future. I will use Twilight Zone episode #112 from season IV, 1963, titled, No Time Like The Past as the template for tonight's journey. As always with my Lost/Twilight Zone updates, the format remains the same. I will offer the original Serling opening monologue, my personal synopsis of the episode, then Serling's original epilogue of the episode, and finally, what it all means to ABC Lost. Let's begin shall we...

As like all Twilight Zone episodes, Rod Serling offered an opening monologue that went something like this...

Opening Monologue:
Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the 20th 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.

Story Synopsis:
Paul Driscol has access to a time machine. He intends to use the machine to go back in time and alter the course of history for the betterment of Mankind. His first attempt goes bad as he tries to convince the Japanese military that a bomb will explode in Hiroshima. In his second attempt he goes back before the start of World War II and attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler but fails. His third attempt is to prevent the RMS Lusitania from being torpedoed but again fails.

Depressed for failing so many times, Driscol comes to the conclusion that the past cannot be changed no matter how hard one tries to do so. He then decides to travel back to a more peaceful time and settles on the year 1881, and intends to live his life out.

Arriving in the past, Driscol realizes that the president, James Garfeild, will be assassinated the next day. He doesn't interfere and Garfield is shot. Later on, he attempts to prevent a schoolhouse from burning down that he read about. Instead of preventing the fire, he inadvertently causes the fire and schoolhouse to burn down.

Realizing that he cannot live in the past knowing what the future brings, he returns to his present time learning a hard lesson to not tamper or attempt to change the course of history.

Epilogue:
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 wearing? 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!'
Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars. In the Twilight Zone.

WOW! Take a minute and let what you just read sink in. Don't worry, you have plenty of time as ABC is airing a repeat of Lost tonight. (BTW, ABC said they would air 16 straight episodes with no breaks, seems they lied, just like Ben Linus) The question for tonight, what is the premise of season five for ABC Lost and where is the series headed? That's right boys and girls, (And the several alien species that read my updates) it's all about time travel and attempting to change past events.

We can easily compare Daniel Faraday or Ben Linus to Paul Driscol. Faraday seems to have the intellect and knowledge to understand and manipulate the complicated space-time theorem. You see him conducting several experiments on the island with the rockets. He also knows about the past, and the future. He has been there before. As for Ben, he may not possess the intellect, but he controls the time machine, and thus, controls destiny. We know that both Faraday and Linus have visited the past before. The results are not yet determined, but seeing that the island is in a hell of a mess, and Faraday and Linus are still traveling back in time, the results are not acceptable. The same fate was had for Driscol in Twilight Zone.

Moving on to Driscol picking a quiet time in the past to settle down and live the rest of his life out, we know that didn't work out to well for him. He inadvertently caused the school house fire he was trying to prevent. Sawyer and Juliet are 30 years in the past, 1974, and after confronting Horace, they become integral parts of the Dharma Initiative, and becomes a powerful man. We know by using this Twilight Zone episode as a template that Sawyer and Juliet will not end up well in their current time frame.

As a side note, Desmond saw the future, and saw Charlie dying. No matter what Desmond did to prevent Charlie from dying, fate or destiny took it's course and Charlie did die.

Perhaps Ben Linus, trapped in a continuous loop of desperation and insanity, is unprepared for tonight's lesson, taught only in the Twilight Zone.

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