The 7th is Made Up Of Phantoms is an episode idea that conceptually I like a lot.  In execution, could there be a more tedious half hour of television?  To understand why I felt that way, I have to go back in time nearly 40 years…

I’m a fan of Time Travel stories and this one opens up really well.  We’re in 1876, the time of General Custer, when a shot rings out.  We’re suddenly in 1964 and a military group is patrolling the same area.  This has promise!!  And then, it fails and give us 20 minutes of redundant material all to build up to the inevitable punchline.

My problem with the episode is fairly simple.  It’s a history lesson dragged out for 20 minutes.  The Command Center works as the antagonist trying to prevent exploration.  That’s about as exciting as watching grass grow.  “Get back here”, repeated ad infinitum is only so exciting; which is to say, not at all.  Meanwhile the group on patrol, William Connors, Michael McCluskey, and Richard Langsford, hear native American’s out on the plain and they want to investigate but here’s the real annoyance: two of them know the whole story of General Custer.  Look, I’m not a history buff so I don’t expect I’d know anything about any part of history the way these guys do, but I also question who remembers the amount they do.  I was present for 9/11, actually having to get out of a building in the hopes of survival, and I can tell you all that I went through, but I can’t tell you the whole history of the day, let alone the days leading up to it. And I certainly wouldn’t expect to revisit it with the only other guy in the platoon who went through it – and that’s events in my lifetime.  An event of 80 years ago??  Come on.  I’d buy one of them being a student of that period to such an extent but not to the point of the dialogue these chaps go through.  “Oh, remember what happened next?”  “Why yes, Mr. Teacher, that was when Custer took a shower and used Ivory soap before lying down with his favorite stuffed animal, Rupert the bear.”  It was the level of minutiae that got under my skin.  Meanwhile, the one pragmatic fella in the group is aware that just because history happened 80 years ago, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.  And I don’t mean a question of history repeating itself in the traditional sense but the actual events repeating themselves.

To make it more irksome to me, I’m thinking ghostly tales here.  A traumatic event might conceivably imprint itself on a land like in Death’s Head Revisited.  I’m not sure the battle of Little Bighorn qualifies.  Still, it brings us to that inevitable ending.  This is where it becomes a personal problem for me.  I was a kid when I had a vinyl record, creatively called Famous Ghost Stories.  (Honestly, you should check it out.  I still think this version of The Tell-Tale Heart is among the very best renditions I’d ever encountered.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSV3OZmgjw&t=492s).  I think it was The Hitch Hiker that struck me with a really memorable twist ending.  The problem is that I had this when I was under 10 years of age, so watching The Twilight Zone all the way through for the first time at 51 made the idea feel stale, even if this story technically came first.   Sure, I acknowledge that the audience at the time may not have known the story, so it would have been fresh but the idea that these three men from 1964 are buried in a graveyard of people who died in 1876… well, that’s conceptually cool, but all too expected for at least this viewer.  I knew that was coming well before we got to the end.

I was disappointed to see that Serling’s brief return to greatness with the last episode couldn’t hold out for a few more.  I wanted to love this time travel episode but unfortunately, my own time travel back to my youth may be the very thing holding me back from enjoying this one.  Ok, at the time, maybe people were excited by it, but some products stand the test of time, while others wither and decay.  Alas, this falls into the latter category.  Age has not treated it well and it could stay buried in the past in the graveyard of never repeated Twilight Zone episodes.  ML

The view from across the pond:

Have you ever wanted to go back and change your own past? I doubt anyone can honestly say they are happy with everything they have ever done. We can all think of things that make us ashamed in hindsight, or at least make us cringe a bit at the memory. But would it be right to change those things, if we could? For our own sakes, probably not. We learn from our mistakes, and hopefully use those mistakes to grow as a person and do better next time. We also learn from the things that go wrong in our lives that are not our fault. Our reactions to difficulties and tragedies can come to define us as human beings, or can prepare us for the future. Then there is also a particular phenomenon that I have noticed many times in my own life: things that seemed really bad at the time eventually led to a positive change. The silver lining was so much more important than the cloud. So maybe if we could actually change things we might end up accidentally breaking something and making our lives worse in a way that is difficult to foresee or calculate. That’s one reason why I suspect that area of scientific discovery will probably forever be closed off to us. It would screw everything up.

Whilst we could probably come to a reasonable conclusion that messing with our own past would be a bad thing, whatever horrors we have had to face, the rights or wrongs of messing with historical events are not so clear cut. Thinking about the big tragedies in history, or the moments when human beings have behaved truly abominably, resulting in torture and death on an unimaginable scale, who wouldn’t want to go back and stop all that from happening, given the chance? My guess is that there would be a significant risk of the noblest of acts backfiring, and the law of unintended consequences would come into play in some unforeseen way. Then we have the problem of the grandfather paradox: any time traveller would by definition be changing their own past, however insignificant their actions. Some scientists have used this to argue that time travel into the past is impossible. Some suggest that a traveller would be somehow prevented from doing anything that contradicts their own established history, which would probably feel like the universe were conspiring against their intentions. It seems difficult to understand how the latter could possibly work in practice.

Taking these ideas and limitations, and translating them to fiction, creates all kinds of problems. They are the kinds of issues that tie writers in knots if they think about them too much, and lead some writers to concoct rather implausible explanations for logical inconsistencies in their world-building (well, time-building) such as Doctor Who’s “fixed points in time”, an idea that some things can arbitrarily be changed, while others can’t. This is a problem that arises because although it can be established that nothing in his companions’ past can be changed (a frequent theme of the First Doctor historicals), as soon as you have a companion from the future, that limits present day storytelling. Besides, almost everything we see is in the Doctor’s own past.

Of course, sci-fi can simply ignore these problems, and allow time travellers to actually change their own past. That creates its own problems, because it means what we are seeing diverges from the universe we actually live in, so it kind of feels like nothing matters and the viewers are not quite so invested in what they are seeing. Put simply, it’s just a bit weird. And for the purposes of this article, it’s certainly not something that you could ever imagine Rod Serling doing in an episode like this, so as soon as the contemporary soldiers start interacting with the past, we know that history isn’t going to be changed. The conclusion is inevitable and dull. They end up as names on a memorial stone.

You’ll notice that I’ve written this article on a tangent to the actual episode, not really engaging with what happens much, and there’s a simple reason for that: it would be a complete waste of my time and yours. There’s just nothing to latch onto here. Some people interact with the past, change nothing and die. That’s it. I mean, I just physically shrugged after I typed that. A shrug of the shoulders is all you really need to sum up this episode. There’s almost no storyline at all, and the poorly-written characters all act in ways that make little sense. It’s a dreadful episode, offering neither emotional engagement with the characters nor food for thought. There is no reason for its existence. When I was trying to think about how to write about this one, I came up with nothing, and in desperation even took a trawl around the internet to see how other reviewers had approached the episode. I found little more than tedious synopses and expressions of frustration with Rod Serling’s apparently lazy work. So we’ll just write this one off as an error from the past, something for nobody to be proud of. It will forever stand as a dismal waste of 25 minutes. There’s nothing to be done about that. You can’t change history.   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Twilight Zone: A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain