User Reviews

Why does Tom Hagan, working for the Godfather, plant a bomb at the Time Tunnel Complex? We may never know. Perhaps General Kirk insulted Don Vito.

But the bomb starts a chase through time that takes Tony, Doug, and Tom Hagan a million years into the future and a million years into the past. In the future, they encounter an advanced human society patterned after bees. In the past, they encounter a bee hive full of giant bees, although the bees are never seen, only heard.

Tom Hagan is left in the bee hive. Ann and Ray, incompetent as ever, are able to shift everyone else but Tom. Or did they leave him there purposely? Tom does reveal the location of the bomb's fuse, which we the audience knew the whole time. Very nice! The day is saved. We also know Tom survives, since he is alive in the 70's in the Godfather movies.

There's more of the ridiculous "10 minutes at the Tunnel complex is 10 minutes wherever Tony and Doug are in time". Why? The Tunnel complex people can just tune in at the moment they want, so they can get help to Tony and Doug without a count down to doom. Tony and Doug have only minutes? OK, tune back to the start of those minutes once you have what they need.

Oh, I forgot. Ann and Ray are incompetent.

Yes, I know the guy who planted the bomb is a spy. He isn't Tom Hagan from Godfather. But it would be neat if he were Tom Hagan.

Tony and Doug chase a 1968 guy through time. The Chase takes them from the distant space age to the distant stone age. Meanwhile in Tunnel command centre, a bomb is about to explode!

The pilot and End Of The World are my favourite Tunnel episodes and this hour comes in close third. Seriously, there is nothing I can single out as being wrong with this hour, the music is so well matched to what is on screen, some guy must of spent hours finding just the right music for each scene. The music is mostly lifted from 1950s 20th Century Fox motion pictures.

Bernard Herrmann's Garden Of Evil music plays a big role in the hour. Herrmann's Beneath The 12 Mile Reef score can be heard. That attention grabbing music heard mid-episode when the travellers are first seen in the stone age was lifted from Young Lions (1958). Imagine what that scene would have been like without the music playing? The stock music does it.

At one stage, stock John Williams music lifted from the Tunnel pilot makes a musical statement to viewers. In the command centre, General Kirk tells his co-workers to depart the Tunnel complex because a bomb might explode at any time. His duty-bound co-workers remain to finish the job and the stock Williams music plays on that scene. Just listen!

But many viewers don't listen or don't care about the music, well, to those folks I say one thing, you don't know what you are missing!

Then again, some viewers see something in James Darren and Robert Colbert that I don't see, so maybe I don't know what I am missing with the two leads?

Anyway, in this episode, the two leads, and everything else really rocks. Who could forget that mid-episode mind-blowing moment when the Tunnel moves FIVE people in time all at once! My god, my jaw hit the ground when I first saw that!

Just as mind-blowing are the final frames when Robert Duvall is left alone to be killed by bees. We don't see it happen and that is the way it should be, if only modern film-makers could look at Chase Through Time and see that a production looks so much more tasteful when things are left to the imagination. We don't need to see it.

At this point my review should be telling you something. This episode combines five star presentation with five star story telling. It is a winning combination that makes Chase Through Time one of the screen's greatest hours.

Added note, if you like chasing down old publications, you might be interested in a 1967 US Variety magazine. It did a huge two page advertisement for this episode the week it first aired in the US.

This curious chapter stands out from the rest for being the only one in which the action takes place in three diametrically opposed times. The premise is very original, a spy places a time bomb in the complex but is discovered, trying to escape is transported through the tunnel to an indefinite time, the only way scientists now have to avoid the explosion is that Tony and Douglas Chase the spy through time and force him to confess where the explosive is hidden. At first they find him in the Arizona desert, but then they are all transported to an era a million years in the future, in their attempt to catch him Tony and Douglas are stopped by strange beings from the future and again by accident they are all transported to the prehistoric era included two of the beings from the future. An entertaining trip back and forth in time in one of the best episodes of the series that also features Robert Duvall as a guest.

A foreign spy who infiltrated the complex a year earlier murders a scientist, plants the timing mechanism for an already-installed atomic bomb, and when he's found out, "escapes" into the Tunnel... winding up exactly where Doug & Tony are. They have about 24 hours, by the Tunnel's point of view, to locate the bomb, before it destroys the complex, possibly kills everyone in it, and traps our heroes "somewhere along the infinite corridors of time". WOW. What a premise!

I always remembered this story as one of the real stand-outs. I was even briefly inspired to write my own tribute to it once (but never got past the first page). As things go in the complex, inexplicably, they're somehow "unable to hold" the spy where he is, and so he vanishes from 1547, and the Tunnel has to try to track WHERE he vanished to, in order to send Doug & Tony after him. Which turns out to be ONE MILLION YEARS A. D. Holy cow! They find themselves in a patented 1960s sci-fi future inhabited by "humans" who have pretty much had all their humanity bred out of them, and have formed a society similar to that of BEES-- rulers, soldiers, and workers. And to make matter worse-- the spy they're searching for, somehow arrived TEN YEARS before they did-- has ingratiated himself to their rulers-- and has convinced them (CONNED, really!) to build their own time machine, to "spread their civilization across all time". WHAT?? This makes ZERO sense, but, again, these future-people are incapable of actually thinking for themselves-- and that includes the rulers. The real reason he's doing this, is to get back to his own time. (But of course, he's not going to tell them that.)

As I said, I always remembered this story, but re-watching now, after so long, it really blew my mind, as being EVEN BETTER than I remembered it. So often, on Irwin Allen shows, even when you had a great premise, the writing would let it down. Surprisingly-- NOT this time. Oh, sure, Ray Swaine & Ann MacGregor are as INCOMPETENT as always, and when they're able to do something with the Tunnel, it's usually a matter of good luck and a prayer. But I have to say, this may be the single most mesmerizing episode of the entire run, right up there with the "Titanic" and "Pearl Harbor" stories.

Has Robert Duvall EVER played a likable character? Apart from "The Chameleon" on THE OUTER LIMITS (and he started as a paid government assassin in that one), I can't think of one. He's SO focused on his murderous assignment, and later, when the heroes confront him and attempt to FORCE him to reveal where the bomb is hidden, he repeatedly refuses, over and over, so confident in his arrogance.

Vitina Marcus, "the girl from the green dimension" on LOST IN SPACE, plays a worker who becomes "defective" due to the hero's influence, and decides to help them when they decide to save her life. She asks, "What is LIKE?" "What is LOVE?", and her dormant humanity begins to come out.

Lew Gallo, previously seen in the Pearl Harbor story, is one of the soldiers, whose sole purpose has become protecting Duvall at all costs. When HE's nearly killed in the last act, he cannot comprehend why Doug refuses to kill him, or leave him to die. The best moment in the entire story may be when he takes his laser pistol back, and surprisingly, aims it AT Duvall, demanding he tell the heroes what they want to know. WHY this sudden change of attitude? He says... "I-- LIKE him." Looks like there's HOPE for humanity, yet! (Later on, Gallo switched over to production, and was one of the people in charge of the Stacy Keach MIKE HAMMER series in the 80s.)

The last act takes place in ONE MILLION B. C., which gives Irwin Allen a chance to re-use footage from his own feature film THE LOST WORLD, some of the same footage that had already been re-used in 2 different episodes of VOYAGE, and, to my surprise, the un-aired version of THE TIME TUNNEL pilot! I have to say, sure, they're giant lizards, but just like in Columbia's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1959), this may be some of the best use ever of lizards pretending to be dinosaurs.

Presumably, Gallo & Marcus' characters were returned to their own time-- one would like to think together, their influence might bring a major positive change to their otherwise-bleak future society. (If not, some other time period is gonna have a pair of visitors even more out of place than Doug & Tony.) Re-watching this story, I couldn't help but wonder what a 2nd season might have been like. This was the small-screen equivalent of big-budget sci-fi feature film at the time, and in my mind, it looked and felt like what VOYAGE and LOST IN SPACE should have more often, but almost never was. Imagine Doug & Tony making it back to the Tunnel, and those in charge having more knowledge, experience and control over the Tunnel. There might have been an infinite range of stories they could have done, that was only hinted at here.

Severl TIME TUNNEL stories had parallels on early DOCTOR WHO, including "Marco Polo", "The Trojan War", "The French Revolution", and even a western. This one clearly parallels "The Chase", which was the FINAL story on that show to feature Ian & Barbara-- before they made it back home to their own time. Suffice to say, DOCTOR WHO didn't end when that happened-- it had barely gotten started, and ran for another 24 seasons afterward. There's no reason THE TIME TUNNEL couldn't have had a longer run-- except the narrow minds of network executives.