Twilight Zone: The Time Element

Some Twilight Zone fans regard “The Time Element” as the show’s unofficial pilot episode although it actually aired on November 24, 1958 as an episode of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. The response of critics and viewers finally convinced CBS to allow Rod Serling to have the science fiction/fantasy series he’d pitched. Besides Serling’s involvement and the genre, did “The Time Element” have other links to The Twilight Zone?

Written by Serling, “The Time Element” featured William Bendix as Peter Jenson, the protagonist, along with Martin Balsam (who played a detective in Psycho) as Dr. Arnold Gillespie, a psychiatrist. Other key characters are Ensign Janoski and his wife and a bartender at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Jenson consults Dr. Gillespie about a reoccurring dream he’s having. In Jenson’s dream, he somehow travels through time and space from New York City, 1958 to awake in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Each time Jenson awakes, he suspects he’s the victim of an elaborate gag that everyone else is in on. After creating a stir in the hotel bar by declaring that the Japanese are going to sink the U.S.S. Arizona on December 7, 1941, he realizes that he really has traveled back in time. Probably fearing that people will think he’s crazy, he takes back everything he said and claims he was joking and that he wasn’t feeling good, that he got a bit “whirly.” Jenson decides that since no one will believe him, he’ll just take care of himself. Like some characters in regular TZ episodes, Jenson loves sports and loves betting on them. His memory of notable sporting events goes back a long way. Jensen is the kind of guy who'd do great on ESPN's Stump the Schwab. He begins betting on everything he remembers from December 1941 on. There’s a complication though. Jenson befriends a young newlywed couple. The husband is an Ensign serving in the U.S.S. Arizona’s engine room. Jenson’s earlier declaration that the Arizona would sink rattled Mrs. Janoski. Something about the young couple - just starting out, hopeful for the future ahead - awakens a big brotherly protectiveness in the older Jenson. He decides he has to save them from the impending tragedy. Jenson then races around trying to warn people about the coming attack. In the script Jenson approaches the military. Due to objections from Westinghouse who had military contracts, the broadcast has Jenson warning reporters whom he hoped would alert the military. He’s ridiculed and ignored and finally beaten up by the very people he tries to help. He’s a prophet without honor in his own country. Each time, the dream ends at the same point, a point Jenson believes is a little too early. He thinks one day the dream will go on to the end. Jenson came to Dr. Gillespie’s office because he’s convinced the dream is real. He believes he really is going back to December 6, 1941 and reliving the day over and over again. It seems as if Jenson wants to see if Dr. Gillespie can explain what might cause him to believe this or perhaps to try to prove it isn’t real.

There are some superficial differences between “The Time Element” and an actual Twilight Zone episode. Desi Arnaz rather than Rod Serling introduces the show. Neither Arnaz nor Serling serves as the narrator who provides occasional voiceovers. And, of course, we don’t have one of the classic openings or the theme music.

Other trappings and the story itself were very much in keeping with The Twilight Zone. The characters and the actors who played them fit seamlessly with the kinds of characters and actors one would see in the regular series. In fact, Martin Balsam starred in two episodes, “The New Exhibit,” and “16 Millimeter Shrine.” It’s a shame that William Bendix didn’t go on to further appearances. There are a number of roles that would have suited him though I’m loath to name them because the actors who played them did so well. For instance, Bendix could’ve played the lead character in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” but it’s hard to imagine any one but Claude Atkins in the role now. There are any number of smaller roles he’d have done well in too. And that bartender at the Royal Hawaiian? Haven’t I seen him somewhere else too?

There’s a certain streetwise toughness and rhythm to the clipped dialogue. Deadpan humor also creeps in.

GILLESPIE
Now. Your occupation?
JENSON
Various. Part-time unsuccessful bookie. Card dealer. I tended bar once. Just down the street from here. Couple of doors. Andy’s Place. I was also a butcher. Highly successful. My thumbs weighed twelve pounds. Now how do I stack up? Normal, abnormal, subnormal or just a typical young American Lad?

GILLRSPIE
(grins again)
Family?
JENSON
Father and Mother. Both married. Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was a coal miner.

(From page 2 of the script in As Timeless As Infinity: The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts of Rod Serling Volume One, Gauntlet Publications, Colorado Springs, 2004.)

Along with having Jenson warn reporters about the attack rather than the military, the dialogue quoted above was another thing changed for the broadcast. In the broadcast, Jenson is no longer a former butcher. Instead it’s his father’s job. All mention of his father being a coal miner is dropped. Since the script had Jenson going on to characterize coal mining negatively, I wonder if fear of offending a sponsor or a potential sponsor played a role.

Tension develops between Jenson and the Royal Hawaiian bartender, a former New Yorker. Jenson himself is a former bartender, and he’s also from New York. It’s almost like the story’s bartender serves as an alter ego, showing how Jenson would react to someone else with a crazy story about being from the future. In fact, there are three New York bartenders in this story. Jenson, the Royal Hawaiian bartender, and the current guy at Andy’s Place, the bar where Jenson once worked. The tough talking, “Don’t cause no trouble in here” bartender appears frequently in TZ episodes. Bartenders are stereotypically someone you can pour out your troubles to. They’re a kind of primitive substitute for today’s therapists. But TZ bartenders aren’t much as listeners and tend to be tough, unfriendly, and intolerant of “strange birds.” Add in one or two psychiatrists, possibly including the Army doctor (a civilian doctor in the broadcast), and there are five people in this story whose professions involve listening to people’s problems.

Attitudes toward psychiatric treatment were different than they are today. Stigma may still be attached, but that doesn’t prevent people from sharing the fact that they’ve undergone treatment. Back then, people felt driven to keep it hidden, terrified at the humiliation it’d cause if other people knew. Sure, there are those who still look down on people with mental illness. It was far worse in the 50s though. This affects the reactions of characters in “The Time Element” and in official Twilight Zone episodes. Serling wouldn’t be a good observer of human nature if he didn’t note that people had these reactions. He did, and the characters realistically portray them. Gillespie serves as a balance in this story, trying to demystify his profession. Another thing to keep in mind is that beliefs change. Even if Serling carefully researched and studied the field for this episode to get Dr. Gillespie right, his information is at least fifty years out of date by now. In many fields there are advances, or often mind changing labeled as “advances.” So, even if Serling got everything right concerning Gillespie and psychiatry, there've likely been some sea-changes since then. In the 1941 scenes, a doctor tests Jenson’s sanity by asking him who the President is and who the Vice-President is. Jenson, of course, takes views typical of a working class guy from the 1940s and 50s. He speaks in terms that won’t placate the easily offended in today’s hypersensitive, politically correct society. He uses terms like “nuts” and “forty degrees tilt” and “a leak in the attic.” Like other characters in the official episodes, Jenson assumes (in a rugged, realist way) others will make a reservation at a sanitarium for him because of what he’s experiencing. He and later characters see all kinds of wonders and horrors that they have to keep quiet about due to social expectations. This adds to The Twilight Zone’s challenge to conformity. People are repeatedly held back from telling the truth and not believed if they do because of society’s demand for “normality.” The characters also question their own sanity in a self-aware, tough, leveling way that leaves the audience believing the character must be sane. The characters often grow frazzled by the bizarre situations they encounter just as Jenson does near the end. Ironically, the situation often seems perfectly normal to everyone else. For instance, it really is December 6, 1941 for all the other people in Jenson’s dream.

Bits of this plot resurfaced in official episodes. A man visits a psychiatrist due to an extremely real reoccurring dream in “Perchance to Dream.” Like Jensen he thinks the dream will one day go further. Also, like Jensen, his waking fate is tied to his dream fate. The character in “Perchance to Dream,” dreads the possibility of the dream going farther, but Jenson doesn’t know what will happen. Despite the similarity of these stories, Rod Serling didn’t write “Perchance to Dream.” Broadcast on November 27, 1959, little more than a year after “The Time Element,” it was the first Twilight Zone that Serling didn’t script. The reoccurring dream element reoccurs again in “Shadow Play” one of the most memorable TZ episodes.

Jenson’s abrupt disappearance echoes that of the astronauts in “And When the Sky Was Opened.” Dr. Gillespie seems to be in a position akin to that episode’s main character after his friend disappears leaving no trace that he ever existed. There are traces that Jenson existed though. In fact, he unintentionally leaves evidence supporting his story similar to the evidence left by the three soldiers in “The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms.”

World War II figures in the plots of several official Twilight Zones. Serling served in the war, and it was a major world event which ended only thirteen years prior to “The Time Element's" air date. Episodes like “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Purple Testament,” take place during the war. Others like “Deaths-Head Revisited,” “He’s Alive,” and “The Encounter” tie in to the war although they occur years later.

As in many Twilight Zone episodes, “The Time Element” features a character trying to tell a skeptic about something amazing, unbelievable. Then, often too late, something occurs and proves the character right. For instance there are the previously mentioned episodes “And When the Sky Was Opened” and “Perchance to Dream” as well as “Mirror Image” and “The Howling Man.”

Noting their presence here, it’d be interesting (well for me it would be) to explore TZ attitudes towards bookies, gambling, sports, tough guys, and bartenders.

The most obvious plot element in “The Time Element” is time travel. H.G. Wells’s novel, The Time Machine, is an early example of one of science fiction’s most popular tropes. It became a favorite plot device in The Twilight Zone, reused repeatedly. (Maybe I'll post a list of time travel episodes sometime.) A number of sub-elements and themes related to time travel also appeared during the show’s run. Often there’s a desire to return to some lost golden age, or, in “Once Upon a Time,” to go on to an imagined future one. Another theme involves changing the past. This involves attempted interventions in famous historical events, but sometimes the stakes are personal ones too. Jenson acts on both levels. He tries to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, but on a personal level, he’s trying to save the Janoskis. In “Back There,” Peter Corrigan steps back in time and attempts to save Lincoln. That’s an example of public stakes like Jenson’s attempt to warn about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Another example is “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms” in which three modern day national guardsmen get involved in Custer’s Last Stand. Personal stakes, such as Jenson’s attempt to save the Janoskis, are on display in episodes like “Walking Distance” when a man tries to relive the happiest summer of his childhood and “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” when a ruthless tycoon seeks to relive his rise to power and “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” when a pioneer ends up in the present seeking to save his son who is dying the 19th century. In “No Time Like the Past,” Paul Driscoll, a scientist using a time machine, attempts to change several historical events, including two linked to World War II. These events are Jenson’s public stakes multiple times over. Finally, Driscoll, dejected by where the modern world is headed, decides to travel back and settle in small town 19th century America. (Interesting . . . the protagonist in “A Stop at Willoughby” also seeks solace from modern life in a 19th century small town.) Driscoll falls in love with a teacher, but learns that the she will die soon. Although he’d sworn off trying to alter the past, he again attempts to intervene. In all of these examples, it proves impossible to change the large, well known historical events, but sometimes it’s possible to change the smaller, more personal things. Sometimes.

“The Time Element” has more in common with official Twilight Zone episodes than just Rod Serling’s involvement and tales of the fantastic. It serves as the show’s forerunner not only because its success prompted CBS to accept Serling’s proposal for a continuing science fiction/ fantasy series, but also because it introduced themes, plot elements, and motifs which often appeared in the regular series.
FIN.