"What is this?! Where are we?!" says the pilot's distraught wife, after the couple finds themselves in a time limbo.
You're in a Hollywood studio. Your transition from location shooting in a desert to being in a studio lot didn't go quite as well as planned.
This is the main problem early on, the fact that the desert-studio-desert-studio transitions are totally out of synch, quite unconvincing. This is what a 60s television low budget can cause. The wildlife stock footage doesn't exactly help things either: it only makes these transitions even cheesier. The coyote chasing the rabbit is almost as awkwardly shoved in as all of the stock footage Ed Wood used to rely on.
Not long after, she gets hysterical so her husband slaps her, which felt unnecessary, over-the-top. And yet, wife-slapping was a common method used in old movies and serials as means to deal with female hysteria. Now, you know almost as well as I do that I am the polar opposite of political-correctness, but I felt the slap was unwarranted in this case. And anyway, it's not as if she didn't have any reason to get hysterical: she absolutely did, and her hubby should have been more understanding. The irony is of course this: in this situation who is more hysterical, the slapper or the slapee?
Fortunately, the couple soon leaves the studio lot "desert" and heads back to the real desert. Location shooting is so much better. Except in "Star Trek". Who doesn't enjoy those cheesy planetary sets, colorful boulders as light as hamsters? Speaking of which, ST has a season 3 episode, "Wink Of An Eye", that is based on the identical sci-fi idea, meaning that Roddenbury and co stole this premise most probably. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that TOL was the first to toy with this concept; they may have stolen it themselves from pulp sci-fi, from the vast catalog of hundreds of comic-book stories, which the vast majority of millennial sci-fi fans aren't even aware exist.
The mystery itself is interesting, but is handled somewhat clumsily on occasion. One illogicality is how the couple, during their earlier speculations and theories, tends to ignore the fact that their doubles are frozen in time.
Early on, I had briefly considered the possibility that everything revolves around their daughter being endangered in some way, but hoped I was wrong. Alas, I was right: the premise suffers greatly because of the absurd situation their daughter is in. Somehow, this military facility has such lax security that a child can just easily walk away and get in harms way by "escaping" her prison i.e. The nursery. Even dumber, she is about to get run over by a truck with the brakes off - while the driver is outside the vehicle. There was no need for the writer to not place the driver inside the truck, which would have been far more realistic. Later we find out that the writer used this silliness as a plot-device for the pilot to have a way to save his daughter. Of course, the writer could have easily devised a different, more realistic situation and solution. After all, what are the odds that a small girl in a military base JUST HAPPENS to be outside of the safety perimeter at the exact same time when a professional truck driver JUST HAPPENS to leave the breaks off in his parked truck, a vehicle that JUST HAPPENS to start moving at the exact moment when the girl is about to cross its path? This entire set-up is far too stupid, made more needlessly preposterous than is necessary.
Besides, by the looks of it, the nanny is close enough to catch the child - who surely can't be going at 100 km/h on that tiny toy vehicle.
The mysterious man they encounter, trapped in limbo for who knows how long and for what reason (which isn't explained), wants to take the place of one of them in order to go back to the normal time dimension - and yet he volunteers all the information they need to get out of limbo instead of him! "I want to sneakily take your place - and yet I will help you foil my own plan." That's essentially what he's doing, which is very contradictory. If he had changed his mind and decided to help them instead of saving himself, there was certainly no clear indication in the script that suggests that this turnaround in his attitude ever took place. The fact that this man is basically residing in a hellish world only makes his decision to explain everything quite absurd. If anything, he should be DESPERATE to escape, hence highly unlikely to want to help them.
Also silly is how much time they waste on kissing and jabbering, when time is of the essence for the pilot to get back to his cockpit on time before regular time flow goes back in effect. One kiss I can understand, but two? Why didn't they just tear each other's clothes off and make out!
Another preposterous plot-device is how the jet lands only 10 meters away from the wife's car. Very convenient, as so many plot-devices here.
The narrator's talk of Gordian knots in the intro and outro is a bit weird. That's not what the story is about. I'd rather he told us how come this time-limbo incident had to occur at precisely the same day, and same minute even, when the couple's daughter was endangered. I wasn't expecting the narrator to give us a clear-cut answer, because the ending should be open to interpretation, but the least he could have done is hint at divine intervention or anything else that may explain this wild coincidence.
You're in a Hollywood studio. Your transition from location shooting in a desert to being in a studio lot didn't go quite as well as planned.
This is the main problem early on, the fact that the desert-studio-desert-studio transitions are totally out of synch, quite unconvincing. This is what a 60s television low budget can cause. The wildlife stock footage doesn't exactly help things either: it only makes these transitions even cheesier. The coyote chasing the rabbit is almost as awkwardly shoved in as all of the stock footage Ed Wood used to rely on.
Not long after, she gets hysterical so her husband slaps her, which felt unnecessary, over-the-top. And yet, wife-slapping was a common method used in old movies and serials as means to deal with female hysteria. Now, you know almost as well as I do that I am the polar opposite of political-correctness, but I felt the slap was unwarranted in this case. And anyway, it's not as if she didn't have any reason to get hysterical: she absolutely did, and her hubby should have been more understanding. The irony is of course this: in this situation who is more hysterical, the slapper or the slapee?
Fortunately, the couple soon leaves the studio lot "desert" and heads back to the real desert. Location shooting is so much better. Except in "Star Trek". Who doesn't enjoy those cheesy planetary sets, colorful boulders as light as hamsters? Speaking of which, ST has a season 3 episode, "Wink Of An Eye", that is based on the identical sci-fi idea, meaning that Roddenbury and co stole this premise most probably. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that TOL was the first to toy with this concept; they may have stolen it themselves from pulp sci-fi, from the vast catalog of hundreds of comic-book stories, which the vast majority of millennial sci-fi fans aren't even aware exist.
The mystery itself is interesting, but is handled somewhat clumsily on occasion. One illogicality is how the couple, during their earlier speculations and theories, tends to ignore the fact that their doubles are frozen in time.
Early on, I had briefly considered the possibility that everything revolves around their daughter being endangered in some way, but hoped I was wrong. Alas, I was right: the premise suffers greatly because of the absurd situation their daughter is in. Somehow, this military facility has such lax security that a child can just easily walk away and get in harms way by "escaping" her prison i.e. The nursery. Even dumber, she is about to get run over by a truck with the brakes off - while the driver is outside the vehicle. There was no need for the writer to not place the driver inside the truck, which would have been far more realistic. Later we find out that the writer used this silliness as a plot-device for the pilot to have a way to save his daughter. Of course, the writer could have easily devised a different, more realistic situation and solution. After all, what are the odds that a small girl in a military base JUST HAPPENS to be outside of the safety perimeter at the exact same time when a professional truck driver JUST HAPPENS to leave the breaks off in his parked truck, a vehicle that JUST HAPPENS to start moving at the exact moment when the girl is about to cross its path? This entire set-up is far too stupid, made more needlessly preposterous than is necessary.
Besides, by the looks of it, the nanny is close enough to catch the child - who surely can't be going at 100 km/h on that tiny toy vehicle.
The mysterious man they encounter, trapped in limbo for who knows how long and for what reason (which isn't explained), wants to take the place of one of them in order to go back to the normal time dimension - and yet he volunteers all the information they need to get out of limbo instead of him! "I want to sneakily take your place - and yet I will help you foil my own plan." That's essentially what he's doing, which is very contradictory. If he had changed his mind and decided to help them instead of saving himself, there was certainly no clear indication in the script that suggests that this turnaround in his attitude ever took place. The fact that this man is basically residing in a hellish world only makes his decision to explain everything quite absurd. If anything, he should be DESPERATE to escape, hence highly unlikely to want to help them.
Also silly is how much time they waste on kissing and jabbering, when time is of the essence for the pilot to get back to his cockpit on time before regular time flow goes back in effect. One kiss I can understand, but two? Why didn't they just tear each other's clothes off and make out!
Another preposterous plot-device is how the jet lands only 10 meters away from the wife's car. Very convenient, as so many plot-devices here.
The narrator's talk of Gordian knots in the intro and outro is a bit weird. That's not what the story is about. I'd rather he told us how come this time-limbo incident had to occur at precisely the same day, and same minute even, when the couple's daughter was endangered. I wasn't expecting the narrator to give us a clear-cut answer, because the ending should be open to interpretation, but the least he could have done is hint at divine intervention or anything else that may explain this wild coincidence.