The Time Tunnel

United States Senator Leroy Clark (Gary Merrill) arrives from Washington, DC, to investigate the progress of Project Tic-Toc in Arizona. He is met outside the subterranean complex by Dr. Doug Phillips, who ushers him in. They are met by Lt. General Heywood Kirk, known to Clark as his former commanding officer when he was a paratrooper in the army. As chairman of the Senate committee overseeing the Time Tunnel, Clark lets it be known that he can either authorize the continued funding of the project or "cut [its] umbilical cord", He wants immediate results. Dr. Tony Newman wants to comply by "going into time", but Phillips, the project chief, vetoes the offer. Late that night while the others are elsewhere, Tony powers up the Time Tunnel, enters, and successfully sends himself back in time. He arrives on board the Titanic on Saturday, April 13, the day before it collides with an iceberg and sinks. He meets Ms. Althea Hall, played by Susan Hampshire, when he "lands" on one of the ship's promenade decks. Later when he learns that he is aboard the Titanic, he runs into the captain, played by Michael Rennie, whom he tries to urge to sail further south to avoid icebergs. As he does this, he discloses the incredible facts explaining his own presence on board. The unconvinced captain has Tony arrested as a stowaway and held incommunicado, although he is seen and heard by those in the Time Tunnel control room, who are tracking him. Doug Phillips decides to follow Tony into time to rescue him and try to convince the captain of the imminent disaster with a newspaper reporting the matter the day after. General Kirk permits him to go. Doug finds himself in the boiler room of the ship, makes his way further into the ship, and enlists the aid of a French lad, Marcel Copot, played by Gerard Michenaud, to help get Tony free. After breaking Tony out of the cabin, they go to the wireless room to send an SOS message. They overcome the staff armed with Tony's guard's pistol, but they are overpowered by the captain and his detail and locked back into the cabin Tony had occupied. As Tony and Doug had predicted, the ship strikes an iceberg at 11:40 pm bringing the captain to Tony and Doug, who then are successful in getting him to order the "abandon ship" procedure. Doug gets to place his friend Marcel with his mother onto a lifeboat, and Tony persuades a reluctant Althea Hall to board one. Thrown off the ship by an explosion, Tony and Doug are successfully frozen in time by the Time Tunnel control room, and placed in "time limbo". Since Tony and Doug are still lost in time, Senator Clark assures Time Tunnel control that he will not discontinue funding.

Tony and Doug find themselves on board a spacecraft's service module just before blast off. The spacecraft, part of the M.E.M. (Mars Excursion Module) ten years in Tony and Doug's future, is to be the first U.S. manned spaceflight to Mars. It is the M.E.M. IV flight, and it is manned by Colonel Kane (played by Larry Ward) the captain, Nazarro (Ben Cooper) the radioman, Beard (James T. Callahan) and Major Harlow (Warren Stevens) the doctor. Tony and Doug's added weight (335 pounds) makes it impossible for the spacecraft to reach escape velocity in order to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Captain Kane decides to jettison the service module, effectively scrubbing the mission and killing Tony and Doug, but Beard, who wants the mission to continue, furtively fires the boosters to achieve escape velocity. Unable to get directions from mission control due to being incommunicado with a sabotaged radio, Kane makes the command decision to make a stop on the moon to replenish the fuel that Beard expended and continue the mission. When Tony and Doug are discovered they are treated as spies. Beard wants to throw them off the ship. Tony and Doug prove themselves honest by assisting in repairing the outer hull of the ship after it is struck by a meteor.

Back at the Time Tunnel control room, three visitors are brought in, who are with the M.E.M. program: Vice-Admiral Killian (Barry Kelley), Dr. Brandon (Ross Elliott), M.E.M scientist, and Killian's aide, Ensign Beard, who is the same crewman Beard on the M.E.M. IV. They are brought in because they are interested in seeing the future of their program, and they are enlisted to help retrieve Tony and Doug. Both Brandon and Beard are spies. Brandon succeeds in exploding the Time Tunnel control panel with plastic explosive before he is exposed later by security Master Sergeant Jiggs. In doing this, Beard does not see his further nefarious actions: killing Doctor Harlow in the moon's fuel depot and his own death when his time bomb explodes the depot.

When Brandon is exposed, he tries to escape by grabbing a machine gun, and he tells Beard that his job is to protect him as his accomplice. Beard betrays Brandon after being given a gun by Brandon. Beard shoots and kills him. Brandon had become expendable, which Beard becomes ten years later if he is successful in destroying the M.E.M. Mars flight and killing Tony, Doug, and the rest of the crew. Doug tells Beard this before knocking him unconscious.

The return of Halley's Comet in 1910, causing worldwide panic monitored by the Time Tunnel control room, interposes an obstacle to saving over 200 miners trapped in the cave-in of the "Emperor Mine". Relocated to this time period, Tony and Doug try to organize a rescue party, but all of the townspeople have left town to wait for the end of the world predicted by a respected professor, Dr. Ainsley (played by Gregory Morton), working at a local college observatory. Doug and Tony split up to get help: Tony goes out to appeal to the townspeople and Doug goes to see Ainsley at the observatory to get him to retract his prediction. Tony succeeds in getting the sheriff (played by James Westerfield) to come to the mine to help, and when a partial cave-in is caused by the suicidal mine office clerk Henderson (played by Paul Fix), the sheriff succeeds in saving Tony. Doug demonstrates to Ainsley that he is a competent scientist, but his chalkboard calculations only corroborate Ainsley's prediction that Halley's Comet will collide with the earth. The Time Tunnel control room tries and fails to send a radarscope to help Doug convince Ainsley. Just before the time of the predicted collision of the comet, Doug gets Ainsley to hook the college's Nichols radiometer up to the telescope to scan for a possible mass in space that would divert the comet. Such a mass would be invisible. The radiometer detects such a mass, which convinces Ainsley that he was wrong. Doug and he go to Pilgrimage Hill outside of town to appeal to the townspeople. Ainsley's accurate prediction of the imminent disappearance of the comet's tail convinces the townspeople that the world will not end, and they proceed to the mine to rescue the trapped miners.

At the Time Tunnel complex, a disaster ensues when the time-spatial "fix" on the comet allows its gravitation to pull anyone or anything not strapped down into the Tunnel. Technician Jerry (Sam Groom), who warned of this earlier, becomes its victim. He is saved by Ray manually ripping out power cables from the right instrument console. As Jerry is led away from the Tunnel, he suffers cardiac arrest due to shock, and is saved by the resourcefulness of Ann, who uses the severed power cords as a makeshift resuscitator to revive him. Ray, Ann, and General Kirk discuss the risk of subjecting the Time Tunnel complex and personnel to the continued attempt to rescue Doug and Tony. Ray feels that they are dealing with forces well beyond control that might force them to choose to shield Time Tunnel personnel over rescuing Doug and Tony, Ann objects to discontinuing the rescue, and General Kirk encourages them to continue while working in safeguards.

Tony and Doug arrive in Louisiana the day before the final battle of the War of 1812. They are taken prisoner by the British troops, court-martialed as spies, and sentenced to be shot at dawn. A present-day British Army general, General Southall (Carroll O'Connor), is brought to the time tunnel so the team can establish the location of their scientists. Recognizing his ancestor, Colonel Southall (also Carroll O'Connor), and confessing that he does not have long to live anyway, General Southall insists on going back to order Colonel Southall to release the two scientists and to find out why he led his troops into the strong point of the opposing army. General Southall fails to convince his ancestor, and both Southalls are killed in the battle.

Tony and Doug arrive in Paris, France in the middle of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror. A shopkeeper offers to help them get out of the city if they will help him get to Marie Antoinette in an attempt to free her. Instead, they end up helping the Dauphin, Louis XVII, to escape with the shopkeeper as his guide and protector. Tony and Doug are confronted by an ancestor of General Kirk, who is a dead ringer for him. Kirk has his heirloom ring sent back to possibly facilitate Doug and Tony's being recovered, but the ring had been a love token between Marie Antoinette and a foreign amour (i.e. Axel von Fersen the Younger). The ancestor General Querque seeks to use the ring as evidence to incriminate Marie Antoinette, clearing the way for her execution. At the end of the episode, Doug and Tony distract a young artillery lieutenant by the name of Napoléon Bonaparte so that the shopkeeper and the dauphin can go aboard a ship that will take them to freedom. The ring experiment ultimately fails; Doug and Tony get transferred to another era just before rifle shots reach their position, while the ring gets transferred, by inference, back to Kirk.

Tony and Doug arrive on an alien spacecraft in space above the Americas. Two aliens soon appear, pull a gun, and force Tony and Doug into an area that translates between their different languages. The aliens tell Tony and Doug that they are going to take all of the protein (food) from Earth and that there will be no life left when they leave, just as they have done with other planets. The aliens also tell them that there are three kinds of people: those who cooperate, those who can be made to cooperate, and those whom they must kill. "Resistance is impossible," they say.

The aliens (from Alpha 1) land their ship at a farm near Mullins, Arizona Territory (approximately 112°W 34°N) in the year 1885. Their first objective is to take over the farm house, which they do. Their second objective is to take over the town, which they almost succeed in doing. Dr. Phillips has been made cooperative by the aliens. Dr. Newman has to get help from the sheriff and the bar owner for his plan to take the aliens' control unit away from them to succeed. Meanwhile, two other aliens, (John Hoyt playing the one speaking character of these two) who no longer need to raid planets for food, appear in the Time Tunnel control room and demand that the Tunnel operators prove that they did not destroy the alien ship, or face destruction of the Earth. After they are shown an image of the ship leaving Earth safely, the aliens leave.

Tony and Doug arrive at the Italian Alps just outside fictional Villa Galba during the Italian Campaign in World War I, and enter the cellar to avoid an artillery bombardment. A German advance team has just arrived at the villa. A German corporal is mysteriously stabbed to death while investigating a crypt marked Nero, which was exposed by a bomb. Fearing that the Germans will think they did it, Tony and Doug hide and accidentally find a secret passage to the upper floors of the estate, where the owner, an Italian count named Enrico Galba –who is descended from Roman emperor Galba –offers to protect them from the Germans. When the Germans arrive at the room, Galba tells the Germans that Tony and Doug are neutral American guests of his. The German major orders them to stay in the room as prisoners while the Germans use the villa to observe the movements of Italian forces.

A German officer is possessed by the ghost of Nero and tries to kill the descendant of Galba, whom Nero blames as his assassin. The ghost also tries to kill the nobleman by possessing Tony. Project HQ utilizes the services of a paranormal researcher Dr. Steinholtz (played by John Hoyt), who suggests zapping Tony with 1,000,000 volts of electricity for one millisecond through the Tunnel to force the ghost out. This nearly kills Tony, so HQ attempts to bring him back to the present. Nero is transported instead, and almost destroys HQ before the scientists can send him back. When the Italian army retakes the Villa, the ghost of Nero enters a young Italian Corporal by the name of Benito Mussolini, who vows to drive the Huns from his country and restore the glory of the Caesars. Tony and Doug are "switched" after this.

Tony and Doug arrive outside of the tent of Joshua during the night, two days before the end of the Israelite siege of Jericho. Joshua comes to believe they are who they say they are–time travelers–and sends them to spy inside the city. Doug and Tony save a young virgin from being sacrificed to the Levantine deity Chemosh by the high priest of Jericho, played by Arnold Moss. Doug is captured and sent to the dungeon to be tortured as an Israelite spy. Tony escapes into a house with an unlocked door. When the resident arrives, he calls her (Rahab) because, from the Biblical account, she is the one who sheltered the two Israelite spies. (Rahab is the sister of the almost-sacrificed virgin.)

After Tony rescues Doug from the dungeon, they take refuge on the roof of Rahab's house, but are betrayed by her servant woman Azah, who desires the reward of 1,000 talents of silver. Doug escapes to tell Joshua the information that he seeks. Tony and Rahab are about to be stoned to death, but when the Israelites complete their march, blow their trumpets and shout, the walls of the city fall down as what appears to be a tornado traces the destruction. Ann, a skeptic, decides that since a tornado is a natural phenomenon, that the fall of the walls was not a supernatural event, while Ray is convinced it was supernatural (perhaps because tornadoes are not known to strike in the Holy Lands). Tony and Doug are transported to a new era after telling Rahab she'll be safe.

Hernán Cortés (played by Anthony Caruso) has captured the royal family of the Tlaxcalan people of Mexico just as his army of 3,000 Tlaxcalans begins its deadly rampage through Cholula during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. He is questioning them about the location of a golden mask, the symbol of ruling authority to these Indians. Doug and Tony arrive before the torture begins and are captured trying to save the royals. Once Cortés gets the information he wants, he kills the king and queen but keeps the timid royal heir alive for the moment. While Cortés is away watching the burning of his ships to prevent the rebellion of his troops, a member of the tribe frees the royal heir as well as Tony and Doug. The four of them try to retrieve the mask before the Spaniards gain it.

Tony and Doug arrive somewhere in the Mediterranean on a pirate ship during the First Barbary War and are captured and taken to an island. Captain Beal (Victor Jory), a Barbary pirate, orders that the strangers be shot. However, the nephew of the king of Spain, Armando, was also captured and pleads for the lives of the Americans, saying Tony and Doug can watch over him until a ransom can be paid. Doug, Tony and the boy attempt several escapes, but are recaptured each time. Beal then decides to kill Doug and Tony for good, but the shelling from several U.S. Navy ships–commanded by Captain Stephen Decatur, who has arrived to defeat the pirates in the First Barbary War–puts an end to the pirates' plans. The pirates head for their ship to engage in battle. Tony is hit by a shot on the beach is and presumed dead. The pirates take Armando and Doug onto their ship during the battle. Tony recovers and swims out to the U.S. flagship.

The Time Tunnel personnel accidentally transfer Captain Beal back to HQ, and he causes a ruckus and kidnaps Ann. She persuades him to go back to his ship, where he is intentionally killed by one of his own crew. HQ then transfers Armando and Doug back to the island before the pirate ship is destroyed. They then transfer first Armando and then Doug to Captain Decatur's ship to save them from the shelling. Both Doug and Armando are seriously wounded, however, and it is feared they may both die. The newly retired Time Tunnel staff doctor, Dr. Benjamin Berkhart, insists on going back to save their lives and help the wounded American sailors. Dr. Berkhart arrives and treats Doug's shock with an injection and administers an anesthetic to Armando. Happy knowing he will live out the remainder of his life in this time period, Dr. Berkhart goes to look after the wounded sailors as Tony and Doug are switched to their next adventure.

Tony and Doug arrive near the Grand Canyon, Arizona, in 1547. Back at HQ, a 'Dr. Stiles' is monitoring the Time Tunnel—no explanation is given as to why Gen. Kirk, Ann, and Dr. Swain are not at the controls 'as usual' when the 'move' occurs. Meanwhile, Raul Niman (Robert Duvall), a spy for an unspecified country or organization, has planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in the complex. He kills Stiles to secrete the bomb's timer in the Time Tunnel control room. A security check exposes his presence, and, with no other avenue of escape, he jumps into the Time Tunnel. The Tunnel had been tuned to the location of Doug and Tony, so Niman also arrives near the Grand Canyon. General Kirk, Ann, and Dr. Swain reappear at the controls and discover the bomb plot through unexplained discovery of 'instructions' to Niman to place the bomb, once his spy mission was complete. Gen. Kirk offers all in HQ a chance to evacuate, or volunteer to stay and try to save the complex (and Tony and Doug). All bravely decide to stay. Tony and Doug are told they must apprehend Niman and get him to tell them the location of the bomb. But the lock on the time period drifts and moves Niman to another time, so Tony and Doug are sent after him.

Tony and Doug arrive in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, where Dr. Tony Newman is quickly shell-shocked by an artillery blast. Dr. Doug Phillips retreats from the battlefield with a small group of Union soldiers, whose commander tells him to put on a Union uniform to avoid getting shot. The Time Tunnel personnel send a shock through time to revive Tony and he is found by a small group of Confederate soldiers. Suffering from amnesia, he becomes convinced he is the lieutenant whom the Confederate soldiers were expecting and dons a Confederate uniform. The Union soldiers had intercepted the courier so they know that a man named Michaels, who has stolen some gunpowder from the Union army, is going to sell it to the Confederate army. Both sides are attempting to find Michaels first and get the gunpowder.

Mr. Michaels is actually the early-16th century philosopher Machiavelli (played by Malachi Throne), who has been moved to this period by the Tunnel due to similarities with Doug's "pattern". When the Confederates show up, Machiavelli is willing to give them the gunpowder because the war is much more interesting when the sides are evenly matched. Tony takes Doug prisoner. Tony, Doug and Machiavelli eventually make their way to the cave where the gunpowder is stored. Doug and Tony fight, which results in Tony regaining his identity after being knocked out by Doug. The Time Tunnel transfers Machiavelli back to his own time (January 3, 1519) and Tony and Doug to a new adventure.

Doug and Tony–wearing their usual attire despite having left the previous era in soldiers' uniforms–arrive somewhere in Mongolia or Eastern China and are captured by Mongols and taken to the tent of Batu Khan (Arthur Batanides). Batu–a grandson of Genghis Khan–feels he is the rightful heir of Genghis, but he has to overcome Kublai Khan. Doug is thought to be dead, so Tony is tortured on the rack for information on the weaknesses of the nearby enemy fortress. Batu and most of his guards leave once Tony passes out. Doug wakes up and carries Tony away from the camp, where they are found by Marco Polo (John Saxon). Tony and Doug seek safety in the fortress, where Tony falls in love with Princess Sarit (Vitina Marcus), the only daughter of Kublai Khan. Batu comes up with a plan to kidnap Sarit and marry her, thereby uniting the various Mongol tribes behind him in his quest.

Batu's men succeed in kidnapping Sarit, but she is freed by Doug and Tony. Batu's forces then launch a massive assault on the fortress. Doug and Tony are able to make artillery shells by mixing gunpowder and potassium nitrate in empty water jugs. General Kirk is able to send back igniters to make the bombs successful. The tide is turned in the battle, and Tony and Doug are relocated.

Merlin the magician appears in Time Tunnel HQ and freezes the personnel. He then brings Tony and Doug out of their "time limbo" (between destinations) back to the Time Tunnel control room in suspended animation so that he can instruct them to do what he asks, though they may die in the effort. He then sends them to Cornwall in the year 544. There, they fight off a band of Vikings and encounter a young man named Arthur Pendragon whose father has been killed by the Viking raiders. Merlin appears and orders Tony and Doug to protect Arthur at all costs. A band of Vikings then attack and Doug is felled by a sword while Tony and Arthur are captured. Merlin prevents the Time Tunnel personnel from moving Tony and Doug from 544 to the point of injuring Ray with an electric shock while never explaining why Doug and Tony apart from any others are needed. When Doug awakes, he is in the castle of King Leodegrance of Cameliard and is being cared for by the king's daughter, Guinevere (Lisa Jak). Merlin heals Doug and has Guinevere fetch the doctor, new clothes. Tony escapes from his bonds and frees Arthur, but they are later recaptured. Doug goes to look for weaknesses in the Viking-held castle, and he and Guinevere, who followed Doug, are captured as well. Guinevere is imprisoned in a room by the Viking chieftain Wogan (Vincent Beck). Arthur, Doug and Tony are imprisoned in a cell. Merlin frees them from their bonds, but tells them that they must free themselves from the locked room, since there is a limit to how much magic he can perform at a time. Doug and Tony blow the door of the cell off by improvising a pressure cooker from water, a pot and two thumbscrews. Doug gathers Leodegrance's troops and brings them back to fight, but Merlin says that the Vikings will not be frightened by these "gentlemen knights", so he changes their clothing to that of Vikings, which is the last way Merlin can help them in this venture. The knights storm the castle and drive the Vikings out while Tony kills Wogan in a sword fight. Arthur declares he will make Doug and Tony his first knights, but they are transferred by the Tunnel.

An alien time traveler from the future called OTT (acronym for "Official Time Traveler") (played by Del Monroe) appears in the Time Tunnel control room and abducts Dr. Ann MacGregor. Ray discovers a metal punched card presumably dropped by OTT that has a set of space-time coordinates. Kirk directs Ray to transfer Doug and Tony to those coordinates, which place them on a planet in the system of the star Canopus in the year 8433 A.D. They are in a futuristic complex run by a curator, played by Michael Ansara, who has begun to compile all the data of the history of the Earth by extracting the memories of all its historical figures, rendering them walking "vegetables". As the first human time travelers, Doug and Tony are fitting subjects for the project. Ann's abduction was the "bait" to have them relocated there by the Time Tunnel. Shortly after their arrival they are reunited with Ann, and since the tunnel's fix on them is strong, Ray attempts to retrieve them. This is forestalled by OTT once again materializing in the tunnel control room to extract the time-spatial conversion unit. Doug, Tony, and Ann witness OTT's return to the alien complex with the unit. They now face the danger of being rendered vegetables like the three historical figures seen there—Cicero, Erasmus and Hitler, but they discover the aliens' significant vulnerability: like plants they derive sustenance from the light of their "sun" Canopus, becoming dormant at night. They fool the curator into thinking that they had eaten the drugged food pills that would have rendered them sedated for mind extraction. When the curator and the guards go dormant at night, Doug, Tony and Ann remain awake to retrieve the time-space converter and escape. They outwit and kill OTT, who by a power pack remains awake to patrol the alien complex; Ann sends herself back to the Time Tunnel control room with the converter by way of the alien time machine, and Doug and Tony are transferred away in the nick of time. This episode also makes use of Bernard Herrmann's music from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Tony and Doug arrive in the middle of the Battle of Khartoum between British and Arab forces in the Sudan. This chapter is loosely based on the campaign of General Gordon. In their efforts to hide from the battling armies, they encounter two aliens who take them prisoner. The alien leader (from Aristos) then contacts the Time Tunnel control center and tells them not to interfere.

Rather than kill them, the aliens are ordered by their leader to bring Tony and Doug back to their base. After explaining their plan to conquer Earth by destroying the city of London, the aliens order Dr. Newman to be taken out in the desert and killed with a dehydration ray while Dr. Phillips will be put in a machine to extract all of his knowledge. But the alien ordered to kill Dr. Newman leaves when they are encountered by two British soldiers. Dr. Newman is thought to be an Arab spy, so he leads them to the alien base where one of the soldiers is killed. The Time Tunnel is also able to move Dr. Phillips out of the alien machine to where Dr. Newman is. In response, the aliens send a bomb to the Time Tunnel control room that will explode in sixty minutes unless all personnel are evacuated to the upper levels of the complex.

Unable to attack the aliens effectively with the resources at hand, Tony, Doug, and the British soldier fetch grenades and gunpowder from Khartoum. They attack the alien base, but have insufficient resources left to destroy it. However, just before the bomb explodes in the Time Tunnel control room, the Time Tunnel transfers the bomb to the alien base, destroying it a few minutes later.