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"Visitors from Beyond the Stars"
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TTT episode
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1.18/18th of 30 aired
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First aired
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Written by
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Bob Duncan, Wanda Duncan
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Directed by
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Summary[]
Tony Newman and Doug Phillips are flung out of the time vortex onto the floor of a futuristic room filled with technology that the scientists guess is around 300 years ahead of their own time. Their assumption that they have arrived in the future proves to be wrong when they are confronted by two alien beings. The time travelers are in fact aboard an alien spaceship that is approaching Earth in the year 1885.
The aliens motion for Newman and Phillips to enter an alcove where their languages are translated so they could understand each other. The aliens inform Newman and Phillips of their intent to raid Earth, taking as much food as possible and leaving behind a dead planet if they have to.
Jan Merlin portrays Cantauri, a less than friendly visitor to our planet.
Everyone then transports to Earth (in Mullins, Arizona) to a farm where the farmer there is instructed to bring all of his food and livestock to the aliens. Newman is then instructed to ride to the next town and have everyone there bring food to the farm, but due to there being trouble with numerous Apaches, the local sheriff and his deputies can not spare any men to help Newman (plus the sheriff doesn’t believe him anyway). The aliens then set several of the town buildings ablaze, which Newman gets blamed for and locked up.
Meanwhile Phillips is transformed so he will obey the aliens, and the team at Project Tic-Toc pour over U. F. O. sighting reports and try to make sense of the layout of Mullins, since there is scant information on the area, with no reports of aliens or U. F. O.s from that time period in order to try to help Newman and Phillips.
Background information/trivia[]
- Each episode of The Time Tunnel ends with a sneak peek trailer of the following week’s story, showing a sometimes truncated version of the opening scenes. For instance, at the end of the previous episode, "Kill Two by Two," the trailer showed Newman and Phillips landing on the spaceship, being led to the translation chamber, then after being told of the aliens’ diabolical plans and Phillips is briefly frozen when one of the aliens shoots him, one of the aliens says that Earth will be left as “a dead planet.”
- Early in the episode, one of the aliens warns Newman and Phillips that ”resistance is impossible,” words familiar to contemporary viewers of Doctor Who where numerous alien 'baddies' use variations of the phrase "resistance is useless" - something that was later swiped by the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation when they created the Borg (initially created as a nod to Doctor Who's Cybermen in the episode "Q Who?") and gave them the trademark catchphrase "resistance is futile."
Cast[]
- James Darren as Dr. Tony Newman
- Robert Colbert as Dr. Doug Phillips
- Lee Meriwether as Dr. Ann MacGregor
- John Zaremba as Dr. Raymond Swain
- Whit Bissell as Lt. General Heywood Kirk
- Fred Beir as Tuareg
- Tris Coffin as Crawford
- Ross Elliott as Sheriff
- Byron Foulger as Williams
- Gary Haynes as Deputy
- John Hoyt as The Alien Leader
- Jan Merlin as Centauri
Links[]
The episode can be seen at hulu.com on The Time Tunnel channel