It gets a ten because James Darren is one of my all time favorites. I will admit that my favorite episodes happened in the first part of the series. Rendezvous with Yesterday has to rank as one of the ten best pilot episodes better. It would be followed up with the series' best episode, The Day the Sky Fell In. James Darren had the right amount of innocence to play Tony Newman, the younger, impulsive, scientist. Robert Colbert was good as his older mentor. (I'll admit in 1966, I didn't appreciate Robert Colbert. I thought he was bland. In retrospect, he's considerably better than I remembered. I do have to admit that the main attraction for me is still James Darren). I liked that there were people back home (Lee Merriwether, Whit Bissel, John Zaremba and for a time Sam Groom) who were trying to get them back. You could identify with the people back home who were trying to get them back. Yes, there were a few too many alien episodes, and a few too many times when they retrieved someone from the past by accident but all and all it was a good effort that should have lasted longer in my humble opinion. Irwin Allen, despite his critics, certainly knew how to entertain. Today's producers could take a page from his book.
Review of The Time Tunnel
