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Land of the Lost
"Hurricane"
TV episode
Written by David Gerrold and Larry Niven
Directed by Bob Lally
Original airdate: December
21, 1974 |
Will inadvertently opens a time
portal, admitting a hypersonic glider from Earth’s future.
Read the complete story summary by Nels Olsen
Notes from the
Marshall Timeline
I placed "Hurricane" before
"Elsewhen" simply due to my
own leaning towards the artistic estheticism of having
"Elsewhen" be the first season finale, seeing as how I've
invalidated "Circle" as same.
Didja Notice?
There are several references to past
episodes. Will mentions Holly's lost perfume from
"The Paku Who
Came to Dinner"; Holly mentions the devastating shock Rick
received from two crystals in "The Search"; Holly and Will
mention the events of "Skylons"; Will remarks on the
circular river of "Downstream".
At 4:16 on the DVD, a hole in the High
Bluff set piece can be seen as Will climbs up. Lumber
supports of the framework of the set piece are visible. |
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Before Will opens the pylon he and Holly find on the
mountaintop, Holly warns him to be careful, saying, "Remember
what happened last time." What exactly is she referring to? The
last time they dealt with a pylon was in
"Stone Soup", where the
Pakuni had removed the crystals from the matrix table of a
weather pylon. But, it seems a specious arguement for her to be
talking about that instance because it was the Pakuni who were
at fault, having removed all the crystals from the matrix table
of the pylon; the Marshalls replaced them, fixing the weather
issues. She might be referring to the events of
"The Possession", where first
Cha-Ka, then Holly becomes possessed by the spirit of a
malevolent (or, at least, morally ambiguous) Altrusian who
describes himself as the "watcher of the pylons".
After Jackson bails out of his glider alone, why are there seem
to be two parachutes on the ground when Will and Holly find him?
Will and Holly find one parachuts lying open on the ground,
apparently attached to a duffel bag. I guess Jackson dumped a
bag of survival gear or something as well?
At 8:15 on the DVD, the actors aren't
aligned well with the miniature background on the blue
screen...Will and Holly are standing on the top of a fern
instead of the ground!
Jackson tells the Marshalls he's from
Fort
Worth, Texas.
The episode opened with Will and Holly heading to
the carrot patch before they got sidelined by their trek up the
mountain. When they finally arrive back at the cave, before
noticing Jackson in tow behind them, their father asks them
somewhat acerbically, "Did you bring anything home that's
edible?" This may be a reference to the events of
"Stone Soup", where the kids'
laziness and fighting about the gathering food for their cave
home caused their father to play a bit of a prank on them in his
exasperation.
Jackson remarks that
he was flying his hypersonic glider between Phoenix Port and
Space Station 5 when the gateway intercepted his transit and
brought him to the Land of the Lost.
After the Marshalls tell Jackson about
Enik having fallen into the Land through a time doorway, Jackson
asks if he got home again and Rick responds, "We never found
out." In "The Stranger", the
Marshalls met Enik and learned his story and of his attempts to
return to his own time. They don't see him again until
"Circle", where they learn he has been
unable to pass through the time doorway, seemingly due to the
paradoxical presence of the Marshalls themselves in the Land.
The Marshalls seemingly return home near the end of that
episode, ending the time loop that was preventing Enik from
passing through. But in our current episode, Rick is probably
referring to
"The Stranger", as
"Circle" was technically the
season-ending episode in the original air sequence; I changed
that episode's place in the chronology because
the Marshalls are there depicted as discovering, for the first
time, the Sleestak in their dormant season, hence it seemed only
logical that it should take place sometime before
"Follow That Dinosaur"
in which the Marshalls are already aware of the Sleestaks'
hibernation status and actually witness the
end
of their dormancy when the lava rises in the Devil's Cauldron. I
also was forced to speculate in the study of
"Circle" that something
must then happen to undue/prevent the events of
"Circle" since the Marshalls continue
to exist in the Land of the Lost after seemingly going home in
that episode and they never even mention those events in any
subsequent episode this season or the next two seasons.
After hearing Jackson's story of his
journey, Rick comments he must be from a different time than he
and his family because where they came from they didn't have any
space shuttles yet. It is interesting that Rick refers "space
shuttles" and that, in their time, they didn't have them "yet."
He must have been aware that a space shuttle was being designed
by NASA for future use. In fact, NASA's Space Shuttle Task Group
was formed years earlier in 1968 and construction of the
prototype test vehicle, called Enterprise, was begun in
June 1974, so Rick could well have been aware of it through
national news reports before the family's ill-fated expedition.
As Jackson and the Marshalls tentatively plan to
escape the Land through the gateway in the sky he came through,
Jackson remarks, "You wouldn't mind getting back about 20 years
after you started now, would you?" This indicates that Jackson
came from around 1994.
At 14:49 on the DVD, you can see in the
background the dividing line between two panels of the painted
set.
When Jackson first steps into the pylon, he
exclaims, "It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!"
Essentially this same statement has been made innumerable times
on the TV series Doctor Who in regards to the TARDIS,
the Doctor's time-space travelling ship. It's quite likely that
Gerrold wrote the line of dialog as a nod to the other series.
If the gateway is gone as Rick says, destroying itself when it
swallowed the pylon, why do we see still see it receding into
the distance as the last shot of the episode? This is one reason
I placed The Dinosaur
Adventure after this episode, speculating that Dr.
Potts arrived through that same gateway shortly after this
episode.
Unanswered Questions
Both the pylon and one of the skylons get sucked
into the time doorway. Does this mean there's a pylon and a
skylon now on Earth?
Notes from the audio commentary by David
Gerrold and Larry Niven
Gerrold notes that "Hurricane" was inspired by
the story "The Wind Between the Worlds" by Lester Del Rey.
Gerrold wrote Beauregard Jackson as a character
to possibly be portrayed by himself as the actor. Jackson's colorful dialog
was written by Gerrold to be fun for himself to deliver. (It would have
been interesting to see Gerrold in the role. But, as it is, Ron Masak does a great job with it.)
Gerrold mentions that in early drafts of the
series treatment, he wrote Will as a younger version of himself.
The original draft of the script of this episode
had the punchline that not only was Jackson from the future but
also from an alternate Earth. It was to be revealed his country
was the United States of Texas (or something along those lines).