The Time Travel Alley

I mentioned in my meandering New Year's post that I've been thinking about Time.  So here's a little mental exercise.  Take five seconds to envision a scene where a time traveler comes to 20th century earth. 

Got it?

You probably set the scene in a dingy alley lined by brick buildings.  A wino/street person may have been involved.  The police turn up.  Why?  Well now.  It starts right here:

This is from a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits called The Soldier.  Written by the brilliant if mercurial Harlan Ellison it has a plot that involves two combatants arriving from a dystopian future.  And the arrival point is this dingy alley.  An encounter with the police ensues... 

Fast forward to 1967.  No doubt these guys are familiar.  They have just stepped through a time portal in the classic Original Series episode "City on the Edge of Forever".   The portal opens into a dingy alley.  And, since they can't go walking around 1930's New York City dressed like that, they've just stolen some clothes.

A beat cop shows up but instead of more vigorous measures Spock just gives him the ol' Vulcan neck pinch.  Of course McCoy had turned up in the same alley earlier and a homeless/hobo type person was accidentally vaporized by his phaser.

If you think these two scenarios look and sound quite similar, well you are correct.  The unifying link is that Harlan Ellison also wrote the much beloved "City on the Edge of Forever" episode.  And, as is only appropriate in a time travel scenario, let's jump again....to 1984 and the original "Terminator".  Here Kyle Reese, the human half of the pair coming from a dystopian far future, materializes.  In a dingy alley.

I can't actually claim to have "met" Harlan Ellison.  That would suggest that our brief encounter was enough to do more than confirm the conventional wisdom that he was a brilliant, talented....jerk.  But even a person of serene temperament might look at the Terminator plot and conclude that a teeny bit of idea swiping was involved.  Harlan sure felt that way.  He threatened to sue.  (To be fair, he was pretty notorious for either suing or threatening to sue people.  It was usually not about money...just ego.).  The particulars of the case are still debated among sci fi fans but evidently there was enough merit to his claims that a modest cash payment and a special credit at the end of the Terminator film were forthcoming.

Ugh.  I'd rather ignore any of the more recent attempts to reboot the Terminator franchise.  But the video above has a side by side comparison of Terminator and Terminator Genisys.   Of course the latter was a lame effort to reprise/reboot the original material but the same alley as a time portal theme is again front and center.

At first I thought the look of these Time Travel Alleys was so similar that they must be the same location.  But no.  The Outer Limits ep was filmed at Paramount Studios, the Star Trek episode on the now defunct Desilu lot.  Terminator went with an outdoor shoot, here's the alley in downtown Los Angeles.

I won't bother trying to track down the later versions of this scene.  After all, we've seen it time and time again.