Profile in Silver
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Profile in Silver is an episode of The Twilight Zone, part of the mid-1980's revival of the television show. It first aired on March 7, 1986, in a program that also included the segment, "Button, Button".
[edit] Plot
Lane Smith plays Dr. Joseph Fitzgerald, a Harvard University professor of history from the year 2172. He has travelled back in time and assumed the identity of an instructor at Harvard in 1963. When he is visited by a colleague from his own time, we learn that his mission is to observe the assassination of John F. Kennedy, from whom he is (perhaps collaterally) descended.
Fitzgerald is understandably nervous about watching his own ancestor be murdered, especially since he never got to know the man himself. His colleague, Kate, reassures him that every field historian has moments of doubt such as this, then departs for the future while saying something that Fitzgerald doesn't quite catch. He decides to get it over with and journeys to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. However, when he sees Oswald raise a gun to kill JFK, Fitzgerald is unable to stand by and watch the killing, and so he intervenes to save the president's life.
A grateful President Kennedy (played by Andrew Robinson) invites Fitzgerald to stay at the White House for the night. As Kennedy and his entourage return home, the president is notified that Russian troops have captured West Berlin. Fitzgerald is astonished, and claims that Khruschev would never do such a thing. Kennedy sadly points out that Khruschev was assassinated earlier that day.
In his room that night, Fitzgerald frantically consults his time travel wrist computer, which informs him that his alteration of history has caused massive rips in the fabric of time. The assassination of Khruschev was not enough to "fix" the damage to the time stream; the computer informs Fitzgerald that all possible outcomes to this timeline will result in total war between the superpowers and mutual annihilation. There is only way to repair the timeline, the computer intones: "The Kennedy presidency must end, as history originally recorded it."
Meanwhile, the president and his chief Secret Service bodyguard, Ray (Louis Giambalvo), have discovered that Fitzgerald's video camera is not the standard model it appears to be. Metallurgists can't open it up or determine what it may be. They summon Fitzgerald, who tells them that it is a holographic camera from the future, as he himself is. They are skeptical but are convinced of the truth when the professor demonstrates the camera's use. President Kennedy asks whether Fitzgerald was sent back in time to observe Kennedy's reaction to the Berlin crisis, but the professor replies that he didn't know about that. Kennedy is puzzled at this, until he looks again at Fitzgerald's half dollar coin - dated 1964, with Kennedy's profile on it - which the Secret Service had recovered after Fitzgerald dropped it on Air Force One, and he quickly deduces the truth: that Fitzgerald came to Dallas to witness an assassination, Kennedy's own (it is illegal to depict a living president on money).
Kennedy volunteers to do whatever is necessary to repair history. Fitzgerald, overwhelmed by his ancestor's heroism, removes his time travel ring and places it on Kennedy's hand, at which point Kennedy vanishes, evidently having returned to Dallas the previous day to be assassinated. But when Dallas and the motorcade are revisited, it is Fitzgerald who appears in the car and is shot and killed.
At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, the dead body of "President Kennedy" (actually Fitzgerald) is being attended to by a doctor, who is actually Fitzgerald's colleague from the future. Ray, the Secret Service agent, recognizes her wrist computer because it is identical to Fitzgerald's. She tells him that she knew what Fitzgerald's fate would be, saying, "Some of us do our research in the even farther future" and goes on to say, "The last time I saw him I couldn't tell him what I knew. All I could do was repeat a phrase" - the remark that Fitzgerald didn't quite catch - "in Chinese that my husband taught me." Holding Fitzgerald's hand tenderly, she repeats the phrase in Chinese and then says it in English: "Goodbye, old friend... Goodbye." Ray asks her if what they have seen will change history, and she replies that it won't - because it didn't. "Even the act of traveling in time is part of history," she says.
At Harvard University in 2172, a man speaks to a classroom full of students, delivering a rousing speech in which he implicitly lauds Fitzgerald's sacrifice and the sacrifices of other honorable men like him. As the camera turns, we see that the speaker, dressed in clothing appropriate to the period, is John F. Kennedy.
