The Twilight Zone (TV Series) Cradle of Darkness (2002) User Reviews

It's okay.

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 12 February 2022]

Andrea travels back in time to kill baby Adolf Hitler...thus saving the lives of many millions in the 1930s and 40s. However, when she arrives, she oddly cannot bring herself to simply kill the child immediately and without hesitation and suffers pangs of conscience....which doesn't make a lot of sense considering she went to all the trouble of time traveling in the first place!!

This is only an okay episode of the series. There are several things I wasn't impressed by. First, they needed to do their homework better. The guy playing Adolf's daddy looked absolutely nothing like the real guy (who looked almost like Curly Howard with a huge mustache) AND they kept calling him 'Alois Hitler'...which was NOT his name. He was Alois Schicklgruber and Hitler was his mother's last name...mistakes that wouldn't have been made if they'd just done a bit more research. Second, the old "Twilight Zone" TV show already covered similar material twice. In "Judgment Night" a man is on a ship he KNOWS is going to be sunk by a sub...and try as he might he cannot change this. Then, in the next season in "Back There" a man cannot stop the assassination of Lincoln.

Overall, not a bad episode but one that falls apart a bit if you know history or watched the old shows.

The Immutability of Time

[Hitchcoc · 8/10 · 7 July 2017]

As a sci fi fan forever, there is only one question to ask when a character travels into the past. What happens to the present? It would seem that events created by a Hitler or his ilk, if changed, would have devastating effects on the present which sent him or her. In other words, what happens to the people who created time travel? Would that science have developed? What other powers would reign supreme; the Russians or the Japanese could have held supremacy, or an Isolationist America. There are so many pitfalls with time travel in the past that it is about as hard to speculate on as any idea. Remember "The Sound of Thunder" from Ray Bradbury. A man steps on a butterfly and the whole world changes. Anyway, this offering shows how forces at work in the cosmos prevent mere mortals from playing God.

Only God has the right to take a life

[kapelusznik18 · 6/10 · 22 November 2014]

***SPOILERS*** Sent back in time in a futurist time machine to April 1889 in the little town of Branuau on the Austrian German border Andrea Collins, Katherine Heigi, is determined to prevent a future world holocaust from happening. That's by her preventing a new born baby Adolph Hitler from reaching adulthood. Getting a job as a maid in the Alois Hitler, James Remar, household Andrea's job was to look after baby Hitler and when on one's around and the time presents itself suffocate him in his crib and thus change the course of history.

As we and Andrea see this isn't an easy task in that baby Hitler seems to have luck as well as history on his side. It's Hitler's mother Klara, Nancy Slvak, who put a lucky charm by her new born son's crib, a key, that seems to have supernatural powers that prevents any harm from happening to him. Also Andrea's maternal instincts kicks in with Baby Hitler who just couldn't stop crying who takes a child-like affection towards her far more then to his mother Klara as well as nursemaid or nanny Kristina, Jillian Fargey, miking it very difficult for her to kill him. In that Andrea sees Hitler , as a newborn child, not being the monster that he eventually turned out to be.

****SPOILERS**** Determined to kill Hitler as well as sacrificing herself, to prevent any guilt feelings on her part, in doing it Andrea slips out of the Hitler household with baby Hitler and together jumps to his and her death off a bridge over the river Inn. As history was to prove that didn't prevent the horrors of WWII from happening even with Hitler no longer around. In fact what Andrea did was set those events into motion by playing right into, without her knowing it, the events that lead to the horrors that she so desperately tried to prevent. And as we all were soon to see it wasn't the Adolph Hitler born to both Alois & Klara Hitler who was to be the one responsible for those horrors but in fact a victim of them..

We are the cause of what we try to prevent.

[andrew_neis · 10/10 · 17 December 2006]

This episode deals with a group of time travels who attempt to go back in time and kill baby Hitler to prevent the homicide. Katherine Heigl goes back disguised as a servant and begins her plan to take baby Hitler's life, stealing the baby while it sleeps and drowning it with herself in the river. When another servant discovers the baby is missing and panics, she offers a homeless woman money for her child, which she takes and the servant returns with the unrelated baby, disguising him as the real one. Hitler's parents do not notice and raise the child...

A great episode showing one of the many theories and paradoxes of time travel! We end up being the cause of what we try to prevent...excellent idea!

A great episode

[metsnfins · 10/10 · 18 January 2024]

There are some good episodes in this incarnation of twilight zone. Most do not compare to the original. Except for this one

This is an amazing episode. If you can go back in time to kill Baby Hitler, would you? Should you? Would you actually be able to?

Heigl does amazing job. She is giving up her current life to go back to the past to create a better future. Sounds easy? Opportunity after Opportunity comes for her to commit the deed, but it's not as easy as it sounds.

Finally, she does the deed. But what did she actually do? Did she change the future? Make it better??

The ending was classic twilight zone. One of my favorite endings to ANY twilight zone episode from any era.

"He will drive mankind to hell on earth."

[classicsoncall · 8/10 · 24 February 2023]

A series like 'The Twilight Zone' was fertile ground for time travel stories, along with attempts to change the present by altering events in the past. The original Rod Serling series offered a couple, like the second season one titled 'Back There', and a first season episode called 'No Time Like the Past', which actually included archive footage of Adolph Hitler in a couple of instances. This story had a uniquely different twist on things, which was ironically demonstrated when housekeeper Kristina (Jillian Fargey) presented the baby to Alois Hitler (James Remar) and his dinner guests after she had convinced a destitute woman to sell her own newborn child. She stated "I had to change the baby", which was truer than any one else could have imagined. This show dramatically depicted how history can't be bargained with, and that attempting to change it is a fool's errand at the very least. What wasn't quite credible in this story though, was why Alois Hitler and his wife Klara (Nancy Sivak) wouldn't have recognized that the baby shown to them wasn't their real child. If I could tell that the babies didn't look like each other, they should have been able to as well.