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| "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." |
I really wanted to enjoy The Paladin of the Lost Hour by Harlan Ellison a lot more than I did. Truly. It opens with a genuinely intriguing premise and for a moment I thought this could turn into an interesting time-travel narrative. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Instead, it becomes a meandering and silly mess that never quite finds its way back.
Billy Kinetta is visiting the grave of an army buddy when he spots, from a distance, a group of hooligans beating up an old man. Naturally, he rushes in and rescues him, Ellison-style, which means things get pretty violent pretty fast. Billy later discovers that this old man is a Paladin, the appointed guardian of a magical pocket watch that supposedly contains a “lost hour” of time.
Sounds cool on paper, right?
This is where the time-travel/science-fiction stuff starts getting muddy. The logic behind the “lost hour” hinges on Pope Gregory XIII abolishing the Julian calendar in 1582, causing one hour to somehow become detached from time and stored inside this watch. This watch must never be used or else the entire universe collapses. I think? Honestly, it’s all presented in this grand, mystical way that suggests it should feel profound, but the more you think about it, the less any of it makes sense. The mechanics are hand-wavey to the point of dissolving entirely and the mythology Ellison tries to build around falls flat. The story wants to be cosmic and metaphysical but the actual science-fiction scaffolding is so flimsy that the whole thing wobbles.
The story actually works better (not to mention more coherently) when it digs into Billy’s trauma, survivor’s guilt, and the emotional fallout of Vietnam. Those moments are heartfelt, grounded, and genuinely affecting in ways the magical pocket-watch lore never manages to be. If Ellison had ditched the pseudo-science and leaned fully into the emotional core, I think the story might have been far stronger.
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