When I’m buying my Halloween cereals (because, yes, this is a thing I do) there’s one ingredient I treasure above all the others. Not iron, I get plenty of that from grinding my fillings in my sleep. Not calcium, because I can kill a gallon of milk every three days, easy. It’s none of the usual suspects: I am always checking for riboflavin. As you know, riboflavin is necessary for healthy time travel.
I owe this essential knowledge to Nickelodeon, to the Adventures of Pete & Pete, to the episode called The Time Tunnel, which I am still certain must be the only recorded instance of a television show commemorating Daylight Savings Time with a holiday special. In it, the Petes become convinced that the end of DST serves no functional purpose, but is in fact actual time travel. Once a year, we tumble backwards through The Time Tunnel, traveling back in time one hour, and we get to try it again.
The concept of a do-over has always fascinated me. I was always calling for them on the playground, when my own milk-grown bone structure flailed uselessly into the air after turf-bouncing kickball pitches. I thought golf might be the sport for me, until I learned that Mulligans weren’t actually officially part of the rules. It also felt cruel that every time my too-tall shoulders growth-spurted up and away from the ball as I took a swing, it cost me a stroke. Video games got it, though. They called it New Game+, and when they needed to extend the replay value of a lengthy adventure, they’d toss it in once you beat the game. This little trick of the code allowed you to start from the story’s beginning with all your characters beefed-up stats, abilities, and equipment, steamrolling the formidable challenges that stymied you the first time, and letting you see the other plotlines and endings the game could offer.
One hour doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but it is. In the episode, Big Pete makes an ill-advised series of passes on his long-time friend, Ellen Hickle. Ellen Hickle, who has one of those undeniable childhood names that just sticks with you, like a flower pressed in your favorite summer camp book. Ellen is the Petes’ most consistent and persistent friend. She fixates on advanced metallurgy in an episode about shop class. She teaches Big Pete the art of Greco-Roman wrestling. She leads a schoolwide campaign against algebra that dared to ask the question “Y?” So when Big Pete borrows Endless Mike’s hookup-modded car and dares to press the GO button to lower their seatbacks at the drive-in theater, it doesn’t go well. Ellen Hickle is every girl I had a crush on growing up, because the show treated her like a protagonist. And in this episode, where she’s reduced to the object of affection, she rebels against it full-throatedly, and leaves.
You can do a lot wrong in an hour. No matter how hard you try, you can lose any football game you please in an hour’s time. You can sleep too long, miss a call, lose a job. You can stay with the wrong person for one hour too long, losing one hour that you could be spending with the right one. You can say too much in seconds, stretch that to an hour and you have exponential potential for destruction. You can say too little. That seems to be my favorite regret. An hour later, I’m in the stairwell, and I’m gripped by that French spirit of “What I should have said was…” I am a walking Mulligan. Do-over incarnate. New Game+ personified.
Big Pete makes his blunder at the stroke of midnight, meaning that (in the fictional everytown of Wellsville, anyway) the clocks roll back, and he gets a second chance. He catches her on a darkened sidewalk, breathless, Endless Mike’s suave muscle car idling in the drive-in, and he tells her “I’m sorry, I kind of got lost in the future.” That’s one of the biggest perils of being self-aware. We know the future’s coming. We’ve evolved beyond thoughts of “hey, that is a good food over there, I will eat it now” and into the space of “how can I make sure I have all of that good food that I could want for the foreseeable future.”
What I like about the Petes’ treatment of Daylight Savings Time is the optimism, not for the easy nostalgia of the past, not for the big plan of the future, but for the present. Big Pete gets to fix his mistake and rebuild his friendship with the unmistakably individual Ellen Hickle, because it’s only 11:30, and her curfew is still a miraculous thirty minutes away. Little Pete goes into a breakfast cereal sugar-fugue and rides his bike across the line between the Central and Eastern time zones, stealing an extra hour on top of the usual time travel. Because the past and the future are overrated. We should just be hungry for a little more riboflavin, and for a little more now.
