David Lee Smith credited as playing...
John
- John Oldman: Believe in what He tried to teach without the rigmarole. Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it's the mistakes they bring to the lessons.
- Art: What you're saying, it offends common sense.
- John Oldman: So does Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, that's the way nature works.
- Edith: My God, what is this? It looks like a genuine Van Gogh, but I've never seen it before...
- Dan: Is that an original, John?
- John Oldman: No, it's just a gift someone gave me.
- Edith: Still, it's a superb copy. Contemporaneous I think, may I take a closer look?
- John Oldman: Please, yeah.
- Edith: Yes, it's the same stretcher Van Gogh used.
- Dan: Hey, there's writing on the back. It's in French.
- Edith: To my friend Jacques Bon. Wonder who that was?
- John Oldman: Someone he knew, I guess.
- [John walks back in the room]
- Harry: Well, you're finally fulfilling one prophecy about the millennium, John.
- John Oldman: What's that?
- Harry: Here you are again.
- Dr. Will Gruber: If I shot you John, you're immortal? Would you survive this?
- John Oldman: I never said I was immortal, just old. I might die. And then you could wonder the rest of your incarcerated life what you shot...
- John Oldman: And that's what I taught, but a talking snake made a lady eat an apple, so we're screwed.
- John Oldman: Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it's the mistake they bring to the lessons.
- Harry: [insistent] *You* are creating the mystery here obviously y'have something you'd like to say. Say it.
- John Oldman: [Hesitant] Maybe... I...
- Harry: [sing-song] Ten, nine, eight, seven, si...
- Sandy: [Chiding] Harry, stop.
- John Oldman: There is something I'm tempted to tell you I think, I've never done this before, I wonder how it will pan out. I wonder if I could ask you a silly question?
- Art: [Scoffing] John, we're teachers, we answer silly questions all the time
- Linda Murphy: [Teasing] Hey!
- John Oldman: What if a man from the upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
- Edith: [Upset by one of John's claims] Were you?
- John Oldman: [Gentle] If I said no, could you ever be sure?
- Dr. Will Gruber: I still don't believe you, you know. You need help.
- John Oldman: Everybody needs help.
- Dr. Will Gruber: Yes, well. Some more than others.
- John Oldman: Bathing was the style until the Middle Ages, and the church told us it was sinful to wash away God's dirt. So people were sewn into their underwear in October, and they popped out in April.
- Dr. Will Gruber: When did you begin to believe you were Jesus?
- John Oldman: When did you begin to believe you were a psychiatrist?
- Dr. Will Gruber: Since I graduated from Harvard Medical School and finished my residency, I've had that feeling. Why I sometimes dream about it.
- John Oldman: Have you acted upon this belief?
- Dan: Wouldn't you have some relic, an artifact, to remind you of your earlier life? Like this maybe.
- [holding up bone tool]
- John Oldman: Thrift shop. Really.
- John Oldman: [lecturing now] If you lived a hundred, a thousand years, would you still have this?
- [holds up ballpoint pen]
- John Oldman: What would cause you to keep it? As a memento to your beginnings, even if you didn't have a concept of beginnings? It would be gone. Lost. No. I don't have artifacts. Keep that.
- [tosses the ballpoint pen to Harry]
- Dan: Interesting. You could have lied about that.
- John Oldman: [totally serious] Don't talk about me while I'm gone.
- John Oldman: I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This was before they were separated from the continent by the rising seas as the glacier was melting.
- Harry: That happened?
- Dan: Yes, the end of the Plasticine Period. So far what he says fits.
- Art: [incredulous] Oh get... from any textbook...
- John Oldman: And that's where I found it. How can I have knowledgeable recall if I didn't have knowledge? It's all retrospective. All I can do is integrate my recollections with modern findings.