Paris, May 1919

"We gave the old men victory and they threw it away. We offered them a new world and they made the old one over again. Still, it might have been worse!"

- Ned Lawrence

"Paris, May 1919" is the twenty-fourth episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the eighteenth episode in season two. The episode originally aired on ABC on July 24, 1993. It was the last episode to air in its original form in the United States, leaving four episodes produced for ABC ("Florence, May 1908," "Prague, August 1917," "Palestine, October 1917," and "Transylvania, January 1918") unaired on that network and released only to other territories. For home video, it was paired up with the bookend segments from Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father and the newly-filmed "Princeton, June 1919" to become Winds of Change.

This is one of only four hour-long episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (along with "Istanbul, September 1918," "Prague, August 1917," and "Palestine, October 1917") to be made without bookend segments featuring George Hall as Old Indy.

Plot summary
Henry Jones has just gotten a job as a translator with the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, where he once again reunites with T.E. Lawrence amid Lawrence's quest for Arabian independence and helps a young waiter gain an audience to advocate for the Vietnamese people, but Indy soon witnesses how the ideals for the future embodied in the League of Nations conflict with the secret agreements between colonial powers determined to maintain control over the world.

Cast and characters

 * Sean Patrick Flanery as Indiana Jones
 * Cyril Cusack as Georges Clemenceau
 * Anna Massey as Gertrude Bell
 * Michael Maloney as Arnold Toynbee
 * Douglas Henshall as T.E. Lawrence
 * Alec Mapa as Nguyen
 * Michael Kitchen as Lloyd George
 * Josef Sommer as Woodrow Wilson
 * Jeroen Krabbé as Brockdorff
 * Anthony Zaki as King Feisal
 * Denis O'Hare as Keating
 * Kai Wiesinger as Jurgen
 * Sorgato Avelino as Italian Diplomat
 * Bohumil Vávra as Wilson's Advisor
 * Kindl Jiri as British Diplomat
 * Otamar Vapenik as Orlando
 * Václav Vodák as Bertin
 * Jirí Valenta as Dr. Bell
 * Tsukahara as Japanese Premier
 * Ladislav Stanek as Colonel House
 * Ota Filip as Muller
 * S.T. Tam as Vietnamese Delegate
 * Jesus Christ

Locations

 * France
 * Paris
 * Verdun
 * Versailles
 * Palace of Versailles
 * Austria
 * China
 * Cyprus
 * French Indochina
 * Germany
 * Italy
 * Japan
 * Kuwait
 * Kuwait City
 * Mexico
 * Ottoman Empire
 * Hejaz
 * Mecca
 * Iraq
 * Baghdad
 * Basra
 * Kut al Amara
 * Mosul
 * Samarra
 * Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem
 * Jerusalem
 * Syria
 * Aleppo
 * Alexandretta
 * Damascus
 * Turkey
 * Ankara
 * Batum
 * Erzurum
 * Van
 * Vilayet of Beirut
 * Acre
 * Beirut
 * Haifa
 * Tripoli
 * Persia
 * Urmia
 * Poland
 * United Kingdom
 * United States of America

Production

 * Produced by: Rick McCallum
 * Created by: George Lucas
 * Music by: Joel McNeely
 * Written by: Jonathan Hales
 * Directed by: David Hare

The preproduction draft script for this episode by Jonathan Hales is dated February 8, 1993.

Principal photography for this episode took place during the production block from February 22, 1993 to April 21, 1993, with location filming in Kroměříž and Prague, Czech Republic, and soundstage shooting at Barrandov Studios in Prague. None of the episode was actually filmed in Paris.

Continuity

 * This is the only hour-long episode which occurs entirely in 1919.
 * Despite the episode's title, however, almost none of the historical events depicted took place in May 1919:
 * Feisal gave his formal statement to the Council of Ten, translated by Lawrence, on February 6.
 * Nguyễn Ái Quốc arrived in Paris on June 7 and first submitted "The Demands of the Vietnamese People" (Revendications du Peuple Annamite) to delegations at the Paris Peace Conference shortly thereafter, with the American delegation acknowledging the petition on June 19.
 * Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, by which time T.E. Lawrence had arrived in Cairo, Egypt.
 * Anthony Zaki is mistakenly credited as "King Feisal," though Feisal was not proclaimed King of the Arab Kingdom of Syria until 1920. He is more accurately referred to as "Prince Feisal" in the episode itself, while contemporaneous sources also referred to him as "Emir Feisal."
 * A number of people who've previously encountered Indy attended the Paris Peace Conference but do not appear in this episode, including Winston Churchill and Richard Meinertzhagen.
 * Henry Jones is only referred to by that name and not as Indy, Indiana, or any of the aliases he used such as Henri Defense when he was in the Belgian Army.
 * Indy notes that it's been nearly two years since he's seen Lawrence, referencing their last encounter in "Palestine, October 1917."
 * At some point before the events of this episode, Indy visited Vietnam and learned enough Vietnamese that he is able to briefly converse with Nguyen in that language.
 * Indy compares Keating's statement about diplomats outlasting presidents to what a peasant he met in Mexico told him about the people suffering regardless of the men in power.
 * Indy quotes the same passage from one of Ned's letters to him that he once quoted to Remy Baudouin as his reason for joining the fight in the Great War.
 * The opera attended by Indy, Gertrude Bell, and T.E. Lawrence is Thaïs by Jules Massenet, first performed in 1894. They are shown watching it during the symphonic intermezzo Méditation.
 * When Jurgen reveals that he fought at the Battle of Verdun, Indy shares that he did the same.

Television
"Paris, May 1919" was first broadcast on July 24, 1993, as the last episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to air on ABC. The following week, a rerun of the TV movie My Brother's Wife aired in its timeslot.

Home video
This episode was edited into Winds of Change in 1996, which was not released on VHS but came out on DVD in 2008 (as part of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Three, The Years of Change).

Reception
Film and television scholar Mimi White wrote at length about this episode in her analysis of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles as an example of how Indy's "relation to the past he inhabits is influenced by modes of historical understanding from the present...as well as by the fictional adult he will become."