![]() The year’s other new time-travel shows may be going for more earnestness ( Frequency), more laughs ( Making History) and more ABC-style soapiness ( Time After Time), so approach Timeless as throwback, somewhat in the vein of a less nuanced Quantum Leap, and it can be enjoyed. And I know that certain twists from the first two episodes are not only obvious - A potentially conspiracy involving a shadow entity is afoot? Get outta town! - but they’re the exact same twists that are playing out in all of our current wave of time-travel shows, but at least one twist I was confident on has already been dodged in the early episodes, which is promising. The second episode, featuring the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, only raises the Wikipedia-at-the-expense-of-momentum stakes and result in something that’s too Disney Hall of Presidents to be taken seriously, but can still work as silly fun.Īnd I know that it will eventually become annoying if Barrett’s character doesn’t become useful for more than witty reflections on how racist history was and as a race-based distraction, but I also respect the idea that the immutability of history might be fundamentally a position of white privilege. The pilot is packed with little factoids about that muddy day in New Jersey that you can sense Kripke and Ryan really loved when they were doing their research and threw in no matter how clunky they make the drama. The recreation of the Hindenburg via CGI delivers a heightened, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -esque vibe and sent me to YouTube to watch footage of the real thing to appreciate the effort at accuracy. Neil Marshall directed the first two Timeless episodes and the pilot is a nicely realized bit of stylized history. They don’t have data on where Flynn is going, only when, but before you can say, “Wait, please explain more why any of this is happening!” our heroes are off to 1937 to either prevent the Hindenburg disaster or prevent the prevention of the Hindenburg disaster, whichever feels relevant.Īs always with time travel, there are rules, but in this case most of the rules are based on preempting complaints that start with “But wouldn’t it be easier to …?” Let’s just say that paradoxes are everywhere and the best way to prevent them is for the core trio to experience famous moments in history, realize exactly how easy it is to instigate butterfly effects of various sizes and then express shock that those ripples spread wide. That team includes a historian (Abigail Spencer) who knows absolutely everything about every moment in history but still lives in the shadow of her ailing mother, a Delta Force soldier (Matt Lanter, clearly relieved to be free from his CW shackles) whose exact qualifications other than “military badass” have yet to be explained and the Mason Industries engineer (Malcolm Barrett) who knows how to pilot the darned machine. It’s almost as if, one way or the other, we’re heading toward an election that millions of people already want to go back in time to prevent and television is just setting itself up for as much wish fulfillment as possible. This TV season will feature The CW’s Frequency, ABC’s Time After Time and Fox’s Making History, and that’s before you get to the myriad Earths now set up on The CW’s The Flash, whatever’s happening time-wise in The Man in the High Castle or Outlander or whatever the backstory happens to be on Tiago a Través del Tiempo, the show-within-a-show telenovela on Jane the Virgin. I’m not claiming that time travel in fiction is a new phenomenon, but we’ve recently been treated to Hulu’s decent 11/22/63, Syfy’s take on 12 Monkeys and The CW’s dreadful Legends of Tomorrow at the same time that political candidates were being asked with total sincerity whether they would kill Baby Hitler if somehow the proper wormhole or machinery were available. This unprecedented commingling of actual and alt-history may be why time travel is having a moment on the small screen. ![]()
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