Timeless 1.4: Skyfall and Weapon of Choice

An historically rich Timeless 1.4 last night - rife in twists and connections to our popular culture as well as our real history, and the potential of travel to the past to change all of that up - with our three heroes interacting with both Ian Fleming (not only creator of James Bond, but also a real secret agent) and Werner Von Braun (responsible for both the V2 rockets out of Nazi Germany and the launch of the US space program).  Indeed, Von Braun's role in this episode makes it a story not only about time travel but space travel.

But starting with Bond, Wyatt recognizes a feature of the architecture back in a 1944 Nazi stronghold that played a role in Skyfall (the 2012 James Bond movie), with Fleming taking that in.  But that certainly had no influence in our history, since Fleming had nothing to do with that recent Bond movie.  However, at the end of the episode, we learn that Fleming did write a story, "Weapon of Choice," which tells what happened with our characters in this episode of Timeless.  That story is of course unknown in our reality.  And there's a quip about Never Say Never Again - in our reality, the name of the second adaption of Fleming's Thunderball, and the one-film final return of Sean Connery to the Bond role in 1983. Ah, the course of popular culture never did run smooth when time travel is concerned.

Meanwhile, in real reality, concerning both the end of the World War II and the space race in the 1960s, Fleming wants to kill Von Braun, seeing as how the rocket scientist's missiles were wreaking such havoc on London.  Flynn, whose ultimate motives are still not clear, wants to kidnap Von Braun and deliver him to the Soviets, which would mean that they not the U.S. would likely have gotten to the Moon at the end of the 1960s.   Fortunately, our team succeeds in preventing both changes to history, which means that the changes in history wrought by the time travel in this episode are limited only to popular culture, with our real history intact for now.

Timeless continues to be a strong program, with appealing episodes, and the underlying stories of Lucy wanting to get her sister back, and our other characters striving to maintain their personal identities and equilibrium, providing a good, roiling backdrop.


See also Timeless 1.1: Threading the Needle ... Timeless 1.2: Small Change, Big Payoffs ... Timeless 1.3: Judith Campbell


             more time travel in the 20th century