Timeless 1.6: Watergate and Rittenhouse

A set-up for what could have been an incredibly timely Timeless episode 1.6 tonight - our team goes back to find the missing 18.5 minutes in the notorious Nixon Watergate tape.  I mean, I've saying that the worst President we had prior to the President-elect was Richard Nixon, and we did survive that. What more could you ask for in relevance in an episode of a TV series recorded months ago and written well before that?

Well, what we got was a pretty good show, with little relevance to Nixon and Watergate, except for the missing minutes revealing that Nixon was talking about Rittenhouse.   That's a nice touch, and leads to a further revelation that Rittenhouse has been around since the American Revolution, which now makes Timeless another kind of secret society in America show - that in addition to being a time travel story.

I still would have loved to see Nixon, Kissinger, Agnew, maybe Walter Cronkite on television in 1972 - or even Woodward and Bernstein - but all we got was Mark Felt in a brief scene.   Because, for whatever reason, Timeless decided to make this episode more about the internal workings of the story than about the specific Nixon issue at hand.

There's a good surprise at the end - good, though, not because it was surprising (it was pretty obvious) but because it deepens Lucy's character, or makes her even more of a major player in this story than she was before.  We also learn more about what Flynn has been reading in the journal Lucy hasn't yet written.

So where do we stand now?   Rittenhouse was running Nixon, and has been doing that sort of thing since the birth of our nation.   But when did that group originate?  Was it in the future, and they traveled back to the past, or ...   Not known, as yet.   But I'm also wondering - did they have a hand getting Trump elected by the electoral college?  Hey, that still hasn't quite happened yet, and you never know ...

See also Timeless 1.1: Threading the Needle ... Timeless 1.2: Small Change, Big Payoffs ... Timeless 1.3: Judith Campbell ... Timeless 1.4: Skyfall and Weapon of Choice ... Timeless 1.5: and Quantum Leap



time-travel and Presidential elections - for real