"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Monday, December 10, 2007

Journeyman Continues: 11: Livia's Beau//Save the Paper Save the World!// Contest Winner!

And we have a new winner for tonight's contest - like last week, I was emailed the correct answer for Dan's last word in tonight's superb episode within seconds after it was said. Look for the name of the winner, and some consolation prizes, at the end of this review...

And what a wonderful holiday episode it was. Tonight's Episode 11 of Journeyman was about family, and deepened and developed the relationships of all the major characters.

The chapter began and ended with Livia in 1948. She's proposed to, and accepts. Now she and Dan are equal. Both are married, both are caught up in the time travel and the feelings they have for each other. (Livia has a picture of Dan and her on her table.) At this point, Katie knows much more than Livia's fiance, and it would be nice to see how he plays out in the late 1940s and after.

Jack and Theresa (played by beautiful Lisa Sheridan) are getting much closer, too. Theresa tells him she's pregnant with their child...

And Dan's assignment this week concerns family, too. The Scrooge owner of the paper intends to fire a big portion of the staff, on Christmas eve, no less. Dan goes back to the late 1970s and finds the owner's father. Turns out he suffered a coronary, and the son took a little too long to call for medical help ... One other person knows what really happened - a young woman who would do anything to become a reporter back in 1979, and has been a fixture with the paper ever since. Dan convinces her to speak to the son, turned Scrooge, in 2007 - and, much as in the Charles Dickens classic, he relents with the firing.

And just to turn this time-traveling Christmas Carol one more twist, Dan also has a talk with his father, back in that 1979 Christmas party at the office. To convince his father not to leave his family would have bent the time line far too much ... but Dan does get his father to at least tell his younger self and brother Jack the night before he left, which has the good effect of keeping the boys from wondering all of their lives if their father's leaving was their fault.

Back in 2007, Jack of course now has always known this - and I can't help feeling that maybe Dan's good deed in time will make Jack a happier, better person. That's one of the nice dividends of time-travel stories.

Dan tells Jack he doesn't remember what their father said that night. If he truly doesn't, this means that Dan, at least as far as his own life is concerned, is one of those time travelers who doesn't remember original realities he changes in the past. (I always have my time travelers remember - since they're traveling in time, their minds are stacked with memories of all alternate realities.) But I have feeling that Dan told his brother he doesn't recall just to keep it less complicated. In previous episodes, Dan seemed thoroughly aware of all sets of realities in which he was involved.

And so Journeyman continues to strengthen its family roots and thereby the possibilities for future story lines. The show belongs here...

"Here" - which was also Dan's last word tonight - when he says "I belong here" ... which brings us to the contest winner...

=======================================================
Who is ... John Muth of Pittsburgh!

An autographed copy of The Plot to Save Socrates will be in the mail to John tomorrow! Congratulations, John!

For everyone else: If you've already answered the question correctly - but got it in after John - I'll be happy to send you, via e-mail, a copy of my 1997 award-nominated time travel novella, Loose Ends (first published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, and widely reprinted, including on Fictionwise.com).

And, further, for anyone who answered tonight's question correctly, I'll be happy to autograph and return to you at my expense any copies of The Plot to Save Socrates that you send to me between now and the end of this year.

My email is Levinson.paul@gmail.com

But John gets the free copy for tonight's episode.

And the contest will continue for the next two episodes of Journeyman. I'll give a free, autographed copy of The Plot to Save Socrates to first person, after each show, who e-mails Dan's last word on the show to me! See Extending The Plot to Save Socrates - Journeyman Contest for details.

Note, by the way, that the contest calls for Dan's last word spoken on each episode - not the last word spoken by someone else, if that last word is the last word on the show. Livia had the last word tonight, when she said "Yes" to that proposal. But the last word I was looking for is Dan's....

My reviews of other Journeyman episodes ... 1: NBC Quantum Leaps Into Journeyman ...2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5 ... 6... 7 ... 8. Livia's Story ... 9. Dan Unravels His Present ... 10. Jack's In! ... 12. The Perfect Time Travel Story ... Lucky 13






The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book


more about The Plot to Save Socrates...

Get your own at Profile Pitstop.com



Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates
.... FREE!

10 comments:

John Muth said...

Thank you again. I completely thought I fudged up my chances, when the show cut back in from black to livia and her proposal!! :)

Anyway, I do agree that it was a fantastic episode. I really enjoyed the twist on what happened in the past - although for one second, I thought that maybe Dan's dad was going to be involved.

I guess, my views on time-travel though vary. In that I ascribe to what is commonly called the Butterfly Effect, where the smallest change can lead to something much larger down the road. And I just have to question, whether either Dan or Jack would be the same person they are at the beginning of the episode, as at the end after something from their past has been changed. I'm not griping though. I do understand that there's really only so much change the production on the show could probably handle.

I was thinking about the true ending of this episode and considering what if the purpose of Dan's traveling was to fix it so that Livia's life could be complete. I'm just getting the feeling that there has to be more to Livia's involvement in Dan's traveling than just to get him out of a tight spot. Maybe their fates are meant to be that they never meet - which would be quite a spin for a TV show. I really, really, hope that the show gets picked up for another season, at least to maybe give us the scoop on why these two people are thrown together to do this.

Well, thank you again, and I'll eagerly be awaiting to see who wins next week and what the last two episodes hold in store for us. :)

JesseM said...

In previous episodes, Dan seemed thoroughly aware of all sets of realities in which he was involved.

Well, Dan is aware of all the different realities he has experienced as a time traveler, but I can't remember any time when his memories of his own past were changed by something he did. Think of the parallel-universe theory of time travel, where if you change something in the past then history will branch off into a new parallel timeline, but you still remember the timeline you came from originally. This allows you to avoid problems like the grandfather paradox--if you prevent your grandfather from having a kid in the new timeline, that's ok, because your grandfather still had a kid in the timeline you originated from. It's as if you could visit another planet whose history had been exactly like Earth's up until the moment you arrived, but whose history lagged behind Earth's by a few years, so if you arrived today the date might be 1979 or something on their calendar, and every individual there would be a perfect duplicate of everyone who existed in the 1979 of our Earth's history. If you then caused the planet's history to diverge from Earth's by interfering, you could experience the different history that resulted on this planet, and still retain your memories of how things went in Earth's history, but since this is just space travel your memories obviously wouldn't change in any way.

Magical Malik said...

Yeah, you seem to have forgotten that Dan's memories are never altered from the stuff he does in the past.

Paul Levinson said...

Good points, everyone.

John - I subscribe to the Butterfly Effect, too, and always embed it in my time travel novels and stories.

That's why I was thinking that Jack may be a better person now - as a consequence of Dan's conversation with his father. One of the many reasons I hope the series continues, is I'd like to see how this thread plays out...

(And, congratulations, again, on being our contest winner for this week!)

Jesse and Magical - Right. That's why I said that I doubted that Dan had no idea about what his father did back then with his little sons, as Dan indicated to Jack.

I would assume that Dan remembers (a) what it was like when his father left without saying anything, (b) Dan's intervention with his father in 1979, (c) Dan's "new" memory of exactly what Jack now says he remembers... (even if Dan had been too young back then to remember much, Jack and Dan would certainly have talked about it, over the years)...

In contrast, Jack has only one memory - the new one - because Jack was not the agent of the time-traveling change.

JesseM said...

Jesse and Magical - Right. That's why I said that I doubted that Dan had no idea about what his father did back then with his little sons, as Dan indicated to Jack.

I would assume that Dan remembers (a) what it was like when his father left without saying anything, (b) Dan's intervention with his father in 1979, (c) Dan's "new" memory of exactly what Jack now says he remembers... (even if Dan had been too young back then to remember much, Jack and Dan would certainly have talked about it, over the years)...


But if you go with the branching-multiverse theory, Dan wouldn't have two sets of childhood memories like this. Think in terms of my planet-hopping metaphor again. Say instead of traveling through time, Dan was teleported from our Earth, "Earth-A", to another planet, "Earth-B", whose history lagged behind ours by 28 years. So if the trip was instantaneous, when he got there all the calendars would read "1979", and all the people on Earth-B would be perfect duplicates of the people who inhabited the 1979 of our Earth-A history. Dan then intervenes by talking to the Earth-B version of his father, who will now behave differently than Dan's original father did in the 1979 of Earth-A. (and his father is still alive at that moment on Earth-A, where the calendars still read 2007!) Then, so that we can continue to avoid any actual time travel in this metaphor, we can imagine that instead of jumping forward in time, Dan is just put into suspended animation for 28 years, so when he wakes up it's 2007 on Earth-B. (Let's also imagine that the Earth-B version of Dan is teleported to a different Earth-C, or otherwise 'disappeared' in 2007, so there aren't two versions of Dan when the Earth-A version wakes from suspended animation.) He is still the same Dan with no modifications to his brain, there was never any time travel in this scenario so it's still true that he grew up in Earth-A where his dad still left without saying goodbye, and that's what he'll remember. But no one else around him has done any planet-hopping, they've all spent their whole lives on Earth-B so it's the Earth-B history they remember, including the Earth-B duplicate of his brother.

Now, I'm not saying that this is necessarily the theory of time travel they use on the show, there are a lot of different ideas about time travel out there, and the parallel universe version could be seen as dramatically unsatisfying since even when you "change" history for the better the original history goes on existing in a different timeline (though I suppose you could modify my metaphor above so that when Dan was teleported from Earth-A to Earth-B, Earth-B was created from scratch at that moment and meanwhile Earth-A was caused to vanish at the moment Dan left it, and instead of the Earth-B Dan going to Earth-C in 2007, he was caused to vanish as well...this way there'd only ever be one Earth, and one 2007 Dan, at a time). So, it's quite possible that in future episodes Dan might show some signs of overlapping memories. But the parallel universe theory I describe is at least consistent with everything we've seen so far on the show, I think (as is the 'multiple histories with each old one vanishing when Dan leaves it' theory, which is perhaps more dramatically satisfying).

Paul Levinson said...

Yes, there of course are many possible scenarios for what would happen to the memories we have, were time travel and changing history possible...

What I am saying is that I like the hypothesis that the person who causes the change - the time traveler - would retain all memories of all universes he or she was in, or caused to happen, or caused to be deleted.

In other words, whatever kind of parallel universes we're talking about, I'm suggesting that the person who made them happen would be "supra" these universes, and would therefore maintain all memories of lives, newly created, changed, erased...

Unlike everyone else in these universes, who would only have memories pertinent to the universe in which they lived.

Paul Levinson said...

PS - A problem with your planets metaphor is that they exist separately in space, and are not connected. In contrast, multiple worlds brought into existence by time travel exist right on top of and through each other...

JesseM said...

A problem with your planets metaphor is that they exist separately in space, and are not connected. In contrast, multiple worlds brought into existence by time travel exist right on top of and through each other...

That's true, although a lot of stories are based on the premise that once the worlds diverge they have no influence on one another, even if they do in some sense exist stacked up "in parallel" in the same space. Anyway, I'm not really saying either version of time travel is better or worse for storytelling purposes, just that the planet metaphor shows one way that time travel could work, and it's consistent with what we've seen on Journeyman so far.

John Muth said...

Well, it seems that the time has come

Paul Levinson said...

Fair enough, Jesse.

Not over until it's over, John. I still say that, especially with the impact that the strike may have on Spring TV programming, anything is possible for Journeyman...

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