Time After Time 1.4: "Mad as a Bag of Ferrets"

The best line in Time After Time 1.4 comes from Stevenson, to Brook, that she's as "mad as a bag of ferrets".  A great line, especially rich coming from the American Psycho, stylishly dressed and always looking for a knife at hand, who's actually Jack the Ripper.  But there's a lot more in this complex, fast-moving, entertaining time travel caper of a series.

It turns out Brook and Griffin are siblings, which explains why both are so interested in Wells and Stevenson and time travel.   And Wells' descendants are not all good, which explains why Chad was out to kill Wells - it was to protect Chad's father, who was killed by Wells' descendant.

This is all good personal time travel plot development.  And we're also beginning to get more of the metaphysics of time travel in this narrative explicated, such as the time machine always returns to the place it started the exact amount of time that the travelers are away in time, so as not risk anyone running into him- or herself.   (I actually like playing with those possibilities and paradoxes, but they're more easily pursued in written form than on the screen, where the reader naturally has the time to think things through - more easily and less intrusively than stopping or rewinding the video.)

So, in that sense, Time After Time is a more conventional time travel story on the screen than is. say, 12 Monkeys, over on the SyFy.  And in episode 1.4, Time After Time bore more resemblances to Timeless, over on NBC, with the similar name.   These kinds of coincidences make me wonder if one of the production teams didn't actually gain access to a time machine, or maybe one or both of the productions had a spy in the other, or - who knows, maybe the similarities, such as traveling to a different time each week, are just coincidence, after all.

But what I do find original in Time After Time, and so far it's best feature, is the two sets of villains - Jack the Ripper, on the one hand, and Brook and Griffin on the other.  Or maybe those last two are not villains - maybe their both as mad as a bag of ferrets - nah, they're villains, and interesting ones at that, and I'm looking to seeing them tangle with Wells and Jane.

See also Time after Time: H. G. Wells Back in Action ... Time After Time 1.3: The Red Heads

 

               speaks for itself