Timeless Season 2 Finale: Back from the Future

Well, Timeless saved the best of its second season for last - that is, the last minute of the 2nd of a double episode.  There will spoilers ahead, so don't read on if you'd rather not know...

First, to set the context - the double episode, which was pretty much two separate episodes, tied together by the same sinews that tied together every episode this second second - began about 15 minutes late.   Only appropriate for a time travel tale.

The first hour, about Harriet Tubman, was good enough.   But the best story was saved for the second hour, and just got better and better.   Jiya, taken prisoner by Rittenhouse, has escaped, and is living her life in 1880s Chinatown in San Francisco.  She lets our team in the present know where she is - by a message in Klingon in an ad (I wonder if Lawrence M. Schoen was a consultant - look him up) - and concludes with a warning not to come find her.  This is because she's seen Rufus dying in her vision, which she's now learned to scrutinize in its entirety.

Of course the team comes anyway.  Before the episode is over, Lucy's mother and the Rittenhouse "genius" are (apparently) dead, Emma's in charge with a pregnant Jessica (with Wyatt's baby) as her second, and ... yes, Rufus is dead, too.  In one of the best O'Henry-esque you-can't-defeat-fate twists of the season, Jiya manages to save Rufus from the death-by-knife in her vision, only to see him succumb shortly after to Emma's bullets.

Chinatown transforms Lucy, who tries to kill Emma, and fails only because her gun is out of bullets.  Wyatt, back home in 2018, tells Lucy he loves her.  It looks like all is lost - mainly because, in the laws of time-travel that have been articulated so far in the series, you can't go back to a time you've already visited, so there's no way our team can go back to Chinatown and save Rufus a second time.

But apparently you can go back in time from some future date to where you are in 2018, and that's where the great last moment leaves us.  Just when it seems that our team has run out of luck and hope if not time, an older version of Wyatt (bearded) and Lucy appear in a spiffier looking eyeball i.e., time machine, and invite our current versions to go back with them to save Rufus....

I'd say that's a pretty powerful inducement for a third season.  If NBC doesn't rise to the occasion, I'm sure some other network or streaming service will.   Otherwise ... well, you never know who may appear from the future as a convincer.

See also Timeless 2.1: "Mein Kampf, by Philip K. Dick" ... Timeless 2.2: The Nod ... Timeless 2.3: Orson, Hedy, and Lucy ... Timeless 2.4: Striving to Avoid the 'I Made It Happen' Loop in Time Travel ... Timeless 2.5: JFK... Timeless 2.6: Lucy and Flynn ... Timeless 2.7: Emma ... Timeless 2.8: Loops in Tales

And 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 ... Timeless 1.6: Watergate and Rittenhouse ... Timeless 1.7: Stranded! ... Timeless 1.8: Time and Space ... Timeless 1.9: The Kiss and The Key ... Timeless 1.10: The End in the Middle ... Timeless 1.11: Edison, Ford, Morgan, Houdini, and Holmes (No, Not Sherlock)! ... Timeless 1.12: Incandescent West ... Timeless 1.13: Meeting, Mating, and Predictability ... Timeless 1.14: Paris in the 20s ... Timeless 1.15: Touched! .... Timeless 1.16: A Real Grandfather Paradox Story


                           more time travel

Timeless 2.5: JFK

Well, I'll just come right out with it and say that Timeless 2.5 was easily the finest episode of the series so far - across one and a half seasons - and that's because the episode was one of the best JFK and time-travel narratives in any medium, page or screen, of any length that I've seen.

JFK in 1934 is whisked into the present (2018). Before the hour is over, every gambit of that time travel is explored, including Nixon's face on the dollar coin (before young JFK is saved in the future) and Rufus warning young JFK not to go to Dallas on November 23, 1963 - after JFK has already learned about his and his siblings' deaths, and his Presidency, courtesy of an iPad.

JFK having knowledge of the time and place of his assassination posed an interesting problem for Timeless - a problem that makes all time-travel about tragic events, or trying to change tragic events, so compelling as a narrative on page and screen.  The most daring result could have been JFK living to old age, but that would have required a major overhaul of history that could have completely derailed the series and the stories it is telling.  That's why, when Fringe showed JFK still alive in the early 21st-century, they did little more than just show this, and didn't explore any of the legion of possible consequences.

And that's no doubt why Timeless played it by having JFK, alerted to his assassination in Dallas, killed in another city in Texas - Austin - thus making this episode another expression of O'Henry's favorite moral of you can't escape your fate.  Timeless has gone this route before - indeed, as early as its second episode (1.2), "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln"- so doing this for JFK was true to the Timeless metaphysic (though, I'd someday like to see a TV series or movie in which JFK lives and we see all the consequences).

But tonight's episode of Timeless also deserves credit for being true to JFK's real history, ranging from his attraction to women to the ills of the flesh he was prone to suffer, with fine acting in the part (and great accent) by Grant Jordan, and one of the best opening scenes of any episode in the series with Flynn rescuing young JFK, guns blazing in some vice principal's office (he was about to kill the young man who would become President).

And tonight also featured some powerful development of the Lucy-Wyatt-Jessica story, which I don't think is resolved quite just yet.  And even a brief but telling debate of atheism vs. faith with Rufus and Jiya, and how it relates to time travel.

So that makes two fine shows tonight about Presidents - a real one on Timeless and a fictitious one on Homeland - and I may or may not now look at what James Comey has to say about another President, and may or may not "review" it.   These days I much prefer drama to news.

See also Timeless 2.1: "Mein Kampf, by Philip K. Dick" ... Timeless 2.2: The Nod ... Timeless 2.3: Orson, Hedy, and Lucy ... Timeless 2.4: Striving to Avoid the 'I Made It Happen' Loop in Time Travel

And 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 ... Timeless 1.6: Watergate and Rittenhouse ... Timeless 1.7: Stranded! ... Timeless 1.8: Time and Space ... Timeless 1.9: The Kiss and The Key ... Timeless 1.10: The End in the Middle ... Timeless 1.11: Edison, Ford, Morgan, Houdini, and Holmes (No, Not Sherlock)! ... Timeless 1.12: Incandescent West ... Timeless 1.13: Meeting, Mating, and Predictability ... Timeless 1.14: Paris in the 20s ... Timeless 1.15: Touched! .... Timeless 1.16: A Real Grandfather Paradox Story


                    more time travel about JFK

Jacob's Paradox: Between Genesis and Milton

I figured I would expand the purview of my year-end plunge into time-travel feature movies and TV series on Netflix to time-travel shorts on Amazon Prime (Netflix doesn't have many if any time-travel shorts).  First up is Jacob's Paradox from 2015, a 36-minute narrative, written, directed, and starring Michael Peake (this is a common configuration in shorts - Jay Kensinger wrote, directed, and starred in The Chronology Protection Case, based on my novelette of the same name).

The name Jacob's Paradox is reminiscent of the Biblical Jacob's Ladder.  But when you're dealing with time travel and paradox, you often wind up not climbing up to heaven as the Biblical Jacob did, but falling into hell, as the Jacob in this short does.   And though I've always agreed with Milton's Lucifer that it's better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, Jacob doesn't even get to do that in Jacob's Paradox.

This Jacob is a professor who lectures his physics class on the grandfather paradox - if you traveled to the past and killed your grandfather before he sired your mother or father, how would you have been able to travel to the past in the first place, since you wouldn't have existed.  Professor Jacob provides two "solutions" - something will stop you from killing grandpa, or, a new alternate reality will come into being with no you, but since the you who traveled to the past comes from the first reality, the paradox is averted.

So informed, the audience is set for what the thrust of the movie will be: Jacob is going to travel a little bit into the past to save his wife, who was murdered by an intruder in their home when Jacob wasn't there.  Jacob's plan is to travel back to the past and indeed be there, and stop the killer,

I won't spoil the ending for you, except to say it's excellent and O'Henry-esque, with good performances by Peake as Jacob and Mindy Heithaus as as philosophy professor.  Recommended viewing, with room for a sequel.

 

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Daniel Keyes, RIP

I was very saddened to hear about Daniel Keyes' passing yesterday.  He was 86 years old.

One of the most satisfying things I did as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (1998-2001), was to choose and honor Daniel Keyes as our "Author Emeritus" at our Nebula Awards ceremony in New York City in 2000.   The night after the ceremony, my wife, two kids, and I had a wonderful, quiet dinner with Keyes and his wife.

All four us in my family had read Keyes' masterwork, "Flowers for Algernon" - I in the 1950s, my wife in the 1960s, and our kids in the 1990s, when the story had become required reading in many a school. All of us loved the story.

Sometimes all it takes is one.   Many writers work over a lifetime, producing an encyclopedia full of novels and short stories, but all of them put together don't have the impact of another author's single shorter work.  Keyes wrote more than "Flowers for Algernon," but, if he hadn't, that haunting, sage story would have established his place not only in the history of science fiction, but in writing itself, putting him right up there in the pantheon with O'Henry and de Maupassant.

To get to talk and dine with such an author, after reading his masterwork as a kid and being moved out of my mind was also a pleasure unique in this world.  Daniel, thank you for the story and your generous conversation.   Your story will be read for millennia to come.

#SFWApro

Almost Human 1.12: If Guy de Maupassant Had Been a Science Fiction Writer

A really fine Almost Human 1.12 tonight, with touches of O'Henry and The Twilight Zone, all wrapped up in nanobot plastic surgery for love story.   Nanites are making their rounds in science fiction television this season, appearing in Intelligence as a separate episode last week, and as one of the foundations of this whole season of Revolution.

But Almost Human brings them to bear in a love story worthy of Guy de Maupassant and the classic short fiction mentioned above.  In de Maupassant's "La Parure" ("The Necklace") published back in 1884, for example, a young woman borrows her friend's pearl necklace, accidentally loses it, borrows a huge amount of money to buy a replacement, and works like a dog for years to earn the money back. At the end of the story, she learns that the original necklace she borrowed was made of paste, and not worth much at all.  Or, in The Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder" (1960), a woman undergoes repeated plastic surgeries to improve her appearance.   We see the doctors only from behind, and the woman's face only in bandages.  At the end of the story, the doctors inform her that the surgery has failed.  The camera finally shows us her face - she's beautiful - and pans around to show the faces of the doctors and nurses, which are grotesque in this alternate or alien world.

In tonight's Almost Human, the villain kills beautiful people to improve his appearance - he injects nanites into the victims to harvest the desired facial characteristics, but the injections leave the victims with fatal heart attacks.   He does this because he's in love with a beautiful woman - they have fallen in love online and have never met in person - and he doesn't want her to be disappointed with his looks, which were ruined in an earlier experiment.   He finally meets the woman near the end of story, only to learn that she is blind, can't see what he looks like, and loves him for who is - that is, the person she got to know online.   So, all of his killing was for naught.

All of this yearning for love ties in with Kennex and his loneliness.  And in a very nice final touch, he asks Stahl to go to a bar with him, just as her date - a Chrome - shows up to take her to that very bar.

Almost Human has shown itself to be completely human in the richness of the stories it has given us, a rarity in science fiction television, more rare than nanites.   The season finale is next week, and I hope Fox gives it at least another year.

See also: Almost Human debuts: A Review ... Almost Human 1.2: Sexbots ... Almost Human 1.3: Change of Face ... Almost Human 1.4: Almost Breaking Bad ... Almost Human 1.5: Clones and Holograms ...Almost Human 1.6: The Blackmarket Heart and Double Dorian ... Almost Human 1.7: Meets Criminal Minds ... Almost Human 1.8: Guided Bullets ... Almost Human 1.9: Literally Bad Robot ... Almost Human 1.10: Killer Genes ... Almost Human: 1.11: The Metaphysics of Flesh

#SFWApro


Like science fiction with bio-tech? Try The Silk Code

Boardwalk Empire 3.5: "10 L'Chaim"

A superb Boardwalk Empire last night, with a multitude of sharp lines and situations.  But my favorite goes to Eddie Cantor - a real entertainer in our history - who not only speaks Yiddishisms, but serves them with a sense of humor.  He tutors Nucky in the toast "L'Chaim" - to life! - and adds that he knows some people in prison serving "10 years L'Chaim".

But there's a dark side to Nucky's relationship with Eddie.  Like the Johnny Fontane character in the Godfather (presumably based on the real life Frank Sinatra), the real life Eddie Cantor in Boardwalk Empire is under Nucky's thumb.  Nucky wants Eddie to star in a new music with Billie.  When Eddie refuses - he doesn't want to renege on a commitment he made to Jerome Kern (another real life musical writer and producer) - Nucky has Chalkie come over and make Eddie an offer he can't refuse.

This is in character for the new, tougher, more violent Nucky that we met at the end of season two last year, when Nucky shoots Jimmy point blank.  Nucky's standing up to everyone in this season - refusing not to get his way - including even Arnold Rothstein, who calls Nucky out on his coming up to New York just to see Billie.  Nucky retorts to Rothstein: unlike you, I'm not dead below the waist.  Good line.

Nucky also tries to take out Rosetti, which, as always with Rosetti, is quite a story in itself.  We see Rosetti at play - first in auto-erotic-asphyxia with a woman, then "joking" with a newspaper delivery boy.  The joke is actually pretty media savvy - as many Boardwalk Empire lines are.  Rosetti asks the delivery boy if the newspaper is new; the boy (about 13-14) assures Rosetti it is;  Rosetti then asks, looking at the newspaper, why "all this stuff happened yesterday"?   That's indeed the reality of newspapers, and one reason why their circulation has been declining in our Internet age.   But back to Nucky: he sends a team to take out Rosettit, whom they find, ropes around his and the woman's neck.  Rosetti manages to grab a gun, shooting ensues, and when the gun play is over Rosetti is fine but the woman and the newspaper boy have been shot to death.   We already knew it wasn't safe to get involved in any kind of joke line with Rosetti, because he was prone to kill the conversationist. This time, even though Rosetti seems to like the newspaper boy, he dies because of his association with Rosetti and his joking anyway.   A chilling O'Henryesque twist.

There are also some good continuing story lines with the fictional Van Alden in Chicago and real life Cabinet Secretaries in Washington.  And it was good to see Dominic Chianese again (he had a good evening, with major role in The Good Wife over on CBS).  But speaking of real life: was Eddie Cantor really ever forced by a mobster to back out of a part in a musical?  I don't know - I'll look into it and see what I can find - but it was an instructive moment in an excellent episode.

See also Boardwalk Empire 3.1: Happy News Year 1923  ... Boardwalk Empire 3.2: Gasoline and the White Rock Girl ... Boardwalk Empire 3.3: The Showgirl and The Psycho

And see also Boardwalk Empire 2.1: Politics in an Age Before YouTube  ... Boardwalk Empire 2.2: The Woman Behind the Throne ... Boardwalk Empire 2.3: Frankenstein and Victrola ... Boardwalk Empire 2.4: Nearly Flagrante Delicto ... Boardwalk Empire 2.5: Richard's Story ... Boardwalk Empire 2.6: Owen and Other Bad News for Nucky ... Boardwalk Empire 2.7: Shot in the Hand  ... Boardwalk Empire 2.8: Pups with Fangs ... Boardwalk Empire 2.9: Ireland, Radio, Polio ... Boardwalk Empire 2.10: Double Shot ... Boardwalk Empire 2.11: Gillian and Jimmy  ... Boardwalk Empire Season 2 Finale: Stunner!

And see also Boardwalk Emipre on HBO ... Boardwalk Empire 1.2: Lines and Centers Power ... Boardwalk Empire 1.10: Arnold Rothstein, Media Theorist  ... Season One Finale of Boardwalk Empire

 

"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

Boardwalk Empire 2.4: Nearly Flagrante Delicto

HBO's Boardwalk Empire put up one of its most powerful scenes - sensual and psychological - in episode 2.4.  It involved two characters who are major but not the most absolutely central to the series.  And the scene in effect came in two parts.

The characters are Gillian (Jimmy's mother, played by Gretchen Mol) and the Commodore (Jimmy's father, played by Dabney Coleman).

In part one, Gillian starts seducing the Commodore with a 1920s exotic strip tease that leaves her naked and the Commodore breathless.   Gillian never looked better - we see her waist up from the front and all the way down the back - indeed, the only scenes I recall as seductive as this were Atia's (played by Polly Walker) completely nude scenes in HBO's Rome.   But the result of Gillian's temptations is not the greatest for the Commodore, who has a stroke.   We learn later that men in his condition apparently can't take this much excitement.

In part two of this story within a story, which comes much later in this episode, Gillian talks to the Commodore, immobile in his bed.  The talk is her reminiscence of the first time the two made love, which turns out to be a harsh and cruel tale of the Commodore plying Gillian (both were 20+ years younger - Gillian was just 13) with alcohol and starting to rape her when she's passed out.  But Gillian woke up, and has always remembered the incident with understandable revulsion and horror.   Which raises the question: did Gillian deliberately try to seduce the Commodore to  provoke a seizure?

I'm not sure, but I do find it just-desert O'Henry-esque (you can't escape your fate) that the Commodore is now pretty much back where he started last year, an invalid in bed in serious condition.  And this is one of the things - actually, three, the scene and the questions and the cycles - that makes the series so good, and this episode especially. It also featured Chalky's flaws as a father (he's insecure when his daughter brings home a well-educated young suitor), and the gang back in New York.   Any scene with Lucky, Lansky, Bugsy, and Rothstein is always one of my favorite scenes on this show.

So far, Season Two of Boardwalk Empire is even better than Season One, which is saying a lot, because Season One was fine indeed.

See also Boardwalk Empire 2.1: Politics in an Age Before YouTube  ... Boardwalk Empire 2.2: The Woman Behind the Throne ... Boardwalk Empire 2.3: Frankenstein and Victrola

And see also Boardwalk Emipre on HBO ... Boardwalk Empire 1.2: Lines and Centers Power ... Boardwalk Empire 1.10: Arnold Rothstein, Media Theorist  ... Season One Finale of Boardwalk Empire

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The Plot to Save Socrates




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

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