The Crossing 1.10-11 Ends: Apex Begins

The Crossing may have ended tonight, if no network or streaming service gives it continuing life, which it eminently deserves, seeing as how these last two episodes redeemed or proved The Crossing's mettle as a time-travel narrative worth watching and continuing, with a classic time-travel slap-in-your-face turn of events.  (Spoilers follow.)

The twist was a variant of the perennial time-travel gambit of the trip to the past causing the very evil that the trip was supposed to prevent or at least avoid in the first place.  The vehicle in this case was Sophie, who injects herself with some concoction that makes her the first Apex to arise.  Reece, who was the first Apex to arrive in our time - that's why I said "arise" regarding Sophie - tries her best to prevent this from happening, explaining to Sophie that Reece doesn't want Sophie to be the start of Apex (but see the following paragraph).  But Reece understandably is a bit distracted, still focusing on finding Leah, and still suffering some of the residual effects of her medical torture.  So Sophie tricks her.

But Reece may have been distracted about something a little deeper regarding Sophie and Apex.  Were Apex never to ever arise, that would mean that Reece would cease to exist.  This would mean that either Leah wouldn't exist either (since who knows what effect Apex had on Leah's parents or grandparents meeting), or if she did exist, who knows what kind of life she would have had without Reece and Apex.  Maybe Reece was willing to gamble that Leah would exist and be happy without Apex or Reece, but, if this was Reece's thinking, it should have been made more apparent.  Not making this clear leaves us with other possibilities, such as Apex being not as mentally superior as they are physically, or having a blindspot to paradoxes of time travel that some us humans know about right now.

The Crossing, however, deserves credit for pitching us into these questions and quandaries - that's what good time-travel story-telling should be doing.  Should not a first season of a series exceed its reach, or what's a second season or meta-for? (Apologies to Robert Browning and Marshall McLuhan).  And The Crossing has left us with other compelling questions, such as why was Ellis's name all over the wall with Apex writing from the future, and why was Marshall's (not McLuhan's) picture in Hannah's locket?  (Maybe the picture in the locket was earlier explained, though, and I missed it because I got too tangled up in the paradoxes.)

Not to mention that Homeland Security's treatment of the immigrants from the future in The Crossing bears disturbing resemblances to Homeland Security's treatment of immigrants from south of the border - the geographical not temporal border - right here in our reality.  (Is that why the series wasn't renewed?  Who can say?)

Here's something I can tell you for sure about one possible future: if The Crossing continues somewhere, I'll be sure to review it.  If not - well, I enjoyed this first season, especially the past two hours.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra ... The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict ... The Crossing 1.6: Apex Antibodies ... The Crossing 1.7: The Locket ... The Crossing 1.8: The Cure ... The Crossing 1.9: The New Machine

The Crossing 1.9: The New Machine

Lots of important time-traveling things happening on The Crossing 1.9 tonight, the last episode before the two-hour series finale this coming Saturday night (maybe season finale, if ABC comes to its senses, see a little more about this below).

Among the most significant threads is Naomi using her knowledge of the future to gain agency, as I've been hearing said in the news these days (that is, people having "agency," or some kind of power over events).   People from the future getting power by leveraging their knowledge is always implicit in time travel stories, but you don't see it utilized in this way too often.

Another important development: Lindaeur aka Noah is displaying some more leanings towards humanity - especially in contrast to cruel Greta - and we learn tonight that that's because he's a father, of the one child who came along in the first crossing (assuming the boy we see at the end of the episode is that child).   Whatever the child's origin, Lindauer as a father is bound to look at such profound issues as life and the future in a more compassionate way.

But the most important development in tonight's episode is Diana's revelation that she has a way of making people disappear, without time-travel.  This means the device she has in mind is, what, a teleportation machine?  Should be fun to see, and I hope we find out next week.

Which brings me back to ABC.  Hey, you have an opening, now that you've canceled Roseanne.  Why don't you fill it with a renewal of The Crossing?  There are some rednecks in the story, and the general message is people needing to get along (a big improvement over the real Roseanne).   I saw today that there's a good chance that Roseanne will be rebooted without Roseanne - even if that happens, you can't go wrong also keeping a time-travel story with a sense of humor (like a character confusing Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio tonight - they did look a lot alike when they were younger, right?) blended into the drama with hope for the future.

And I'll be back here after what I hope is just the season finale, on Saturday night.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra ... The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict ... The Crossing 1.6: Apex Antibodies ... The Crossing 1.7: The Locket ... The Crossing 1.8: The Cure


          Paul Levinson interviewed about Roseanne

The Crossing 1.8: The Cure

As seems to happen all too often when an announcement comes down that a series won't be renewed for another season, the remaining episodes just get better and better.   If episode 1.8 on tonight is any indication, that's just what's happened with The Crossing.

We already knew that Apex antibodies could cure and banish all kinds of ailments fatal to humanity.  Tonight we get a hint that Reece's antibodies can do something much more amazing.  It was something that Naomi said about coming back from the dead.  Maybe she was speaking metaphorically.  But it got me thinking (always a dangerous proposition): could Apex antibodies bring people back to life - people who had recently died?   Like, for example, Emma - whose body, in pretty good shape albeit dead, turned up tonight?

Even Jude pointed out that her body sure didn't look like it had been buried for days, and I had the feeling, when Emma was killed, that this wasn't the last we'd be seeing of her.  Well, we did see her again tonight - unfortunately, dead - but now it's less of a leap to see her revived.  All that Jude has to do is get some of the infusions that Dr. Forbin will be preparing, get them into Emma, and ... well, who knows?

At very least, this biological science fiction - of which my own Locus-Award-winning 1999 novel The Silk Code has been said to be an early example - is becoming almost as important in The Crossing as the time travel, and maybe more so.   Which makes it all the more unfortunate that it's not being renewed.




So I'll join the chorus - or say it solo, if need be - hey, ABC, renew The Crossing.  Or, if not, let some other network do this. Bring it back to life!  It deserves a shot.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra ... The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict ... The Crossing 1.6: Apex Antibodies ... The Crossing 1.7: The Locket

The Crossing 1.7: The Locket

On the heels of ABC's announcement that it would not be picking up The Crossing for a second season, it posted a strangely satisfying and important episode.  Of course, that's just a coincidence, since the episode was written and produced long before the cancellation, but it somehow seems significant nonetheless.

The most appealing and provocative of part of episode 1.7 was the continuing story of Hannah and her locket.   The whole locket arc has a quiet elegance about it, and makes The Crossing a much more ... sensitive ... story.  She lost the locket in the water.  A beachcomber picks it up and puts it on his table of trinkets and beach-finds for sale.  Hannah wants it, but doesn't have the $10 he asks for it.  But Roy, who knows how much the locket means to Hannah, later goes back and buys it for $25.

The ingredient that make this little vignette a kind of parable - and emblematic of the entire series - is Marshall.  His image is in the locket.  Hannah is attracted to him, and he to her, as they walk the rocks by the shore.   But who is he?   Someone from our time?  But why, then, is his photo in this locket that Hannah presumably acquired in the future?  If he's from the future, what's he doing back here?

Hannah tells him she comes from the future, but Marshall acts just as you would expect anyone from our present to act when hearing about it: he can't make much sense of it.  Unless he's putting that on, but he didn't seem like that's what he was doing.

I think these quiet stories are more the soul of the story then the battles between Lindauer and Reece and all the super gymnastics.   With the series now not up for a second season, we may never know how this parable of the locket turns out.  Unless some wise network or streaming service picks it up.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra ... The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict ... The Crossing 1.6: Apex Antibodies

The Crossing 1.6: Apex Antibodies

The most intriguing aspect of The Crossing 1.6 tonight was Sophie's thought that Reece's Apex antibodies might be life-saving not just for Reece's daughter, but humans suffering from all kinds of otherwise fatal illnesses - including, it turns out, Sophie herself.

This raises an interesting question: is it possible that the way the Apex arose in the future was from the antibodies that Reece left here in our present, first to save her daughter, then to save Sophie, and who knows how many more?  This would make for a nice time-travel loop, in which the Apex unintentionally helped create themselves.

Otherwise, there again was not much evidence of time travel, or anything other than honest cops and crooked superiors, and the conflict we've been seeing between the local police and the Feds, mainly because the Feds so far have been dominated by the people from the First Migration.  Viewership for The Crossing has slid to about half of what it was when the series started six weeks ago - see TV Series Finale  - and this syndrome is classic when a series doesn't live up to its initial promise.

There are still a lot of appealing pieces on the board in The Crossing, and the series needs to begin putting these into play if it is to survive.   If it doesn't, the fate of The Crossing will no doubt be said to be another example of the limited appeal of time travel on network television.  But the real reason will be that there wasn't enough time travel in this narrative which began pretty brilliantly.

There's still time - but, of course, the remaining episodes have already been recorded.  So the time's already passed, and one can only hope now that the producers did the right thing months ago - an appropriate kind of hope, when the subject is time travel.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra ... The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict

The Crossing 1.5: Migrations in Conflict

A pivotal episode 1.5 of The Crossing tonight, in which a big piece of the back story is revealed, and the stakes are dramatically raised for the near future.

The group that figures in both is the first migration from 200 years in the future, which we now learn got back here on a road late one night in 2008.  Unlike the water arrivals, these folks apparently all survived, and hit the ground running with a plan to stop Apex from ever happening, by taking out the small number of humans identified as crucial to Apex’s later emergence and ascendance.

In this, The Crossing is revealed as partaking of a classic time travel gambit - prevent something bad from happening in your present by going back in time and eradicating its progenitors.  Of course this plan will fail - if it had succeeded, there would have been no need to go back in time to prevent something which never happened - but the First Appearers are not quite that astute in their understanding of time travel and its paradoxes (at least not yet) and they come up with more drastic plan which will call for far many more people to die, after The Firsters realize their first plan didn’t work.

Interestingly, they see the evidence of their first plan’s failure in the Second Migration in the water, which until tonight had been the main focus of the series.  And this means the First and Second Appearers are on a bigger collision course than we first supposed.  The Firsters now want more than keeping the Seconders secret so as not to draw any attention to themselves - they want the Second never to have happened in the first place.

Never mind that if Apex is prevented from happening there will be no migrations from the future at all.  This conflict between First and Second Migrants makes for a strong upcoming story.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor ... The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra

The Crossing 1.4: Hofstra

Well, episode 1.4 of The Crossing was moving along pretty predictably until about a few minutes to the end, when "Hofstra" was mentioned, and everything suddenly changed for the better - for the narrative, if not for one of the major characters.

Hey, I taught a few courses at Hofstra in the mid-1990s, and my wife and I were right across the street this past Fall, at the Nassau Coliseum, for a great concert by Paul McCartney.  Hofstra's a good school, and this may be the first time I've heard it mentioned in a television series, definitely a time-travel series, so The Crossing deserves notice for that.

Anyway, here's how Hofstra came to be mentioned: One of the survivors, Paul, is looking for his wife.  He gets an artist to draw a likeness of her, based on a precise mathematical diagram of how far apart the centers of her eyes are, etc - is there a name for that? - I don't know, but it's pretty cool.  And Agent Ren gets hold of the drawing and finds Paul.  He tells her it's a picture of his wife, who came here - to our time - in the earlier migration.  Ren, unsurprisingly,  goes looking for the woman. 

She finds her, and the woman explains that she and her husband met at Hofstra - why Hofstra? who knows? - and that she learned he was part of a cult.  It's not clear how much if any of this Ren believes, but before we find out, the wife shoots and badly wounds Ren.

Is she dead?  Well, Sandrine Holt is a medium-big star, and her character Ren is important, so under the logic that you don't kill off a big star or a major character so early in the show, she'll likely survive.  But you never know.

More important, the series has taken an interesting turn in the story of the early migration, which  has been one of the more intriguing parts of the narrative.  We now know the first migration people easily lie as well as kill to protect their secret - it's not just Lindauer who does this.  And then there's Hofstra - why pull this name out of the blue?  I'm hoping we'll hear more about this university in Hempstead, and how and why someone from the first migration knows about it.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel ... The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor

The Crossing 1.3: The Missing Inventor

With episode 1.3, it's clear that The Crossing not only has some elements of Lost and FlashForward, but also of Stephen King's The Dome - probably why King, on Twitter, said the first five minutes of The Crossing were "jaw-dropping".  Which it was.

But as the series is progressing, it's less jaw-dropping, and more the kind of mix of good and bad and in-between characters we encountered on The Dome.  And also, at the same time, a mix of characters who know a little to a lot of what's going on, with no one knowing everything.

Those mixes can make a series work, but in order to be truly revolutionary and mind-blowing, like Lost at its best, it needs to have more.  At this point, although the repeated demonstrations of Reece's super prowess are impressive -- especially tonight, quickly recovering from a bullet, and killing someone played by Steve Harris, meaning he could have been a major character - they're beginning to wear a little thin.

Possibly this is a problem of anything on traditional network television, which is increasingly struggling to keep up in narrative daring with cable and now Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu streaming.   That was one reason why The Dome faded.   But I still think The Crossing has potential.

Someone invented the time travel that has twice gotten people from the future to the present.  If Apex are the super-human group in the future intent on destroying what's left of normal, i.e., our current, humanity, why would one one or a group of them try to help normal humans by giving them a way to escape to the past?  Or was the time travel invented by some normal human genius (how's that for an oxymoron?) in the future, intent on helping his/her, i.e., our own kind?

Such questions don't even need to get into the metaphysics of time travel.  They're just the makings of good espionage narrative, and I hope we start seeing more of them addressed in The Crossing.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK ... The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel

The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel

The Crossing moved into its regular season last night - or maybe it did a week ago, when its first episode was rebroadcast on ABC, having first played earlier on Hulu - but the series is anything but regular, and I mean that in pretty much a good way.

It's part time travel, part super-humans ala (I guess) Fringe, and part fast-driving FBI and local law enforcement caught up in a conspiracy and a plague from the future and all kinds of things.  Readers of Infinite Regress won't be surprised to find that the part I find most interesting is the time travel, but that part's been the least developed so far.  It's only the second episode, and there's still time to roll this out, but so far we have no idea how the time travel was created or stumbled upon, only that hundreds of "commons" came here from the future, that some number have been here for a long time already, and that at least one super-human or Apex came along for the ride, too.

Instead of the time travel, we've seen a lot of scenes with the Apex - a mother who loves her common (adopted) girl - finding the girl as a little baby in the future, and frantically looking for her in our present where (when) they both traveled.  She has a tempestuous (so far, only professional) relationship with the local sheriff, and manages to survive massive hit squads, though not unscathed.

Another Strike Force show we don't need - though the first rendition of that series was excellent, and I'm starting to watch the second.  Instead, we - meaning, I - could use a well-done time travel narrative.  (I can always use one of those.) But for this to happen, we need to see more time travel in The Crossing, and learn more - much more - about it.

In terms of other similar series, Lost was hit and miss (but mostly hit), the same for Fringe, but The Event (whose producers Jay Beattie and Dan Dworkin also are creators of The Crossing) and Alcatraz never really got off the ground or hit their stride because they lacked a clear allegiance to the time-travel genre or in fact any genre.  Will be fun to see if The Crossing is more like Lost or Alcatraz.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK

The Crossing: Lost Again but OK

I somehow caught the pilot of The Crossing - a new time-travel series starting in April on ABC - on Hulu, and I came back to file this little report.

Here's what's good about this - The Crossing has echoes of Lost and Flashforward, both on ABC, you will recall.  There's a guy who doesn't look like Sawyer but he has something of Sawyers demeanor, especially when he first comes into view sitting not that far from a beach under an umbrella.  And while we're at it, there's even a main character who reminds me a little of Kate.

As to the story, it's about a group of people who wash up on shore in the northwest, many but not all dead.  The ones who are living say they're from the future.  And the Sawyer-like guy says that people from their future have previously come to our time and earlier.   Before the hour is over, we get to meet one of them, an FBI guy.  (Why didn't Trump fire him?)

And it turns out that some of the folks from the future are genetically enhanced or advanced and have super-strength and who knows what else.

But if this sounds a little trite - because it is - this first hour was nonetheless well-played with a couple of good surprises and a somewhat interesting, idiosyncratic set of characters - especially Steve Zahn as the sheriff (I last saw him on Treme, where he was also memorable).  So that, along with the fact that I'm always willing to give a time travel story a chance means that I'll definitely try the next few episodes ... and, if I had to bet, I'd say I'll stick with it.