Time After Time, Timeless, and Frequency in the Dustbin of History

It's been a bad year for time travel series on network television.

Time After Time, based on the excellent Malcolm McDowell movie, barely made it out of the starting gate on ABC.

Frequency, based on one of the best time travel movies ever made, had a short run on the CW, and was recently canceled. *Noted added 18 May 2017: But CW posted a very satisfying little epilogue - details here.

Timeless, a big ticket series on NBC, learned its sad fate yesterday.  *Note added 14 May 2017: But NBC reversed its decision and renewed Timeless after all!  See here.

Although I had good things to say about all three series, I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't make it.  In fact, though I'm always up for seeing any time travel on television, I also had problems with all three.

Frequency had in principle the best story.   The idea of a father (a cop) hearing from his son, in the future, that the father will be killed, worked well as a father and daughter set-up in the television series.   These kinds of personal time travel stories have a lot of appeal, precisely because they are a refreshing departure from saving the world.  But what worked great in the movie got bogged in the television series.   Of the three canceled series, I would have most wanted to see what happened next season, but the first season took a little too long to get there.

H. G. Wells traveling to our present in his time machine was a great idea for the Time After Time TV series as well as the movie.   For all we know, the series could have been excellent.  But we didn't get a chance to see that, and what we did see on screen got tied up in a few too many stories and subplots.

Timeless was original, and had some nice touches, such as travel to the past resulting in real, demonstrable changes in our present.   Most time travel stories don't dare go there.  But the labyrinth of conspiracies blunted the impact of the story, and the conspirators going back to the American Revolutionary War is something we saw before on screens.  *Note added 14 May 2017: Still, I'm very glad to see it renewed!

12 Monkeys returns for three nights on the SyFy Channel later this month, and then next year for a final season.   The future of time travel on the screen may well reside on Netflix and Amazon.


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Time After Time 1.5: You Can't and Can Change History

Time After Time was back with episode 1.5 last night - filmed at Silvercup's new Bronx studios, by the way, where I attended a great opening ceremony with Governor Cuomo speaking this past summer.

Changing the Bronx - bringing it back - is what Silvercup North is all about, just as changing history is what Time After Time is all about.  The very notion of time travel is about changing history.   Which is why Stephen Hawking talked about the chronology protection conjecture, and I wrote The Chronology Protection Case, basis of the movie you can see any time for free on Amazon Prime.

Now the theme of both, and of Time After Time 1.5, is that history - or the universe - won't let you change it.   So when John aka Jack the Ripper goes back to World War I in Paris to save his son, it turns out that H. G. doesn't have to go back in time himself to stop John - history, the universe, will do that all on its own.

Except when it doesn't.  Which, of course, can happen in a time travel story, since it's the writer, not really the universe, which/who is calling the shots in the story,  So I would say it's just a matter of time, to coin a phrase, until Wells or who knows who does manage to change something in history in Time After Time - whether in spite of or because of Wells' or John's interventions - just as Silvercup North has changed the course of the Bronx.

Meanwhile, the other story in Time After Time, which will somehow tie into the time machine and Wells, is the work of Brook and her brother. Tonight we saw her heal his wound with some kind of quick-acting DNA-relevant something or other.  That was not only cool, but promises some interesting gambits ahead.

I'm very much liking Time After Time, and looking forward to more.

See also Time after Time: H. G. Wells Back in Action ... Time After Time 1.3: The Red Heads ... Time After Time 1.4: "Mad as a Bag of Ferrets"


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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

Time after Time 1.3: The Red Heads

A strong third episode of Time after Time last night (the first two debuted back to back last week), which furthered the mystery, mostly due to two or three redheads.

One was the bearded guy we saw following H. G. and Jack the Ripper in contemporary New York last week.  He visits his elderly mother this week, says Wells and the Ripper are in New York as she said they would be, and goes off to kill Wells.  Fortunately for the fictional inventor and real-life author, unfortunately for this narrative (at least, as of now), he gets killed by one of Wells' great-great granddaughter Vanessa's body guards, before we have a chance to find out more. As Vanessa later says when Wells muses that maybe he met the redhead in Wells' future and redhead's past, that doesn't tell us anything about why the guy wanted to kill Wells.

But there's another redhead -  a neurologist well played by Hell on Wheels' Jennifer Ferrin - who's also in some way a part of this.  She knocks Jack the Ripper out with an injection just as he's about to stab her after the two have a great sex, and it turns out she knows more or less or who knows exactly what about what's going on, too.

And, just for good measure, Vanessa's boyfriend Griffin also knows about H. G. Wells and his time machine and who knows what else, after feigning shock when Vanessa brings him in to see Wells demo the repaired machine.  He, Griffin, has reddish hair, too, right?  Well, Will Chase did play Luke Wheeler on Nashville, and he's running for Senator in Time after Time, so he has that going for him and a lot of potential in this story.

And where does that leave us?  With a lot of simmering leads and possibilities, with all kinds of characters in New York in 2017 with knowledge of Wells and his time machine.  Who are these people?  Are they all connected in some way?  What and how do they know about Wells and time travel?  I'm looking forward to being surprised and amazed.

See also Time after Time: H. G. Wells Back in Action

 
not only H. G. Wells but Orson Welles in this tale

Time after Time: H. G. Wells Back in Action

With Frequency and Timeless concluded - the first seasons, I hope, not the series - I figured what better time to watch Time After Time, which debuted tonight on ABC with a two-hour episode.

The story is an adaptation of the 1979 movie of the same name, in which H. G. Wells, who in real life published The Time Machine in 1895 and went on to have an illustrious career as one of the grandfathers (along with Jules Verne) of science fiction, uses his machine to travel to our present day.  The 1979 movie creatively has Wells in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who has absconded with Wells' time machine (which the story imagines Wells not only wrote about but actually built) into 1979, to save the future from the Ripper's depredations and get back sole control of the time machine.  The TV series does the same for the two main characters, except their terminus point is our present, 2017.

The series mines all sorts of opportunities for Wells to be amazed by Google and smartphones, just as the movie did for Wells and MacDonald's.  But the movie was far more serious than the series, which is maybe 70/30 drama and humor, in comparison to 90/10 for the movie.

The first two episodes have some cool time-travel wrinkles, including H. G. Wells and his great-great-grand-daughter in 2017, motivated to meet and help Wells because an older version of himself met a younger version of her years earlier, introduced himself, and gave her a brief letter and a request to give the letter to Wells when they met in 2017.   Wells, though young and at the beginning of his career, already understands the complexities and dangers of time travel and its paradoxes, including why it's perilous to travel too many times to the same time in the past (it could create "a hole in time," as Wells puts it),  which neatly explains why Wells doesn't just travel back to a little before the Ripper ripped off the machine, and nip that in the bud.  And there are some nice dabs of young Wells in 2017 seeing a library with his books, yet to be written.

Those kinds of touches happen all the time in time travel stories about real writers who travel through history, but they're good to see anyway, and the same can be said for Time After Time, which I'll definitely keep an eye on.


not only H. G. Wells but Orson Welles in this tale