Journeyman Continues: 6: Unabomber and Tachyons

A strong Episode 6 of Journeyman last night, in which three significant things occurred:

1. Dan and Jack's relationship is healing. This is good to see, because Dan will need all the help he can get in the adventures before him...

2. Something that Livia said early in the episode clarified, for me, what she is doing in the story: she travels back to help Dan. This is obvious, but what I mean is that Dan is the problem that Livia is traveling back in time to fix. She shows up whenever he needs any help. We still don't know what her home base is - I suspect maybe some time in the further future - and whether she's being yanked back to help Dan (which I suspect is the case, or maybe she said that on an earlier show), or is initiating the jumps. I look forward to see how this is played out.

3. There's more to the Ted Kaczynski (the unabomber in our world) character in last night's episode - Kowalchuk in last night's show - than meets the eye. He's conversant with tachyons, and provides a crystal clear explanation of their power. He sent a letter to our tachyon scientist, Langley. He believes in time travel, and correctly id's Dan as a man who is time traveling (he asks Dan if he's from the past or the future, and Dan says the future). He tells Dan that his shoes gave Dan away as not being from 2000, the time in which they are talking...

But, in the end, in 2007, the "cured" Kowalchuk says he's come to see that time travel is not possible, after all. Yet, he still notices Dan's shoes.

We have not seen the last of tachyon-savvy characters in this story...


4-minute podcast of this Journeyman review


Reviews of other Journeyman episodes: 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5 ...
7 ... 8 ... 9. Dan Unravels His Present ... 10. Jack's In! ... 11. Livia's Beau//Save the Newspaper, Save the World ... 12. The Perfect Time Travel Story ... Lucky 13

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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

Journeyman Continues: 5

A good Journeyman - Episode 5 tonight - as Dan tangles with a character based on D. B. Cooper (Dylan McLeen on tonight's show), who parachuted from a plane in the northwest with a suitcase full of money in the 1970s, and was never found...

At least, not in our reality. But Dan gets to find out McLeen's story in Journeyman, and help set it right.

A good story. But, as usual, the better story - and this is what makes Journeyman so appealing - is in Dan's personal life, in his attempt to be a family man and a time traveler at the same time, and to find out how and why he is time-traveling.

His wife Katie already knows, his brother Jack is close to knowing (and comes closer tonight), and in this episode Dan & Katie's son Zack sees Dan disappear.... And this, as Katie earlier had suggested, is easily comprehensible to Zack. He accepts and enthusiastically approves of Dan's "magic". It's a sweet scene, and it's good that Zack no longer need be frustrated and disappointed by his father's absences. Dan also gets to meet his own father in another sequence, when Dan's father was Dan's age and a photojournalist at the same San Francisco newspaper where Dan now works as a reporter. Dan's father left Dan and his mother when Dan was Zack's age, and his father also connects to another crucial aspect of the larger, unfolding story in what was clearly a father-and-son episode.

Dan gets a visit in his 2007 office from Dr. Elliot Langley - the tachyon scientist who called Dan in the past last week (played with just the right slight mystery and timelessness by Tom Everett). Dan mentions the call, and Langley replies that maybe he was calling Dan's father.

As you know - see my Tachyon Telephone - I think nothing of the sort. I'm more convinced than ever that Langley was calling Dan across time.

Langley gives Dan a pretty good explanation of tachyons and time travel, making clear their hypothetical nature. And Dan gives a satisfying explanation for why he's asking these questions - Dan says he's writing a science fiction novel about a time traveler (of course, much like himself).

Langley makes one minor misstatement - tachyons are not necessary for time travel, as he tells Dan. Rather, they are one way - traveling faster than the speed of light - that time travel could conceivably take place. But if we're in the realm of science fiction - or speculative physics - there are other ways, for example, folding time, stepping into an image of the past when the present looks just like it, or artificial wormholes in which tachyons do not necessarily play a part (yeah, I use the latter in The Plot to Save Socrates, as well as my Loose Ends stories).

But, all in all, a fine episode of Journeyman this evening, with at least one happy father-and-son ending, a good contemporary reference about blogging, and Langley getting deeper into the picture.... I predict we'll see a meeting between him and Livia before too long...


5-minute podcast of this Journeyman review

Reviews of other Journeyman episodes: 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 6 ... 7... 8 ... 9. Dan Unravels His Present ... 10. Jack's In! ... 11. Livia's Beau//Save the Newspaper, Save the World ... 12. The Perfect Time Travel Story ... Lucky 13

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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

Tachyon Telephone: A Journeyman Extra!

Back with a little focus essay on what could be a very important thread introduced in last night's Journeyman - Episode 4 - on NBC. In 2007, Dan contacts a scientist who has done some work on tachyons - the name our real-life scientists give to particles that might travel at faster-than-light speeds, were such speeds possible. Dan presumably thinks this scientist might know something about time travel (because, again in our reality, some projections of what conditions would permit time travel say it could be linked to faster-than-light travel). Dan has an inconclusive conversation with the scientist, who tells Dan he'll get back to Dan, and-

Later in the show, when Dan is back in the late 1990s, he gets a call from this scientist...

Now, conceivably, the scientist's late 1990s self might have been calling Dan for some reason. But let's assume the scientist was in 2007 when he placed the call to Dan in 1998.

How might this have happened?

Greg Benford, a physicist at University of California-Irvine, and a science fiction writer (and a friend, so I know he's real), published an award-winning novel in 1980 entitled Timescape. In this novel, scientists from the future communicate with scientists in the past via tachyons.

Was that what was happening with Dan in Journeyman last night?

Well, in order for that to have occurred , here's would have been required in the telephone technology. Our telephones and cellphones and iPhones today work by encoding sound into electronic signals - electrons - and sending them through wires, or whatever carrier waves in the air, to receivers, which in turn decode the electronic patterns back into sounds that we can hear. Since electrons and the carrying signals travel at the speed of light, we can talk to anyone anywhere on the Earth just about instantly. Of course, if we try to do this with someone near the Moon, there will be a little delay (the Moon is 240,000 miles from Earth - light travels at 186,000 miles per second).

A tachyon telephone would work the same way - except, rather than the sound being encoded into electrons it would need to be encoded into tachyons (or, if it was encoded into electrons, those electrons would need to be hitched to a tachyon carrier wave).

Presumably our tachyon-knowledgeable scientist in Journeyman would understand this, and might have access to or even constructed a tachyon telephone.

But how about Dan? He would need to have a tachyon telephone in order to receive a call from a scientist in the future (the scientist in 2007, Dan in 1998) and have a conversation with him. Dan is seen using a late-1990s cell phone in last night's episode - his old phone, that he dug out in 2007 (hey, I have one just like it, buried somewhere in my desk!) - but there is no reason to think that it came tachyon enabled.

But Livia, Dan's former lover, also travels around in time, and she might have gotten to Dan's phone at some point, and given it a tachyon chip... a tachyon hack!

Interesting possibilities here, and I'm eager to see how Journeyman develops this.

In the meantime, you might enjoy the following:

Greg Benford's Timescape

my time-travel novel, The Plot to Save Socrates

20-minute podcast: Time Travel in Fact and Fiction


5 minute podcast of this tachyon analysis

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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

Continuing Journeyman: 4

One of the key threads in NBC's Journeyman - perhaps the key thread - is how many of the people around Dan in 2007 know what he is doing.

The show started with no one. In Episode 2, Dan's wife Katie had to accept that his stories about his absences were more than psychotic illusions when he disappeared from a plane in which both were passengers. Last week in Episode 3, Dan's boss Hugh may have begun to get a clue, when Dan came up with a nickname for Hugh that he hadn't heard in years.

And tonight, in Episode 4, Dan's brother Jack (winningly played by Reed Diamond), is in a men's room with Dan, when Dan goes missing. The window is closed, Dan didn't fall in, so ...

Part of the set-up of the show is that no one sees Dan vanish - he disappears when cohorts step out of the room, or turn their backs - which results in his wife and brother taking longer to realize that Dan is really disappearing.

But now the menage-a-quatre of Dan, Livia, Kate, and Jack is finally beginning to crystalize into awareness of what Dan is doing, and Livia has apparently been doing for a while. I predict that before the season is over, all four will be players in time, working together and at cross-purposes in some kind of plot that is central to the series. (I'd like to say that I traveled a little forward in time, and saw the end of this season, but ... you wouldn't believe me, would you....)

In the meantime, the missions that Dan is sucked into each week are ok, but I find the impact on Dan's life in 2007, and his relationship with Livia, far more interesting. The plot construct of Dan missing in 2007 for the amount of time he is in the past can't help but have interesting, provocative consequences for the 2007 action.

Most time travel stories don't go this route, and instead have the time traveler returning exactly to the time - and place - from which he or she left. That's what I did in my Loose Ends short story series, and in The Plot to Save Socrates. Of course, in those and like stories, the traveler initiates the travel, and can to some extent specify arrival times. This is unlike Dan, who gets yanked into the past with no warning, other than a headache.

One other touch I very much enjoyed in tonight's show. Dan contacts a scientist in 2007 who is an expert in tachyons - hypothetical faster-than-light particles which could play a role in building a time-travel machine, were such a device possible. Dan speaks to the scientist in 2007 ... and the scientist unexpectedly calls Dan back ... in the past, in 1998 ....

Such touches are the spice of time travel tales - and this one is likely the beginning of an important new thread - bring 'em on!

More details on "Loose Ends" and The Plot to Save Socrates

Reviews of other Journeyman episodes: 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 5 ... 6 ... 7 ... 8 ... 9. Dan Unravels His Present ... 10. Jack's In! ... 11. Livia's Beau//Save the Newspaper, Save the World ... 12. The Perfect Time Travel Story ... Lucky 13


8-minute podcast analysis of Journeyman

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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