“Timeless” Sticks to Time-Honored Genre Formula

In the new NBC series “Timeless,” brilliant history professor Lucy Preston (Abigail Spencer) is recruited by the government to use her world-renowned knowledge of contemporary United States history to stop the mysterious time-terrorist Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic) from wreaking havoc in the past. His target: Preventing the Hindenburg disaster? At least for the first half, the show has you rooting for a cast of unlikely heroes who hope to ensure a historical tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 36 people. [Eventually, however, Flynn’s true motives are revealed—sort of—as he does actually intend to blow up the Hindenburg, but on its voyage back to Europe with influential historical figures, one of his targets being John D. Rockefeller Jr., a key figure in the development of the League of Nations.

Professor Preston is joined by the soldier with a soft side, Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan (Matt Lanter)—who at the first sign of danger completely disregards all protocols, beginning with the warning not to commit homicide using modern day technology—and the geeky IT guy, Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett), who understandably expresses unease, as an African American, at the thought of traveling back to 1937. The unlikely trio work well together in driving the narrative forward.

Although the show may fall for classic time-traveling clichés such as the narrative-saving principle that time travelers can’t travel slightly further back in time to fix any potential mistakes of their own, the tongue-in-cheek humor shines through. Although there are no fewer than three dick jokes dropped in the first three minutes of the pilot episode, including a snide comment by a female reporter in 1937 on the Hindenburg’s size as “compensating for something,” the humor comes into its own with Rufus’s commentary on race relations in 1937. From the uncomfortable glances of the inhabitants of 1937 New Jersey directed at Rufus while the group is searching for their prime suspect to subtle remarks about how the back of the bus was better than he expected, the character provides witty insight to emphasize how much the black experience has evolved in the United States.

“Timeless” asks the viewer to suspend disbelief throughout the episode, ignoring things like the United States government’s almost comedic inability to discover a time machine capable of “bending the space time continuum to create a time loop” or the science behind the time travel and the ramifications that the slightest impact may have on alternate futures. The biggest leap in logic occurs in the alterations of the time stream. Despite warnings against interacting with the past, as the consequences could be potentially catastrophic, our trio of heroes throw that mantra out the window the moment they step out of their time capsule.

Yet despite the monumental changes they make to the timeline, once they return to the present day, they seemingly find little difference in this new alternate timeline, other than some convenient plot twist in one of the characters’ main storylines, thus propelling them to continue the saga in the next week’s installment: Lincoln’s assassination. Overall the show does not change the formula of the time travel genre, but it does succeed at not taking itself too seriously when considering interesting historical what ifs coupled with snarky comedy.