‘Timeless’ Premiere: What Works, What Needs Work

If you’ve watched anything on NBC over the last three months, you’ve no doubt seen numerous ads for Timeless, the network’s new time-travel drama with the Heroes-esque tagline: “Protect the past. Save the future.” But should Timeless have a future on your DVR? Let’s talk about the series premiere.

What Works:
It’s ambitious. It’s a time travel serial that mixes historical events with multiple timelines, which means dabbling with those real historical events will likely create a new alternate American history the writers can play with. For example: In the premiere, a rogue government agent steals a time machine and saves the Hindenburg so he can load it up with dignitaries and blow it up on its way back across the Atlantic. This leads to our trio of thrown together protagonists following him back in an older, prototype time machine in an attempt to stop him from completely altering history.

The combination of villainous acts and some foolhardy heroics end up saving 35 of the 36 who were supposed to die, resulting in an alternate timeline where our lead Lucy Preston is engaged (not so in the original timeline) with a healthy mom (extremely ill) and no sister (cool younger sister with a podcast before she goes back in time). We only have the very end of the episode following their return, so we don’t get a chance to find out what else has changed.

It also touches on the morality of playing with time travel (if you know when someone is supposed to die, could you resist the temptation to save them?) and the entire concept of free will versus fate. Executive producer Eric Kripke dabbled with some time travel on Supernatural, but this is a much larger beast.

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews ‘Timeless’

The three leads are all very solid. Abigail Spencer (Rectify) achieves her typical greatness as Lucy, a history professor who I assume we’re going to find out is an expert in every era of America’s past. Malcolm Barrett (Better Off Ted) is Rufus, a coder for the company that built the time machine who serves as the pilot, brings some comic relief but also the serious reminder that there aren’t many periods in American history where a black man can travel and not be in danger. (In the pilot alone, Rufus is forced to ride in the back of the bus, pressured to leave a bar, and accosted and nearly beaten by 1937 police officers.) Matt Lanter (90210) rounds out the group as Wyatt Logan, a Delta Force master sergeant widower who provides the muscle (and bad decision-making we’ll touch on below) for the expedition. There’s enough chemistry among the trio to power this operation.

What Needs Work:
Time travel stories are incredibly difficult to pull off, because the stakes always become very malleable when you can just go back and change things again. Rufus offers a nonsensical explanation for why they can’t double-back to places they’ve always been, saying that if you run into another version of your self the result is horrible. What’s stopping the government from sending three different people who they know won’t be in that location back in time to stop the bad guys before they even steal the time machine in the first place? I’m all for some good, old-fashioned suspension of disbelief, but Timeless is going to take the maximum amount.

This leads to the other problem with time travel shows: You better keep your rules straight or things become increasingly hard to follow for the audience. Are they going to alter the current timeline every single time they return from a trip? Most of the time? At what point do one or all of the three main characters erase themselves, or eliminate Connor Mason, the man whose company built the time machine in the first place?

They’ve also implied that Lucy has already time-traveled and written a journal about it that Garcia Flynn, our antagonist, has procured and is using in his mission. I’m hoping Timeless‘s writers have the basics sketched out, but there are going to be a lot of threads to keep straight while also spinning plates at the same time.

And a word on Wyatt’s horrible, no-good time traveling: It’s understandable that he’d be the worst of the group, as the only one who wasn’t an historian or working on the project, but he is so bad at it. He attempts to save a plucky reporter who’s supposed to die in the crash because she reminds him of his dead wife, even though the explicitly stated Prime Directive of time travel is leave things as you found them so as not to alter history. Wyatt also brings back a modern pistol with a silencer on it instead of an older gun and then murders one of Flynn’s men in cold blood, hiding the body so poorly that the police immediately find it when they show up. Our Delta Force operative has a lot of room for improvement in round two.

Our Burning Questions
How bad is the bad guy? When Homeland Security — apparently the government group responsible for cleaning up time travel mishaps — is briefing Lucy and Wyatt on Flynn, they mention that he killed his family. When Lucy and Flynn have a climatic confrontation next to the wreckage of the Hindenburg, the look on the latter’s face when that accusation is thrown at him implies there is more to the story. Also, what’s up with Mason and Rufus? Mason, the man behind the time machine, insists Rufus be the pilot for the recovery operation, stating that “we both know it has to be you.” Then he has Rufus record his two other companions on the way. This seems like an unnecessary level of subterfuge, but we’ll see.

Finally, will our leads ever forget the correct timeline? When they return from 1937 New Jersey, everyone involved with the project that didn’t go back in time has no recollection of the original Hindenburg story and accepts the altered history as fact. Was that the point of Lucy’s journal that Flynn acquired at some point, to attempt to keep things in order?

Okay, that’s our take — now we want to hear from you. Will you make more time for Timeless next week? Take our poll!

Timeless airs Monday nights at 10 p.m. on NBC.