Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Timeless Review: “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln”

Save Abe
(This review contains minor spoilers!)

          After a good but shaky start last week, this week’s episode of Timeless improved in almost every way, adding more humour, action, and mystery to the already good plot.

          We pick up directly where we left off last week, with the Hindenburg surviving an extra day causing Lucy’s sister to be erased from the timeline and her mother’s lung cancer to be cured. Before she has time to comprehend this, she’s called back to the base to travel back to the date Abe Lincoln was killed on to track down and stop the time terrorist once and for all.

          The best part of this episode is that the team dynamic between our 3 leads is much, much better over what it was in the pilot. Despite this only being their second mission, they play off each other much better than they did before. Lucy’s still the best character (for specific reasons I’ll get into later), but it’s nice that the other two don’t feel superfluous anymore.

          It’s also great that the show is playing up the humour more after the mostly sterile premiere. The comment about needing to get paperweights for the office got a big laugh out of everyone in the room, and I also really liked some of the smaller quips littered throughout the episode. It was by all means better than the pilot’s feeble attempts at getting a laugh.

          The one thing that does still bother me though is how everyone is so relaxed about changing the past. Last week it could be forgiven because of how our cool dude soldier guy was drunk the whole time and is still getting over the loss of his wife, but this time nearly everyone except Lucy is just like “eh, so you changed a few things, big deal”. It’s already been made clear that the tiniest of changes could have disastrous consequences for the timeline! It seems extremely out of character for this top secret government project to be so lax about these things.

          We also got a few extra layers to the ongoing mystery of who this time terrorist is and what exactly he wants. Through a second encounter with Lucy, it seems he’s trying to save America from some top secret organization who seem to be in cahoots with the guy who came up with the idea for the time machine, and Lucy supposedly will help him at some point. I like that they’re doing a lot of world building ahead of time, and it really begs the question: just when is this guy from? If Lucy helps him, it’s entirely possible he’s from another point in time entirely and he uses her time machine to go back and steal the one he’s currently using. Maybe I’m looking into it too much, but I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

All in all, a real step up from the premiere, aside from the slightly unbelievable response to the timeline changing. Timeless continued to plant seeds of intrigue and world building, and I hope the payoff is just as good.

FINAL SCORE
8/10

Great

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