One small step forwards, one giant
leap backwards
(This review contains
spoilers!)
The moon landing was teased in the
pilot for Timeless, making me feel that they were saving it for some sort of
endgame episode, or at least one that would create a major shakeup in the
status quo. Instead, the moon landing was utilized as, once again, an episode
that only exists to create new drama for the characters and set up things for
later. Nothing of note really happened this week, which is especially
disappointing to see after two stellar episodes back to back.
The story is the same one we’ve seen
before: Flynn has travelled back in time to mess with the moon landing, and our
heroes have to go stop him. On their way, they meet up with a hero of history,
who helps them fix up the timeline so there are no real significant changes,
just minor ones. Then the episode ends as the characters reminisce about what
just happened. We’ve seen this episode before, and as this show is going, I’m
almost certain we’ll see it again.
This week, Flynn and the professor who
I’m sure has a name but I can’t remember it travel back to the moon landing, and
Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus give chase. Surprisingly, Lucy is the best part of the
episode this week, as she gives a lot of social commentary on what it was like
being a woman in the late 60’s. In fact, a lot of this episode is a very
pro-woman message, with the major side character of the week being a long
unsung female hero of NASA. Aside from the always excellent set and costume
design, the acknowledgement of the important roles women played in the moon
landing was easily the best part of the episode, and it was handled perfectly.
The rest of the episode, on the other
hand…wasn’t. A lot of this week was spent with Flynn, as he met his mother
before he was born. In recent weeks, Flynn has been an enormous problem for Timeless for two specific reasons. The first,
and more minor of the two, ties into last week’s episode. Flynn has maintained
that he’s only able to do this because Lucy gave him her journal at some point.
Well, if all went according to plan last week and they remained trapped in the
18th century, Lucy would never be able to give him her journal,
resulting in him never stealing the time machine and the space-time continuum
as we know it being thrown in a blender. A minor nitpick, maybe, but it really
shows that not much thought is being put into the long-term writing here.
The second and far more significant
problem with Flynn is how the show is trying to treat him as a morally gray and
even sympathetic villain. Now that’s all fine and dandy, and I feel the actor
is doing a great job of portraying him. The problem is that you can’t feel sympathetic
for this guy when the episode opens with him killing two innocent bystanders. What!? With the emotional crux of the
episode focusing on the villain and his interactions with him mother, you can’t
start us off seeing him drop bodies like nobody’s business! That immediately
ruins any and all sympathy we may have for him, because as soon as the villain
of the story kills someone, they immediately get a black mark on them that’s
hard to remove. Think back to Scar from The Lion King. What if, after killing
Mufasa, we had a lengthy scene that tried to make us feel sympathetic for Scar
as he struggles being king? It wouldn’t work, because there was no way we would
feel for this guy after we watched him commit a murder. It’s the same story
here.
The rest of the episode doesn’t really
give me much to talk about. It’s a lot of talking and waiting for a payoff that
never really comes. The real meat of the episode lies in the last fifteen
minutes or so. In a battle with the professor, Rufus kills one of the NASA
workers, leaving him wondering what these missions is doing to his psyche.
Later on, we get the reveal that Flynn saved his half-brother from dying due to
a bee sting allergy. I liked the reveal that Flynn was hanging out with his
mother, but why couldn’t the kid just be a younger version of him? That’d be
much more interesting than them pulling the “oh yeah he had a dead brother”
trick. I guess it’s because of the rule that you can’t visit a point in time
where they already exist, but they’ve already stretched that and other rules
enough as it is. It was a fine reveal for what it was, but it could’ve been
done far better.
I really, really want to love this
show. I want to look forward to watching it every week like I do the other
shows I review on here. But the lousy characterization and boring, repetitive
plots are keeping me from enjoying it the way I enjoy Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D or
a really good anime. The set design continues to be stellar and the pro-female
message kept this episode from being the absolute bottom of the barrel, but for
an episode that was teased in the pilot I expected far better.
FINAL SCORE
4/10
Mediocre
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