Syfy greenlights new pilot ""Timegate SG1""

Was that David Cronenberg?

 

So this is a pilot that was not picked up?

 

That's what IMDB says.

 

Yeah, it just wasn't well-justified.

My initial expectation was that Roarke was setting off the nuke in order to generate the necessary energy to open a wormhole to the past, that that was the only way to do it. Although that wouldn't have explained why he did it in Manhattan or why there was a countdown timer.

Anyway, I'm just getting sick of seeing New York City or analogues thereof getting blown up or destroyed. Okay, I get it, our society is still processing 9/11, but this year in particular it seems to have reached a critical mass of crassness and excess, like it's more about trying to top previous disaster movies than about dealing with a societal trauma. I've seen NYC destroyed enough now. It's time to move on to another trope.

What I found completely unbelievable was that they'd just leave the window unguarded. Even if they'd saved the world, they must've known the window was still active and posed a risk to the timeline, and thus it would've been under 24/7 guard. So that ending was pretty lame.

I wondered that too. Presumably in the altered timeline, Knox would never have been arrested and recruited into Project Tik-Tok Quantum Backstep Leap in the first place, so there should be another one of him somewhere else altogether.

Yeah, Keisha Castle-Hughes's character Priya was fun, but too much an example of the TV trope of the single genius character who knows everything and fills the role that a whole team of researchers would be needed to fill in reality. I could buy her being an expert in the minutiae of one period of history, but not all of them.

Speaking of history, the time rift here had the same conceptual problems as a lot of random/accidental/natural time rifts in fiction. How come the rifts only open to points in recorded human history, when that's like 0.0002% of the planet's existence? How come they're only to the past and not the future? More generally, how come they only open at the Earth's surface instead of up in the sky or underground? Most of all, how do they even track the Earth as it moves through space? Where we are right now would've been empty space 7 minutes ago, let alone 70 or 7,000 years. Primeval did a good job of averting most of these cliches except the last one, and it was never explained why the present-day anomalies only seemed to open up in England and later Vancouver. Terra Nova also averted the first trope. But Rewind pretty much embraced all the cliches without question.

 

^Technically, the window they used was underground. It just conveniently opened up on a basement.

 

This sounds lame.

 

There's a Cylon wandering around suspiciously with a steel brief case.

How is that not Hilarious?

It's significantly better than Morlocks.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014296/

But I liked the failed Time Tunnel pilot better because they're fighting Nazis.

 

Is the failed Time Tunnel remake pilot up on the internet ?(like the original unaired "Lost In Space" remake pilot.) That sounds like it would be interesting to take a look at.

 

It used to be online.

Look in the usual places.

Seriously, Star Gate, half the episodes were about a 38 minute long ticking clock.

The resolution about this ticking clock?

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFrick.

besides, in all fairness, you don't take the hot engineer, you take the hot historian.

And time travelling to anywhere before 1980, you don't take minorities and you don't take women. The racism and oppression makes them a liability to the mission, because you're facing down a ticking clock but inevitably you have to decide what's more important, saving the world or rescuing your team-mate from a klan bonfire.

 

^Actually "minorities" played a bigger role in a lot of history than the media have generally acknowledged. For instance, there were a lot of black cowboys in the American West. And a number of black people in history have achieved great things despite living in a racist society, such as George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois. Alexandre Dumas's father Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was biracial, the son of a French nobleman and a black slave, yet he became a general-in-chief in the French army, as did the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture.

 

Obviously.

But the more epidemic factor to be weary of is drunk power mad cops randomly beating a time traveller to death because he's an uppity n#### that should know better.

This aired recently...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2163315/

African American Jazz musicians trying to make it big in 1920s Britain.

It's interesting watching them deal with the strict immigration policies more so than the racism, but that's there too.

 

In five parts on youtube.

Here's part one, which will help you find the other four:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KiXw2VVaT4

 

Aside from the racial and gender questions, there are other issues that time-travel shows rarely deal with and that Rewind would probably have skirted. What about language? If the time windows can open anywhere on Earth, then statistically speaking, the ones that open on land are most likely to open in Asia, then Africa, then North America, then South America, then Antarctica, then Europe. And North America's only been Anglophone for the past four centuries or so. Plus, go back far enough, and nobody in the past will understand Modern English. So in principle, most of the places they'd go to would not be English-speaking lands.

Although I suspect the show would probably have ignored that and kept the windows focused mainly on the Western world in relatively recent history.

 

But they did say that they had been waiting months since New York was destroyed for a usable window into America this century to save the day.

I liked the mention of the distortion field around the effect that protects their "lives" from being rewritten and allows them to remember alternate pasts.

But the General who left the protection of the distortion field was under the belief that only his memories were going to be rewritten and it would be basically the same meat chassis as before strutting about. Death of personality is death.

If you're inside the distortion field then surely if the world was so different that your counterpart in the new timeline never worked for the rewind project then, they're a doppleganger outside the field wondering why you are trying to steal your/their life after you eventually emerge?

So it's suicide to be wittingly walk outside the distortion field, because a different version of you, is not you, and it's exile to foreign territory to stay inside the distortion field when the universe is rewritten...

Do they inadvertently destroy the project rewind base and support team indigenous to any new timeline whensoever they crash on top of themselves? but what about a slightly different timeline where the project rewind was built in a different location? Would every project rewind then be also protected by their own distortion field and be dragged along into each new universe thereafter?

 

I only found out about this pilot last night and watched it today. It was kind of low-budget but I actually liked it and would have stuck around to see how it progressed if it were picked up. Lousy title though.

I liked Jennifer Ferrin. Looks like I've seen her in a number of things. It might have been nice to have Keisha Castle-Hughes in the prominent role, but then again, you have the ethnicity issue that Guy brought up.

When they first crossed over into the past, it looked like they used the white-out effect from the Time Tunnel remake. Here it is.

Saving Hope is actually a pretty good show.

When this issue was brought up in regards to Back to the Future, someone came up with a pretty good explanation... Maybe gravity has a subtle effect on time travelling people/objects/windows and keeps them in place on the Earth's surface. Works for me.

 

And it causes socks to disappear and reappear from the washing to balance the shifting amount of mass and energy through time.