Syfy greenlights new pilot ""Timegate SG1""

A Time Tunnel?





I won't be watching. I am resolved to never start watching any new shows put out by SyFy due to the high probability of a premature cancellation. I will only continue watching the ones in my signature.

 

FTFY.

 

If it has a time traveling Delorean in it then I will watch

 

source

Jack Bender To Helm Syfy’s ‘Rewind’ & Other Pilot Director Hires

this gets specific compared to the info in the past. Now we know it is a nuclear device and NYC.
Sort of a Source Code. I can see after the pilot this turning into Source Code the TV series.

 

Which isn't exactly an improvement, is it?

I have a feeling this is a case of, "the more we know, the more it sucks."

 

maybe Erica Durance she's from canada.

 

Too late for Durance - she's already in some schlocky sounding summer replacement doctor show (with Michael Shanks).

Knowing Skiffy, the actors will suck, especially the younger ones. They can only afford good actors in the 50-and-over age range (due to the lack of demand for their wrinkly asses). Maybe they should just have casts made up entirely of AARP members.

 

Heads up, Rewind will air tonight on Syfy @ 9pmEST. No encores are on the schedule, so, this is your only (known) chance to see it.

 

Isn't it considered badform to resurrect dead threads? esp as it 18months old. I thought it was considered best to start a new thread.

 

Thanks for the alert! And the reminder . . . I had completely forgotten about this.

 

I hadn't realized it's been 18 months since I first posted it. I just entered Rewind into the search box.
But if a mod wants to split any new responses off into a separate thred, feel free.

 

I completely forgot this existed. Is it a movie or a new series? It just says premier event on the Syfy site.

 

Sound more like:

Seven Days - The Next Generation

Edited to add: Sorry, replied before reading the thread. Looks like I was beaten to the punch by A LOT of people. But yeah, not really original idea here, is it?

 

It's a 2 hr pilot movie. That didn't go to series, so this is all there is.

 

Just watched this. Actually wasn't that bad if you ignored all the "don't mess with the time stream" messing with the time stream stuff.

So, did the lead used to stunt double for Nathan Fillion? They look like they could be brothers.

 

I can see why Rewind didn't go to series. Some bits were interesting, like the support crew and their quirks, but a lot of it just didn't work very well. The driving premise was too much like Seven Days, and the specific threat to New York was too much like Heroes. I never felt there was a convincing explanation for why Roarke blew up New York just to get someone to go back in time and save his wife. Okay, they said he was insane, which is a handy excuse for things that don't happen for good reasons, but if he were actually mentally ill, that would've impaired him sufficiently that I doubt he'd ever have been granted access to the means and resources to build a nuclear weapon.

Also, why was there no effort to evacuate the city? Sure, it would've been impossible to clear out all of Manhattan in less than a day, probably, but at least they could've gotten some people down into the subways, which might've saved some of them, maybe.

There were a couple of contradictions, too. Like, the lead character is smarter than he looks and able to talk enough science to impress the scientist lady, but he doesn't recognize the obvious notes about wormholes in Roarke's journals. And back in 1929, if they can't hear a train whistle unless they're at least 9 miles from their destination, how come there's subsequently a trainyard just a couple of blocks' walk from their destination?

While some of the characters had some interesting nuances, a number of them were also a bit annoying. The scientist lady was too one-note hostile and condescending for a while, the sidekick was always doing the hero's emotional/backstory exposition for him, Matthew Bennett's military guy was too much a stock mean military guy, etc. And I didn't find the lead actors all that appealing, especially not the guy playing Knox, who was somewhat annoying. (The actress playing his estranged wife/girlfriend/whatever was lovely, though.)

Conceptually, they made a decent effort with the time-travel stuff, but I felt they had too much of a technological edge in their favor, especially that Panopticon thing, a magic machine that tells them the effects of their interventions so there's no real suspense or need for individual judgment. It's not a good idea to give your heroes too many advantages. And the actual "window" didn't quite work for me. The effect was rather unimpressive, and I found it hard to believe people could just stand around unprotected that close to the most powerful particle-accelerator stream in history (or that such a stream would just be a bunch of languidly flowing blue dots rather than searingly intense particle radiation at nearly the speed of light).

And I'm not sure how they could've sustained this as a series. How do you do a time-travel show where the heroes are trying to avoid interacting with the past as much as possible, where they're mainly brainstorming with their team in the present and treating history as just a problem to be gamed? It's too detached. And would there have been a different change every week? From the initial descriptions, I got the impression that it would be more an arc-driven thing where the whole season would be about making incremental changes to bring about a single final result. Which would've been more interesting than the Seven Days rehash they seemed to be going with instead.

So I can't disagree with the decision to pass on this pilot.

 

I assumed that, from the set up, our heroes would wind up crossing Roarke in the past, since Roarke somehow 'sensed' hero guy was ''the One'' to set things right... But that all fell flat as the ''backstep'' veered towards saving his wife, in order to erase Roarke's motives for mass murder and destruction. Since Roarke wasn't involved in the program, and only gained knowledge of it through reports that he shouldn't have had, his reasons for doing this makes no sense. He had no assurance that the steps taken to stop him would even extend as far back as to save his wife.

While the cliffhanger ending was provocative, I agree, the premise as presented here was just too limiting. Mean Military Man obviously, was operating with info the project leaders didn't have. I'm left wondering if perhaps he-and whatever faction that he might inevitably be involved with, were responsible for aiding Roarke in order to set up the on going reasons for tracking him thru time. Who knows?
But, it was more interesting than spending another Monday night Under the Dome.

 

The part of the premise involving the facility being protected from time changes and then having the main characters re-interface with the new continuum was ill-conceived. So, what, now there are two versions of everybody in the facility? How could they just leave the facility and take over the lives of their alternate-history selves? Also, the magic computer and the building full of Johnnies-on-the-spot were over the top.

It seems that the show's premise involved the twist of finding out what the hidden purpose of the whole facility was. Had it gone to series, I would have expected some drawn-out adventure to find out what Malcolm (Matthew Bennett) was up to, perhaps something like The Event in how the mysterious details of what's really going on are progressively uncovered, instead of just a steady stream of saving the world from disasters in the mold of Seven Days. Viewers don't necessarily like being strung along, though, especially when the payoff doesn't seem to be worth it. Maybe that had something to do with it not getting picked up. The onus would certainly have been on the show's creators to come up with something truly interesting, which was only vaguely hinted at in the pilot. Perhaps that was missing.

Still, I have to rate this one much higher than shite like The Event. It was no Source Code, though.

 

Panoptican?

Was that on purpose?

 

Missed the first 30 minutes before I remembered to record, so unless SyFy puts it up on demand or something, probably not worth me trying to jump in...