Just finished watching the first episode and I liked it and hope the series goes well, but mostly because I'm a sucker for time-travel stories and this series seems like one on the track of the kind I like. (As opposed to Dr. Who. Who is fighting some crazy aliens from the future or something and is an immortal alien or something himself rather than a brilliant human being? Yeah, whatever.)
Have you checked out the early years of the classic
Doctor Who from the '60s? They didn't actually establish he was an alien for several years -- he was from another planet in the far future, but he was sometimes referred to as human, suggesting it was a human colony world -- and the stories alternated between straight-up historical adventures in Earth's past and science fiction stories in outer space. Although the production values were very low-budget and stagey and a lot of the episodes are missing.
and white guy.... Wasn't moved one way or the other because he was.... hungover?
Yeah, so far Wyatt seems a bit too stoic and withdrawn to seem like the best use of Matt Lanter's talents. I mean, this is the one guy who's ever played prequel-era Anakin Skywalker in a way that made the character interesting and likeable. He's capable of better than this.
Since all of the past has happened why haven't his changes taken place yet? If his changes impact only a "separate timeline" and doesn't impact the one the characters are presently in then why try and catch him? He's not making any changes that would impact you.
The ending made it clear that the changes
did affect the world they were in, in pretty major ways. When the travelers got back, they were the only ones who remembered the original history. So it's
Back to the Future time-travel logic.
And yes, that does raise the question of why the changes weren't instantaneous.
And while it's important to know about these things from the past I hope the past racism and feminism issues don't become a recurring theme. (Yes, the episode didn't touch on sexism issues but it will have to eventually.) Yeah, these things happened and we need to know about them but I suspect the everyone alive today knows they happened and the overwhelming majority knows how terrible it was.
If that were so, we wouldn't have an overtly white-supremacist presidential candidate polling at over 40 percent. Such reminders are more important now than they've been in a long time.
And I must say, I find it pretty bizarre to hear a poster who calls himself "Trekker" say he doesn't want social commentary in his science fiction.
The costuming and look of the past looked good for TV CGI. costuming and location shooting and such, but also had a "quality" to it. But with budget constraints this is likely to fall under "they're doing what they can with the money and time they have" umbrella like with the dodgy effects we sometimes seen in "Supergirl" and even "The Walking Dead."
Even those "dodgy" effects are enormously better than what we had just ten years ago or even five years ago, let alone when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Audiences today are so spoiled and entitled about VFX, and I have no sympathy for that at all.
It was interesting to see the contemporary cop questioning the semi-automatic pistol from the future but he didn't see the thumbdrive voice-recorder thing the black guy had?
Rufus. His name is Rufus. The historian is Lucy, the soldier is Wyatt.
And at least the cop recognized what the gun was. The recorder was probably too strange for him to identify as anything other than some kind of jewelry.
I liked the past journalist woman noticing the LCD on the bomb.
LED, actually, but yeah, a digital display would stand out for someone in the '30s. They didn't even have
nixie tubes yet.
The woman didn't seem too concerned with how even with the Hindenburg blowing up that night that it'd still make monumental changes since the same people wouldn't die and she points out a number of important people who were going to be on the ship during the return flight and how that'd have big impacts which apparently was... Her mother no longer has terminal cancer and she's now and only child?
Her concern was that those important people
would die. Flynn's plan was to delay the
Hindenburg's destruction until after the important people boarded it, so that they would be killed when they were originally spared (because it blew up before they boarded). In the altered history, everyone evacuated except the lady reporter and the one bad guy, so nobody else died in the disaster. So the historically important people who lived still lived, and the people whose deaths were undone were presumably more ordinary people who had subtler ripple effects on history.
And there seems to be some suggestion of a "self-correction" thing with the contemporary journalist woman getting killed anyway as well as the ship blowing up. So if there's this "self-correction" aspect then they needn't do anything at all, since time is dealing with it "naturally."
Not at all. Quite a few time-travel shows are based on the premise that history can be changed, but not easily; it resists change, so that achieving a desired goal is difficult, but major change is possible if it's done in the right way, so that the whole thing isn't pointless. This show allows for easier changes to history than something like
Continuum or
12 Monkeys, but still, the self-correcting effect is clearly limited. Something similar to the original events still happened, but there were still alterations. And that means it's possible for a more major alteration to happen, even if it's not easy to achieve.
I doubt I'll get much out of the earliest episodes considering its look and budget would make "Dark Shadows" snicker.
