Spoilers Timeless: Season 1 on NBC

[Romulan_spy]

Probably it'll turn out that the space race was all some evil scheme of Rittenhouse's to conquer the world more than they already have, or something.

Well, Rittenhouse could have used the US space program to put satellites into orbit that they used for spying or communicating between members. That capability could have greatly helped Rittenhouse grow in power. So without the US space program, a major tool that Rittenhouse used to grow in power would be taken away?

 

[Mr Awe]

There were other conceptual problems. What was that nonsense about the astronauts being in danger of running out of air in just a few hours? What does a loss of communication have to do with their air supply, which would have to be sufficient to sustain them for the several days it would take to get back to Earth? And as soon as contact was restored, suddenly the whole air-loss issue was forgotten and they went ahead with the Moon walk. That was just dumb. It's like some network suit ordered them to slap on the "running out of air" lines to create more suspense and a ticking clock even though it made no damn sense whatsoever.

Rufus's line about Katherine Johnson suddenly having a movie about her in the altered timeline was a bit incongruous, given that a real movie about her and her colleagues, Hidden Figures, is coming out next month, with Taraji P. Henson as Johnson.

Agreed on all points! And, I didn't know about the upcoming movie, so thanks for the heads up!

Mr Awe

 

[Photoman15]

I'm more concerned with the authenticity of the props, costumes, etc., and some of the computer tech here was anachronistic. There was one scene where Rufus was typing code into a supposedly 1969-vintage computer using a keyboard of a type that didn't exist until the 1980s.

I was more annoyed they were loading the tapes into the IBM 3420 drives backwards AND with the "write rings" in (so they could accidentally be erased.)

 

[Scout101]

So, this show is NOT good with time being somewhat connected, huh? Isn't Flynn saving his OLDER brother (before he was conceived) about the dumbest possible thing he could do? Like "series-ending, what happened to the bad guy" bad?

According to the backstory, his mother will lose the son, move, meet someone, conceive Flynn. Doesn't saving the brother take a HUGE chunk out of the odds of his ever being born? If she doesn't lose her son, maybe she doesn't move, or decides she only wants one kid. Almost certainly won't be in the place (physically and emotionally) to meet Flynn's father and conceive him, no?

I get it, it's a cute sci-fi trope, but it's usually done within your own lifetime, i.e. you save your brother from dying when you were two years old, not before you were born. And the rationale was that he remembered his mother being sad and didn't want that. Never met the brother, can't really have any attachment there other than wondering what he would have been like.

Seems like the easiest way to tank everything he's working for; ruin your chances of ever being born, or at least change a large chunk of your circumstances so you probably aren't who/where you need to be to launch the mission in the first place. Maybe his wife will be alive now, but probably because she never meets him in the first place.

Just a dumb/casual throw-away bit in the episode, but highlighted (IMO) how little they're thinking things through on this one. Cause and effect, guys...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Killing/sterilyzing the mum/dad should always have been a secondary target they could have gone after, Terminator Style.

 

[LJones41]

So, this show is NOT good with time being somewhat connected, huh? Isn't Flynn saving his OLDER brother (before he was conceived) about the dumbest possible thing he could do? Like "series-ending, what happened to the bad guy" bad?

People do stupid things all of the time . . . especially when they allowed their emotions to get the best of them. Why is it when intelligent characters do stupid acts, people start screaming "bad writing", when so-called intelligent people have been making stupid decisions throughout the ages?

 

[Scout101]

Well, I can't blame the character since he's imaginary, so seems like blaming the writer for making him do something stupid is all I have to work with, no?

I mean, seriously. His whole goal is to intentionally alter the timeline for big reason X (hopefully that will make more sense eventually). He presumably has some idea of how it all works, and has a plan. Screwing with your own family history, before you are born, is probably about the DUMBEST thing he could possibly do. I know it'll just service the plot no matter what, but if they followed any sort of logical sense, that episode would have resulted in basically the series being wiped away and no one travelling anywhere ever. He almost certainly wouldn't exist, never steal the time ship, no one chases him, no series.

Hell, I was lightly worried when they were messing with the history of the Alamo right after one of the good guys (not Rufus, other guy, I suck at remembering his name) said he was from Texas. 150 years in the past, but still could have made enough tweaks to screw with things and maybe he wouldn't exist. Flynn sorta blew right by that, and messed with his own personal family history, only a couple years max before he was due to be born, and to a father the mother hadn't met yet. Almost certain way to ensure he's never born! Guess that's an easy way to fix all of his grievances, though: just make sure he isn't around to have anything bad happen to him in the first place!

 

[Christopher]

Hell, I was lightly worried when they were messing with the history of the Alamo right after one of the good guys (not Rufus, other guy, I suck at remembering his name) said he was from Texas. 150 years in the past, but still could have made enough tweaks to screw with things and maybe he wouldn't exist. Flynn sorta blew right by that, and messed with his own personal family history, only a couple years max before he was due to be born, and to a father the mother hadn't met yet. Almost certain way to ensure he's never born! Guess that's an easy way to fix all of his grievances, though: just make sure he isn't around to have anything bad happen to him in the first place!

As I've been saying, a lot of time-travel series go with the assumption that history is not quite so easy to change, that there's a momentum to the river of time and making small-scale changes won't automatically lead to large-scale results unless they're the right changes. We've had a lively debate in past weeks about whether that actually makes physical or probabilistic sense, but the fact is that many, many time-travel TV series have presented it as a fundamental premise -- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Continuum, 12 Monkeys, DC's Legends of Tomorrow ("Time wants to happen"), and plenty more. They've all asserted that history resists easy change, that small, localized elements can be altered but the grand flow of events is harder to push in a completely new direction. Regardless of whether you attribute it to probabilistic dynamics or some force of cosmic destiny, this makes sense from a dramatic standpoint, because you don't want the outcomes to be too random or too easy. Just in general plot-structure terms, it's a matter of characters pursuing goals -- you want it to be possible for them to achieve their goals, because the story would be pointless otherwise, but you want it to be difficult as well, so that you can get an ongoing series out of it rather than having the whole thing solved or rendered moot right off the bat.

So here, as with so many other time-travel series, it's best to assume that history has a "momentum" that isn't easy to redirect. Whether you believe that makes realistic sense or not, it's still a commonplace story conceit that exists for a logical narrative reason. Without that assumption, either history could never be changed at all and there'd be no story, or any tiny change would alter everything and time travel would be complete chaos. There has to be a practical middle ground, and the usual one is that individual changes to the details of history won't undo its broad strokes unless they're the right changes. E.g. killing Edith Keeler changes everything but killing Rodent the bum changes nothing. Or killing one creator of Skynet/preventing one source of the plague just means that Skynet comes into being/the plague begins a different way, because there are multiple forces of history converging toward the same outcome and thus changing one of them will only alter how it happens rather than whether. Timeless's use of the trope is not as clearly defined as in some other cases, but it's a concept that any experienced viewer of time-travel television series should already be well-acquainted with.

 

[Mr Awe]

So, this show is NOT good with time being somewhat connected, huh? Isn't Flynn saving his OLDER brother (before he was conceived) about the dumbest possible thing he could do? Like "series-ending, what happened to the bad guy" bad?

According to the backstory, his mother will lose the son, move, meet someone, conceive Flynn. Doesn't saving the brother take a HUGE chunk out of the odds of his ever being born? If she doesn't lose her son, maybe she doesn't move, or decides she only wants one kid. Almost certainly won't be in the place (physically and emotionally) to meet Flynn's father and conceive him, no?

I wondered about this too. I'd say it's virtually impossible that Flynn would be born after this. It doesn't take much of change to make it so that the one Flynn sperm doesn't fertilize the one Flynn egg, and Flynn is never born. And, this would be a huge change to the specific environment that produced Flynn.

One thing I wondered about is how we see that changes in the past don't affect the time travelers. They remember the old history. If Flynn made a change that prevented him being born, would he still exist because he was back in the past when the change was made? At least by the rules of the show? Or, would he vanish on the spot or when he returned to the present?

If he continued to exist, that would actually give him a great form of protection. Rittenhouse wouldn't even be aware of Flynn's existence! The ultimate witness protection program!

Mr Awe

 

[Mr Awe]

So here, as with so many other time-travel series, it's best to assume that history has a "momentum" that isn't easy to redirect.

I can totally buy what you're saying from a story telling perspective and can easily live with that for the sake of a good story. But, I think the idea making it appear like you don't exist (assume he'd continue to exist) would be a great protection!

Mr Awe

 

[Scout101]

Yeah, could be a good way around things, I guess, but they haven't been clear on that point yet.

And Christopher, we're back to the big/small argument. Yes, having the brother alive likely changes nothing in the big scale. On the more macro scale, though, this is a huge change to his personal family dynamic, and WAY too big a risk to take. He said his mother is emotionally different after this event, moves overseas where she meets his father, etc. Likely makes little to no difference if that sequence doesn't happen, historically, but means EVERYTHING to whether Flynn himself is ever born, no? Maybe the mother only ever wanted a single child, so doesn't have him at all. Or doesn't move overseas, so doesn't meet the father. Or has a child instead of depression, so isn't out bar-hopping to meet the father, etc. History is almost certainly roughly the same, but his PERSONAL history just got a bomb dropped on it. It makes ZERO sense for him to take this risk.

I can't imagine how a writer could be thinking through this and think this was a good plot idea to drop in there. It only works in stories where he's already alive and saving the younger brother, or something along those lines. Look how well deleting the George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life turned out for the town! Or for Harry in particular. WWII still happens just fine, but sure changed the town, the Baileys, and everyone on that troop transport (plus future of all the families and anyone they interact with going forward)

 

[Christopher]

I wondered about this too. I'd say it's virtually impossible that Flynn would be born after this. It doesn't take much of change to make it so that the one Flynn sperm doesn't fertilize the one Flynn egg, and Flynn is never born. And, this would be a huge change to the specific environment that produced Flynn.

Again, though, there are certain standard conceits of time travel stories. By that logic, you could argue that every time history is changed, it prevents any of the same people from being born thereafter. And yet fiction routinely shows the same people coming into being even in radically different histories. Marty McFly was still born on June 12, 1968 (and still had the same brother and sister) even though he changed the direction of his parents' lives from 1955 onward. Spock was still born in the Mirror Universe even though Vulcan was a subject world of the Terran Empire rather than a member world of the Federation. And so forth. Realistically, yes, it's more plausible for the grand strokes of history to have a momentum than it is for the same individual combinations of gametes to be guaranteed to occur in variant histories, but fiction does routinely assume the latter, because stories are about characters and so the characters need to be the most constant parts of the story even when everything else changes around them.

One thing I wondered about is how we see that changes in the past don't affect the time travelers. They remember the old history. If Flynn made a change that prevented him being born, would he still exist because he was back in the past when the change was made? At least by the rules of the show? Or, would he vanish on the spot or when he returned to the present?

Usually time travelers are unaltered by the changes in their timelines, and so they can continue to exist after being erased from history. See Spock in "Yesteryear," for example. Or Peter Bishop in season 4 of Fringe, after a fashion.

And Christopher, we're back to the big/small argument. Yes, having the brother alive likely changes nothing in the big scale. On the more macro scale, though, this is a huge change to his personal family dynamic, and WAY too big a risk to take. He said his mother is emotionally different after this event, moves overseas where she meets his father, etc. Likely makes little to no difference if that sequence doesn't happen, historically, but means EVERYTHING to whether Flynn himself is ever born, no? Maybe the mother only ever wanted a single child, so doesn't have him at all. Or doesn't move overseas, so doesn't meet the father. Or has a child instead of depression, so isn't out bar-hopping to meet the father, etc. History is almost certainly roughly the same, but his PERSONAL history just got a bomb dropped on it. It makes ZERO sense for him to take this risk.

Again, though, it's a standard conceit of fiction that the same people usually do get born regardless of small changes. It's just part of the rules you have to suspend disbelief about along with bigger stuff like, oh, time travel actually being possible in the first place.

And you're offering a lot of "maybes," but it's just as possible to counter those with maybes in the other direction. Maybe Flynn knew for a fact that his mother wanted multiple children. Maybe he knew for a fact that she would've been required by her job to go overseas anyway. After all, he knows his own family history much better than you or I can know his history, so maybe he had reason to be confident that saving his brother wouldn't prevent his own birth. As I've been arguing all along, the problem with singling out a specific factor and insisting it's required to cause a change is that it exists in the context of countless other factors that might actually cancel out its impact. And as I said, that's the logic that makes the most narrative sense for time travel stories -- that only the right changes have a major impact, and others have no significant impact.

 

[Scout101]

Honestly, this plot point would have made more sense if it was the good guys instead of Flynn. This is the perfect way to stop him without having to kill him, kill his parents, kill him as a kid, etc. This way, they save a child, Flynn almost certainly isn't born, history saved.

First rule for the guy trying to make the change ought to be to stay as far away from anything that would affect his ability to launch his mission in the first place!

 

[Mr Awe]

And you're offering a lot of "maybes," but it's just as possible to counter those with maybes in the other direction. Maybe Flynn knew for a fact that his mother wanted multiple children. Maybe he knew for a fact that she would've been required by her job to go overseas anyway. After all, he knows his own family history much better than you or I can know his history. As I've been arguing all along, the problem with singling out a specific factor and insisting it's required to cause a change is that it exists in the context of countless other factors that might actually cancel out its impact. And as I said, that's the logic that makes the most narrative sense for time travel stories -- that only the right changes have a major impact, and others have no significant impact.

I concede your point about the requirements of telling a good story. No argument there and I agree that they need these rules to help in that regard.

But, as I've noted, it takes only a minuscule change to prevent the one Flynn sperm from fertilizing the one Flynn egg. A half-brother that doesn't die would be an atom bomb in the specific environment that created Flynn when only a tiny change would prevent him from being born.

Getting that specific sperm out of millions to fertilize the specific egg is a very touchy thing. Small changes even in the timing, position, room temperature, etc could give a different sperm the edge. And, that's even if you hold all of the big things constant, which you couldn't assume given the huge change.

So, even if he knew things you describe and everything else worked out the same (except for now he has a half-brother), I'd still say the odds of him being born would be tiny.

Mr Awe

 

[Mr Awe]

Honestly, this plot point would have made more sense if it was the good guys instead of Flynn. This is the perfect way to stop him without having to kill him, kill his parents, kill him as a kid, etc. This way, they save a child, Flynn almost certainly isn't born, history saved.

First rule for the guy trying to make the change ought to be to stay as far away from anything that would affect his ability to launch his mission in the first place!

I have to wonder if there will be ramifications for them to deal with? Or, was this just a one off and now his half brother is alive but largely unaddressed and no ongoing complications? I'm not sure which direction the series will take. I'm guessing these won't be an ongoing issue, but we'll see.

Also agree with your point that this type of plot would make sense for the good guys. Make some positive change that prevents the main villain from being born.

Mr Awe

 

[Christopher]

But, as I've noted, it takes only a minuscule change to prevent the one Flynn sperm from fertilizing the one Flynn egg. A half-brother that doesn't die would be an atom bomb in the specific environment that created Flynn when only a tiny change would prevent him from being born.

I think we all know that's objectively the case. But it's also a fact that is routinely and nigh-universally ignored by time travel stories. It's just part of the basic conceits we're being asked to suspend disbelief about. As I said, if the rule did apply in time-travel stories, then all the characters we know would cease to exist every time that history before their birth was changed. And that's unviable for a weekly TV series that has to pay its regular actors to appear every week.

After all, it's far from the most unrealistic conceit in time travel stories. Scientifically speaking, it's impossible and logically absurd to "erase" a timeline. An event can't both happen and not happen, because that's a mathematical contradiction. Theoretical physics offers only three options: One, time travel is impossible (by far the most likely option); two, all time travels would be self-consistent causal loops with a single fixed outcome (as in The Time Tunnel or the movie version of 12 Monkeys); and three, time travel would split off an altered timeline that coexisted alongside the unaltered original. In every case, the original history would still exist. The conceit of it being "erased" entirely is a physical impossibility. But it's dramatically more effective to pretend that impossibility is possible, since it raises the stakes of the story. So being a viewer of any story about time travelers "protecting history" requires suspending disbelief about an absolute impossibility right off the bat. If you can do that, then you can also suspend disbelief about the highly improbable premise of the same people being born in an altered history. It's absurd, yes, but it's a slightly lesser degree of absurdity than the idea that erasing the past is even possible.

 

[Scout101]

But the whole story this week wasn't about the half-brother, and not even the reason they went to that time (as far as we know). This was a throw-in extra plot, and should have been left out. That's all. it wasn't a conceit they needed to make, could have avoided it completely.

On the positive side, I liked that this week, they showed more of the logistics. They did research in the future, they showed them working the 'evil plan' before the good guys got there, etc. The extra bits were a nice touch; in the previous ones, they've just dropped the good guys in after the bad guys have been there plotting a while, etc. this way flowed much better.

 

[Christopher]

But the whole story this week wasn't about the half-brother, and not even the reason they went to that time (as far as we know). This was a throw-in extra plot, and should have been left out. That's all. it wasn't a conceit they needed to make, could have avoided it completely.

Not at all. Whatever the nitpicks about its causal logic, it was important from a character perspective. Clearly we're meant to be learning that Garcia Flynn is not the simplistic villain we thought, that his motives are personal and empathetic, that in his own mind he believes he's doing a good thing. We learned in the Watergate episode that he's trying to destroy Rittenhouse because they killed his wife and child, so we know he's a man who will tear reality apart to save the people he loves. This episode was, in part, about showing us Flynn's side of the struggle, walking a mile (or a few decades) in his shoes, so it makes sense that he'd have a sympathetic motivation that would reveal more about who he is as a person. That's a kind of story I find interesting, flipping the script and turning the antagonist into the protagonist.

This is why it's usually pointless to critique the technicalities of time travel stories. As I said, time travel is almost certainly impossible. So time travel stories are not about technicalities. They're about characters and emotions. They're driven by the universal wish-fulfillment fantasy of wanting to go back and undo our mistakes and regrets, or just to wonder how things might have gone differently if such-and-such hadn't happened. So just about any time travel story is ultimately going to be a story about people and their relationships and fears and hopes, or about satisfying our curiosity regarding who they would've been and what they would've done if their circumstances had been different. And all the physics and technology and causal logic are merely in service to those character-driven and emotion-driven goals, so they work in whatever way is necessary to advance those goals.

 

[JD]

I think it's been pretty clear from the start that this isn't exactly a "smart" sci-fi show, and that's it's just using the time travel as a way to throw the characters in fun historical with the Rittenhouse/Flynn stuff just there to give them a reason to time travel. So to me it's really kind silly to complain about the science or logistics of the time travel, when that is obviously not something the show is interested in.

 

[Christopher]

I think it's been pretty clear from the start that this isn't exactly a "smart" sci-fi show, and that's it's just using the time travel as a way to throw the characters in fun historical with the Rittenhouse/Flynn stuff just there to give them a reason to time travel. So to me it's really kind silly to complain about the science or logistics of the time travel, when that is obviously not something the show is interested in.

Exactly. I mean, the producers have said their main inspiration was Voyagers!, which is one of the dumbest time-travel shows ever made. (It was about a time-traveler named Phineas Bogg -- yes, really -- and a teenage boy who traveled with him, and Bogg had a pocketwatch that alerted him when history was threatening to go off course from how it was "supposed" to turn out, so he and the kid would go to major historical events and make sure they turned out "right," as a way of teaching history to young viewers. It was never explained why these events were in danger of not happening the "right" way, or what determined what the "right" way even was, so the whole thing made no damn sense to me even though I was still more or less in its target demographic at the time.)