The time travel show about a big blue ball shaped craft that can move back in time 7 days. Used to watch this show every week when it was on TV and for many years I have wanted to own a copy of the whole series but there was none to be had but found out only last year about this being available so am watching it all over again. The pilot episode they do a pretty ballsy move for the day and have an attack happen on the Whitehouse. This don't forget is long before we had movies like White House Down or Olympus Has Fallen, and this show was before the twin tower attacks too so I thought it kind of gutsy that they went in for the kill so to speak like that. I never thought much about the attack in the pilot episode when it was on TV but now my view is somewhat different with the hindsight of recent history. Having said that this is a goofy scifi show about time travel which is its main plot device and I've watched the first 6 episodes so far so am getting back into the groove with this show. To me I find myself still having fun with it. Also interesting to know that two of the main lead actors could not stand each other off set and yet unlike today they kept filming and didn't can the show, but I don't know what the full story is about them behind the scenes and I never really looked into it. Anyway yeah so far it's been a fun little ride down memory lane. I tried watching another old show with Knight Rider but I really just gave up after season 1. I couldn't continue, and that was one of those shows I loved growing up as a teenager that I loved but now I just can't watch it. Anyway let's discuss.
I vaguely remember the show, but I do remember that attack and didn't think anything of it either. However it reminds me that DS9 ended in 1999 and boy did my view of the show changed. I think it's even better now because it's insanely relatable. All I remember of the show is the cool ball time machine. Do they explain why you can't just go back in time 7 days and go back in time 7 more days and so on and so on?
Yep they do. 7 days is the limit because of the size of the reactor in the sphere, and its fuel source which is limited but seems to recharge over time. I loved the couple of times Frank landed in the middle of a park and then hops out saying it was a movie effect. They never did show how the retrieve the sphere.
Here's something I always wondered. Everytime Frank goes back in time it is rewriting history. So shouldn't the team in the building always be sending the sphere back for "their first time"?
More importantly, when Frank goes back in time, what happens to the version of him that's already there?
I had a lot of conceptual and credibility issues with Seven Days and found it rather mediocre, so I watched it for a while and then lost interest. The coolest thing about it was that it featured Norman Lloyd, an actor with an extraordinary career going back to Orson Welles's Mercury Theater and a long collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. The main thing that bugged me about it was just how routine it was to have cataclysms on a national scale. They happened pretty much every week in order to require the timeship to be authorized to go back. If such massive attacks and disasters were that commonplace, how did the United States ever survive before there was a time machine? And if they weren't commonplace before, why did they suddenly start happening all the time once the means to stop them was invented? A lot of individual time-travel stories have this issue -- the coincidence that a totally catastrophic event that kills most or all of the heroes and destroys everything they hold dear just happens to occur in the presence of a time warp or something that allows the heroes to reverse the disaster, e.g. in TNG: "Cause and Effect" or DS9: "Visionary" -- but Seven Days built the whole series around that contrivance.
The other version of Frank would vanish. Same for the sphere because once he arrives the one in the hangar also vanishes so that's another hint a backstep has occurred.
First of all, shouldn't the mods move this thread to the SF/F forum? Secondly, now that this show is FINALLY available on DVD, it has reaffirmed my belief in a benevolent universe! This show was tied with Star Trek: Deep Space 9 for being my absolute favorite show in high school. Even the theme song kicked so much ass, especially with the way that they plugged the most vital exposition from the pilot into the title sequence. "You are about to be let in on the most highly classified data America holds." "We have a device that can send one human being back in time 7 days...." My favorite episode is the 2nd season premiere where the nuclear football goes missing and Parker & Olga have to run around Washington D.C. trying to find it. I also really enjoyed the Season 3 episode where Parker switches bodies with the Pope. "Could Parker have told the Pope about Backstep?" "That's treason! The President doesn't know about Backstep!" I would like to point out that 9/11 only happened a few months after the show was canceled. You see, UPN!? You see what happens to America when we don't have Project Backstep to protect us?! What were you thinking!? Still, the crashing a cessna with a fertilizer bomb into the White House in the 7 Days pilot isn't nearly as spooky as the Lone Gunmen pilot where they narrowly avert a jumbo jet crashing into the World Trade Center (originally aired March 4, 2001). Spoiler: episode 3x14 "Revelation" Probably has something to do with the Devil. No, seriously, there was a Season 3 episode where Robert Picardo plays a character who is kinda implied to be literally Satan. I suppose that there is a level of suspension of disbelief required to swallow the premise of the show. But the characters are so fun, I think it's totally worth it!
And don't forget two of the leads hated each other's guts. Like that's never happened before on other shows but they never played up on it. But as someone mentioned later in the series you never see them much in the same scenes.
Ok, I am curious now - who were the two cast members who did not get along and how well know was that when the showed aired? I watched the show in the beginning and gave up on it quickly. The repetitive nature of the premise and the huge holes in their time travel logic. Most of all the lead character was very unlikable.
I am near the end of season 2 now and still somehow enjoying it. The two actors that hated each others guns were Johnathan Lapaglia and Justina Vail. I don't know the full story but by the third season they didn't film scenes together so whatever it was it must have been a doozy. I just wanted to add this. I just realized they are all world killers. The world that Frank leaves every time he backsteps ceases to exist so for better or worse everyone on the planet dies at that point until he arrives back 7 days in the past. How's that for fun?
Which doesn't make any sense I can figure, further more, if they both do vanish, why does Frank have to call in and tell them he's Backstepped? Wouldn't the dead giveaway be both Frank and the sphere vanishing?
IIRC, there was an episode where the lead was worried that, since each time he jumps he ends up seven days older than he should be according to the calendar, this would eventually accumulate so that he'd be essentially aging faster than everyone else. When showing his calculations to others, he put the number of backsteps per year as something really low, like 8 or something. The other characters comment that that's a ridiculously high number and he replies along the lines of "assume it's a hectic year." I guess the idea was that the episodes were actually much more spaced out, chronologically, than their actual airdates.
I think I recall aliens being the reason humans have the tech. I also believe their is a Art Bell episode. I do recall being a big fan of the entire cast. I liked the main leads but you also had Norman Loyd and Scarfe and the deputy guy from "American Gothic" and the other guy who was in a wheelchair or had a disability of some sort. I think it might also had the first officer from "Seaquest" but I might be confusing that from another show. Jason
Well, in-universe, every backstep was the first one for every character except the lead. Yeah, they tied it into the Roswell myth that's become so trendy these past few decades. It's weird how that one story has come to totally dominate modern UFO-themed fiction, when as far as I can tell it was never used in mass-media fiction prior to the early or mid-'90s (though the conspiracy theory originated in a 1980 book, whose similarity to the unrelated UFO-crash movie Hangar 18 from the same year may have boosted its popularity and blurred the two together in people's minds). I realized recently that UFO fiction has gotten so much more boring these days than it was before the '90s, because it's never about anything except Roswell and Area 51 anymore. Yes, Don Franklin of SeaQuest was the backup pilot who never got a chance to replace Parker in the capsule.
Still pretty sad for you if you are on this side of the time line before the sphere leaves. You won't live long