Time After Time: Season 1

[Guy Gardener]

Oh my.

Is Brooke Inventing Morlocks?

Actually, if Brooke was inventing Eloi, that would make far more sense.

A super healthy selfarming food supply that maybe maturates at a ridiculous rate?

We saw the test subject angry, and then docile.

It just begs the question about what is a Morlock in this new lore?

Telepathic super Minds living underground, or Brainless hungry things that eat.

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I love David Hewlett, but I have no idea what he was thinking, signing on to this awful b-movie.

They invent a time machine that looks and works like a stargate, not quite sure how far into the future they have arrived, maiden voyage, no calibration, but the planet is f###ed. Overrun by Morlocks. They instantly concluded that it's a thousand years later, until they finally get their bearings: "Shit, it's only 2042."

 

[Romulan_spy]

I enjoyed this episode. I liked that we got to see WW1 Paris. I also liked that the episode dealt with some ideas of whether or not you can change history. It felt a lot more like a classic time travel story. I hope we see more episodes like it.

 

[JasonJ]

I've got 4 episodes of this on the DVR... is it going to be worth my time to get into this series?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Are you excited by shirtless boys or girls in short skirts?

 

[JasonJ]

Are you excited by shirtless boys or girls in short skirts?

Is that an either/or question, or do the two groups exist collectively? lol. Short answer, no and eh, it depends.

 

[Christopher]

I enjoyed this episode. I liked that we got to see WW1 Paris. I also liked that the episode dealt with some ideas of whether or not you can change history. It felt a lot more like a classic time travel story. I hope we see more episodes like it.

I felt the same way. This is the first episode that's really engaged me. They finally did something with the time travel beyond re-enacting the movie, they explored John's character in an interesting way, and they gave us an engaging debate over the ethics and philosophy of time travel, although it was a scene that called for better actors than we're stuck with here. Plus even the present-day conspiracy stuff is starting to get somewhere, now that we get an indication of what Brooke's experiments are about -- and clearly the genetic research of the "Monroe" family is meant to be the inspiration for Dr. Moreau in Wells's yet-to-be-written novel.

The bit about keeping past and present in "real-time" sync to avoid "tearing holes in reality" or whatever is another thing that's reminiscent of Timeless, but unlike Timeless, at least they bothered to offer an explanation for why they do it that way. And it differed quite a bit from Timeless in that it treated history as, if not immutable, then at least very difficult to change. Despite everything that could've disrupted history, everything the travelers did was part of what had happened all along. After all the casual history-rewriting in Timeless and Legends of Tomorrow, that's kind of refreshing.

Before this, I was starting to consider dropping the show if this week's episode didn't satisfy me. But now I have reason to stick around.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Is that an either/or question, or do the two groups exist collectively? lol. Short answer, no and eh, it depends.

One of the very handsome male leads, seems to keep finding excuses to misplace his shirt, meanwhile until they go to the 1960s, dresses and trousers all seem to be uniformly going down to every bodies ankles.

I have a load of washing to dump in the machine.

 

[Romulan_spy]

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I love David Hewlett, but I have no idea what he was thinking, signing on to this awful b-movie.

That clip looks like a low budget rip off of Stargate. David Hewlett even seems to be playing McKay again.

 

[marillion]

Doesn't matter now.. ABC has pulled it from the schedule effective this Sunday. Booooo!!!

 

[Christopher]

Ironic... Just after the first episode that made me think the show had promise, the show gets cancelled. I wonder if the remaining episodes will be released online somewhere (legally, I mean).

 

[tenmei]

Well - that's me down to The Magicians, Riverdale, Last Kingdom, The Originals, The Good Fight and the upcoming American Gods and season of Doctor Who. I'm disappointed it's been cancelled, but was expecting it on a daily basis - that said, at least it got more episodes out than Doubts two.

 

[Scout101]

That was quick...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Caprica continued to air in Canada and was released weekly (legally and illegally) when it should have been, after it had been pulled from the Yank schedule. Google is telling me that Time after time is airing on CTV (in Canada) and unless their ratings suck too, will probably continue since defaulting on a distribution deal is probably actionable, if Canada doesn't already have the full season in a vault and America can't stop them airing the episodes if they did want to pray that DVD sales will save them.

If Christopher got his shit together, and had a Candian friend, they could snail mail him the new episodes recorded on video tape, which is really no less illegal than burning the episodes to dvd, and might be more illegal since something physical is crossing the Us/Canadian border and (maybe) several state lines.

Postal fraud will send you to jail for life if you're not careful.

HA!

I did not know that he Boys are from two of my favourite shows, because I'm a dummy.

“Time After Time” stars Freddie Stroma ("Unreal") as H.G. Wells, Josh Bowman ("Revenge")

Although Freddie was possibly the weakest element of the fantastic first season of Unreal, never mind, he took his shirt off when the director told him to, like a good soldier, and the series was renewed.

 

[Galileo7]

Ironic... Just after the first episode that made me think the show had promise, the show gets cancelled. I wonder if the remaining episodes will be released online somewhere (legally, I mean).

Agree. It was just getting interesting with episode five. Eight episodes were filmed and hopefully the remaining three will be shown eventually. http://epguides.com/TimeAfterTime/

 

[Dick Whitman]

I am not sure how I missed the news of its cancellation until now. Nothing I follow online reported it. I could not remember if a new episode was scheduled to air last night while I worked and a google search informed me.

Mild disappointment from me. I agree the show was finally getting interesting. But I was expecting a short run but never this short.

Midseason premieres are certainly not new. Sometimes it has even worked out and lead to long runs. But ABC did not seem to have much confidence in this at all. It did not get much of a protomtional push. The network described it as completely present day set after the Pilot episode. But Kevin Williamson admitted that there would be further time travel in later episodes. I wonder what ABC reasoning on that was? There are too many time travel shows on so let's sell it as something else?!

I agree that contintuing the hunt for Jack the Ripper was a poor premise for a whole series. I am a big fan of the original movie but that is one story. Long before this series I thought it would be interesting to see further adventures of a fictional time traveling Wells. Even HG Wells appearances on Lois & Clark suggested he was regular time traveler who took many different trips. Using the actual novel's time periods and the George Pal film adaptation which showed stops in the 20th century which Wells' book did not. Plus drawing on all of Wells writings, not just the fiction. But this show was far limited in its imagination.

 

[Kirk Prime]

This was similar to Frequency in some ways. Frequency was a fun movie about a man who could talk to his father in the past, and the consequences of historical changes they made. It wasn't a perfect movie, but if you suspend standard time travel cynicism, it's a pretty nice story.

It doesn't work as well as a weekly series dragged out.

Maybe the same can be held true here, where as others have pointed out, we should have focused on Wells' adventures, rather than just dragging out the plot of the movie.

That said, I did like the show, and wish I could see the rest of the episodes for closure.

 

[Christopher]

Long before this series I thought it would be interesting to see further adventures of a fictional time traveling Wells. Even HG Wells appearances on Lois & Clark suggested he was regular time traveler who took many different trips.

Honestly, I'm a bit annoyed by the recurring tendency to portray Wells's Time Traveller as Wells himself. That doesn't fit the text of the actual novel, in which Wells essentially presented himself as one of the Traveller's friends, the one who transcribed his account and presented it to the world in book form after the Traveller had vanished for good. That was a common idiom for fiction at the time, to present it as an account that the author was told by one of the characters in the story, or a manuscript they found, or sometimes as a first-person account by a surviving participant in the story. In this case, the Time Traveller's entire first-person narrative is encased in quotation marks, because he's narrating it to his friends, including the actual narrator of the frame story, who's implicitly Wells. (One of the other friends, by the way, includes a "Medical Man" -- perhaps the basis for Dr. John Stevenson?)

But there have been a number of works that have identified the Time Traveller as someone other than Wells. There's a partial list at Wikipedia. I like the one about the RPG supplement suggesting that the Time Traveller was Sherlock Holmes's sister Ashleigh disguised as a man. Shades of Warehouse 13's Helena "H.G." Wells.

Granted, there's something to be said for the original Time After Time's conceit of pitting Wells's utopian futurism against the realities of the 20th century. But for an ongoing series like this, I think it might've been better to make the Time Traveller someone other than Wells. This show's premise, with Wells having who knows how many years of adventures throughout time before finally returning home to write his books, is fraught with conceptual and logical holes. Is he going to read his own books before he writes them? Why don't his books have more accurate futurism if he actually lived in the future? And so on. If the show's main character had been Wells's Time Traveller friend, as in the original book, that would've made more sense. That way, they could posit that the Traveller had all sorts of adventures in the future, and that he occasionally dropped in back home and told his accounts to his friend Wells, whose distorted interpretations filtered through his 19th-century assumptions became the source of Wells's novels.

Of course, that would've been something other than an adaptation of Time After Time. But that's kind of the point. I don't think TAT is a story that really lends itself to an ongoing series. Maybe that's why they couldn't make it work.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I agree with that. With the orignal novel being in the public domain anyone could make further adventures of Wells' unnamed Time Traveler.

A much more clever angle would have been that Wells' friend the Time Traveler once used Wells name as an alias when he discovered that he wrote a book based on the story he told.

 

[Scout101]

Almost ALL time travel stories make a ton more sense as a single incident rather than a recurring device. Logic pretty much always falls apart when you have a functioning time machine at your disposal and you make multiple trips

 

[Christopher]

Almost ALL time travel stories make a ton more sense as a single incident rather than a recurring device. Logic pretty much always falls apart when you have a functioning time machine at your disposal and you make multiple trips

Unless you use a fixed-timeline model, as The Time Tunnel did, at least initially. History was never changed on that show, although there were some later episodes whose crises were based on the assumption that history might be changed if the heroes didn't prevent it, contradicting what had ben established earlier in the season.