Spoilers Timeless: Season 1 on NBC
- Thread starter Aragorn
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I like it so far. Stuff like this is right up my alley, so I hope it gets a chance to grow.
The Military has 40 guys learning how to dive that sucker in video game trials since they discovered that the damn thing exists 5 minutes before the pilot.
From how Rufus was talking last week, he's the guy who who invented Time travel, and Mason is just an asshole money man taking all the credit, who really doesn't even have that much money if Rittenhouse can push him around so easily.
From how Rufus was talking last week, he's the guy who who invented Time travel, and Mason is just an asshole money man taking all the credit, who really doesn't even have that much money if Rittenhouse can push him around so easily.
There will always be an argument over how much he did as a Nazi was just because of the rockets, though. Did he morally object to the Jewish workmen that helped on his project, or did he just not worry about them being used as slave labor because he knew there was nothing he could do about it anyway, and he needed all the men and materiel he could get for the rocket project?
There will always be controversy around him. I think it was beyond stupid for the Army (and Truman/Eisenhower) to keep him and his team on the sidelines for 10 years before they allowed him to do anything of consequence because of the controversy. Imagine...we could've probably gotten to the moon by 1960-63 if they just let him and his team work. Korolev was a genius in his own right. They both were. But Von Braun would've won the space race much earlier.
Well, we have the hindsight of history to judge. Art the time, we were fighting a bitter world war against Nazi Germany which was a brutal totalitarian regime. It would be like a scientist today that was helping ISIS. I don't think we would be so quick to embrace that scientist if they came over to our side.
That seems unlikely, since ISIL's members are anti-science fundamentalists and creationists. And there are many ways in which likening our modern conflicts with terrorist groups to historic conflicts with other nations are flawed and misleading, which is part of why we have trouble coping with terrorism on both a military and a sociopolitical level. The so-called "Islamic State" is neither of those things. It's not a government or a country, it's an insurrectionist group within various countries that it's trying to conquer. There's little reason for anyone to support it unless they had an ideological or financial incentive for doing so, and given their anti-science attitude, I doubt you'd get a situation like that of von Braun or Jiro Horikoshi (the Zero designer portrayed in The Wind Rises) where a scientist or engineer would collaborate as an opportunity to continue their research. And since ISIL is not a nation, but is in fact a rebellion against the nations it occupies, you wouldn't have an attitude like von Braun's that, as a German, he was obligated to act in Germany's defense. In this case, patriotism would compel fighting against ISIL, not for it. So the analogy just doesn't work on any level.
I just used ISIS as an example because they are the most obvious hated entity that we are currently at war with. I figured it would be a more potent analogy since there isn't really any nation comparable to Nazi Germany that we are at war with right now.
You don't need science to time travel.
Get to the end of Quantum Leap, and it turns out the science was shit, and it was God moving Sam around the whole time. Sam Becket was an Angel.
Anyone that faithfully believes in the old testament, even if they actually haven't had this conversation with themselves, Angels can totally time travel, when necessary.
Extreme prayer can even get you on the grassy knoll in 1963, to save Kennedy if you think that that would make things better, even though it might not.
Get to the end of Quantum Leap, and it turns out the science was shit, and it was God moving Sam around the whole time. Sam Becket was an Angel.
Anyone that faithfully believes in the old testament, even if they actually haven't had this conversation with themselves, Angels can totally time travel, when necessary.
Extreme prayer can even get you on the grassy knoll in 1963, to save Kennedy if you think that that would make things better, even though it might not.
But that alone doesn't make it an applicable analogy for von Braun's case specifically. It would only work as an analogy if he had worked for the Nazis because he shared their ideology, or because he profited financially from the alliance. I suppose you could argue that he profited in terms of being able to continue his work, but that work was not done for his own personal gain, since he was trying to give humanity the means to reach outer space. Anyone who willingly assists ISIL is only interested in taking humanity backward, not forward.
(And yes, I resist the "ISIS" acronym that the news media inexplicably cling to even though the acronym used officially by the US government and the UN is ISIL. It seems incongrous to refer to a xenophobic, monotheistic fundamentalist group by an acronym that spells the name of an ancient deity from a different, polytheistic religious tradition.)
Sam Beckett was NOT an angel (in Quantum Leap). There is NOWHERE that that's stated in the episodes and Bellisario has never said that
Blackwater is to the US Military, like Sam Beckett is to an angel.
Same job, different title.
Same job, different title.
I've been liking the way this show challenged conventional narratives of history and offered more of a look at the subaltern perspective, but this week's Alamo episode dropped the ball. It made a passing mention of the fact that the state the Alamo defenders were fighting to achieve would be a slave state while Mexico was free, but it ignores the fact that people like Travis and Bowie were themselves slaveowners and, in Bowie's case, an actual slave smuggler. It mostly clings to the conventional, romanticized view of the siege instead of acknowledging the ambiguities and tough questions as previous episodes have done. So I'm disappointed.
There were other problems, like plot points being telegraphed. As soon as they mentioned the need to open up the aqueduct, I immediately remembered the grenades they'd called attention to earlier, but Rufus inexplicably forgot about them long enough to generate dramatic tension. And, come on, having Flynn mention that he's a father in the same episode where Lucy presses her mother about the identity of her biological father? Could it be more obvious that he's Vader to her Luke? And yet for some reason they contrived to delay the reveal by having her put it on a folded piece of paper. Why would anyone do that? Why not just tell her the name?
There were other problems, like plot points being telegraphed. As soon as they mentioned the need to open up the aqueduct, I immediately remembered the grenades they'd called attention to earlier, but Rufus inexplicably forgot about them long enough to generate dramatic tension. And, come on, having Flynn mention that he's a father in the same episode where Lucy presses her mother about the identity of her biological father? Could it be more obvious that he's Vader to her Luke? And yet for some reason they contrived to delay the reveal by having her put it on a folded piece of paper. Why would anyone do that? Why not just tell her the name?
Daddy's name may have nigh ungooglably ambiguous spelling?
I assumed they were going to invent molotov cocktails early with all that whiskey.
I assumed they were going to invent molotov cocktails early with all that whiskey.
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By the way, are there any fluent Spanish speakers out there who can assess how good Goran Visnjic's Spanish accent was? To me, based on my three years of high school Spanish, it sounded surprisingly authentic, given that he speaks English with a noticeable Croatian accent. But I'm no expert.
Yeah, the "writing his name on a piece of paper" was lame.
For the smartest man in the fort, Rufus was pretty dumb - work smarter nor harder.
I too am a little disappointed that there aren't more changes in the present, especially the further back they go or the more important event they are involved in.
I thought it was too bad the changes in Texas couldn't have made it so the suit didn't want to replace Wyatt (ala Quantum Leap's "Honeymoon Express" episode), rather than just having Rufus put his foot down. There doesn't seem to be any real reason that Rufus is the only pilot - it's not like he is doing advanced mathematical computations while "piloting" the ship, he is pushing some buttons and hopefully the computer is doing any necessary calculations. And Like Guy Gardener said, there should be several guys trained up as pilots already.
Furthermore, Timeless should have taken a page from Stargate SG-1 and have multiple teams ready to go. You can't say that the team, Wyatt especially given his combat duties, will be 100% on their game on every mission if given little downtime. Furthermore, this would allow you to have several historians with a variety of specialties and expertises, the team could go which has the most expertise in that time period/location. The show could still just follow (a majority of the time) the Lucy, Rufus, Wyatt team for dramatic purposes (just like Stargate SG-1). [Now spinning off into fanfiction here, it would probably work better to have 4-person teams: 1 leader, 1 pilot, 1 grunt, and a slot for a historian based on the time period/location. The teams rotate which are on-call/hot and swap in the appropriate historian as needed, with the team leader providing the consistency/cohesion that might be missed without a single, lead historian like Lucy.]
For the smartest man in the fort, Rufus was pretty dumb - work smarter nor harder.
I too am a little disappointed that there aren't more changes in the present, especially the further back they go or the more important event they are involved in.
I thought it was too bad the changes in Texas couldn't have made it so the suit didn't want to replace Wyatt (ala Quantum Leap's "Honeymoon Express" episode), rather than just having Rufus put his foot down. There doesn't seem to be any real reason that Rufus is the only pilot - it's not like he is doing advanced mathematical computations while "piloting" the ship, he is pushing some buttons and hopefully the computer is doing any necessary calculations. And Like Guy Gardener said, there should be several guys trained up as pilots already.
Furthermore, Timeless should have taken a page from Stargate SG-1 and have multiple teams ready to go. You can't say that the team, Wyatt especially given his combat duties, will be 100% on their game on every mission if given little downtime. Furthermore, this would allow you to have several historians with a variety of specialties and expertises, the team could go which has the most expertise in that time period/location. The show could still just follow (a majority of the time) the Lucy, Rufus, Wyatt team for dramatic purposes (just like Stargate SG-1). [Now spinning off into fanfiction here, it would probably work better to have 4-person teams: 1 leader, 1 pilot, 1 grunt, and a slot for a historian based on the time period/location. The teams rotate which are on-call/hot and swap in the appropriate historian as needed, with the team leader providing the consistency/cohesion that might be missed without a single, lead historian like Lucy.]
Let me guess, the word written on the piece of paper is... Rittenhouse. 
A case could be made that in many instances, changes made further back would have less influence, because they'd be damped out by other factors. As I've mentioned before, past about a dozen generations, you're unlikely to have any actual genes directly inherited from any of your genealogical ancestors, because there's a finite number of bits that chromosomes break down into when recombining, and eventually the number of ancestors you have in a single generation gets so much larger than that number that the odds of getting any of those ancestors' genes at all become inconsequential. So if a time traveler killed your grandmother, it'd have a major effect on your existence, but if they killed your great-to-the-sixteenth grandmother, say, it would have effectively no influence on your genes or your overall family history. Much the same probably goes for a lot of historical variations. Only certain ones would be so pivotal that the resulting changes would amplify into the future rather than being damped out.
I'm glad they didn't go that route, precisely because it has been done before. It's what I expected from the moment they established that plot point, and a story that only gives you what you expect is disappointing. I'm glad that it came down to a moment of characterization and team bonding instead of a cliched time-travel gimmick. It has more meaning that way. It's important both because it solidifies their bond as a team and because it allowed Rufus to have a moment of defiance at a point when he's under increasing pressure to be passive and obedient. Which, come to think of it, ties into the whole "last stand" mythos of the Alamo, although I wish they'd chosen a less pro-slavery last stand to use as an analogy for the show's lead black character refusing to be submissive.
Why should there? The whole premise of the series is that these timeships are just prototypes, that it's an experimental technology that they'd barely had a chance to test before the big one was stolen. How many trained pilots did the Wright Brothers have? And the Lifeboat is the cruder first prototype, no doubt less automated and refined than the one Flynn and Bruhl stole, so it makes sense that it would be more finicky and difficult to operate, and that Rufus, who helped build it, might be the only one qualified to deal with its quirks.
Ideally, sure, but again, that's misunderstanding how ready Mason was to deal with something like this. They aren't a refined, organized time-police operation. They're a bunch of scientists working with a prototype time technology, and they were taken off guard when it was stolen. Flynn is driving events with his time missions, and the Mason team and Agent Christopher are struggling to keep up. They generally only have a day or two of downtime between missions, so they've barely had time to organize their response or recruit a larger team.
Also, maybe they have security concerns and want to keep the "loop" as small as possible. Note that Baumgartner, Wyatt's replacement, didn't even know what he'd been brought in to do. He would've been told, but not until the official handover from Wyatt. So maybe they don't want to tell more people than they absolutely need to.
Besides, your argument just boils down to "They should copy Stargate exactly," and I don't see how rehashing something that's already been done is a good thing. If you want Stargate, there are 17 seasons and a couple of movies' worth of it on DVD. Let Timeless be Timeless.
