Agreed. Easy enough to rig up the explosives before the race begins and detonate them remotely. In that day and age, they're not going to be searching for explosives.
Spoilers Timeless Season 2 - SPOILERS
- Thread starter JD
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I was seriously confused by the mural for a moment. Given the jaw dropping reactions, I figured there must've been something on the mural that was blowing them away. That doesn't seem to be the case. I guess they're just really impressed by mediocre art! I suppose the fact that he painted such a huge thing without anyone noticing him doing that *is* impressive in its own way! Not quite what was intended though.
I think the mural was supposed to depict his master plan for changing history. The mural probably had a list of events and showing how they all connect and how the changes will ripple through history. So the draw dropping reactions from the characters was them looking at the mural and seeing how the entire master plan is going to work. They were looking at the master plan for changing history! That's what impressed them. Of course, we the audience could not see much detail on the mural so to us the mural did not mean anything.
Yeah, but we already had that in the manifesto, so it's kind of redundant to have the big reveal be just a showier manifestation of the exact same thing set up a week before. It was presented as some big, revelatory moment, but it was all flash and no substance, like too much about this show.
Exactly the problem. What matters isn't the underlying intention, what matters is whether they succeed in conveying the desired impression to the audience, and I think they utterly failed at that. So he painted a big picture, so what? Surely it couldn't possibly convey as much information about his plan as the manifesto could. Maybe it'd make it a bit more intuitive, but if they can't show it clearly to the audience and have to convey the point in dialogue anyway, then why even bother? It's just a gimmick, and a superficial one.
I suspect that the reason the episode did not show us what is on the mural is because the writers themselves don't actually know what Rittenhouse's master plan is.
It's a sloppily-written show, unfortunately. Why would one ever go 'check' on a sleeper agent in the past? He already did (or didn't do) whatever his task was 50 years ago, and it's your history. You only visit if you want to alter what he did (i.e. you had him do NOTHING originally with the plan that if you decide to go back and tweak that later, he's already in place).
The 'operating out of the distant past' idea won't really work because no matter where you work out of, the PEOPLE came from our present, so you can't screw with the timeline without risking everyone. Unless you invent a technobabble bubble that they can be protected from the changes in (a la Year of Hell), but if you have that, any timeframe is fine.
I suggested early in Season 1 that they should have tiny tweaks every time they came home. Rotate the Mason Industries staff so it's a bit of a random pool every time as an easy example. They're making real changes to the timeline, there should be at least minor differences.
But this is definitely a show you shouldn't think about, the internal logic is non-existent. More enjoyable to just know going in that it's history porn/cosplay and leave it at that. Utter failure at serious stories, so have fun with the live action "mysteries at the museum" stories...
The 'operating out of the distant past' idea won't really work because no matter where you work out of, the PEOPLE came from our present, so you can't screw with the timeline without risking everyone. Unless you invent a technobabble bubble that they can be protected from the changes in (a la Year of Hell), but if you have that, any timeframe is fine.
I suggested early in Season 1 that they should have tiny tweaks every time they came home. Rotate the Mason Industries staff so it's a bit of a random pool every time as an easy example. They're making real changes to the timeline, there should be at least minor differences.
But this is definitely a show you shouldn't think about, the internal logic is non-existent. More enjoyable to just know going in that it's history porn/cosplay and leave it at that. Utter failure at serious stories, so have fun with the live action "mysteries at the museum" stories...
That's the problem, though. Last night's episode wasn't much fun. It was just weak. And it's too early in the season to tell if that's the exception or the rule.
Oh, one other thing that makes no sense: Why is Jiya hiding her visions? If she knows that she's seeing the future, then she absolutely should be telling people about everything she sees. Having her hide it is a lame plot contrivance to drag out the plot point. Too many TV writers just default to having characters keep secrets even when there's no good reason for them to do so.
I agree with both of your points. It's just funny that somehow this guy from the past supposedly knows how to change what is his future better than the people who are actually from the future! How does he write a detailed manifesto in 1918 without knowing the future events for the next 100 years. Sure, once he is in 2018, he checks Wikipedia and has some knowledge of the events prior to 2018. However, I have doubts he can thoroughly digest world history over the past 100 years and paint that huge mural!
Agreed. I suppose they could be setting this mural up as a visual aid in future episodes. Visual depictions of their missions rather than showing some handwritten text. Still silly.
IIRC, and I might not, new memories from the changed time line seem to set in when they return to the present. That would not be the case if they don't return to the present. Perhaps it's not totally consistent (no time travel story is), but it's a heck of a lot better than what they're doing now! You're a sitting duck if you're in 2018 and there's a time traveler intent on changing the past. You could be written out of history, or otherwise altered, with no chance to respond.
The Manifesto could be more philosophical, explaining why Rittenhouse believes what they believe and why they are doing what they are doing. That's usually what political manifestos are. And it could talk about the parts of culture that Rittenhouse wants to expunge from history and why. The mural could be a visual diagram that shows how Rittenhouse plans to accomplish the Manifesto's vision. Basically, the Manifesto is the Why, the mural is the How.
That just didn't come across. If you have to invent an explanation after the fact, that still means the episode failed to convey its meaning. I just came away thinking "Why should we care?" It was the episode's job, not yours, to answer that question for me, and it failed.
As I mentioned, the whole idea of someone from 1918 having a better idea of how to manipulate history from 1918 to the present than those in 2018 is ludicrous!
I'd also argue that his ability to understand how to change history prior to 1918 is lower given a narrower perspective on how recent history has played out.
So, no, none of it really makes sense, including the mural.
I'd also argue that his ability to understand how to change history prior to 1918 is lower given a narrower perspective on how recent history has played out.
So, no, none of it really makes sense, including the mural.
Oh, I agree. The writing is clearly pretty sloppy. There are several instances where an extra scene or better dialogue would have easily cleared things up.
I don't think at this point we really know enough about the mural or the manifesto to know how redundant one is or isn't.
I think Romulan Spy's ideas seem pretty likely, it looks like he wrote the manifesto back in 1918, and then just now did the mural after all of his Wikipedia research. So there are probably a lot of specifics in the mural he wouldn't have known about when he wrote the manifesto.
The stuff with the black driver was pretty good, and it was nice to learn a bit more about Wyat's history. I hadn't really given to much though to some of the issues with the story, like why they needed to sleeper agent just plant a bomb, or what exactly the point of sending Emma and her partner back was. Now that I've noticed those pretty serious issues, they do hurt the episode a bit for me.
I think Romulan Spy's ideas seem pretty likely, it looks like he wrote the manifesto back in 1918, and then just now did the mural after all of his Wikipedia research. So there are probably a lot of specifics in the mural he wouldn't have known about when he wrote the manifesto.
The stuff with the black driver was pretty good, and it was nice to learn a bit more about Wyat's history. I hadn't really given to much though to some of the issues with the story, like why they needed to sleeper agent just plant a bomb, or what exactly the point of sending Emma and her partner back was. Now that I've noticed those pretty serious issues, they do hurt the episode a bit for me.
Yes, the pilot ep told us, or at least heavily implied, that he wrote the Manifesto in 1918. The Manifesto was basically a rough draft whereas the Mural is the finished master plan that he finished in 2018 after his wikipedia research. On a side note, I do think it was laughable that the guy printed the entire wikipedia. There are 5.5 million wikipedia articles in English. There is no way he could have printed every single article and read them all.
I do wish the show would tell us what Rittenhouse's master plan is because then the audience could "buy in" to why it is important for Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus to defeat Rittenhouse.
All I'm talking about is whether this episode succeeded in making that scene feel like a big deal to the viewers, which it didn't. It's not just about knowledge of in-story facts. These are creative works, and criticism is not just about a sterile cataloguing of data points; that's just how you write a wiki entry. Criticism is about assessing how successful the creators were at the things they attempted to achieve, at making the audience feel what they wanted us to feel. The makers of this episode attempted to make the mural reveal scene feel dramatic and important, and they failed. They attempted to make the "search the trunk" scene feel suspenseful, and they failed. They attempted to make it feel like there was a non-contrived reason for a major assault on American history to take place at a stock car race, and they didn't quite succeed. It just wasn't a very good episode.
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Yeah, that bugged me too, there is simply no way a person could print out all of Wikipedia like that. I think they probably should have just said that he had researched world history between 1918 and 2018.
The mural reveal felt pretty significant to me, since it was our first real good look at just how big his master plan is.
I thought the search of the car still felt fairly suspenseful since there was still the chance the people searching could have stumbled across the secret compartment and find them.
They probably could have done a bit more to make the events at the race feel important.
That's one part I don't have a problem with, because we're under no obligation to assume that every line a character speaks in a story is objectively correct. A guy from 1918 probably has no clue just how huge Wikipedia actually is. So he probably just grossly underestimated its size.
Yes, nominally it was presented as such, but there was no there there. We already knew Rittenhouse (gods, I'm sick of that name) planned to reshape history in their image. What Rufus said about the manifesto last week made that clear enough. I can see why the makers of a TV show might want something more visual to express the idea, but that's just form, not substance. It wasn't as big a deal as it was made out to be.
It just felt to me like they expected their audience to be too stupid to remember the compartment.
Immortals can tell if someone else is Immortal even if they haven't experienced their first death yet.
It would be interesting if an Immortal found out about time travel and asked a time traveler to change history so they never became Immortal (it takes a violent death to trigger the process for immortality, at least according to Highlander: The Raven).
This whole issue reminds me of the Time Patrol stories by Poul Anderson. A lot of these sleeper agents could be there for research purposes - getting more intimate knowledge of a particular time and place that the organization wouldn't get just from reading a history book. In Anderson's stories the Specialists (field agents) are considered a very important part of the organization; their job is not to change history, but to get to know the era by living in it and reporting anything that seems off or is a blatant change.
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