Spoilers Timeless Season 2 - SPOILERS
- Thread starter JD
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That was exactly Lucy's end goal in infiltrating Rittenhouse in the season premiere. She killed that guy so she'd earn her mother's trust so she could get close enough to blow up the Mothership. But she was exposed and had to flee. So they definitely do have "Destroy the Mothership" on their to-do list; it's just a question of getting the opportunity, which obviously the writers won't allow anytime soon, at least not until the Ritties manage to build another time machine to take its place.
not enough power in the grenade for that, just some localized contamination.
The plutonium power cell probably has some pretty heavy-duty containment in the event of accidents. An explosion powerful enough to irreparably damage sensitive temporal circuitry or whatever might not even breach the seal.
"Quit noddin' your head at me." 
So this guy from WWI wrote a manifesto on how to improve the world by tweaking historical events that was somehow picked up by Rittenhouse and turned into a Bible. Kind of a retroactive Foundation. What was Rittenhouse doing before this guy came along? Why did he make such an impression on them? And why did plucking them out of history not change the history of Rittenhouse? And why were they trying to change events that took place after WWI, since Manifesto Guy couldn't have known about them? And what kind of world are they trying to make? More cultured? This is definitely an Irwin Allen show. Just focus on the likeable characters and don't bother trying to make sense of it all.
So this guy from WWI wrote a manifesto on how to improve the world by tweaking historical events that was somehow picked up by Rittenhouse and turned into a Bible. Kind of a retroactive Foundation. What was Rittenhouse doing before this guy came along? Why did he make such an impression on them? And why did plucking them out of history not change the history of Rittenhouse? And why were they trying to change events that took place after WWI, since Manifesto Guy couldn't have known about them? And what kind of world are they trying to make? More cultured? This is definitely an Irwin Allen show. Just focus on the likeable characters and don't bother trying to make sense of it all.
He is Lucy's grandfather, who would have certainly died without the motherships intervention .
"Quit noddin' your head at me."
I admit this is outside my own cultural experience, but I find it hard to believe that someone from the 1950s would have never seen anyone nodding at him. From what I can tell online, "the Nod" is a common gesture of acknowledgment between black men in communities where black people are marginalized, and less common in cultures where racial exclusion is less of a problem. So I'd imagine it's probably something that's been around since the days of slavery and would be quite familiar to a man from the segregated South in the '50s.
Didn't Rufus say the manifesto was like "The Man from the High Castle meets The Handmaid's Tale"? So basically more racist, sexist, and autocratic.
I definitely get the impression that Rittenhouse are straight up Nazis. The show has given us plenty of strong hints that Rittenhouse believes in a fascist and white supremacist view of the world even back to the American Revolution episode where the founder of Rittenhouse, played by DS9's Rene Auberjonois, talks about how people born into the upper socio-economic classes are destined to rule over the lesser classes. And the Mural speech by the guy from 1918 about chipping away the flaws until only the perfect man remains, was very Nazi to me. Also, the light brown suit that Lucy's mother was wearing in the pilot when they go back to 1918 seemed very much like a brown shirt uniform from the Nazi era. I guess it would be too cliche if Rittenhouse started wearing swastikas and doing the Nazi salute. On the other hand, maybe it would help the audience "buy in" to our heroes quest to defeat Rittenhouse?
Armin Shimerman. Other side of the Quark-Odo rivalry.
I was referring to Our Heroes stumbling on The Game and trying to stop Immortals from killing each other because they believed it was part of a Rittenhouse plan, but I can see how my phrasing was unclear--I'm quite aware of how The Buzz works.
They could also be motivated to change historical events for their own reasons, both personal events (e.g. the untimely death of a loved one, whether Immortal or not) and others they had lived or were living through.
oops.
"Quit noddin' your head at me."
So this guy from WWI wrote a manifesto on how to improve the world by tweaking historical events that was somehow picked up by Rittenhouse and turned into a Bible. Kind of a retroactive Foundation. What was Rittenhouse doing before this guy came along? Why did he make such an impression on them? And why did plucking them out of history not change the history of Rittenhouse? And why were they trying to change events that took place after WWI, since Manifesto Guy couldn't have known about them? And what kind of world are they trying to make? More cultured? This is definitely an Irwin Allen show. Just focus on the likeable characters and don't bother trying to make sense of it all.
Before WWI Rittenhouse was just trying to get behind the scenes power the old fashioned way. After the manifesto they realized that there could be another way (time travel). Manifesto Guy died in 1918 so removing him wouldn't change anything.
Somebody must've been reading H.G. Wells.
I often wonder how our body language has changed over the decades. Body language and expressions have changed. And, I suspect that a modern person in the past would stand out for a variety of reasons even if their clothes blended it. I thought the nodding was a great example of that!"Quit noddin' your head at me."
All good questions. Some touched on up thread. Much of it just doesn't make sense! Apparently, you can both learn 100 years of history in depth and paint a huge mural secretly in a very short amount of time! Maybe they'll expand on some of this and it'll make sense . . . but I wouldn't hold your breath!
This show is all about history porn--the other stuff is secondary.
Apparently after having all the necessary offspring. Which raises more questions, like why wasn't saving him the very first thing they did with the time machine? And why swoop in with life-saving medical treatment at the last second on the day he died after he was wounded, and not when he was in town on leave the weekend before?
So is Manifesto Guy Rittenhouse? Seems unlikely that he would be in the trenches if so. But if not, what makes one random nutjob's manifesto so special? And even if somebody thinks so, what makes the nutjob himself so special? They've got the manifesto and a hundred year's of knowledge on top of it-- they could put together a team, again like a retroactive Foundation, to craft a better manifesto. You'd think a group of egomaniacs like Rittenhouse would prefer their own plans over grandpa's.
Good point. There are probably a lot of subtle nuances of body language and accent that would mark a person as wrong in two seconds flat.
Well, he did print out Wiki.
The next episode, "Hollywoodland", is shamelessly ripping off a Legends of Tomorrow episode as the team goes to Hollywood in the 40's to save Hedy Lamarr.
Given how close together they were made, there's no way it was a "ripoff." Timeless season 2 may only be airing now, but it began filming back in November, and since "Hollywoodland" is only the third episode, it was undoubtedly written months earlier, probably during the summer, since the show got the season 2 order back in May. The "Helen Hunt" episode of Legends didn't air until November, by which point the Timeless script was surely too far into pre-production to abandon. It's the kind of accidental parallel that happens quite frequently when different shows are drawing from the same pool of concepts and subjects, and that creators generally try to avoid if they're aware of it. Nobody wants to be accused of imitation.
In the case of the Hedy Lamarr story, it's been part of popular awareness for many years now. Ever since cell phones became a major part of life, the story of how they depend on a wartime technology invented by a gorgeous movie star has been frequently told. It's a romantic and unexpected story, it involves Hollywood glamour, and it's a great story to tell if you want to showcase the overlooked achievements of women in history, so it's not at all surprising that two current time-travel shows would use it. Indeed, a feature documentary about Lamarr's career, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last April. So maybe both shows' writers were independently inspired by the film and the new attention it brought to Lamarr's story.
It's not even the first time the shows have used overlapping ideas. They've both done Apollo-program episodes, although Timeless focused on Apollo 11 and LoT on Apollo 13. They've both done Al Capone episodes. And there will surely be other parallels as the shows continue.
He's Lucy's maternal great grandfather, and as we learned at the end of last season her mother's family is another old Rittenhouse family, so that would have to mean that he is.
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