Other responsibilities pulled me away from reviewing for a while – too long! – and I’m eager to resume. So let’s dive right in!
In the last 12 months, TV has given
us three shows about time travel—or more specifically, about the idea that
changing the past could change the present.
In fact, we’ve had four of those, considering that the entire Fall 2016
season of The Flash has been about the consequences of going back to change the
past.
That trend, in itself, isn’t so
weird. Certain ideas hit the zeitgeist,
and this is apparently time-travel’s moment.
Perhaps that’s because time travel is one of the few technological
frontiers that seem truly out of reach in a world where tricorders and
wristwatch-communicators are commonplace.
Perhaps we just hit a critical mass of things in the world that people
wish they could go back and change.
What’s weird is that the driving
force of all of them—even the Flash!—is a man wanting to use the advantages of future-knowledge to
save his wife or mother from a death he believes shouldn’t have happened. As a result, the shows are crammed full of hubris and manpain
and the selfishly myopic idea that changing the past to save one person is
“good,” even if it hurts or kills others.
I find it remarkable how much license the shows give their characters—especially
the male ones—even when they make objectively risky or harmful decisions in the
interest of “protecting” the women they love.
The women are helpless and stripped of agency—of course, they’re
dead—and they exist to motivate the men.
The women's own interests are irrelevant, but implicitly devalued—after all,
their judgment cannot possibly be as good as those informed by
future-knowledge. The women’s chief
value is as a beloved possession, and getting them “back” might as well be retrieving a child's lost teddy bear.
I don’t mean to imply these shows
don’t do good or fun things. I’ve
enjoyed Timeless’s exploration of race and gender in history. There have been some real clever moments in Frequency
(although not clever enough to keep me watching). Occasionally the shows wrestle with the moral
implications of believing there is a “right” history and a whole lot of “wrong”
ones, or with vastness of their possibilities.
Full marks to the Flash for portraying the decision to change the past
as something other than heroic (but harsher marks for its continued reliance on poor intercharacter communication to create drama). Mixed
marks to the others.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (CW, new
January 2016. Action/Adventure.)
Watched: three or four episodes
Premise: Several second-line superheroes travel
through time to stop a first-line supervillain
Promise: When first billed, this show seemed like it
might have an “Adventuring Party Travels Through Time” vibe that replicated
some of the fun of playing the TimeWatch RPG.
(If you’re a tabletop role—playing gamer, I highly recommend playing it.) And on one hand, it did. It gave us some of the goofier bits of
role-playing, where the player characters wander into unfamiliar situations
never knowing whether they’ll make them better or worse. But the group didn’t feel like a coherent
adventuring party—their skills didn’t complement each other, so at any given
time there would be characters with redundant skills, yet still gaps in the
group’s collective abilities. And at
some point, most episodes would inevitably devolve into a bunch of superheroes
whizzing around in set-piece fights. It
felt at once too serious and too silly, perhaps a side effect of bringing in
characters from shows with different moods and throwing them into a third
mood. Ultimately, I came away feeling
like these characters were second-string for a reason, and they didn’t put their
time traveling ability to well thought-out uses, and I wandered off.
Verdict: I’d heard the second season was better than
the first (and abandoned the “save the damsel” element as well), but after
watching the recent crossover, I’m not convinced.
Frequency (CW, new Fall 2016. Law enforcement drama).
Watched: about 9 epsiodes
Premise: In 2016, a police detective communicates
backward through time to help her father prevent the 1996 serial-killer death of
her mother.
Promise: There are a lot of clever things happening in
this show. As the past changes, our
heroine remembers the intervening years both ways, giving the show ample
opportunity to explore the consequences of changing the timeline. The characters have to be creative to
communicate and use the evidence they gather.
But I gradually began to dislike everyone on the show, and that dislike
has grown so strong that I’d rather not watch the show than start actively rooting
against them, and those are the options I have left. Seriously, everyone’s awful. Corrupt, morally suspect, sociopathic, rude,
hypocritical, whiny…. The father is a weird combination of pushover
and bully. The daughter is rash and
cruel. The mother is rigid and
headstrong. The partner is disloyal at
best. Seriously, I’m starting to wonder
if the dirty-cop boss isn’t so bad after all.
Verdict: This review pretty much sums it up.
Timeless (NBC, new Fall 2016. Science fiction spy drama.)
Watched: season so far
Premise: A historian, a soldier, and an engineer
travel through time unraveling a conspiracy and chasing a fellow time-traveler
who seems intent on destroying U.S. history.
Promise: The underlying motivations of these
characters are maddening. With only one
real exception, every character on the show has selfish and poorly-thought-out motives,
and the show doesn’t condemn them for it, although it should. This show has not one, but two dead wives who
need saving, and a dead sister. And it
seems oddly sanguine about letting other people die to save those three. What makes those three special? Our main characters knew them. But setting that aside. Of the three reviewed here, this show also
has the most depth. It actually
considers, sometimes, the broader context and consequences of its characters’
actions. It struggles to explain how their
actions don’t totally derail chronal stability.
It keeps its butterfly effects both real and (relatively) small. It tackles issues of race and gender in
American history—not always in the most subtle or artful way, but at least it
tries. Malcolm Barrett (who I remember
fondly from Better Off Ted) is fantastic.
Verdict: Despite my criticisms, I’m still enjoying it.
On the metaphorical DVR: More than a whole season's worth of TV! YEAH!
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