Sunday, December 25, 2016

The Past is Personal


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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