Review of “Timeless” (season 1)

* * * B

Timeless is a time travel series that mixes science fiction with historical drama. The primary cast consist of an antagonist, Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic), who steals a time machine, and the crew of its prototype: historian Lucy Preston (Abigail Spencer); soldier Wyatt Logan (Matt Lanter); and pilot Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett). These three are sent by the time machine’s creator, Conor Mason (Paterson Joseph) to stop Flynn from destroying the present by changing history.

The episodic plots, where the crew visit different times in history, typically meeting multiple famous people (e.g. Ian Fleming and Wernher Van Braun), and manage to prevent Flynn’s efforts to destroy history, are blended with a long arc, where we are gradually shown that Flynn is not altogether bad, and Mason is not altogether good. Gradually, the identity of the mysterious “Rittenhouse” is revealed.

I enjoyed the science fiction. The historical drama suffers from the typical problem: the team keep meeting up with famous people. Given that you suspend your disbelief, the historical events they get embroiled in are generally interesting, though very focused on American history. My biggest criticism of the series is that the writers’s progressive politics occasionally make their way into the scripts in a heavy handed fashion.

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