More telly
Sep. 17th, 2017 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerThis seems safe...
Going through Netflix's genre offerings like a dose of something that moves very fast, I light upon Travelers (sic), starring Eric McCormack of Will and Grace fame, and featuring a time-travel operation so half-baked, ill-considered and shambolic that it could almost be British. (Spoilers to follow.)
The future is not what it used to be. Humanity, almost extinct, has come up with a way to save itself, by sending agents back to the past to prevent some of the more disastrous events and decisions that have taken place between now and their time. These agents are sent back in the form of disembodied personalities, which overwrite themselves on to the brains of people who, in original history, died. The new personalities don't have access to the old ones' memories, but fear not, because they have been fully briefed, based on what can be learned about their hosts on social media.
It's all right. I laughed too. Get it out of your systems. I'll wait.
Surprisingly, there are only two utter disasters, one host being a woman suffering from extreme learning difficulties whose social worker helped her construct a completely fictitious profile for herself on Facebook as an exercise in social interaction, the other being a young man who for some bizarre reason neglected to mention in his online activities that he was addicted to heroin. The consequences of these problems play out over the first season of the series, and are very well handled. Not so the troubled marriage of the FBI-agent team leader, who, being essentially Sitcom Husband, completely fails to realise that when he tells his wife he's working on a case the first thing she will do is call up his friend and partner, who is also her friend, and check. She, of course, being Sitcom Wife, immediately assumes that he is having an affair.
Because these agents from the future, who obviously must keep their existence Super Secret, have missions to carry out such as preventing assassinations, deflecting asteroids, stealing anti-matter and so on, and not unnaturally this eats into one's timetable a bit. One would think that the "director" of the project would have had the sense to pick old, retired people who have too much time on their hands anyway, and to be fair there are some of those later on, but nearly all our heroes come up with thudding regularity against the problem that when they are supposed to be at point A studying, or attending meetings, or bringing in bad guys, they are in fact at point B trying to save the world, and they can not say why. The "director" has provided a set of Protocols, to guide the temporal squatters in how to avoid revealing themselves, which the team members tend to recall at the most inconvenient moments, and let slide completely at other times.
As for the rationale behind the time travel, it's the usual sf half-and-half mix: a validatory mention of the many-worlds hypothesis, just so we know it's not magic, on to which is bolted the clunky concept of Time As Housekeeper, expending huge amounts of energy creating and destroying people and things so that history remains causally sound. ("If we change the future we ourselves will cease to exist!") There's even a hint, possibly to be developed in future seasons, of Time As Historian, ensuring that history continues to develop the way it "should" (according to whom?).
I'm being a little hard on the show. It's well written despite the aforementioned flaws, and the writers are not afraid to sling around a few deep concepts when things aren't exploding. McCormack is always watchable, and the other principal performers, previously unknown to me, acquit themselves more than competently. I'm actually hooked, though whether I'll get the chance to watch season two is anybody's guess.
Going through Netflix's genre offerings like a dose of something that moves very fast, I light upon Travelers (sic), starring Eric McCormack of Will and Grace fame, and featuring a time-travel operation so half-baked, ill-considered and shambolic that it could almost be British. (Spoilers to follow.)
The future is not what it used to be. Humanity, almost extinct, has come up with a way to save itself, by sending agents back to the past to prevent some of the more disastrous events and decisions that have taken place between now and their time. These agents are sent back in the form of disembodied personalities, which overwrite themselves on to the brains of people who, in original history, died. The new personalities don't have access to the old ones' memories, but fear not, because they have been fully briefed, based on what can be learned about their hosts on social media.
It's all right. I laughed too. Get it out of your systems. I'll wait.
Surprisingly, there are only two utter disasters, one host being a woman suffering from extreme learning difficulties whose social worker helped her construct a completely fictitious profile for herself on Facebook as an exercise in social interaction, the other being a young man who for some bizarre reason neglected to mention in his online activities that he was addicted to heroin. The consequences of these problems play out over the first season of the series, and are very well handled. Not so the troubled marriage of the FBI-agent team leader, who, being essentially Sitcom Husband, completely fails to realise that when he tells his wife he's working on a case the first thing she will do is call up his friend and partner, who is also her friend, and check. She, of course, being Sitcom Wife, immediately assumes that he is having an affair.
Because these agents from the future, who obviously must keep their existence Super Secret, have missions to carry out such as preventing assassinations, deflecting asteroids, stealing anti-matter and so on, and not unnaturally this eats into one's timetable a bit. One would think that the "director" of the project would have had the sense to pick old, retired people who have too much time on their hands anyway, and to be fair there are some of those later on, but nearly all our heroes come up with thudding regularity against the problem that when they are supposed to be at point A studying, or attending meetings, or bringing in bad guys, they are in fact at point B trying to save the world, and they can not say why. The "director" has provided a set of Protocols, to guide the temporal squatters in how to avoid revealing themselves, which the team members tend to recall at the most inconvenient moments, and let slide completely at other times.
As for the rationale behind the time travel, it's the usual sf half-and-half mix: a validatory mention of the many-worlds hypothesis, just so we know it's not magic, on to which is bolted the clunky concept of Time As Housekeeper, expending huge amounts of energy creating and destroying people and things so that history remains causally sound. ("If we change the future we ourselves will cease to exist!") There's even a hint, possibly to be developed in future seasons, of Time As Historian, ensuring that history continues to develop the way it "should" (according to whom?).
I'm being a little hard on the show. It's well written despite the aforementioned flaws, and the writers are not afraid to sling around a few deep concepts when things aren't exploding. McCormack is always watchable, and the other principal performers, previously unknown to me, acquit themselves more than competently. I'm actually hooked, though whether I'll get the chance to watch season two is anybody's guess.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-18 10:58 am (UTC)