TELEVISION
NBC’s time travellers are total strangers who come together in ‘Timeless’ to prevent history being changed
Timeless jumps from the Hindenburg disaster to Lincoln’s assassination — and that’s just the first two episodes.
Timeless, the new NBC science fiction series, whisks viewers — and its characters — deep into the past on a weekly basis. The ambitious pilot, which aired early this month, unfolded in 1937 and featured the Hindenburg, while the second episode centred around the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Other hours of the show will take place in Las Vegas in 1962, at the height of the Rat Pack era, and during World War II, with James Bond author Ian Fleming making an appearance. Another puts the characters into the midst of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.
Why all the time-jumping? In the modern day, the enigmatic Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic) has stolen a time machine for reasons that remain a mystery. Using a second machine, an unlikely trio — history professor Lucy Preston (Abigail Spencer), Delta Force soldier Wyatt Logan (Matt Lanter) and scientist Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett) — try to stop Flynn, killing him if necessary, before he can alter history forever.
In the present — or rather in early September — the cast and crew of Timeless were in Canada, hard at work shooting the sixth episode, “The Watergate Tape”, which unfolds in 1972. The parking lot of an abandoned Super 8 Motel in Vancouver, British Columbia, was doubling as a Washington back alley, and the cast, attired in appropriate period garb, played out a tense conversation, followed by a hasty departure in a Dodge Charger.
All around the set were classic cars, an old rotary pay phone and “Nixon Now!” and “Nixon’s the One!” posters. Large blue screens hung suspended behind the set, and visual-effects magic would be used to place the United States Capitol in the shot.
After wrapping their scene, Spencer, Barrett and Lanter came over to talk with a small group of visiting journalists.
“What’s so interesting is that these are three total strangers who’ve been put together in an extraordinary circumstance, which is what I love about it,” Spencer said.
“It’s kind of like the experience of coming here and making the show. You leave your home, you all come together, you’re all making one thing. You’re with each other all the time, and you’re ordinary people having to do something really extraordinary.
“So you cling to the people that you’re going through that experience with, and Rufus and Wyatt and Lucy are clinging to each other. They’re becoming a family. The lifeboat [second time machine] is like our therapy tank, where we bare our souls. And what’s interesting is that, at this point, their real lives aren’t as satisfying as the missions. But they only have each other in it, so they’ve really got a lot closer.
“What happens in this episode is that you find out that Rufus has been keeping a very large secret from the team. And so has Lucy. So there’s friction, and we’re all at a crossroads at the end of this episode.”
After playfully deflecting a question about the apparent glut of new time-travel shows this season, Barrett explained the rules of his show’s time travel. There was a perverse logic to his explanation, especially because anyone who saw the pilot knows that a “butterfly effect” occurs in the present after anything the team does in the past.
“There are basic rules,” Barrett said. “We have the time machine, and it allows us to go to the past, but we are not allowed to go to any period where we already exist, and we can’t go to any period where we’ve travelled to before, because that can lead to ramifications that not everyone is completely clear on, but they are disastrous.”
Spencer then leaned in and joked, “Or can we?” Barrett laughed, then continued his thought.
“What’s good about the guys,” he said, referring to writerproducers Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan, “is that they’re very good about establishing certain rules and establishing certain expectations, and then defying them when the moment feels right.”
Lanter described Logan as a military man whose job it is to get things done tactically and to hunt down the villain. The historian, he argued, won’t pull the trigger on Flynn, nor will the scientist. It’s up to Logan.
However, Lanter acknowledged, there’s a question of who’s actually in charge whenever Logan, Preston and Carlin are together.
“I think it depends on the situation,” Lanter said. “There are moments that we can play that are funny, and some that are not. Wyatt thinks he’s in charge a lot of the time. Lucy thinks she’s in charge a lot of the time.
“She knows, culturally, what’s going on around us. Wyatt knows, mission-wise, what’s happening and what needs to happen. So I think there’s a little bit of butting heads.”
Speaking of Flynn, Visnjic — tall, lean and sporting shiny sunglasses on an overcast day — came to the set on his day off to speak with the visiting press. The reckless Flynn is a long, long way from Dr Luka Kovac, the good-guy character Visnjic portrayed on ER from 1999 to 2009.
“This is a show where nothing is going to be black and white,” Visnjic said. “We have to give the audience something to really bite on, so at the beginning his reasoning is not going to be known. He’s doing what he’s doing and, I have to tell you, he’s a lot about carpet-bombing. He doesn’t know what he needs to accomplish exactly.
“But, further down the line, we go and he talks about these … delusions. Is he right? We’re going to find out through the course of the season. But he believes in the things he does, definitely. So we’ll see.”
Spencer and Barrett contemplated what time periods they hope to visit if Timeless proves timeless, or at least runs a good while.
“I always talk about rock ‘n’ roll, so seeing Wattstax, or seeing Jimi Hendrix perform for the first time, or these great rock moments … I really just want to go to these great rock parties throughout time. It’s cool to see all these moments in history, these great speeches being given, and being at the March on Washington, but I just want to go to the great historical parties,” said Barrett.
“We’re going back to a lot of events, so we can explore so many things within certain years,” Spencer said. “But I’ve been watching Tootsie (1982) and Yentl (1983) and Victor Victoria (1982), and I really want to go to a period of time where Lucy can’t go so that she has to be undercover as a man. So she forces her way into it and we see the underbelly of whatever that event in time would be.
“That would be a dream come true as an actress.”