FORWARD INTO THE PAST
‘Timeless’ takes joyride through history
The premiere of NBC's “Timeless” opens with a recreation of the Hindenburg disaster. It is terrifying. And a tribute to how CGI technology has changed in just a few short years, that a prime-time show can pull it off in such a convincing way.
That's the first surprise of many in this trippy caper show from Eric Kripke, creator of “Supernatural,” and Shawn Ryan, creator of “The Shield.”
In the present, an international fugitive named Flynn (Goran Visnjic, “ER”) steals a time-traveling sphere from a multibillion-dollar corporation.
There is, however, a prototype vessel also capable of time travel that is linked to the “mothership” — but it is no Tardis — it can only seat three.
Homeland Security calls in, well, not exactly the big guns to avert the destruction of everything we hold true.
The brains is Lucy Preston (Abigail Spencer, “Rectify”), a history and anthropology professor caring for her sick mother with her sister Amy.
The muscle is Delta Force veteran Wyatt Logan (Matt Lanter, “90210”), who is mourning the death of his wife and prefers to call Lucy “ma'am,” probably just to irritate her.
The pilot is Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett, “Better Off Ted”), a programmer, and he so doesn't want to be hurtling through time.
“I am black,” he says. “There is literally no place in American history that'll be awesome for me.”
Their mission is to blend in, not change anything and stop Flynn.
Naturally, everything goes wrong.
Rufus is a black man in 1937 New Jersey, about as welcome as the plague. Wyatt becomes smitten with a journalist fated to die in the airship crash. (Shades of “Star Trek's” Edith Keeler.) The police close in on the trio. And Flynn's scheme seems perplexing — he prevents the airship crash.
Lucy realizes he's aiming for a bigger disaster with a different group of people.
But what are his motives? He seems to know Lucy better than she knows herself. And seeds of a conspiracy are sown even as our trio discover time has been changed in ways that seem unfathomable.
If you dwell on time-travel paradoxes too much, you'll go mad, and that advice holds for this show: Come for the ride, enjoy the appealing cast and the sheer adventure.
In the midst of a dark and dreary fall TV season, “Timeless” is something to set the clock for.