did anyone watch it on Sci Fi last night? I was pretty impressed. First with the fact that the guys daughter is Drew Barrymore Frozen In Time (circa ET) but the show itself seems very cool.
I like the way they handled the mystery and how the characters aren’t really acting like they are in a sci fi show, ya know? At first everything is met with doubt and skepticism.
Anyway, I’ll watch it again tomorrow night. Just wondering what the Dopers thought.
Meh. I started watching, but when you consider it, after the initial MacGuffin of the suitcase from the future, it’s just a run-of-the-mill Who-Dun-It. Didn’t hold my interest.
I watched last night. I watched the first 15 minutes or so of tonight’s show, and then turned it off. Too many things about it bugged me.
I was fairly interested in last night’s episode, until the end. It was very noble and all for him to say that he wanted to stand with Claudia as she faced up to her past, but under the circumstances, it was ridiculous. Way to increase your chances of getting shot, sport! I’m sure your kid will just love being an orphan.
Then, in tonight’s episode, they brought in the classic T2 paradox, where technology from the future spurs the development of that same technology. It was interesting in T2. Here, not so much. (I turned it off as they were arguing about getting rich off of the technology, so I don’t know what happened with it.)
Cliche after cliche after cliche. And annoying irrational characters. It’s a recipe for failure. They’re really going to have to do better than this if they want to get people to watch their original miniseries.
It doesn’t look at this point as if the paradox will become an issue. The main character refused to let his colleague use the briefcase’s technology; the colleague - who is in dire financial straits - has thus been made into a suspect. My guess is that’s about how far this portion of the plot will progress.
I didn’t mind the show, and I may watch it again tonight. But it’s mostly because I enjoy a halfway decent whodunnit.
I disagree. I think the future stuff actually moves the plot. Like at the end of last night’s episode, we find out that Mandy - who he thought he saved from the storm - died anyway in a car accident.
Which brings up the issues of fate vs. personal choice. Can you really escape your fate? Perhaps you can change the details of it but the big picture might remain the same. And what will J.T. do with this information? Does it change how he goes about “solving” his murder?
I think the acting in this series is a couple of levels better than the last few Sci-Fi events I’ve seen on this channel lately.
My daughter and I are enjoying it so far; yes, it’s a whodunnit dressed up in a scifi suit, but it’s been fairly entertaining.
The frickin’ ads are killing me, though. These hour-long episodes would be 20 minutes long if all the ads were chopped out.
Thanks for the info, Mr. Monster. I do want to know what eventually happens, but I’m just not willing to sit through hour after hour of it.
It would have been better as a 2-3 hour movie. I’m usually oblivious to the editing of movies, but even I noticed lots of places where scenes could have been cut down or cut out entirely. 5 minutes of friends and relatives playing with silly string? Yawn-o-rama.
I keep watching, hoping that it will become good at some point. (I liked Timothy Hutton in his Nero Wolfe series), but it stubbornly looks like it’s going the way of all bad TV movies. Instead of science fiction, we’re getting mawky metaphysics about not being able to change fate. We’re getting a mad-scientist grad student (Neither he nor Hutton’s characters act like physicists. And since when does the Prof rely on the Grad Student for insight into Time Paradoxes and General Rel? Hutton’s character acts as if he doesn’t know any physics!)
What’s with all the slo-mo scenes? Most of the time they are clearly unnecessary, and don’t add anything (except padding). Why the “flashbacks” when Hutton’s character walks into the stripper bar? He hasn’t experienced any of this before – only the audience has. Why does he even walk into there in the first place? Knowing what he does, I’d stay as far away from there as possible until after the date of my supposed death.
Annoying stuff, but I’ll probably watch the last episode. Then I’ll curse out the SciFi channel.
Sad Me! You beat me to complaining about that. I was near to yelling at the television last night that the strobing slow-motion camera work added nothing except annoyance. I cringed and wanted to weep during that godawful Claudia acting like a secret agent scene.
I was hopeful for this series until last night. With only one hour left, key portions of the plot haven’t been pushed forward at all - we still haven’t got any idea (any idea!) at all who sent the briefcase, or why, or how. Only two suspects have been shown to have any motive for murdering JT, and only one of those we could really expect to go through with it.
And why exactly is death an occurrence so interesting to physics? We’re to assume that plenty of stuff has been changed for this temporal order, as opposed to the one which sent back the briefcase. But Carl acts as if it’s especially important not to mess with life and death - why? Is this the right side of some sort of equation he wrote down in his room?
So far, the camera work has been the most annoying factor to me. The stop motion business can work well if used properly; it’s a pity that it’s in the hands of someone who has no clue when or how to apply it.
Monster, I’ve been trying to retcon the business about death being a special problem for the stability of space-time, but without much luck. The best justification I’ve come up with is that it’s a matter of degree–any incident that has largely transient effects (say, breaking a leg) can be altered, and the ripples will smooth out. Death (or logically, any permanently life-altering change) has effects that continue to spread. If you prevent a death, that person could go on to have kids who will cause their own ripples, and so forth. Basically, there’s a breakover point somewhere beyond which the altered future can’t be reconciled with the original future. It seems rather silly to me.
Motive-related spoilers: [spoiler]
The Broke Broker–He wants the case. Failing that, I believe it was mentioned that he gets custody of the girl in the event of JT’s death, so the insurance payout would be at least somewhat accessible to him.
The Mad Grad–He’s wrong about the hazards of preventing deaths, but try telling him that. He wants to kill JT to save the world/universe/the space-time continuum.
The Angry Gangster–JT’s banging his wife. Besides, JT tried to take a cell call while they were talking.
The Mysterious Moll–She could have an insurance scheme of some sort running.
Of course, there’s a chance that the real killer isn’t on the list, so I present:
The Inconvenienced Cop–Let’s face it: JT is annoying bugger, and he’s been hassling the poor guy endlessly. I’m not the violent type, but even I’d want to smack him with a tire iron if he pestered me the way he has the detective. Who would be in a better position to keep his name off the suspect list, leaving the case unsolved for 50 years?[/spoiler]
At this point, I don’t even care about any of the characters–they all seem vaguely annoying at best. Still, I’ll probably watch the rest of it, just in case they manage to salvage a decent premise, but I’m not over-hopeful.
2 things that I think are going to become very relavent at tonight’s finale:
what was with that little exchange between Bremmer and Fat Quaid when he was being arrested? Sounds like Bremmer has some dirt on Fat Quaid and isn’t afraid to use it.
uh, why they heck did Claudia call Bremmer? And was it just me or did she have an accent when she did it?
Here’s a bump now that the whole thing has aired, in case anyone wants to discuss it further.
I’d just like to point (only slightly smugly) at the last entry in my spoiler box above. I was a little off, but I stand by my suggested motive as adequate. Besides, the crucial evidence didn’t surface until tonight.
The kid really bloomed in this one; I actually kind of liked her, which makes her different from every other character in the show. The Bad Broker’s role was rather forced, I think, but overall the finale was better than the previous three. Oddly, given all the frantic action going on, they didn’t seem to use the annoying camera tricks quite as much.
I have to at least give it credit for having a reason for all the principal characters independently converge on one spot for the finale. Taken as a whole, the show was mediocre, which raises it above the level of a great deal of what Sci-Fi shows. At least it wasn’t Time Cop.
So, did he get shot or not?
Nope. But two other people did.
The finale disappointed me. I don’t like whodunnits where it’s impossible to tell before the end who the killer is, and that’s exactly what happened here.
We had no reason to suspect it’d be Quaid. None at all. It just kinda popped up to give the ending a twist - and that, my friends, is cheating. And at the very end the brought in that stupid Back To The Future-esque time travel paradox which made me want to bawl.
I could give them credit for pulling it all together in the end, but the resolution lacked any sort of finesse. The acting was good, especially for the little girl (who impressed me). The writing and cinematography were unpleasant.
I realize that I shouldn’t lean too hard on time travel movies about time paradoxes – most of them won’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny – but I can’t help it. Since everything in the Magic Briefcase changed to reflect the altered situation, then where did the original material come from? Not to mention the – you should pardon the expression – Magic Bullet?
And is it really a surprise that the daughter sent the briefcase? Hasn’t that been sorta obvious all along?
There was no part of the ending of 5 Days that made any sense. To give an example:
The file in the briefcase wouldn’t have changed. It wouldn’t have been sent back in the first place – why would anyone think JT needed a copy of a 50 year old file on a dead cop?
If the time stream is mutable (as the ending showed), then why would there be a concordance of events leading everyone to the strip club? That was driven by a need for suspense, not physics.
I do hate movies where the characters are left to explain a completely unexplainable situation that will probably have them doing jail time, yet they somehow sit around smiling and high-fiving rather than frantically making up plausible stories.
Two dead bodies, one, a cop, shot by the “hero”, the other, the hero’s girlfriend’s ex-husband (I think – I wasn’t paying that much attention). A car driven by the hero’s grad student plowed into the strip club. A wacky story about time travel, and an even more implausible one about $12million dollars of real estate. Try explaining that to a jury.
And while we’re at it, just how did the crooked cop expect to cash in on $12M of real estate when there’s no reason for anyone to sign it over to him * and * he was on the scene when the woman who signed it was killed (if his plan had come to fruition)? Wouldn’t that have raised eyebrows somewhere?
What a mess of a story.