Thanks to my Tivo being awake at 4am, I’ve been watching Seven Days again. The show had been unavailable until recently when SpikeTV started running it. I had forgotten about the show completely! I watched it first run from 1998 - 2001 until it was canceled due to the two lead actors fighting all the time. I don’t know why they haven’t released it on DVD.
The show followed a secret branch of the NSA – Project Backstep. Using technology collected from the crashed Roswell spacecraft, scientists were able to create a device that can send one human back in time seven days. The show was kinda formulaic, but I enjoyed it. Are there any other fans on the SDMB?
It was one of my favorite shows; I think I still have almost all of the original shows on VHS waiting to be transferred to DVD whenever I get around to getting a DVD recorder (or have the time to figure out how to hook up my VCR to my computer’s DVD burner).
I liked the way they played with the basic premise, throwing in (mostly) believable complications. The character interactions were good, too; an interesting mix of people. all well cast. I kept hoping that sooner or later Donovan would finally get a chance to Backstep. I was annoyed when Sam Whipple left the show (it wasn’t until later that I found out why…he had cancer and was no longer able to handle the work, dying soon afterwards).
I liked it well enough, but it seemed that they ran out of ideas pretty fast. And if they ever explained where the time-jumper’s original self was when he arrived seven days in the past, I must have missed it. Cute Russian scientist, though.
I thought it was a great show. Loved it when it re-ran on SpikeTV every morning. Though I did think that, after 9/11, you couldn’t do a show like that.
I believe that in one episode they explained that anything that backstepped (the sphere, Frank, anything he brought with him) disappeared from the “past” when the sphere appeared. The idea being that matter cannot exist in two places at the same time, and Frank would be made up of the same matter in both the “past” and the “present/future”. It’s not all that far-fetched to believe in the context of a time-travel show.
There are places online where you can buy pirate DVDs of the show (certainly compiled from VHS collections). I suppose Paramount hasn’t shut them down because they haven’t released a legal DVD yet, although I’d buy it if they did.
I didn’t hear that*, but I did hear that the actors weren’t terribly upset as the writers/producers had no intentions on growing any of the cast of characters out of their one-dimensional boxes.
*Doesn’t mean it isn’t true, just didn’t hear of it and could find no corroboration in a quick Google search.
Well, I don’t have a cite, but that is what I heard years ago. Could be a rumor. I did hear that Don Franklin was upset about his character always being “in the background.” I think they would have done well to have Donovan perform a Backstep in at least one episode.
I think the “why he doesn’t meet his past self” angle has been covered. What I’d like to know is how they got around that fact that they’ve never actually done a Backstep!. Every timeline in which they do gets erased; so Project Backstep consists of having the sphere and Parker disappear every so often and reappear elsewhere with information about a purported future. Code name “Conundrum” indeed!
It makes sense, actually. The Backstep team has never actually performed a Backstep, but they know how to do it through careful training and reviewing the log files that come back with the sphere. What bothers me is how much faster Parker will age compared to the rest of the universe. If he backsteps 20 times a year, that’s 140 days extra he lives. Kinda sucks for him.
They are both Australians without the accent. :eek: