I’m in for the entire season, even if it declines in quality. I would watch almost anything that features Paterson Joseph and Goran Višnjić.
One nitpick: the female lead is given clothing that is reasonably appropriate to the time period she’s entering, yet she always wears eyeliner and mascara, which would look weird (or hooker-ish) in earlier times.
I was really hoping someone would swat a butterfly at some point.
I doubt that they’d want to remind us of that concept, given that they are making HUGE changes to the past, yet come back to ‘nothing has changed except that the history books mention a different assassin of Lincoln’ or ‘nothing has changed except one character’s mother didn’t marry the same man.’
Okay, Bradbury’s “butterfly” thing is posited to have happened millions of years back, whereas this show’s changes go back only 151 years (so far). Still, it’s implausible that everything would be pretty much the same after all the changes they made: Grant was in a different place that day; Johnson was not in the presence of gunfire as depicted (his would-be assassin got drunk instead of trying to kill him); the people actually in the theater box with Lincoln were displaced in the show’s version and would have done different things. And of course that’s a very short excerpt from what would be a very long list of things changed by the show’s characters.
Yeah, it’s only a TV show. But when it comes to high-concept, I like to be able to feel respect for the amount of thought the creators put into their story. This show is entertaining enough, but I suspect it’s too slapdash to be as compelling as any great cult show must be.
We can’t really be sure what the larger scale changes are but there could be some that have no be shown. Honestly, I’m ok with the level of change we see. For one thing, there is practical side that showing larger scale changes requires more writing and so is easier to screw up. From an in-universe perspective, it could be that there is a certain amount of inertia to history. Take the people that survived the Hindenburg. Maybe none of them made that much of a change to the historical outcome. It seems that the “bad guy” (and I agree they will probably be shown to be the good guys) are choosing specific changes that will have a very large effect. Like killing four key people instead of just Lincoln.
Some changes are pivotal, some just get “damped out” by historical inertia. For instance, in any given Presidential election, it probably matters who won. It would matter a lot less who the losing nominee was.
Lincoln is such an overused choice in time travel stories. Pretty ironic since his assassination is such a pivotal moment. It can’t be changed without a massive and unpredictable change in the future. Much more so than saving people on the Hindenburg.
I’m bit confused with the idea that the bad guys are good implications. Trying to fulfill Booth’s master plan of killing the heads of the Union just can’t be spun as “good”. It would have rained even more vengeance and devastation on the South. The Confederacy’s army was shattered at that point and nothing could change that.
I guess this show will do Hitler soon. It’s another obvious time travel story writers can’t resist.
Is it any better than the average Mr. Peabody and Sherman episode. Or The Time Tunnel?
I watched the first two episodes and was pleasantly surprised. This was fun. I liked that they had the nerve to change history. Most shows like this put all the toys back where they found them. I am also interested in finding out what the bad guy (or is he?) is up to. And it is nice to see Lem from Better Off Ted again. He looks different but I recognized his voice immediately.
I’m in.
At the beginning of this episode, one of the black soldiers asks Rufus to write out something for them, giving him paper and a pencil. I was wondering what would have happened if they’d given him a fountain pen, or even a quill and inkpot. Because there are so many minor things that would be known to someone in the past that many of us don’t know today. Like horse riding, or starting a fire.
And obvious lipstick. And no hat - what Civil War era lady left the house without a hat? I know she somehow lost her bonnet from her original outfit, but then she bought a new outfit to wear to the theatre, but no hat? 
Wow. Watched a few minutes of this. Bad CG, bad acting, bad understanding of academia, Bad science (the non-sci-fi parts even), bad cliches. I understand pilots aren’t a metric for future quality, but I don’t understand it.
A whole few minutes. Impressive.
The CG is fine for a TV show where the CG isn’t the star.
I disagree.
Not relevant. It isn’t a documentary on academia.
Also not really all that relevant except maybe in a subjective sense, although I don’t understand why it should matter. I don’t watch TV for good or bad science, I watch TV to be entertained and be told an interesting story.
Maybe. I don’t find it that bad, but to each their own.
At least you don’t need to watch it again and only lost a few minutes of your life.
And in the Lincoln episode, didn’t somebody say something along the lines of, they had to hurry before the bad guys changed history to the point where the project might not even exist any more? Again, any changes they made were made over 100 years ago. It was bad enough when this sort of thing happened in X-Men First Class (where something in the present is about to happen, but just then, somebody does something in the past, and the threat in the present just vanishes).
I remember the second Timecop movie (yes, there were two), the bad guy was being chased by Timecops and he pops into the past, kills a few of their ancestors, and now nobody is chasing him. Come on. Wouldn’t the Timecops just have hired other agents? That’s like saying that if you went back to WW2 and killed a young aviator named George H. W. Bush, that Reagan wouldn’t have had a Vice President, and that would wouldn’t have been a President during 1989-93, and 2001-2009.
I still occ use a fountain pen.
But yes, that bit with his pistol being scarily futuristic in 1935 was off.
I did like that fact that they *can’t *do what so many time travel stories fail to get around- they can’t just go back in time another 5 minutes and fix what they screwed up. They get one shot. No do-overs.
That one thing has made me like this show- that and the fact that changes to the past have consequences.
So how many mystery threads does this show have:
I’m sure I missed a few.
Well In real life Grant did not attend the play since his wife hated Mrs Lincoln. Doubt that a train breakdown would make them attend
[QUOTE=Hey Paula Paula]
And obvious lipstick. And no hat - what Civil War era lady left the house without a hat? I know she somehow lost her bonnet from her original outfit, but then she bought a new outfit to wear to the theatre, but no hat?
[/QUOTE]
An actress; aka not a Lady.
If they’d had the guts to actually save Lincoln it would have pushed this show into must watch territory, right now I’m thinking of dropping it.
This came up at the Timeless panel at NYC Comic Con last weekend. The answer the show’s producer(?) gave was that it takes years of training to pilot the time machine, and there are only two pilots: Rufus, and the Matt Frewer character, who was kidnapped by the bad(?) guys.
But what would have been different? Anything he would have done to help the former slaves would have almost certainly been undone after the Hayes-Tilden election. Besides, I don’t think Lincoln had any authority to take the land of the former slaveowners, short of having the Army take it by force. Still, I wonder how he would have dealt with Grant’s promise to Lee that all Confederate soldiers would be pardoned.
On the other hand, remember that Lincoln was a Republican, and even back then, that meant money for the rich; tell Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker otherwise.