Date of airing: November 14, 2016 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 4.528 million viewers, 2.9/5 in Households, 1.15/4 with Adults 18-49, 0.6/3 with Adults 18-34, 1.6/5 with Adults 25-54
Do you know what I find confusing as a white male in a white-dominated world? Old white men look the same when they have the same hair color, the same eyebrow color, and the same tone of voice. I needed to take a few minutes to figure out that the Rittenhouse member threatening Rufus and Benjamin Cahill were one and the same person, because not only did this episode not use a melodic needle drop for the moment in which Lucy stood in front of her father (which I guess is a good thing in this case, as the episode shipped around an obvious trope), but also because Lucy’s father and the threatening Rittenhouse member were captured by the camera quite differently (the Rittenhouse member from a low angle, and Lucy’s father from the side). This is me getting all confused about one and the same person, because the producers decided not to make a clear twist out of the revelation of who was Lucy’s father. Though in a way it was predictable that Lucy’s father turns out to be part of Rittenhouse. She figured in this episode that she might somehow be involved with Rittenhouse, and the secret involving the identity of her father since the second episode always looked like it was part of the larger series mythology. Consider me surprised that the writers managed to answer a few questions six episodes in. In a way, this episode was not just a trip back in time to the Watergate scandal, but a mythology-heavy episode detailing Rittenhouse, even if nothing particularly new or exciting was mentioned.
It was fun to hear that the famous 18 and a half minutes of
Nixon’s Watergate tape that got deleted had something to do with
Rittenhouse. The writers took a moment of history everyone on this
planet interested in politics was asking questions about, and they just
put it into the show’s mythology, because maybe it sounded cool that
Nixon was somehow involved in Rittenhouse or may have been threatened by
them as Rufus has been. If one United States president knew about
Rittenhouse (maybe Nixon was even a member?), then maybe others knew
about Rittenhouse, making the American political system extremely toxic
and dangerous for our heroes. If more than one president was aware, or
even a member, of Rittenhouse, it meant that the Cabinet back then and
today might have been infiltrated, which means the Congress could have
been infiltrated, which means the Senate could have been infiltrated.
So, Rittenhouse was not just apparently controlling time, but also
politics, which would certainly explain why they are trying to destroy
real-life America in real-time on cable news television. Fox News is just an arm of Rittenhouse in our real world.
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| Two violent men share their tragic backstories. |
That makes Flynn a lone hero of sorts because he is the only one who decided to take the fight to Rittenhouse. This episode made sure that Flynn wasn’t the villain he seemed to be throughout the first four episodes. He was humanized with this episode, with his backstory (as an ER fan, I was shocked to hear that another one of Goran Visnjic’s characters had to live through the murder of his entire family), and maybe the writers took the first steps to make sure that Flynn will become an ally for the team (as he has stated he will be, according to Lucy’s diary). These were interesting steps taken to advance the show and further the agenda of the writers, as well as make sure that TIMELESS wasn’t just a time travel show. I’m still wondering what SEVEN DAYS could have been if the secret NSA panel had not been unlike Rittenhouse as portrayed in this series – a shadowy government organization making decisions about the fate of America by controlling time. But I guess UPN never wanted a mythology-heavy show, and it was the late 1990s – I’m almost sure that a show like SEVEN DAYS would have been a lot more meaningful if it had premiered the year after TWENTY-FOUR. Instead, it got canceled the summer before TWENTY-FOUR premiered.
Anyway, using the Watergate scandal as a backdrop for the episode was a nice idea (albeit an obvious one – TIMELESS goes through all the well-known American historic events), and I was happy that the hour wasn’t just about the tape or the missing 18 and a half minutes of it. While the general idea that the “doc” wasn’t a document, but indeed a human being, was a little twisted and way too much TV-like (sometimes, even weapons turn out to be humans, so it’s not even a twist I saw for the first time here), I liked that it took away from the Watergate scandal and turned to become a separate, more unique storyline, which the writers could use again in the future to flesh out Rittenhouse as an organization, by bringing Doc back in one of the present timelines. The premise of getting born into Rittenhouse, and having to escape is a good enough idea for me to consider whether it might be of importance for the main characters to save past and future “Docs” from getting involved with Rittenhouse. Maybe Flynn should have changed his agenda and instead of burning America to the ground, he simply could have searched for all the "Docs" throughout time and saved them, because this way he could have destroyed Rittenhouse from within – continuously cut off an arm until it can’t grow a new one, because at one point there aren’t enough cells left to grow a new arm. Flynn had the time machine, he could just go from the founding of America to, let’s say 1975 (to get out of the way of his own timeline), and kill every single Rittenhouse member, after he saved all the Docs and found out who their members are.
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| Rufus is growing concerned about his involvement with Rittenhouse. |
I also loved the little twists of the episode: Wyatt learning about the notebook that Flynn has been using as help to define and steer his mission; Wyatt and Lucy learning about Rufus’s connection to Rittenhouse and the betrayal that transpired; Rufus taking charge for once in this mission by leading Lucy to the Black Liberation Army and generally taking a stance against the bad things that are happening in his life right now. Granted, it was quite convenient that the BLA was somehow involved in the Watergate affair, but this is still a scripted television drama, so I can excuse it – right after I giggled about it for a couple of seconds. At least Rufus has developed as a character during this episode. It’s almost like the writers realized they haven’t used much of him in previous episodes, and his double agent mission to record the team during their missions hasn’t led to anything specific. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the team is doing more than just following Flynn into the past: They are doing their own investigation.
