Date of airing: January 16, 2017 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 3.453 million viewers, 2.2/4 in Households, 0.88/3 with Adults 18-49, 0.5/2 with Adults 18-34, 1.2/4 with Adults 25-54
written by: Lana Cho
directed by: Craig Zisk
I have no idea if this episode was proof that the writers did not know what to make of the show after more than half a season, or if there were just too many events in history they wanted to visit, and too many historical people they wanted to fictionalize for a little history lesson on primetime television. Flynn kidnapping Lucy and using her for his own good could have been a great story, but it was a goner as soon as the writers found Harry Houdini and were able to use him for an episode. Flynn wanting to kill Edison, Ford, and Morgan could have been a worthwhile story to tell the audience how different history would have been if such an event had happened via time travel, but the writers did not put a lot of effort into that story either. If the writers intended to make Flynn more of a human character with some weight on his shoulders, they sort of succeeded with the previous episode, but the work they have done was pretty much deleted from this episode, turning Flynn back into the sometimes absurd villain that he is – one that just shoots his way out of trouble with a shotgun before holding it like a cool man by putting it on his shoulder. That is what comic book villains do and not people who want to change history to save their families.
Also, I got a little confused as to what the rules of the show are regarding time travel. Flynn mentioned at the end that the characters cannot travel back into a time where they already existed, and I wondered if it had been a rule of the series that had been established previously, because I cannot remember (so, I guess no trips back to the 1980s?). It certainly makes things a little more interesting, since the team is unable to travel back to the moment right before Flynn’s wife was murdered, so the killer has to be stopped in another way, in addition to not getting a chance to travel back to a time where they have already been and fix their mistakes. But it is also convenient that the writers did not try to explain what could happen if the characters travel to a time where they already existed – will they melt TIMECOP-style if they meet one another, or does the universe end if two versions of the same person exist in the same time? The writers created a simple rule here, one they will have to follow, but one that also makes it a little easier for them to create a larger narrative: Since the characters cannot go back to a time they have already visited, it pretty much means that a more serialized narrative, in which an adventure in a specific time period comes back to haunt the characters in a later episode, will be impossible for TIMELESS, and each individual adventure will very much have ended as soon as the hour is up.
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| Harry Houdini has a pistol up his sleeve. |
The episode was okay. It looked like it could have been a horror episode, considering the serial killer theme, hidden torture rooms, and a victim who turned out to be the secret killer, because maybe the writers have seen the SAW movie series a few too many times. H.H. Holmes might have been an intriguing villain for this episode, but in the end, he was a throwaway villain to keep the characters busy for parts of the hour, and one who deflected from the ongoing storyline of the show, continuing to push the Rittenhouse storyline further out. The Rittenhouse story was gone after the halfway mark of the episode when Lucy and Houdini decided to save Lucy’s friends, because the writers decided they wanted to play a cat and mouse game instead of continuing the work they have done with Flynn recently.
However, I liked some of the elements in the Holmes story. Houdini turned out to be a solid plot device for Lucy to grow out of her shadow and into the fearless person she needed to be to save her own skin (hopefully this will stay with Lucy and she is treating fear the way Houdini taught her), and there might be a chance that Wyatt killing Holmes could affect the future somehow, although the series did not dive into what happens when people who were destined to have died early were suddenly alive to live an uncertain future (and how it changes the present). After all, Wyatt killed Holmes before he was able to kill more of his victims, which means there were more unintended survivors. In the pilot, such action led to the deletion of Lucy’s sister Amy from the timeline, but at one point someone living who was not supposed to live is going to lead to a circumstance similar to Lucy’s, and I am just waiting for that. The writers cannot just put this bombshell in the pilot, but let the characters continue to change history in every episode, while the bombshell was never repeated. There are so many ideas to radically change the future and tell the viewers what it is like when Wyatt, Lucy, and Rufus change the past by saving someone’s life who was supposed to be dead, but eleven episodes in and TIMELESS has not bothered getting into that part of the narrative.
At least Lucy was given the chance to save her friends for once, after Wyatt and Rufus each had the opportunity in the past, and she succeeded in doing so. Lucy needed to be saving her friends here, because sometimes she was kind of the helpless person in the show, the damsel in distress, or she was planted in the story to be the weight of morale in the team. But every once in a while, she took the opportunity and be a lifesaver in her own right, though she needed the help of a man to do so.
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| This hotel manager has got to clean up house for once. |
And finally, I was not impressed by the final scenes of the episode. Rufus declaring a cold war against Rittenhouse could have been more exciting, but it did not give me any chills because it is obvious that no one will declare a full-on war against Rufus for his decision to stop audio-recording the missions. I am not even sure they will do anything about it when it comes to Connor Mason, despite all the threats that were thrown at Rufus from both Rittenhouse and Connor. It is one of those stories that has been dragged from one episode to the next, due to the writers’ indecision to do something with the story.
