Date of airing: January 30, 2017 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 3.506 million viewers, 2.2/4 in Households, 0.86/3 with Adults 18-49, 0.4/2 with Adults 18-34, 1.2/4 with Adults 25-54
written by: Anne Cofell Saunders
directed by: Greg Beeman
At first, I was surprised, but then I was not surprised any longer about how the episode evolved and the way it ended. After the finale of the previous episode, I was not expecting Wyatt to take action upon his words and immediately steal the time machine and try to prevent Jessica from getting murdered and therefore create a new present timeline for himself that could be a bit confusing for everyone involved (if Jessica had been alive, does it mean she would have spent the last couple of years still married to Wyatt and he would not have remembered anything about those years?). But when it was revealed that Jessica was still dead, I just nodded my head and figured that I was right after all. The writers are not just going to change the status quo of one of the main characters just like that, and before a season finale no less.
If Jessica had been back among the living, it would have changed the Wyatt/Lucy relationship drastically (although there is not much of a relationship in the first place, the writers only teased that something could happen between the two), and it would change his working relationship with Mason Industries. Why continue hopping through time and trying to stop Flynn when you have your wife back and can live happily ever after? While I appreciate the writers’ efforts to at least try to prevent Jessica’s murder, TIMELESS is still a mainstream show that cannot just screw up the premise like that, in the middle of the season, during an episode that is just like any other (although with less of a history lesson, as Wyatt and Rufus jumped into a year that was not of much value when it comes to American history). Though I was wondering how the episode would have ended if TIMELESS did not get an order of three additional episodes. After all, this episode was the finale of the original episode order...
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| Lucy is in some sort of danger again. |
The trip back to the early 1980s was okay. I guess trips back to the 80s were possible after all, since I do not think that Wyatt and Rufus were older than me, which means that trips back to 1986 and beyond are not possible, according to the previously established rule that the characters cannot travel back to a time in which they already existed. I wonder what would happen if they do – bodymelt like in TIMECOP, or will the original versions of the characters simply disappear into Nowhereland, like Frank Parker was assumed to in SEVEN DAYS, which is why he was supposed to be confined on base all of the time? The story of trying to prevent Claire and Joel from having naughty fun in their hotel room, so they cannot make an evil and serial-killing baby, seemed alright, but because the story did not have the wanted intent and even lost the purpose of saving Jessica at times (that is where the story turned somewhat creepy with predatory men and Wyatt getting arrested), it seemed pretty much a useless hour of television.
Except of course you were thinking about the possibility that Jessica was not killed by Wes Gilliam, as Flynn said, and he instead just sent Wyatt back in time to kill another Rittenhouse member. Or Jessica was killed by Rittenhouse, and that was Flynn’s way to lead Wyatt to this important piece of information, to get him on his side. Another interesting tidbit is that Wyatt got the information wrong about the plane’s arrival time. It could have been a simple mistake, or it could have been the writers’ intent to send Wyatt and Rufus to the hotel, so they can be trapped there, but maybe those 20 minutes were part of something larger. I do not want to think that way though, because it would make TIMELESS a more complex and mythology-heavy show, and it simply is not a good-enough series to be a carbon copy of what made LOST a success in 2004 and 2005.
However, the complication of the plot was solidly worked into the episode. Joel continued to flirt with Claire throughout the episode, and it almost seemed like Wyatt was walking towards a wall the entire time. But I cannot say whether I found it absurd or interesting that he decided to kill one of the two after he failed to impress Claire and stop her from going up to her (or his?) room with Joel. He could have acted in character because Wyatt never stopped thinking like a killer on the lookout for his next victim, to execute his target to end the mission with a success, but he was strictly warned that stuff will happen to the timeline if he just kills people left and right. Yes, the death was just an accident, and who knows, maybe Joel was an insignificant person to humankind’s history (with the exception of conceiving a serial killer) but Wyatt better gets haunted by the death of this innocent man, like Rufus was affected by his kill moment in Houston, or the death scene was as useless as most of the episode.
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| Wyatt is in some sort of danger again. |
Meanwhile, stuff was happening at Homebase, and it was good enough to keep me interested. Finally, the writers got rid of Anthony because they never managed to make him count in the show (Flynn could have gotten any random character to make a battery out of the nuclear core ten episodes ago), and it gives Rufus the chance to finally get into the fight because now he does not have to think about Anthony any longer.
Anthony going against Flynn, because of what Rittenhouse was planning with the time machine, was extremely dull though. Anthony knew what Rittenhouse wanted to do with the machine from the beginning. For some reason, he even decided to somewhat band together with Flynn, to not be a hostage to the man who lost his family, and instead be a willing pilot. But in this episode, he decided to take matters into his own hands and blow up the mothership, and suddenly Anthony was seen as the “traitor” within Flynn’s group, the villain among the villains of Rittenhouse, although Flynn could have continued to make use of Anthony as the expert of time travel and as a pilot. Granted, Flynn has Emma as a pilot now, but why would Flynn be the villain in this story when it was clear even to Anthony that Rittenhouse was the ultimate enemy? I find it very convenient that Anthony thought this was all just about destroying the time machine and preventing Rittenhouse from changing the past, when that is something Anthony could have advocated for to Flynn in the very beginning before he was kidnapped during the events of the pilot episode.
