Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's been over 4 months since I last wrote about the TV series Timeless. It originally aired in 2016-2018 on NBC. I watched it earlier this year streaming on Hulu. I actually finished watching it, both seasons, back in February, but it subsequently got lost in my backlog of things to write about. Now I have time to pick the thread back up.



In my last blog about Timeless, back in February, I mused about who or what "Rittenhouse" could be. It's the name of the mysterious, invisible, powerful bogeyman that drives the whole series's plot. We're introduced to the name as early as the first episode, when the apparent villain, a former-government-spy-turned-terrorist named Flynn who's stolen a time machine and is going back in time to kill key US government officials, says, in so many words, "It's not me you should be chasing, it's Rittenhouse." Okay, but who or what is Rittenhouse, and what do they want?

Clues dribble out over successive episodes, but mostly it's a cat-and-mouse game as the protagonists, Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus, chase Flynn to stop him from murdering past key political leaders— including presidents. The nature of the hidden enemy becomes more clear in Episode 10, "The Capture of Benedict Arnold". It's also where the protagonists agree to join forces with their immediate enemy, temporarily, to oppose the hidden enemy.

In this episode Flynn travels back in time to upstate New York, 1780. It's when Benedict Arnold betrayed George Washington to the British. The protagonists fear Flynn is changing the past to aid Arnold and the British, helping them capture George Washington and presumably defeat the fledgling United States of America in its war of independence.

( Spoilers for this episode (click to open) )

New Zealand Travelog #43
Back home - Mon, 22 Apr 2024, 8am

We're back home from New Zealand now. ...Well, when "now" was Monday morning; it's taken me until Tuesday night to post this blog.

Our flight landed at SFO a bit early, around 6:30am. The journey had been nearly 12 hours in economy class, albeit United's Economy Plus, with a bit more legroom. This time there was no empty middle seat between Hawk and me. And the person between us was not exactly small.

I got zero sleep on the flight, absolutely none. Partly that was due to the cramped seating, partly it was the timing. 6:30am San Francisco time is 1:30am New Zealand time. Staying up the whole flight was just like staying up late. Except now it's Monday morning here, and I've got a whole day ahead of me. Yeah, I think I'll be crashing early tonight.

One curiosity of flights back from Asia is that they arrive before they depart. Our flight left Auckland Monday the 22nd at 1:50pm and arrived San Francisco Monday the 22nd at 6:35am. That's an effect of crossing the International Date Line. It's (spoiler alert) part of a plot twist in the classic Jules Verne novel I read as a child, Around the World in Eighty Days. Or, as I like to call it, the second closest I've ever come to time travel.

Thankfully things moved swiftly once we were off the plane at SFO. US immigration and customs move quickly now with Global Entry. It took them several years to get things properly automated, and the cost has been surely billions of dollars plus all our privacy from the government (the system uses biometric identification), but at least now it works. And the Uber ride home was pretty quick, even though we hit the early end of rush hour traffic. We walked through our own front door at 7:45am. And while I could technically have made today a workday, I very intentionally took it off. Today's a day to unwind from travel and get back on the local timezone! And likely also take a nap to make up for being up all night.

As we watch through the 2016-2018 streaming TV series Timeless it's fun to see the little changes to history the writers include as consequences of people time-traveling to the past and mucking with key events in history.



Recall the format of this show is a cat-and-mouse, adventure-of-the week serial where two teams are chasing each other through history. One team is trying to change history, acting from motivations that are slowly revealed, while the other is trying at the same time to keep history's major events aright.

For example, in S1E1 the teams traveled to the site of the Hindenburg disaster. The end result was the Hindenburg did explode... but it happened a day later, after the maiden voyage succeeded, and it was attributed "terrorists" who used a cheekily 21st century moniker. The characters' use of hastily-imagined fake names when they're trying to patch things up— names that then become part of the historical canon that everyone in the (new) present day knows— seems to be a minor running gag. As do black-and-white photos or artistic renderings of the modern characters standing at the edge of the scene in newspaper reports. I like it.

Stop Whining about Amy!

One timeline change the showrunners created that I do not like is the disappearance of Amy, the younger sister of one of the main characters, Lucy. When Lucy returns from her S1E1 mission involving the Hindenburg she finds her sister isn't home... and her mother says Lucy never had a sister! One of the other characters does some research and finds that, in the new timeline, Lucy's mother never met her father. He married instead a woman descended from a new survivor of the Hindenburg disaster. "So how am I still here?" Lucy asks. Answer: the man she's always known as "Dad" was only her step dad, and Amy was only her half sister.

Now, if Lucy's emotional takeaway from this was, "Waaah! My whole live I've been lied to!" I wouldn't mind it. It'd be a little trite, sure— because it feels a bit overdone— but I'd take it in stride. What happens instead is that Lucy focuses on, "They took my sister and I want her baaaaack!"

This emotional beat of "My sisterrrrrrr!" becomes irritating because Lucy harps about it every single episode. And that's frustrating because she, an otherwise very smart person, is written as completely unable to reason about what has happened. She harps in every episode to multiple characters about how she needs to use the time machine to "save" Amy. But there's nobody to save. Amy hasn't been killed. She hasn't been kidnapped, stolen, or harmed. The simple fact is Lucy's now in a timeline where Amy's parents never met. Amy never happened. Going back and changing that with a time machine is a vastly different proposition than, say, preventing an accident or stopping a crime. The writers write Lucy as too daft to get this... and by extension treat us viewers as unable to see the difference, either.

A week ago I watched the pilot episode of Timeless, a 2016-2018 TV series about time travel. It's a cat-and-mouse type story where two groups have time machines. One is trying to change things the in the past, the other is chasing after them trying to prevent world-altering changes. I already wrote a few thoughts about the pilot in general. Now I'd like to share three thoughts about specifics in the in S1E1, "Hindenburg". Spoilers marked.

1. The "What If?" Game

Early on in the episode we learn the thieves have travel back in time to the day the Hindenburg explosion in 1937. The characters challenge each other— and, by extension, us— to think how history could be different if there was no Hindenburg disaster.

"It could have made Germany stronger going into WWII," Hawk suggested.

"Ennnnh," I objected. "The Hindenburg was a bad design with its hydrogen flotation. A successful demo success would have risked German aeronautics pouring more time and money into a fatally flawed design."

"But a success there could have intimidated the US into staying out of WWII..."

Except the US did stay out of WWII for two years. And when the Japanese thought they could intimidate us by bombing Pearl Harbor and destroying half our Pacific fleet, they miscalculated. Their attack, which did hobble our Pacific fleet, galvanized the country into action. It spurred us to join WWII and, more importantly, awoke us from a long stupor of underdeveloped manufacturing capability.

Ultimately the time-thieves' plan was ( Spoiler (click to open) )

2. An Oddly Timed Plot Reveal

At the climax of the episode the writers make a plot reveal that seems premature. ( Spoiler (click to open) )

3. "Killing [them] in the Cradle"

As the three protagonists are discussing what happened before they return to present day, Lucy declares to the other two, ( Spoiler (click to open) )

It's a few days late, but since I'm such a science fiction fan I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of wishing everyone a happy May 4th.



( Confused? )

We're getting near the end of season 3 of The Mandalorian. After S3E7 there's only one more episode, the season finale, in the season. ...Which is a shame because the writers only found The Way after stumbling badly through the first half of the season.

In S3E7, "The Spies", Bo-Katan leads two now-united tribes of Mandalorians back to planet Mandalore to explore resettling it. She and main character Din Djarin, aka "Mando", lead an exploratory party down to the surface of the planet to find the Great Forge and scout for where they can build an outpost. With the epic space-western structure of the show (This Is The Way) it's predictable both good and bad things happen.

( Episode Spoilers )

Despite this being yet-another instance of sloppy writing this episode is otherwise strong and enjoyable. It'll be interesting to see how this gets wrapped up in the next episode, the season finale.

Season 3 of The Mandalorian has gotten off to a rocky start. The first two episodes suffered juvenile writing and seemed like fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000. Late in ep. 2 the writers found their way back to laying out a classic epic storyline for the season but then backslid to cheesy, juvenile plotting in ep. 3. Ep. 4 was no better, and I felt it necessary to defend why I'm not ready to quit this series yet. Finally the writers have found their way— I mean, The Way— in ep. 5, "The Pirate".

The Pirate spins a classic Space Western style tale. ( Episode spoiler )

This is how you write a good show.

This Is The Way.

Oh, man. Just after season 3 of The Mandalorian escaped the MST3K parody-ready juvenile writing of S3E1 and seemed to set up an epic story progression in S3E2, along comes S3E3 and throws it all away. 🙄 Chapter 19, "The Convert", reverts to amateur writing with loose ends and unearned plot points. It also commits the grave mistake The Book of Boba Fett and Andor did when they split their stories with side plots that involved different main characters. With TBoBF, at least, that other main character was interesting— it was The Mandalorian! See Boba Fett S1E5: No Boba Fett and The Book of Boba Fett S1E6: Boba Fett Writes a Book About Somebody Else. Alas this series is already about Mando, so switching viewpoint to someone else is a step down.

( Meanwhile, on Coruscant... (episode spoilers) )

...Okay, so is that side story now over? If so, what was the point of it? What was Elia's goal? Is she now the main character of the side story? Is she evil for good's sake or evil for evil's sake? These are bad questions to have to be asking at this point in the story.

Oh, and the title, "The Convert"? That refers to the plot with the actual main character, Din Djarin, who's only given a few minutes of screen time in this episode. He and Bo-Katan go back to the Mandalorian covert in exile. Din Djarin is redeemed, and Bo-Katan, having also bathed in the sacred waters, is forgiven for her helmet-taking-off ways. ...Nevermind that she was part of the ruling family in political feuds that probably caused the destruction of their whole planet, she's now absolved of going helmetless in public. This is The Way.

This short sequence with the Mandalorian covert also surfaces numerous unearned plot points. A few of them:

• How do they eat? There's no food. They're on a deserted desert planet and have no space ship.


• How did they even get there? They have no space ship and there's no space port.


• How do they get technology— and fuel— for the Armorer to build things with her forge? They're on a deserted desert planet with no food, no supplies, and no transportation.

Again, this story feels like an roleplaying adventure written by a 12 year old... with an army of set dressers and special effects people to make it look like a million bucks.

A few weeks ago we started watching season 3 of The Mandalorian. It's TV we've been looking forward to ever since the second half of that other Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett, turned into Boba Fett Writes a Book About a Someone More Interesting. Here are my thoughts after watching the first 2 episodes.

The Mandalorian definitely has strengths going for it. Din Djarin, the title character, is a genuinely interesting character... even if the face mask thing does have actor Pedro Pascal seeming to phone in 99% of his performance. A number of the recurring characters are interesting, too. Then there's CGI costar Grogu, aka "Baby Yoda". I have hopes we might see him develop this season into something more than a MacGuffin dressed in a potato sack.

Production values remain strong. It's obvious even when the writing gets cheap (see below) that the show still have a lot of budget. The crew, artists, and animators continue doing a fantastic job.

The setting continues to be a great canvas for storytelling. The "Space Western" genre provides an outer rim of the galaxy where every planet is different and danger lurks around every corner. BTW, space-western isn't just my term for it. It's a known category within writing, and showrunner Jon Favreau has said in interviews that his idea was to create a Star Wars story that was like the Old West.

So, with all these positives, what's not to like? You knew there was a "but" coming.

Mandalorian Science Theater 3000

The "but" is the writing. The first two episodes of Mandalorian are just cheesy. I sat there on the sofa offering a sarcastic running commentary like I was Joel and the 'bots.



What's so cheesy about eps. 1 and 2? Here's a partial list of things I spontaneously ragged on the show for, spoiler protected as it reveals plot points:

( Episode 1 spoilers, MST3K-style )

Episode 2: coming later, as this is getting too long.

Game of Thrones S7E6, "Beyond the Wall" involves a climactic battle: "The Battle of the Frozen Lake", as people call it. While the battle is narratively powerful, the writers took a lazy shortcut the writers took broke my suspension of disbelief. A heroic rescue that's shown arriving in 12-16 hours really should have taken more than two weeks to arrive, if time, distance, and the reality of traveling speed mean anything.

This is not the first instance of the TV series's showrunners playing fast-and-loose with time. As they've condensed carefully plotted but overly long storylines from the books, sometimes the timelines don't match up. For example, did a character ride 500 miles through a war zone in 2 days? Did an army seemingly sail or march halfway around the continent in a week? Until now these plausibly could be hand-waved away. A few weeks could pass between episodes or even between scenes in one episode. The endangered heroes' predicament is clearly urgent: they're surrounded by an enemy horde in sub-zero weather with no food or shelter. They have hours to survive. Yet somehow, in that time, a raven flies 1,000 miles with a written plea for help strapped to its leg, and help comes.

You might ask why unrealistic flight speed for a common bird is what suspension of disbelief falls apart on in a story where we've accepted that there are dragons and hordes of undead animated by dark magic.

There's a bedrock principle in the genre of fantasy and science fiction that a writer only gets a small number of "freebies" in setting up their story. Small being, like, one or two. In fantasy, that's typically the presence of magic and fantastical creatures. In scifi it's often faster-than-light travel and certain other bits of fantastical technology like hoverbikes, matter replicators, or instantaneous communication.

Beyond the basic existence of these 1 or 2 freebies everything else must be earned. And to be earned it must follow rules that are internally consistent. In this story it's an unforgivable shortcut to say, "Surprise! After 65 episodes, we're just now revealing that ordinary birds actually fly at the speed of light."

I am, of course, not the only fan to criticize this aspect of S7E6. Nor am I even the first. I mean, I watched this episodes five years after it dropped. Lots of critics are 5 years ahead of me.

It's interesting to see how the showrunners responded to this criticism. Director Alan Taylor sneered in an interview with The New York Times, "I've only looked at one review online, and it was very much concerned with the speed of the ravens. I thought, that's funny — you don't seem troubled by the lizard as big as a 747, but you’re really concerned about the speed of a raven."

Yes! We are bothered by that! We accept that huge dragons exist but not that ordinary ravens can fly 500 mph (nor even that said dragons can fly that fast) because of that bedrock principle of the genre I explained above. The director's response isn't an explanation at all but a Twitter-quality retort making fun of the critics instead of addressing their actual, valid point. The director either is a complete idiot about the $10-million-an-episode genre he was hired to direct, or he thinks his audience are complete idiots.