 |
| There are 3 travelers in this picture, from 2 teams |
Travelers are time traveling sleeper agents embedded in the 21st century. They come in teams like Mission Impossible except the team never gets to go home. There’s a leader, medic, hacker, the muscle; and there’s usually a number 2 man whose narrative roll is to spoil the team leader.
I thought I’d be ok with the series since I never get to see the future. It’s not a line rather a timeline if there’s only one point, and I tend to nitpick with the logic of the timeline. But as it turns out without the future there is no emotional core as far as time travel stories are concerned.
The
team has no hint of self righteousness which comes from knowing the wrong moves
that made their future world, not even among themselves. No fear or anger on
seeing the 21st century with their own eyes as it continues the
mistakes of humankind they’ve only studied.
 |
| Grant Maclaren throws away coffee with cows milk. The future is vegan? Why? |
 |
| 4 seconds before download |
There’s not even relief or temptation
to quit now that they live in a world before the apocalypse they call home. Well, I think I saw samples of this twice but not of the main team.
The biggest emotional anguish that plagues each team member is how to live their 21st century lives. At first they try to present it as all business, maintaining cover and all that, then as the episodes go on the cover is their lives.
Carly (Nesta Cooper) for example has a son, which she could discard to the father of the child easily, but she chose not to. Besides the mission she needs to find a job, fend off an abusive ex, and care for a baby. There's no mention of her future self.
Should Carly give the child to the father or raise him as her own 
Philip gets help for addiction
It has been mentioned that not talking of the future is protocol. For a normal present day story that would be fine, relatable every day people with problems is good, but emotionally is it a time travel story?
Completing my rant for the series is my top nitpick in the temporal logic, the no kill order, also known as protocol 3.
There’s an episode set in a plant
containing antimatter. At some point in the mission they
had to know the plant had to blow up, even as a contingency, in order to
harvest the energy. They set up an armed perimeter staffed by new travelers from
the future, including skilled snipers, and to my astonishment they are not
allowed to kill.
What’s the point of defending a perimeter? Quick answer is to stall enemy forces, but if they all die anyway what's the point? Anyone within the blast radius of the plant will die.
The time travel answer to saving lives or killing is that people create the world they live in. Every time a life is added or subtracted the future is different. But if we’re going there then what is the point of embedding travelers in the bodies of the recorded dead, thereafter the traveler maintains original host lives as cover. That in itself is already polluting the timeline.
A physical traveler going in and
out like a Mission Impossible would have made more sense for a non-interference goal. Question now is, do I watch season 2 and 3?
No comments:
Post a Comment