Thursday, May 31, 2018

Timeless: Season 2, Episode 9, "The General" & Episode 10, "Chinatown" (Season Finale) - Timeless leans on its strengths to deliver a powerful finale (and cliffhanger)


It's no big secret that Timeless is on the bubble for renewal, especially given the huge cliffhanger it decided to leave the audience with as it rounds out its second (and hopefully not final) season. Fingers crossed. As I write this, the fate of the show is still in the air, though some hope remains because of that mere fact since the network television upfronts have come and gone without a word on Timeless, which aired over the same weekend. Regardless, Timeless set out to spin a tale of the lesser known aspects of history in a fun, action-adventure romp, and landed on a spectacular finish that really demands at least a final, if truncated season (even more so than this year, if that's possible).

The two part finale concentrates Timeless into a perfect distillation of the show's strengths without skipping a beat. Oddly, I did feel the first hour ("The General") felt more of a transitional episode despite being the penultimate episode of the season. It's an otherwise almost run-of-the-mill episode where they have to stop the American Civil War turning out the wrong way, with a bit of help from Harriet Tubman. from A few points were made about season long arcs such as Jiya's growing abilities and how she could start to control them, on top of that the arc with Jessica and her affiliation with Rittenhouse. Carol tries to sway Nicholas back to her side over Emma, but it's played very slowly until it explodes in the following hour.  Everything ends up contributing greatly to the second hour ("Chinatown"), making the first hour feel like one last standalone adventure before everything hits the fan.

On that note, Timeless as a show that frequently leans harder on the episodic side of storytelling as one of its strengths, though for me, at some points the longer arcs feel inconsequential until it truly comes to a head. Often the longer arcs can feature too little change or movement as the season progresses without giving much hint for the future ahead, though it's more of a nitpick than anything from me.

It's in "Chinatown" that Timeless really begins to stop playing safe and go for broke with everything that's been building through the season. Starting with Jessica, she kidnaps Jiya back to Rittenhouse only to be made a hostage (Carol wants to leverage her to bump off Emma). She quickly makes her escape but not before Emma gets a few shots in at the Lifeboat, and it can't land back in the bunker. I suppose at this point Rittenhouse has little to no resources left seeing as they can't attack the bunker despite maybe knowing where it is. What's impressive is Jiya leaving a message for the team on where to find the Lifeboat in the present and warning them to leave her behind. It's a drastically heightened scenario that we saw with Lucy at the start of the season, placing Jiya in the late 19th century for three years on her own. It's a much bolder move than what they attempted to do with Lucy, and if the show continues, Jiya might seem much better equipped to head out with the team as she's been given time to "toughen up" (for the lack of a better term).

The second drastic change Timeless makes is to set Rittenhouse down a different path by basically turning Nicholas Keynes an afterthought. The leftovers of Rittenhouse chase after Jiya all at once, and it causes the sole four survivors to whittle each other down - Keynes kills Carol and then Emma executes Nicholas - leaving Emma and Jessica left to escape back to the present. With Rittenhouse in the present essentially now in the hands of two women, it makes me wonder what type of threat will they pose, considering Jessica and Wyatt's child will either be leverage or used against him. It does make me wonder that if the show is done with using Rittenhouse as a stand-in (especially with Nicholas) for influential white men trying to control every aspect of history; what will drive Emma to take the reins? One guess is she'll want to change history for the better in her image (we saw her going against orders in "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes"), but perhaps her attempts to change things for the better might backfire without the care someone like Lucy or Carol can provide. Nicholas felt like an attempt to put a face to Rittenhouse that wasn't there is season one (unless you count Lucy's father), but he never really amounted to much and his will was mostly enacted through Emma mostly or really just played off as a more cynical version of Sleepy Hollow's Ichabod Crane.

Ultimately though, the show's strengths lies in leaning on its characters, and despite my misgivings about slower, season long stories, they do end up contributing in small ways to make us care about everyone. Flynn was a perfect example of that in season one, and with Emma and Jessica now at odds with everyone else, I'm interested in seeing where the show might take them. At some point in the show, Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus have embraced the act of changing history because their gut reaction is to change it (hopefully for the better) even when preserving the events would be the best course of action. For historians, Lucy especially, that aspect is interesting because of that struggle between judging history as a social science where one must accept the values of the past were not as enlightened versus the fiction that allows one to actually experiencing that history and being able to manipulate it. Timeless is an interesting time capsule in a way because unlike most time travel fiction that places someone from our future or past into our present as ways of examining our society and its values, it does the opposite by observing and critiquing past values to our current ones in hopes that it can act as a catalyst to improve our present. Layered on that, with the work the show puts into its characters, it's not hard to see why earlier in the season, Lucy decided to help the women of Salem avoid their fates. Or why we might agree with Jiya when she begs for Rufus to leave her behind in the past, or when Lucy just lets loose on Emma in a down-and-dirty fist fight because of what she did to Rufus. Or how it must feel for the audience to know that when a newly-upgraded Lifeboat shows up and a grizzled, future Lucy and Wyatt propose they go save Rufus, you know in the back of your mind that they wouldn't hesitate to say that they will.

Miscellaneous thoughts:
  • There is a fantastic article on Bustle that hit many of the same beats I've noticed over the first and second season, especially as it pertains to how the show tells the tales of the lesser known people of history and the connections between Rittenhouse and influential white men in history.
  • I'm not particularly in nitpicking how the time travel really works in Timeless but I have to assume anything that has time travelled is immune from changes, like any person's memories or objects remain the same despite history changing. Maybe that's why Emma killing Nicholas didn't immediately make Carol and Lucy disappear from history. Though to be fair, he was probably destined to die in WW1.

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