Timeless - 'Atomic City', 'Party at Castle Varlar', 'The Alamo' and 'The Watergate Tape'

I'm going to be honest with you, I'm mainly going to be illustrating this series
with costume porn.

I was working from home yesterday, which is always a good chance to catch up on the brain candy side of my TV backlog. No The Expanse or The OA, but I did get through four episodes of Timeless and a crap tonne of Agents of SHIELD.

First, Timeless, and time-troubleshooters Lucy Preston, Wyatt Logan and Rufus Carlin(1) are first sent back to Las Vegas in a time when it was better known as 'Atomic City'. They discover that Flynn has kidnapped JFK's mistress, Judith Campbell. They rescue her, but faced with the threat of blackmail she turns on the team and unwittingly helps Flynn and his technical adviser, time travel project head Anthony Bruhl, to steal the core of an atomic bomb. Although they recover the case in which the bomb was being transported, they find it is empty, the core itself having been buried for recovery in 2016.

I seriously expect these two to kiss at some point.

Once more, Wyatt is unable to kill Flynn - I predict this becoming old real soon now - and Rufus gets huffy before handing over his recording of events for the scrutiny of the mysterious Rittenhouse. Rufus also gets to be cooler than usual as he uses his 'historical superpower' - he is black, and therefore in many periods in history essentially invisible - to effortlessly steal waiting staff uniforms to infiltrate a casino, and later boosts a car simply by walking up to the driver at the front door of said casino.

Back in 2016, Lucy still doesn't know her fiance's last name and has a bust up with her mother over her father's identity, while Wyatt's attempt to prevent his wife's murder via time-delayed telegram fails.

Worst. Costume. Ever.

The team tracks the Mothership's power consumption, but Flynn's group escape and the ship next turns up in Germany in 1944. Concerned that Flynn intends to use the stolen core to arm the Nazi regime with nuclear weapons, the team travel back and try to contact the Resistance, instead running into a British intelligence agent named Fleming; Ian Fleming (professional cheeky chappy Sean Maguire doing a posh accent.)

With Fleming's assistance they reach a V2 test site, but Lucy and Rufus won't let Wyatt start shooting due to the risk of hitting Werner von Braun and nixing the US space programme. Instead, Lucy and Fleming infiltrate the titular 'Party at Castle Varlar' to try to kidnap von Braun. Flynn turns the tables on them, but discovering that there is no nuclear material in the V2, Wyatt and Rufus smell a rat and turn up to be big damn heroes. The team grab von Braun, prevent Fleming killing him in revenge for the Blitz and escape through a secret tunnel before returning to discover the best historical change yet, as their mission report is likened to the plot of James Bond novel and movie Weapon of Choice.

Bonus points for Lucy not letting Fleming kiss her.

"Wait! Weren't we supposed to remember something?"

Next, in 'The Alamo', the team heads for the Alamo, where Flynn is intent on preventing the birth of the state of Texas by encouraging Santa Anna to attack early, attack often. The team is a little off their game, as Wyatt has been told that he will be replaced as the team's designated Garcia Flynn shooter for failing to shoot Garcia Flynn in a staggering 100% of missions, and is getting flashbacks to a previous mission when he drew the short straw and had to run off and get a vital message out while the rest of his team died to a man. It's amazing he can string a sentence together.

While Wyatt struggles to impress Jim Bowie and Rufus discusses courage with alleged bear-wrestler Davy Crockett, Lucy has to put together a reasonable and rousing approximation to the Travis letter. When Flynn's exhortations result in Santa Anna declaring no quarter, they also have to work out a way to get the women and children clear (with the letter.) Wyatt is minded to stay to the last, but Lucy insists he is the only Garcia Flynn shooter she could trust, and Jim Bowie gives him his signature knife as a remembrance.

Rufus refuses to lie anymore and tells Mason he won't be Rittenhouse's spy, only to be stopped on the way home by a man in a limo who hacks his car and threatens his family. Lucy's mom finally gives in and gives her the name of her father, but at the top of 'The Watergate Tape' we learn that it is not Garcia Flynn (I guess he probably is a bit young,) but some rando named Benjamin Cahill. Wyatt has a full-blown conspiracy wall for tracking his wife's murder.

Seriously; I do wonder if the concept wasn't pitched by someone in wardrobe.

Unsurprisingly, the next trip is to Washington DC in 1972, where Nixon is about to go down and Flynn appears to be after the missing 18.5 minutes in the Watergate tapes. Rufus is charged with making sure that no-one gets the tapes, and given a number to report to in 1972. Unfortunately, it turns out that Flynn already has the tapes, and after he nabs the team as well he plays it, revealing that Nixon was concern with recovering 'the doc' on behalf of Rittenhouse. He also reveals that his guide in all of this is the journal written by future Lucy, causing her comrades to doubt her.

Flynn sends Lucy and Rufus to locate the doc and return it to him, but Rufus' unseen contact tells him to destroy it. Using future knowledge to find and blackmail Deep Throat, they learn that the Black Liberation Army have the doc, which turns out to be the Doc, a woman with a PhD in history who used to keep books for Rittenhouse, which she describes as a secret society with vast reach, into which she was born. Back at the safehouse, Flynn tells Wyatt that Rittenhouse and America are too intertwined to destroy Rittenhouse - which he claims had his family murdered in order to frame him when he stumbled on the conspiracy - without attacking the USA. Rufus confesses his involvement with Rittenhouse and together they set Rittenhouse and Flynn at each other's throats while getting the Doc to safety. All secrets are told, and Wyatt decrees that they both suck, but that Rufus is now their inside man.

In 2016, Lucy goes to visit Benjamin Cahill, but bottles it just after we get to see that Cahill is the Rittenhouse agent who threatened Rufus and was on the other end of the phone in 1972.

Timeless has a nice little conspiracy going on, but I'm not sure how much staying power it has, as eventually they either need to bring Rittenhouse down or face the increasingly unlikely scenario of these impossibly powerful Illuminati allowing their sworn enemies to remain in a position to threaten them. What mileage the show will have after that remains to be seen, especially as we're six episodes in and the team is looking rocky. Individually they aren't ad, but they need to develop a more than one-note rapport if they are to carry the show past that difficult moment when the conspiracy theory strains credibility.

(1) I straight up failed to notice that our three protagonists are named after Bill S. Preston, Esq, Ted "Theodore" Logan, and both the character Rufus and actor George Carlin, partly because their surnames are rarely used given the tendency to offer ludicrous aliases.