Timeless - 'Pilot' and 'The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln'

"Is anyone going to talk about the fact that we're flying through time in a giant
eyeball?"

History Professor Lucy Preston is somewhat taken aback to be picked up by sinister agents and hurried to a lab, where she is asked to be the historical consultant on a trip through time. One of two prototype time travel machines has been swiped by Garcia Flynn, a former NSA agent who killed his own family and is considered well and truly off the res. Flynn has traveled back to 1937 with a group of associates to work some shenanigans on the Hindenberg disaster. Lucy is to work out what he's doing, Delta Force badass Wyatt is to take Flynn out, and technician Rufus Carlin is along to look after the second time machine and report back on what happens if the other two get dangerously independent.

Flynn prevents the destruction of the Hindenberg in order to bomb its return flight, when it will be packed with dignitaries. A reporter whom the team befriends is shot in a confrontation with Flynn, who shows Lucy a journal which she will supposedly write in the future and challenges her to ask the machine's creators about 'Rittenhouse'. Back in the present, they learn that the Hindenberg was destroyed by anarchists (actually a hastily assumed cover that the team used to force an evacuation) with no casualties except reporter Kate Drummond, and Lucy goes home to discover that her mother is no longer a near-catatonic invalid and that her sister no longer exists.

I'm very torn, because on the one side diversity is awesome, but on the other
there is almost no setting in American pre-living history where two whites and
a black guy hanging out won't look sus. I think that all in all I'm happie that
he's there, but hope they will be at least as good as Legends in dealing with the
issue.

The pilot episode establishes a few basic rules of time travel, which are picked up on in 'The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln'. It is not possible, or at least inadvisable, to travel in one's own lifetime (so, the opposite of Quantum Leap.) Changing the past is completely possible, but those time traveling will remember the changes. The lab can detect when the first machine - the Mothership - lands and send the second - the Lifeboat - after it, but crucially all time travelers operate in a parallel chronology to the present, such that temporal events occur one at a time, and there is a fixed window in which to launch an intervention before time is changed. So, although they can travel to any time at any time, when Flynn lands in 1865 to get involved in the assassination of Lincoln, the team have only as long as it takes him to do whatever he's doing to launch their intervention, before they don't have any knowledge of the original timeline to work with.

Due to illness, the part of John Wilkes Booth will be played by Garcia Flynn.

So, yes, the second jaunt is to 1865 and the brief period of optimism for future race relations. This time, Flynn's goal seems to be to ensure that not only Lincoln but General Grant, Vice-President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward are assassinated, but equipping Booth and his co-conspirators with modern firearms. Lucy catches the eye of Robert Todd Lincoln, and snags an invitation to the President's box, where Lincoln and Grant will be, while Wyatt protects Seward and Rufus Johnson.

Rufus has a run in with a group of black soldiers who peg him for a fake, but saves the VP and earns the respect of the soldiers. Wyatt's job is pretty straightforward, but Lucy is left to wrestle with the question of whether she ought to act to protect the President as well, thus - hopefully - changing the future for the better. She clashes with Rufus over whether historical integrity is worth the backstep for black rights, and Wyatt over whether there is a difference between saving someone (his dead wife, for example,) and her determination to reinstate her vanished sister. She also has another run in with Flynn, who tells her she will end up working with him.

Ultimately, she tries to save Lincoln, and while Flynn - replacing Booth, who refused to switch his 'more dramatic' derringer and dagger for a Glock and got knocked out for his dramatic principles - is able to shoot Lincoln, she does save Grant. On their return they learn that a mysterious actress saved Grant's life and has a school named after her, while Johnson was reported saved by one of his (white) bodyguards. Rufus reports to project head Connor Mason on behalf of Rittenhouse, while a friendly tech explains that Lucy's sister has gone because her dad married the granddaughter of a Hindenberg survivor and never met her mother, which also means that the man she thought of as her father wasn't. She then returns home in time for an engagement party to a man she has never met.

Timeless shows considerable promise in its opening episode. Its characters are currently a little generic (my current prediction is that Flynn is Lucy's real father, but I hope they'll do something more interesting,) but I do like that the team seem consistently unable to prevent any change to history. Also, next week is JFK but not the grassy knoll; props for that.