Timeless - 'Space Race'

"What does 'phear my 1337 skillzors' mean?"

Timeless goes back to 1969 and the height of the Cold War, but Garcia Flynn has more on his mind than disrupting the first moon landing and handing control of Earth to the Silence.

Wait; wrong time travel show.

I kid, but I am starting to get a little muddled. I was really thrown by the fact that Nate and Ray could be affected by the Lucas aberration in Legends of Tomorrow before I remembered that it's Timeless where the travelers are insulated from the effects of the changes that they made (and to an extent Frequency, but I haven't talked about that yet.)

The main plot sees Rufus and Lucy struggling to undo Anthony's sabotage of the landing, which would cause a major shift in the balance of Cold War power by prolonging the space race. That said, there's a double meaning in the title of the episode. Not only is Rufus, the one member of the team with the technical know-how to defeat Anthony's work (a DDOS attack using a computer virus coded for the machines of the time,) forced to masquerade as a janitor, but in order to access the hardware they need the help of Katherine Johnson, stealing a march on big screen offering Hidden Figures in the process.

"You know where you can shove your coffee?"

It's very much Rufus' show this week. Not only because of his technical abilities, but because he is the one who knows about Johnson and the other black women who provided their mathematical muscle to the space programme, having grown up with these largely unsung heroes as his role models. By giving her the credit for resolving the communication glitch, their change in history this week is in providing her a platform from which to be recognised and published - and have a movie made about her - where in the original timeline she largely vanished(1). By contrast, Wyatt once more fails to do his one job, and Lucy gets to sass a chauvinist, which is satisfying in its way, but strictly small potatoes.

Elsewhere, Flynn infiltrates not-Lockheed disguised as a plumber in order to make contact with a widowed secretary, get close to her son and nefariously inject him with epinephrine when he is stung by a bee! Yes, it turns out that the secretary, as well as being a future engineer, is Flynn's mother and the boy who would have died his half-brother. How this affects her meeting and marrying Flynn's dad is apparently a moot point, and our heroes are left to wonder why the bad guy feels more able to do good by his loved ones than they do. Rufus is also troubled by the fact that he shoots Anthony's bodyguard and doesn't feel bad about it.

At this stage in its run, Timeless is in need of a bit of a shakeup. There's only so much jump of the week you can get away with hen you're running an ongoing arc with a driven antagonist like Flynn. We need more episodes like 'Stranded' which stray from the formula, rather than 'Space Race', which is a decent enough episode in its way, but not different enough to stand out from the crowd.

(1) Our first instance of a change which moves the Timeless timeline closer to ours, I think.