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.

12 Monkeys - 'One Hundred Years'

Time travel: It's about hats.

Following the clues from the hotel, Cole persuades Jones and the increasingly creepy father-daughter survivalist team of Deacon and Cassie that the next step has to be back to 1944, in pursuit of the Messengers.

While Deacon pushes for Ramse's execution, Cassie and Cole are splintered back, with Cole arriving two months earlier than Cassie. He is clearly loving the period, while nuCassie is all about the mission, which involves tracking a pair of Messengers - a man and a woman - who are going after a man named Thomas Crawford, although Terminator-style, their first attempt hits the wrong Thomas Crawford.

What is the deal with the face? Presumably it's an image that haunts the
Primaries through their weird temporal sensitivity. Maybe someone is going to
throw a baboon into the time machine.

The right Thomas Crawford is a mental patient, daubing the Monkey emblem on the walls of his cell. He is a Primary, like Jennifer, and he knows that the Messengers are coming for him. Played by Continuum's Erik Knudsen, he is kind of adorable, and like Jennifer he is resigned to the predestination of his doom. Unlike Jennifer, he doesn't have a Cole to talk him off the ledge. Cassie's impersonal insistence on protecting him does not persuade him and he gives himself up to the Messengers in part to save Cassie and Cole.

Crawford is ritually murdered using a piece of his own future skeleton, invoking a paradox which sends devastating ripples into the fracturing timeline. As anomalies tear open - fortuitously interrupting Ramse's execution - the forests turn red, and the world is one step closer to the Army's vision.

Also, Dr Ecklund is rocking out in the time machine room and giving Jones the Tormund eye. So cute.

'One Hundred Years' brings snappy suits, while spiraling our heroes further and further down the rabbit hole. Cassie continues to bridle against the new, softer side of Cole, but it is increasingly apparent that it is Cole who is - ironically as a result of Cassie's influence - coming to understand the big picture.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' (and Bones - 'The Resurrection in the Remains')

Okay; I see what you did there.

And so we come to the Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover; or as I like to think of it, proof that Brennan is a blinkered idiot. I mean, seriously, she prides herself on detached observation without assumption, which means that she looks like a bit of a pill every time Angela's psychic or a random ghost pops up to establish that the supernatural is totes for real even in the Boniverse, even without a massive supernatural hotspot in upstate New York; a mere four hours drive from the Jeffersonian. Actually, this makes Christopher Pelant make a lot more sense, because clearly he was a motherfucking wizard; I bloody knew it!

Anyway, it is the Ween of Hallows, and a group of revelers setting up a kegger in an abandoned church stumble on a dead med student lying atop the iron coffin of a headless redcoat. Cue a visit from a certain informal investigative duo still pondering the ultimate fate of one Abraham van Brunt, patriot captain turned Hessian demon cavalier and better known as the Horseman (Headless). Of course, we know that he was actually sucked into Pandora's Box, and sure enough they soon learn - thanks to an extra awesome turn from the Angelatron, reconstructing a face from a missing skull - that this was in fact the nefarious redcoat General and probable diabolist General Howe, of shadow assassin-summoning and Ichabod-torturing fame.

"It's not nonsense, it's a spell book."

In the dead student's digs, Booth - who was, it turns out, and old mate of August Corbin's - and Abbie discover a book of spells in runic script, which contains a hidden message - This book shall lead the Witness to the skull that grants the power to resurrect the dead. Cutting ahead to 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' this suggests to me that OMFG, by her lights, Pandora is a Witness. More prosaically, the student wanted to do some Flatliners style shit with near death experiences, and so nicked the skull of a British Army necromancer from his secret grave as a good luck charm, which notably is the kind of shit that seems a little outre in Bones, but is par for the course in Sleepy Hollow.

Anyway, back in Bones Ichabod produces an authentic letter from the Jeffersonian archives; an order from George Washington that Howe's body be returned to Sleepy Hollow (even if it is mysteriously in Ichabod's handwriting.) Of course, by now the skull has turned out to be the murder weapon, and Crane breaks the case by revealing that a missing tooth had in Howe's lifetime been replaced with a French-made porcelain prosthesis (and honestly I would have watched the episode just for his disdain at the concept of fancy porcelain teeth.)

"Franklin invented sex on the beach?"

Mystery solved, the corpse is packed off for Sleepy Hollow and the four investigators retire to the Founding Fathers for a celebratory drink before Abbie and Ichabod return to Sleepy Hollow (and to Sleepy Hollow.)

Unfortunately, Pandora hijacks the transport carrying Howe's remains and uses a runic medallion to transform the decapitated skeleton into a very active zombie, promising him revenge against an old enemy: "Crane," the general hisses, in case we thought that someone might have encountered Ichabod in his patriot days and not fixated on him in an unhealthy fashion. Truly the greatest trick that Washington ever pulled was keeping Crane out of the history books.

Gotta love that 18th Century shooting stance.

Howe's hijacking interrupts the team costume bowling match - at which Ichabod runs into Zoe, who is dressed somewhat disconcertingly as sexy (seamstress) Betsy Ross, but who is the only one to recognise his natty, hand-embroidered waistcoat as a John Adams costume - especially when the General resurrects a force of redcoat zombies who prove impervious to bullets. The books eventually identify them as Draugr, virtually unstoppable undead shock troops, and the only hint of a weakness is a reference to Howe's 'primal tomb'.

With no other means of identifying Howe's original burial site (clearly not Twickenham) our heroes turn to the country's foremost forensic analyst. While Christine's Jane Goodall costume still needs finishing touches, Brennan agrees to look over the bone and determines it was originally interred in Washington's secret, unused tomb in the Capitol building. Insisting on coming along for the archaeology, they find a tomb with a Masonic lock and a booby trap fueled with unquenchable Greek Fire, prompting Ichabod to realise that the Great Manhattan Fire was caused by (not just a seamstress) Betsy Ross putting down Howe's original Draugr regiment with a multi-barreled, rapid-repeating, Greek Fire crossbow; an instrument of pure gratuity that I chose to dub the Betsy Rossbow.

"We're here for a massacre or an Iron Maiden photo shoot,
whichever comes first."

Leaving the indomitably skeptical Brennan ("She would dismiss Moloch as a tall man with a skin condition") to coo over the anthropological ramifications, Ichabod and Abbie set about planning a means to dispose of the Draugr without, you know, burning Sleepy Hollow to the ground. Their plan is to use Ichabod as bait, lure the Draugr into the stone tunnels under the city and incinerate them there, where the Greek Fire can burn itself out without taking too many houses with it.

The plan is enacted just in time, as Pandora - displaying a scary snake face which may or may not be her real visage - and Howe plot to unleash the Draugr on the unsuspecting Halloween crowds, thus reaping the fear that Pandora needs. Even with the Witnesses successful, enough fear is generated to bloom another rose (this one white) and leaving just one, a red flower, to open. The fact that Pandora is talking about fear and love at about the same moment Abbie is pushing Ichabod to ask Zoe out on a date makes me fear for the new love interest even more.

Meanwhile, Jenny and Joe have been pursuing the B-plot and trying to get a meeting with the mysterious buyer who wants the Shard of Anubis. This man, the kingpin of illegal artefact shipment, turns out to be an old military buddy of Corbin Snr, and also the target of Agent Reynolds' big investigation, leading to a clash of Abbie's worlds.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - 'How is Lady Pole?'

Let's be honest; she's not good.

Mr Norrell is the English Magician, and his hangers-on are determined that Britain will accept no substitutes. After all, there's not much credit in being the personal friends of an English magician, rather than the definite article. When Mr Segundus, late of the York Society, introduces the self-taught Mr Strange to the scene, Messrs Drawlight and Lascelles are up in arms, but a display of his prodigal talent and a respectful request for an apprenticeship win over Mr Norrell himself.

Yet these are genteel matters compare to the fate of the titular Lady Pole, who is alive and wed, but now bound to the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair to dance helplessly at his revels every night as she sleeps, growing more and more exhausted and distracted, and quite unable to speak of what troubles her without recounting fanciful anecdotes. Mr Norrell will not help her and no other can do; the only other person who knows is Stephen Black, Lord Pole's butler, himself now caught in the Gentleman's web. Her husband merely locks her in her room, so that the only person who will at least credit that there is a problem is Arabella Strange, who knocks heads with Mr Norrell at an auction and catches the eye of the Gentleman as he spies on Strange.

Episode 2 of the BBC's adaptation of Susanna Clarke's grand epic kicks it up a notch to announce the arrival on the scene of the second magician of prophecy. While Mr Norrell is determined that magic be 'respectable', you can see the extras and supporting characters straining for him to do something exciting. The disappointment when his magical sea defences are entirely invisible is evident, and the catharsis when Strange cuts loose at the Horse Sands is almost palpable.

Meanwhile the enchanted Lady Pole and Stephen Black are shown as tragically powerless figures, and the audience yearns for them to get their chance to kick back against their fey oppressors (and at Lord Pole to boot.) The brief visit to the manor of Lost Hope is a masterpiece, a weird and distorted world of ruins and fragments where the Gentleman and his cohorts cavort with the hapless mortals in their power. Ironically, in her madness and her resistance to the attempts of others to have her confined, Lady Pole finds more backbone than as a whole and unensorcelled woman, but it is Arabella Strange who steps up to represent for the sisterhood, not just in believing in Lady Pole's plight, but in refusing to take any shit from her husband.

The series continues to impress with its combination of special effects and magical storyline with the utter commitment to period detail which lends an intense verisimilitude to the entire tale. 

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - 'The Friends of English Magic'

It's been a while since I read the book, but as I recall, it's pretty accurate to
depict Strange (Bertie Carvel) as slightly baffled as to how he got anywhere,
and Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan) as simply pissed off to be there.

English Magic is not what once it was. What once it was is not yet clear, but what it is is gentlemen eating fabulous dinners and discussing theories over the port, while poo-pooing the idea of casting spells (because some stereotypes aren't very empowering.) Enter Mr Norrell, practical magician and hoarder of magical texts. Spurred by his ambitious valet Childermass and a challenge from the gentlemen of the local magical dining club, Mr Norrell animates the statues in York Cathedral and finds himself hailed as the saviour of English magic. Sourly determined to rid magic of its trappings of charlatanry, he unwittingly sets in motion a sequence of events that will bring about the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, that two magicians will restore magic to England: Mr Norrell, and the dilettante sorcerer Jonathan Strange.

This adaptation of Susanna Clarke's spine-cracking opus has far more pace than the novel (after one hour of an absolutely faithful adaptation we'd be halfway through the footnotes in Chapter 1,) although that still makes for a measured affair. Some reviewers seem unable to forgive it for not being Poldark, but if you're not here for heaving bosoms and shirtless ex-vampire/werewolf/dwarf Aidan Turner, there's a lot to like. While actual porn is thin on the ground, the costume and scenery porn is lavish, and part of the success of the production must be that it looks like a BBC Dickens adaptation, just with more moving statues and scrying mirrors.

Thoros of Threadneedle Street!

Perpetual second fiddle Eddie Marsan impresses as Mr Norrell, bringing the requisite absolute nonentity to the great Magician of Hanover Square, while Bertie Carvel belies his stage roots to give a spirited performance as the more dynamic - but so far shiftless - Strange. Norrell's shifts from private rage and animation to public awkwardness, and his horror at finding that London has heard that, far from conjuring statues to life, his great feat was to magically clean all the laundry of York, are deftly underplayed by Marsan. Carvel contrasts with a wide-eyed amazement at everything, which means that his receipt of spells and prophecy from a man under a hedge authentically seems no more startling to him than would be finding a sixpence on the road.

The supporting cast is also excellent, including Sam West as Sir Walter Pole and erstwhile Richlieu Marc Warren popping up to raise the dead as the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair. There's not much in the way of female characters, but that was an issue with the book and a simple side-effect of Clarke's adherence to the traditions of the period style in which she was writing. The minor characters are even more Dickensian than the central dramatis personae, with particular mention going to Norrell's hangers-on Mr Lascelles and the almost grotesque Mr Drawlight, to the entire port-swilling Yorkshire society of magicians, and to ubiquitous scruffy religious crazy person Paul Kaye's turn as street magician and agent provocateur Vinculus.

'The Friends of English Magic' is a strong opening episode, although compared to the book it is oddly silent on the legend of the Raven King, who is referred to, but not at any point explained in even the most basic of terms. I don't think it's ever going to win over anyone who came here for the bosoms, but it was never meant to, and despite the costume porn connection, it really is comparing apples and curtain fabric.