TV Roundup: Person of Interest – ‘QSO’, ‘Reassortment’ and ‘Sotto Voce’, Timeless – ‘The Red Scare’, Agents of SHIELD – ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Hot Potato Soup’

Aptly enough, the them of the Shaw link in this episode is that Root wantsto believe.

Person of Interest gets heavy with 'QSO', when the team is given the number of a conspiracy theory radio host, one of whose listeners has stumbled on a Samaritan communication code embedded in AM radio signals. Reese and Root rescue the host, but he chooses to put himself back in the crosshairs by revealing the conspiracy on air. Tragically, he receives nothing in response but an ongoing parade of self-aggrandizing theories from his listeners, and a cup of poison from his producer. Root is, however, able to use the Samaritan system to send a message to tell Shaw that they are still looking. Shaw, having just been tricked into killing an innocent woman under the belief that she was in another simulation, takes heart. Fusco quits the team over Reese and Finch's refusal to tell him the truth of their situation.

There is a degree to which the show is just playing Root dressup, but it must
do wonders for Amy Acker's portfolio.

In 'Reassortment', Samaritan engineers an outbreak of a deadly flu strain to kill three medical professionals who have noticed its manipulations of an automated medical system to effect its adjustments. The team is able to provide a cure - thanks to the Machine's open system and a hastily conjured CDC alias for Root - but the outbreak still provides the justification for widespread flu vaccination, allowing Samaritan to create a massive DNA database. I wasn't clear if Samaritan was going for Worldwide, national or New York with that last one, because Person of Interest often conflates the three somewhat.

In Johannesburg, Shaw breaks out of her cell and shoots her chief jailor, Lambert before high-tailing out of the city in his car.

Elias is right; what did he expect?

In 'Sotto Voce', remote control killer the Voice returns and throws the precinct into chaos in an attempt to kill off a former associate. He is successful, but Reese and Fusco work together to survive, while Finch and Elias track his true identity. Finch confronts the Voice, and Elias kills him, challenging Finch to claim to be surprised by that outcome having asked for his help. Realising that he is in it regardless of what he knows, Reese opts to read Fusco into the Machine's existence. Shaw makes it back to New York, and after Root threatens to kill herself if Shaw decides to take her own life now, is reunited with the team.

Person of Interest remains quality TV, but more and more the deeper arc is less interesting to me than the earlier procedural set-up, delving more into human nature rather than the more speculative realm of ASI psychology. As a show that used the Machine to be about people it was excellent; as a show about the Machine, it's just pretty good, and the specifically New York setting makes less and less sense as Samaritan moves on global domination.

I never trusted her, but I only just realised that that's because she's Moira
Queen.

Timeless closed out its freshman year with 'The Red Scare'. Forced to jump with an injured Rufus and four people, Jiya – as the fourth passenger – began to suffer blackouts. Despite Flynn's machinations, setting Senator McCarthy onto them as Communist spies, they are able to contact Lucy's grandfather, Ethan Cahill, and gain access to the summit, offering Flynn an alternative path. They return to the present, where Mason assists them and Ethan provides all the records they need to set the US Government against Rittenhouse. Agent Christopher arrests Flynn before he can save his family, but promises Lucy a shot at saving her sister, but before she can take that trip, Lucy discovers that her mother is a high-ranking member of Rittenhouse and that they still have active plans for the time machine.

This has been an interesting series, and the twist with Lucy's mother gives a potential second season legs that it wouldn't have had otherwise, but something about its earnest tone has tended to make its fanciful incorporation of every famous figure in a twenty year radius into the plot of each episode seem laughable, where Legends of Tomorrow is actively improved by Einstein punching. I'm not sure I'll bother with Season 2, if it happens, given my reduced TV watching time.

When she actually wakes up, someone is in for a universe of pain.

Agents of SHIELD ploughs ahead with its LMD subseason. Agent May breaks out of her pod, only to discover that this is her new simulation, an ever expanding conflict created within a metacognitive space called the Framework. Ultimately, she finds herself captive in a recreation of Bogota in which she is able to save the Inhuman child she was once forced to kill. An attempt to bug Senator Nadeer is uncovered during a senate hearing to ratify Quake's registration under the Sokovia Accords. The team realise that someone is bugging them using LMD eyes and May realises it is her. She confronts Radcliffe, but can't turn on him. Fitz reveals he has been working on Aida as part of an investigation; they pick up Radcliffe, but Fitz realises that the real Radcliffe is already with Nadeer; this is another LMD.

The family Koenig (well, some of them.)

The Watchdogs go after Billy Koenig, who was given the task of hiding the Darkhold. The team taps Billy's brothers and big sister to retrieve the book from the Koenigs' vault. Coulson and Maybot make out - cross that off my list of things I don't really want to see in the series - but then they find the book, May's programming goes off, and while Fitz realises that Radcliffe could have used a brain scan from her treatment for ghost madness to duplicate her in time to save Coulson, Radcliffe and the Watchdogs end up with the Darkhold. The original Aida and Radcliffe LMDs are destroyed.

LMD is definitely proving a less engaging plotline than Ghost Rider, despite John Hannah's excellent turn as the slippery antivillain Radcliffe. Patton Oswalt's Koenig brothers continue to be fun, but every time they turn up I'm afraid they're going to explain them and that would ruin it. Easily the most engaging thing going on is the burgeoning relationship between Mack and Yo-Yo, which hit a bump when he started keeping things from her. Then he confessed he had to go and be with his ex-wife on the birthday of their daughter, Hope, who suffered from a congenital condition which meant that she only lived for four days and apparently Mack could be more of a huggable, vulnerable hard man woobie bear after all.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Laws of Inferno Dynamics', Emerald City - 'They Came First', Timeless - 'The World's Columbia Exposition', 'The Murder of Jesse James', 'Karma Chameleon', 'The Lost Generation' and 'Public Enemy No. 1', and Iron Fist - 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and 'Immortal Emerges From Cave'

Vengeance!

'The Laws of Inferno Dynamics'(1) brings us to the end of the Ghost Rider subset of Agents of SHIELD's fourth season. With Eli rapidly growing in power, Coulson persuades Mace to bring in the big guns: Yo-Yo, Robbie and, of course, Daisy. Eli sets a trap for them by coating the walls of a passage with caesium, but Robbie strolls through the fire to find that he has managed to create a plutonium replica of the Los Alamos 'demon core'; an atomic bomb, in other words. Also, each time he uses his powers, the world gets a little wonkier. Coulson leads a bravura assault while Daisy struggles to contain the quakes. Although badly wounded, Robbie unleashes the Rider on Eli after it becomes clear that he plans to scrub the world clean and create life anew. Aida(2) uses her Darkhold knowledge to open a gate which Eli, the bomb and the Rider drop through, and Quake is exposed to the public, obliging Mace to undisavow her and claim she's been working undercover against the Watchdogs on behalf of SHIELD. Mace also brings the LMD programme in house, but PR guy discovers that Aida has knocked out Agent May and replaced her with a duplicate, and gets his neck snapped for his trouble, which can't be a good sign.

Also, d'aww.

The Ghost Rider weirdly muddies the waters of Agents of SHIELD, because suddenly they know magic exists and Coulson has even heard of the Rider before, yet they roundly rejected Clairvoyance a season before it turned out that there was a clairvoyant Inhuman. The story has been okay, and if Eli was a little low key for a major villain, I can't help but approve of them wrapping an arc in a quarter season, given how overstretched the season-long plots have traditionally become. It's an approach that worked well for Teen Wolf's third year, and would probably have been a stronger pitch for its fourth and fifth. Similarly, it did great favours for Gotham's sophomore year, if only by ditching some of the more irritating villains (by which I mean Theo Galavan) halfway through.

Ana Ularu is okay, but I am constantly disappointed by her failure to be 12
Monkeys' Emily Hampshire.

In 'They Came First', Dorothy and Lucas travel to Glinda's fortress while the Wizard tries to root out witchery in the Emerald City and now-Queen Langwidere is a dick to Jack, who is apparently into that. The last of these is purely fluff so far, featuring a sexed up version of the classic 'oil can' scene, because we totally needed that. West tries to save a young witch from a mob, but shit goes down, buildings asplode and to keep order the Wizard decides it is necessary to set fire to the entire High Council of nuns, because heaven forefend we get through an episode without some institutional violence against women. It is suggested that witches are themselves the Beast Forever. Oh, and someone realises that the knife Jack nicked from Momba when Tip was rescued suggests that she is Ozma, Princess of Oz, which was either obvious AF or means nothing to you.

In the A-plot, Dorothy busts out her inner witch to save young Sylvie from wolves. Sylvie has been fitted with earplugs for… reasons, and Dorothy removes them as part of a bonding process. She also gets it on with Lucas, and suggests that they should both come back to Kansas and join her in a land which welcomes the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially those with violent tendencies, magical powers and no documentation. All she needs to do now is prevent Glinda's war against the Wizard, by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, as soon as they reach her fortress she's all 'memory returned' and next thing we know she's got her tongue down Lucas/Roan's throat and Dorothy is all kinds of betrayed because – title quote! – 'they came first.'

I predict that this happy domestic scenario will in no way implode.

Emerald City continues to struggle hard with, among other things, its sexual politics. I think that the idea is that women have the power in Oz and men like the Wizard fear this, but nevertheless, it is principally men who domineer and women who machinate. The transfer from a relatively children's novel to sprawling adventure epic also has the effect of leaving the protagonists – Dorothy and Lucas – unusually short on agency, with one essentially willing to uncritically undertake any course that will enable her to get home, and the other completely at the whim of his unreliable memory. They are, hands down, the least interesting characters in the show, surpassing even Jack and Langwidere, whose deeply unhealthy relationship at least has something of the grim fascination of a car crash.

Next we come to a bit of a Timeless marathon, although actually I watched them over an extended period intending to do an end-of-series review until I realised I could put them in my newly inaugurated roundup.

When you go back to the wild west and people are like 'dude, have some
respect for human life,' you should know you took a wrong turn somewhere.

'The World's Columbia Exposition' sees the show pin its colours to the mast in the War of the Currents, labelling Edison and Henry Ford as key Rittenhouse members whom Flynn sets out to murder. In order to prevent interference he decoys Team Lifeboat to a hotel transformed into a serial killer's death maze (true story) and captures Lucy, who manages to recruit assistance in the form of Harry Houdini to prevent the assassination and rescue Rufus and Wyatt. Then in 'The Murder of Jesse James', the crew travel back in time to stop Flynn saving the life of Jesse James by assisting legendary lawman Bass 'The Real Lone Ranger, but he's black' Reeves and his native American partner Grant Johnson. They discover that Flynn has no intention of letting James live; he is just using him to find someone in Indian territory; former timeship pilot and Rittenhouse oppose Emma Whitmore.

"A soldier, a scientist and a stewardess(3) walk into a bar..."

With Flynn having given Wyatt the identity of his wife's killer, Wyatt persuades Rufus to help him steal the lifeboat and prevent the killer's conception in 'Karma Chameleon'. He promises no harm, but ends up accidentally killing the man's father during a storm, only to learn that the killer was lying: He killed two other women, but not Wyatt's wife. Anthony contacts Lucy and offers to destroy the mothership if she does the same to the lifeboat, in order to keep time travel out of the grasp of Rittenhouse, but Flynn rumbles him and Anthony is killed. Lucy and Rufus realise that the man who threatened Rufus was Lucy's biodad.

Rufus is all flustered about meeting Baker, and asks Lucy not to tell his sort-
of-girlfriend Jiya, which a) is kind of tacky, and b) raises the issues of how
time travel affects a 'three for free' policy.

In 'The Lost Generation', Wyatt is arrested and replaced with the super decent Dave Baumgartner, who is killed by one of Flynn's goons as the team try to rescue Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh turns out to be a Rittenhouse legacy – like Lucy – who has been charged with becoming famous and then being a big old racist douche. With the help of Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rufus and Lucy rescue Lindbergh, who plans to ditch Rittenhouse but turns out to have stuck to that for only a short time. As Rittenhouse-controlled NSA agents take over the time machine project, Agent Christopher busts Wyatt out of chokey and together with Lucy and Rufus they undertake to continue the fight against Rittenhouse by any means necessary.

The big joke this week is that they have the wrong costumes.

Finally, in 'Public Enemy No. 1', Flynn helps Al Capone to evade his tax charges and kill Eliot Ness in exchange for abducting the Mayor of Chicago to learn when Rittenhouse will next meet up en masse. Dispatched to assassinate Flynn's mother, Lucy and Rufus tranquilise their new muscle and steal the Lifeboat, leaving a worm in the project computers. Jiya is arrested after receiving a call from Rufus, but is able to cobble together a computer with parts while in custody to ensure her friends aren't tracked. Although at first intending to save Lucy's sister, the team determine that they can't let Flynn mess with Capone's history. After Ness's death, Lucy suggests that they work with Richard Hart, a prohibition agent and secretly Capone's big brother Jimmy (true story) to gain access to Capone, who shoots Rufus before being killed by Hart. Mason asks the NSA for access to the same data the Machine uses in Person of Interest. As the team jumps out, Rufus collapses at the controls.

Timeless has done the needful and changed up its game, although the jump of the week structure was already a bit stale. Wyatt's hair-trigger temper and failure to make and execute a simple plan – there are many better ways to prevent conception via time machine than trying to cock block the future father; I came up with several during the course of the episode, some of which didn't even involve fire – prevent his failure being all that sympathetic, especially given that it involved the death of a guy who seemed pretty decent. Similarly, Rufus has not only left Jiya in the lurch, by then calling her he has dumped her right in it, so a bullet in the collar seems little more than karma. Flynn may be a monster, but he's still in the top three for most sympathetic character in the series (number one is Lucy's unrealised sister.)

Not doing yourself any favours, Danny boy.

Iron Fist struggles gamely on with 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and the inevitable Claire Temple cameo. A group of posh-slutty saleswomen introduce an exciting new line in synthetic heroin to the city, and Danny determines that it is being imported via the pier the Hand wanted Rand(4) to buy. With Ward refusing to act without proof, Danny goes to Colleen for backup, bringing takeaway, which for him means ordering from his dad's favourite restaurant and paying for them to bring the food, tables and chairs to the dojo, because he's rich and clueless and so hilariously endearing, right?(5) This is where he meets Claire, who is taking private lessons from Colleen because of course she is. Danny and Colleen spy on the Hand shipment, but it turns out that they are not bringing in drugs, but the chemist who makes them. Danny 'rescues' the chemist, and I use sarcastic quote marks because this rescue involves the man being stabbed in the chest and hauled back to the dojo to be treated by Claire.

"Basically, Danny, you're just not as interesting as I am."

Moving on to 'Immortal Emerges from Cave', the Meachams move to deal with a viral video of Danny apologising for not-technically-illegal pollution from one of the company's factories and Ward is suddenly pitifully addicted to prescription-strength painkillers. One of the better scenes of the series comes when Danny basically hijacks Ward to trawl around warehouses looking for the chemist's daughter, who is being held hostage, but they find the body of the chemist's guard and an invitation to a duel. While Claire and Colleen take the chemist to hospital and the Hand swipe him from under their noses, Danny fights three battles under the watchful eye of Madame Gao. The first is against a pair of brothers,  the second an entomologist who fights using poison needles and high school seduction moves(6), and the third a psychopathic blade fetishist and karaoke enthusiast. Gao ultimately calls a halt by reminding Danny that the Hand doesn't do honour, but reveals a) that she was born in Kun Lung and b) that she is a way more ultimate a weapon than he is.

Iron Fist is struggling, and not because no-one likes a billionaire post-Trump. It's because the show fails to make Danny likeable, fails to overcome its inherent cultural appropriation (seriously, Marvel; it's cool having Method Man weigh in to Luke Cage, but if RZA is your authority on the history of Chinese martial arts, then you're in trouble,) and fails to make the conflict interesting. Danny Rand's wealth takes the fight off the streets. With Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage we saw the street-level struggle, but Iron Fist lifts us right up to the level where Elektra briefly and tediously took Daredevil and the result lacks emotional punch. We don't not care about Danny Rand because he's a billionaire, so much as because we only see him fighting for abstracts – his name, his company, Kun Lung – and not for people.

Straight up the fuck is this shit?

Also… we need to have words about the entomologist assassin, because damn that was some nineties shit right there. An Asian American ninja poisoner in a black corset and fucking chopstick buns vamping her way in close to deploy her needles o'death? The only thing more disappointing than that particular portrayal is the fact that Danny fell for it. Sweet Christmas, Rand; if a pouty chick in black shows up for a duel to the death and suggests you could just make out instead, you say no. How hard is that one to wrap your head around? And how is it that you were trained to be the destroyer of the Hand but without any preparation for the fact that some of your opponents might be women? What the hell?

Iron Fist. It's disappointing.

(1) Points for trying on the title, at least.

(2) It is apparently Aida, not Ada, which makes me a little sad.

(3) They do make the point that in the 1980s they were still called stewardesses.

(4) At this point, I kind of expect to learn that the Hand are using Rand because when they take over they only need to change one letter.

(5) Wrong.

(6) Fortunately for her, Danny has the emotional maturity of a high school freshman.

Timeless - 'The Capture of Benedict Arnold'

It must be nice to have Washington on your side.

This week, the team travel back in time to the War of Independence to prevent the assassination of George Washington by the brainwashed Rip Hunter and… No, wait; damnit. That was Legends of Tomorrow.

Okay, this week, the team travel back in time to the War of Independence, where they know Garcia Flynn is up to some shenanigans involving Benedict Arnold, the man who tried to surrender West Point to the British and became a byword for treachery after his death in comfortable retirement in England. Before they go, Agent Christopher gives Lucy a flash drive containing a record of her family, in case the team ever comes back and finds that her children have been erased.

The team are captured by Patriot forces, but freed when Flynn – having murdered and replaced Washington's spymaster Rowe with consummate ease(1) – explains that they are his homies. Flynn believes Arnold to be up to the eyeballs with the original Rittenhouse after finding a letter from Arnold in the clock that Ford's key unlocked, and promises to surrender himself to justice and tell Wyatt who killed his wife, if the Lifeboat team will help him to kill the weed at its root. This involves the four of them pretending to defect to the British, ostensibly to capture Arnold for trial, but in fact to beat him up until he agrees to introduce them – or at least the white folks, since that's the kind of dude Rittenhouse is – to Rittenhouse himself.

"There are things I will not tolerate. Uppity negros. Feisty women. Assassins
from the future set on protecting the democratic rights of the masses. And also
sloppy clockmaking."

Rittenhouse turns out to be a creepy clockmaker with a heavily trod-upon son, who explains his father's belief that democracy is a smokescreen to convince the masses that they have power, while a secret cabal wields the only effective form of government: Tyranny(2). Rittenhouse spots them for assassins in a heartbeat and decides that he's going to have Flynn and Wyatt shot and Lucy for a sex slave. Dude; even evil can be classy, you know. He also shoots Arnold with Wyatt's gun, because this is the price of failure, and clearly has plans in his little clockmakey brain to mass produce knock-off Brownings in the 18^th century. Fortunately, Rufus creates a ruckus, allowing Flynn to kill Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse Jr escapes, however, and Lucy prevents Flynn killing him as well, since he's just a child and since Rittenhouse clearly indicated that he was not a sole operator.

Flynn takes this philosophically and kidnaps Lucy. Meanwhile Rufus is left to deliver the recording of this to an increasingly suspicious Rittenhouse organisation, who have threatened to bump off his family if he messes with another recording and are unlikely to be philosophical about him giving his seal of approval to the assassination of their own articular founding father.

Perhaps a little disappointingly, Timeless hits its terminus post quem in the 18^th century, as if this is the founding of Rittenhouse then there will never be a need to chase further back. I always figure that for a weakness in a time travel show, but then again we have been told that the story of Rittenhouse is the story of America, and there is always a chance – should the series be renewed – to reveal even earlier roots. On the upside, this false denouement provides the solid shakeup that the formula has been wanting; with the team separated and Rufus facing near-certain death in the present, it seems a pretty sure thing that we won't just be getting another temporal brouhaha of the week next episode.

This week, the team's vacillation over the rightness of their course and the justifiability of murder was interesting, not least because of Rufus' resentment of Lucy's moral position. Murder appals her, and he clearly feels – having shot someone for the sake of the timeline – that her absolutism is a judgement on him (and less emotively, Wyatt.) The fact that of the three of them, he is also the only one being personally threatened by Rittenhouse in the nownow is also clearly a thing, with the mission for him clearly far more than just a matter of historical pragmatism.

(1) Apparently Rowe and Washington never met, but I continue to be amazed at how smoothly Flynn fits into a time, and yet how badly Team Lifeboat do the same.

(2) I increasingly expect to see Flynn putting on the white hoodie and parkouring around the past.

Timeless - 'Last Ride of Bonnie & Clyde'

"So, eight episodes before they felt we had to kiss."

Timeless gets a little bit Alias this week, as the Rittenhouse conspiracy threatens to transform a simple mission to protect the timeline into a trans-temporal scavenger hunt.

As the Lifeboat heads back to 1934, where Flynn is searching for a key tied into the Rittenhouse organisation; a key that hangs around the neck of infamous outlaw Bonnie Parker. Caught up in one of the Barrow gang's robberies, Lucy and Wyatt pretend to be another pair of outlaw lovers, forcing the will-they-won't-they to the fore as they await an opportunity to steal the key, which Clyde explains he stole from Henry Ford while trying to ascertain if the letter he had sent him, praising the Ford as the only automobile worth stealing, was really kept in pride of place.

Ultimately Flynn, posing as a bounty hunter, gets the key, and Bonnie and Clyde meet their fate just a few miles and a few hours from where they ought. The crew return home and Rufus reads Agent Christopher in on Rittenhouse for fear that she will otherwise get caught poking around and be 'Rittenhoused'. Flynn unlocks a clockwork device and retrieves a scroll, and the whole Rittenhouse thing is starting to look hella Da Vinci Code (or, as I say, Alias.) I start to wonder if the whole thing wasn't founded on time travel in some way.

The weakness of this episode is the history. The goal of the week is to get the key, not to change or protect history, so little thought is given to timelines as our heroes shoot at 1930s coppers, and Bonnie and Clyde are portrayed in the most romanticised manner imaginable, just a couple silly in love who occasionally shoot people. This is disappointing, especially considering the show's willingness to address the impact of Rufus' race in historical settings. This week, while the white folks are all Sam and Dianeing, he helps a little girl use the segregated water fountain and falls foul of Flynn's machinations, thankfully being able to prove that he isn't this 'Rufus Carlin', but as his driver's license shows, Wesley Snipes. The historical standard of forgery was also charming, as the Feds dismiss claims that the driving license might be fake. "It's got a stamp on it; you can't fake that."

So, I guess what I'm saying is more Rufus, less romance all around.

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.

Timeless - 'Stranded'

"This is not a good start."

So, this seems a good point in the series to shake up the formula, right?

After the bombshells of 'The Watergate Tape', with trust between our three protagonists at an all-time low and revelations thick on the ground, we take a step back from routine Flynn thwarting, as our antagonist's latest time jump - this time to Pittsburgh in 1754, at the height of the French and Indian War - proves to be a trap, and while the team are being detained by the French Flynn's people locate the Lifeboat and blow a hole in its circuits. Thus our protagonists are forced to try and patch up their time machine with 18th century materials and to send a message by sealed time capsule to request navigational assistance from base.

Moving away from the disruption of the week allows 'Stranded' to just have fun in a time period, being victimised as English spies and threatened with death by Native American anti-colonials. There is also a chance for Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus to work through what they learned last week: Rufus' recordings and Lucy's journal in particular. Back at base, the potential loss of the team brings out the concerns of the base crew, which provides some vital humanisation for Agent Christopher and affirming that Mason's claim to care for Rufus are genuine. It's easy for an arc show like this to get caught up in chasing the big story, to the exclusion of the little details. Episodes like 'Stranded' help to avoid this by focusing on the characters and their relationships in the absence of an external threat.

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.

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.