So there you have it. Possibly the last episode of Journeyman ever. I was pleased that we did seem to get a few answers. Obviously, the writers couldn't give us everything, because I assume there's still a chance the show will be picked up by another network. But it was at least enough to hint at the larger picture the writers had in mind. And it was also one of the best episodes of the entire season. Which just makes me all the more sad that it may not ever be back again. Oh well. Maybe the new Sarah Connor Chronicles show can give me my time travel fix in the new year.
Anyway, on with the recap ...
Dan lands in a mental institution. Ironically, it's his shortest "leap" so far, but a critical one -- back to September 2007. His mission this time around involves Evan, a patient who claims he is also a "traveler". Dan helps him escape, and we eventually learn that Evan first jumped about 15 year ago, but went off track when his wife of 20 years died in 2005, as the result of something he had "fixed". To prevent this from happening again, he went back to the day the two of them met and prevented it -- an act he has regretted ever since. Dan and Livia try to help him reconnect with his wife in the here and now, hoping to keep him from dying tragically, but even when they do, he just plain dies for no reason ... or so it seems.
It turns out that the day Evan dies is the same day that Dan first jumps back in time -- within a hour or so of Evan's death. So whatever Dan's ability is, it has transferred from Evan to himself. Some kind of universal "Conservation of Time Traveling" law is in place, I suppose. Livia jumps away again, and just before she does, she and Dan agree that it will probably be a while before they see each other again. (Nice meta touch on the part of the writers.) Dan goes back to the newspaper, and finds Langley waiting for him in the elevator. Have you noticed there are lots of important elevator meetings in this series? I guess it makes a kind of metaphorical sense, if you think about it -- Livia travels "up" in time and Dan travels "down" and they sometimes intersect on the same "floor".
Langley finally tells Dan that he's part of a larger organization that keeps an eye on travelers like him. For Buffy fans out there, think of this as kind of a "Watcher Speech". There have been travelers as far back as the Egyptians, historical technological anomalies that can only be explained by time travel, and Dan is one of a unique group whose numbers have dwindled over the years. No explanation why, but the implication is that there are forces working against the travelers. In fact, Langley believes that Dan is that last one. Dan assures him that there is one more, but doesn't tell him any more than this. Although it does make one wonder why Langley believes this.
Dan goes back home, where Katie is all excited about the prospect of sedating him the way Evan was sedated, so that they can have a normal life again. But with everything that has happened, Dan has already been converted -- he believes now that what he does is not a curse, but an important and perhaps vital calling. He tells Katie this and she accepts it, and in a touching moment, calls back to the pilot episode -- if he will always come home, then she will always leave the light on. They go to bed, and when he wakes up in the morning, he wakes her just before he's about to jump again, so she can -- for the first time -- see it happen. It's an oddly touching bit of intimacy, as was the moment earlier in the show when she asked him to do it. Then the camera zooms into her eye, and it's over.
Sad as I am that this might be the end of the series, the episode was very satisfying as a finale. Many technical questions have been left unanswered, of course, and this was inevitable -- there's only so much you can do in 13 episodes. According to a short article I read, Kevin Falls (the show's creator) would have liked to find a way to bring together all of Dan's "rescues", but there wasn't enough time to do this without rushing it. Yet the emotional plot arc at the heart of the show was wrapped up quite nicely ... while still leaving plenty of room to grow if the show gets picked up again. Dan and Katie have come to accept Dan's calling. Livia is getting married that same day, and has told her hubby-to-be about her ability. Jack has found some happiness. And the newspaper is safe, for now.
It's certainly a far better goodbye than I've gotten from many other shows in the past that have met such untimely ends.
First, a reminder: the last episode of Journeyman (possibly ever) will air tonight, instead of the usual Monday. So if you don't have a TiVo watching your back, be sure to look for it!
Now the recap of this week's episode, which was a classic time travel story ...
Dan goes back to 1984, and in the process of saving a mother and son from death by cliff, drops his digital camera. This then results in 32-bit technology being created much sooner, so that by 2007, things like nanotechnology and digital paper are already common. An indirect result of this is that Dan and Katie don't end up conceiving a child on the same day that they originally did, which results in Dan's son Zack becoming Dan's daughter Caroline. What's more, the son who Dan saves at the start of the episode ends up getting killed by the tech company who takes possession of the camera.
An agonized Dan and his lingerie-wearing sidekick Livia manage to go back, destroy the camera before it can be reverse engineered, and everything goes back to normal. The son who the company killed in the alternate timeline goes on to become some kind of ocular implant specialist, motivated by his mother's deteriorating eyesight and perhaps a bit by the glimpse at future technology he got in the form of the digital camera.
My favorite detail from this episode was the fact that both Zack and Caroline spent the day making a butterfly for Dan. As in "Butteryfly Effect" -- a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan might cause a tornado in New York City. With Aeden Bennett, we saw the effect of Dan directly and willfully screwing with the timeline and getting punished for it. But now we see that even the most casual error in judgment can have huge personal and historical ramifications.
We also learn from a psychic/astrologer/whatever that both Dan and Livia were born under the "Joseph-Lee Comet"(?) -- something that has occurred only twice in the last 100 years. So I'm not sure exactly how the math works on that, but I'll assume it means that some other people out there the same age as Dan (30-something) and Livia (84) are also bouncing around in time.
Jack gets a chance to see the file of the FBI guy who was on Dan's tail (before Aeden Bennett killed him), and finds a photo of a young Dan posing with Langley at a NASA rocket launch. Armed with this photo, Dan rushes to confront Langley, only to find that he either doesn't remember Dan or is acting as if he doesn't. I really hope we get some closure on the whole Langley thing in the last episode. What's his deal? Considering his age, I'm wondering if maybe his father or mother was a time traveler?
Oh, and Livia needs to get married soon, because her fiancee is shipping off to war. And pretty much everybody knows now that Jack got Theresa pregnant.
Some small good news for Journeyman fans out there. Although the show still hasn't been picked up for 2008, NBC has at least decided to burn off the last two of the first 13 episodes before the end of the year. One is coming next Monday the 17th and the other two days later, on Wednesday the 19th -- I guess so as not to air it either on Xmas Eve or New Years Eve. And after that ... who knows?
Now on with the recap ...
Lots of father issues this episode. Dan saves the jobs of dozens of staff at the newspaper -- including his own -- by blackmailing the owner, who Dan learns sat by and watched as his father, the previous owner, died of a heart attack on Xmas Eve in 1979. Dan also gets to impart a bit of fatherly wisdom to his own father, Frank Vasser, who he knows will leave his family the next day. Frank still ends up leaving them, but as a result of Dan's advice, first takes the time to explain to his sons why he's doing it, giving them (or at least Jack) some valuable closure. And Jack finds out from his doctor girlfriend that he is going to become a father in 8 or 9 months.
And that's more or less it. The story lines are all very personal, very close to Dan himself, and therefore very satisfying ... but not terribly convoluted. It was a nice, simple "closed loop" episode to watch after the whole high-energy Aeden Bennett plot line (which Katie still hasn't quite recovered from yet). As a bonus, we finally get to see Livia in her own timeline, and learn that she has a boyfriend back in the 40s, who proposes to her in one of the final scenes ... and who doesn't know yet that she's a "journeywoman". It's also very satisfying to have Jack be a part of Team Journeyman now, although I'm sure the lies of omission to his doctor girlfriend will eventually bite him in the ass.
Okay, so what I said about this past week's episode of Journeyman being the winter finale? Strike that. Either it was never actually the case, or NBC has shuffled things around due to the writers strike. Because there's another one coming on December 10th. Unfortunately, according to this press release, Kevin Falls is saying that there's only one more episode in the can after that ... which NBC may or may not bother to air. And then, short of a Jericho-style miracle, it's potentially all over. Read the press release for the full depressing details.
For now, let's talk about the awesome two-parter we got last week and this week ...
Dan goes back to 1992 and saves a young girl who's locked up in a room. He intersects with her again in 1995, and it's clear that his "mission" is to keep her from ending up in jail or worse. But he knows that the guy who locked her up -- Aeden Bennett-- will kill another girl in 2001, and Dan plans to prevent that. Livia scolds him for this, and warns him that stepping off the path of his mission can only lead to bad things. He pushes forward anyway, and the result is that Aeden Bennett goes to jail in 2001. And as Livia warned him, things do not end happily ever after ...
Back in 2007, Bennett gets out of jail early for good behavior, and lands on Dan's doorstep, angry and tattooed, guns blazing. Fortunately, Dan "jumps" in the nick of time, and lands himself back in 1980. He gets his gunshot wound tended to, then tends to his mission -- helping a 10 year old boy who is locked up alone in his house by his douche-y single father, who's a cop. And that boy is ... you guessed it, Aeden Bennett. We've all heard the question asked: "If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler as a baby?" And this is Dan's version of that -- a kind of test from the Powers That Be. The simplest solution to protect himself and his family in 2007 is to kill Bennett in 1980, before he can ever become a threat. But as we'd expect, Dan doesn't do this, and instead returns to the present armed with knowledge, which he uses to disorient Bennett long enough for Jack to arrest him. Loop closed.
In between all this, some other things happen ...
Livia comes to the realization that perhaps her mission when she first jumped and met Dan way back when was to make sure that Dan & Katie would eventually end up together. Dan manages in the first part of the story to convince his brother Jack that he really is traveling in time ... but then when he gets Bennett arrested in 2001, it changes everything, and Jack forgets again. But then in the second part, a combination of creepy not-FBI guy sharing his theories with Jack and Livia visiting Jack in 2007 all serves to enlighten him again, so that he's part of the "Vassers Who Know What Dan Does" team by the end of the episode. Which should certainly make Dan's life much easier from an information-gathering standpoint from here on out.
As for the creepy not-FBI guy, he sadly (for him) meets his demise at the barrel of Bennett's gun, but we definitely get the impression from his earlier conversation with Jack that he's part of something bigger, whether a secret branch of the FBI (a la X-Files) or some private concern. And we also learn that Dan and Livia are not alone. Not-FBI says something along the lines of, "It's always the money that trips them up." Which implies that he's been on the trail of other time travelers in the past. And although I had pretty much assumed that there were probably others out there, it was nice to have it confirmed like this.
And there you have it. Did I miss anything?
Just finally watched the most recent episode of Journeyman tonight. Really enjoyed it. Figured I'd post about it, for the few of us that enjoy talking about this potentially short-lived show. I'll be out of town on Monday, and probably won't get to watch the next episode till later in the week.
Okay, so Langley definitely knows more than he's letting on. All that talk about the research he abandoned after 9/11. And what's up with the fact that he mentioned teaching a class on quartz and that dude from the past saying quartz every five minutes? Coincidence or no? I'm guessing tachyons AND quartz are important parts of the puzzle now?
And so Livia's from 1948, jumping forward, while Dan is from 2007, jumping back. Very intriguing. It almost makes me want to see a whole episode from Livia's point of view. And how does that work for her, clothes-wise? I haven't noticed if her outfits are dated. Seems like she wears long coats a lot. And what about her hair? (Keith, I'll defer to your particular observational talents in this area.)
Also, now that so much of the hijack money was found on the floor of the liquor store during that robbery, does this mean Dan's off the hook? Will less missing money mean no douchebag FBI guy giving him grief about it in the present? Or are they still mad about not finding however much Dan gambled last episode? Jack defiantly spending the $20 bill that was in evidence makes me think the FBI guy is still around.
And then there's the matter of the crazy "key party" in the beginning. With John Schneider. How bizarre. Indiscriminate wife swapping back in the pre-AIDS era. "Love in the Time of Penicillin". And how funny that Dan was more interested in seeing TV coverage of Nixon's fall.
Next episode is the first of a two-parter that will serve as the winter hiatus finale. And possibly the series finale. Hope we get more answers before it's all over!
Sorry, I haven't been posting about Journeyman the past couple weeks. To be honest, with everything else that's on Mondays, I don't usually get around to watching it till later in the week. And there doesn't seem to be that much interest in it here on the blog.
Anyway, I am still watching and enjoying the show, more and more each week. Sadly, the ratings are going in the exact opposite direction, and I suspect that whatever slim chance this show had, the writers strike pretty much flushed them down the toilet. So I'm just prepping myself to enjoy the few episodes that are probably left.
With that in mind, any diehards out there want to discuss the last couple episodes?
This week, Dan is on the trail of a decades-old news mystery -- Dylan McCleen, the pseudonym of a hijacker who parachuted from a plane in 1975, got away with $100K, and was never found ...
As with the earthquake episode, all the jumps this week are back to the same year. Over several of them, Dan discovers that "Dylan McCleen" was actually an army ranger named Captain John Ritchie who stole the $100K as a means to help a Cambodian family who helped him survive during the Vietnam War. Dan helps him fulfill this mission, while also protecting Ritchie's identity, and in return, he ends up with $50K in "old currency" -- something he's been needing for a while now, since, you know, today's money has a lot of really big heads on it.
Meanwhile, Dan's jumping continues to cause problems for him in 2007. He inadvertently leaves his son Zach stranded at a crowded street market, and he has to cancel plans to see a big 49ers game with him because he can't trust himself not to disappear. He's under suspicion for an armed robbery that happened on the night of his wife's big fundraiser -- the victim of which is currently in a coma. And he doesn't even realize yet that management rumblings at the newspaper he works at could put him out of a job any day now.
Also in 2007, Dan finally gets a chance to swap ideas with Elliott Langley, the scientist who somehow called him on his cellphone back in 1998 in the last episode. Dan asks about this, and asks a lot of other questions about time travel under the premise of writing a science fiction book. Langley offers very little helpful information, but we get the impression that he knows a lot more than he's letting on. Which is especially intriguing because we know that he was friends with Dan's father -- who Dan also gets to interact with this episode, back in 1975.
His father is played by the same actor who is Tom on "The 4400" (who is, by the way, William Shatner's son-in-law) ... and ... well ... he's kind of a douchebag. But he does end up playing a critical role in Dan's mission, while at the same time reminding Dan of just how important it is for him to maintain his relationship with his own son Zack, in spite of all the obstacles posed by his jumping. This goal becomes much easier to attain when, at the end of the episode, Zack reveals that he witnessed Dan's most recent jump first-hand. Now I guess the hard part is just making sure Zack doesn't tell all his friends that his father can do "magic"?
I'm really enjoying how the writers raise the stakes just a little bit more every week. The episodes are largely self-contained, but there are always bread crumbs of a larger plot arc there. For instance, I'm curious to see if Dan eventually gets to fix his own life by jumping back to the night of the armed robbery. And I'm very intrigued to see what role Langley is going to play. Something about that guy just rubs me the wrong way -- especially that crack about somebody using Dan's power for their own gain, which almost sounded like a taunt to me.
After two rounds of fighting, Journeyman seems to have easily trounced Bionic Woman in the TMFT ratings. My guess is that Dan simply jumped back to a time before Jamie got her bionics and told her that the outfit she was wearing made her look fat? However he pulled it off, here's an overdue recap of Monday's episode ...
In a genius stroke of luck that makes me think more than ever that Dan has some subconscious control over the timing of his jumps, he pulls one while doing some plumbing. "Sorry honey, guess I just can't be trusted to do any home repair projects from now on. What a shame! If you need me, I'll be over here on the couch watching the 49ers game." In fact, all of his jumps away from the present this week seem suspiciously, if inconveniently, well-timed -- one just before Katie's big party, and another while getting interrogated by his brother in the bathroom. And so far, we've never seen him disappear while somebody is actually looking at him.
Regardless, Dan's jumps this episode take him back to 1994 (aka The Year of the Spin Doctors), 1997 (aka The Year of the Creepy Dancing Baby), and 1998 (twice). His focal point is a woman who makes a love connection with a guy she met on the "World Wide Web" (yes kids, we used to call it that), who she also then goes on to start a Dot Com stock trading company with, which fails due to some kind of malfeasance on the guy's part, he gets angry, and he kills her.
What's interesting is this marks the first time we see Dan change something in the past, then have go back and make a correction. In one jump, he prevents the guy from killing the girl, but she then ends up killing the guy in self-defense and goes to jail for it. So in the next jump, later that same night, he ends up not getting there in time to prevent her from killing him, but is able to plant evidence that makes it clear that she was only defending herself. Equally interesting to me, however, is that there doesn't seem to be any greater good served by saving this woman. Or maybe there was, and it ended up on the cutting room floor?
In the intrigue department, during the present timeline, Dan reaches out to an old friend of his father's, a physicist at Berkeley, for more information about tachyons -- which as any sci-fi geek worth his/her salt knows are the key to time travel, because they are hypothetical particles that move faster than light. Anyway, this guy, Elliot Langley, calls Dan on the phone in 2007, makes a joke about a time machine, and tells Dan he'll call him back another time ... then proceeds to call him back on his old cell phone in 1998! WTF??? So is Langley also a jumper, or is he something else entirely? Whichever the case is, it was certainly a great hook to guarantee that I'll be back for more next week!
I finally got myself caught up with the first 3 episodes of both Bionic Woman and Journeyman this weekend, and I think I'll be able to keep up with both in real time for the foreseeable future. When I posed the question last month of which one I should recap this season, the response I got wasn't nearly as decisive as I was hoping. So for now, I'm going to take a stab at recapping both in the same post for a couple of weeks, and see which one gets more chatter.
Let's start with an overview of the first 3 episodes of each show ...
Bionic Woman is a classic story of girl (Jamie Sommers) meets boy (Will Anthros), boy gets girl pregnant, boy asks girl to marry him, rogue agent of boy's clandestine agency hits boy and girl with a truck, girl almost dies, and boy saves girl's life by replacing some of her blood with nanites, installing some chips in her brain, and giving her a bionic ear, eyes, arm, and legs. Then boy gets shot by rogue agent and dies -- end of romance. Further complicating the equation are Jamie's bratty sister, Miguel Ferrer's incessant cynicism, and Sarah Corvus, the first bionic woman, played by Katie Sackhoff with pitch-perfect crazy, desperate, dangerous precision. There are some other main characters, but they're all kind of boring to me -- the icy blonde woman, the Asian martial arts guy who's in love with Sarah, whoever Isaiah Washington is supposed to be, and the forgettable IT dude who upkeeps Jamie's bionics.
The show is dark, both literally and figuratively. Lots of black clothes, scenes at night, scenes in bars, scenes that take place in poorly lit windowless rooms of the Wolf's Creek facility. Figuratively, there are all these dead people weighing down the storyline -- Will, Jamie's mom, Sarah's sister, the 14 agents that Sarah killed, 200+ people in the town that gets gassed by some terrorists. And did I mention Miguel Ferrer's incessant cynicism? The happy-fun scenes between Jamie and her sister seem obtrusive somehow, and the closest thing to an active romance is Sarah & Jae -- and considering that Jae once "killed" Sarah, that one is dysfunctional at best. And what are we supposed to make of the fact that Will kept a dossier on Jamie for 2 years before he met her? Creepy.
Still not sure if I care about these characters yet, and that may eventually keep me from sticking with the show long-term. Even the dangers these people are saving the world from seem two-dimensional. But I'll give it till the mid-season break and let the current plot arc play out before I decide. I just have a hard time believing there's a plot twist coming that will really surprise me all that much.
Journeyman is a classic story of boy meets girl, boy dates girl, girl disappears and is presumed dead, boy steals his brother's girl, boy marries that girl, boy starts jumping around in time, and boy learns that the first girl has also been jumping around in time. And really, it's as simple as that. The main cast is minimal -- Dan the time jumper, his amazingly understanding wife Katie, his cop brother Jack, and his ex-fiancee (also a time jumper) Livia.
Through exposition in the most recent episode, we learn that Dan has overcome a gambling addiction and that his boss Hugh has overcome a drinking problem. And details like this seem to establish a tone of redemption for the show. The jumps that Dan makes sometimes literally force him to look at who he used to be, and force him to reflect on both himself and his marriage. Complicating this process is the fact that his not-dead ex Livia keeps popping up at some point during every one of his jumps, being mysterious, making it hard for him to concentrate on the task at hand, and indirectly creating rifts with his wife.
This show is light where Bionic Woman is dark -- again both figuratively and literally. Lots of daylight scenes, and most of the sets have tall ceilings and/or lots of windows. The relationship between Dan and his wife (and their son) is a central plot point, and despite their difficulties, the tone is always positive. To punctuate this, in the first episode, Dan follows a man through time and ultimately prevents him from killing his own wife and child in a fit of jealousy -- the child goes on to become a doctor and save lives. In the second episode, Dan helps deliver a baby girl on a plane, and follows her through time, indirectly causing her to donate bone marrow to a pilot who now flies humanitarian missions. In the third episode, Dan jumps repeatedly to 1989, the day of the big San Francisco earthquake, and saves the life of a lawyer who now defends wrongly accused convicts. So it's kind of a "pay it forward" theme -- helping people who help other people.
So far, I have to say, I'm enjoying Journeyman a bit more than Bionic Woman. The characters are better developed and more sympathetic, and I get the impression that there are some interesting plot surprises awaiting us in the coming months. And while I have no problem watching a "dark" show -- Battlestar Galactica rules! -- I'm not convinced that it works for BW tonally. It seems a bit put on. "We're saving the world. But we're really broody and serious and cynical (Miguel Ferrer) and we listen to The Cure and we don't really know why we're saving the world, because life sucks." On the other end of the spectrum, it's very easy to accuse Journeyman of being too optimistic and hopeful. And maybe it is. But so far, it works for me.
It's Day Four of my shameless attempt to shoehorn more sci-fi content onto the TMFT site, and today I'd like to give everybody a choice. Besides Chuck and Heroes, NBC is giving us two new sci-fi shows this fall season -- the much-anticipated Bionic Woman remake, and the intriguing time-travel series Journeyman.
I've watched and throughly enjoyed the pilots for both shows. Each in its own way takes advantage of a formula used in most of the sci-fi shows that seem to appeal to the masses these days -- take an ordinary person, and throw them into an extraordinary situation. Take a bartender, put her in a near-fatal car accident, and have her wake up with superpowers. Take a dude with a wife and kids, and have him suddenly start bouncing around in time for no apparent reason, like Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
It's a no-brainer why this formula works -- they're "gateway drugs". If you're trying to entice viewers who don't normally watch or read fantastic genre stories, then you start with a character who is "normal" like them, and work your way up from there. And if you're trying to entice geeks like me, who have an active imagination, and who on some level have always dreamed of being "super", then these kinds of shows become pure wish fulfillment fantasies. It's not that most of us don't also wish we could be Captain Kirk or Superman or (for the girls out there) Wonder Woman. But there's something especially intriguing about seeing the progression from zero to hero, and wondering what we would do if faced with a similar situation. Which might explain the popularity of an "origin" show like Smallville, or J.J. Abrams' decision to give us a young Kirk in the next Trek movie.
Okay, lecture aside, the bottom line is that I only feel like recapping one other show besides Heroes this fall, and I need to decide whether that show is Bionic Woman or Journeyman. Needless to say, it's much more fun to post these things if people actually comment and we get an active dialogue going. So I'd like to hear from you. Which pilot did you like better, do you plan to watch both or either, and which would you rather talk about here each week?