New Time Travel on Television

Time travel seems to be quite popular on television these days. In addition to Barry Allen bouncing back and forth between time periods and timelines on CW’s The Flash, which he has been doing for some time now, this season gives us two brand new series to mess with the logic centers of our brains—NBC’s Timeless and CW’s Frequency. If you know me then you know that I like a good time travel story—emphasis on good—so I thought I would discuss each of those new shows briefly. I invite anyone who might wish to comment below to do so.

* The descriptions following the titles are lifted directly from Google searches.

TIMELESS: When a mysterious criminal steals a secret state-of-the-art time machine, planning to use it to change past events to destroy America in the present, the only hope is a team of unexpected heroes composed of a scientist, a soldier and a history professor. The trio must use the stolen machine's prototype to journey back in time to critical events, being careful not to affect history themselves, while working to stay one step ahead of the villain who would unravel the timeline and understand the mystery driving his mission before it's too late.

As I watched the premier episode, I started to feel that, while enjoyable, the show was rather simplistic. That is to say that I felt as though the writers were just engaging in some basic, straightforward storytelling—bad guy goes back in time and changes history, good guys go back in time and change it back, or fix it as best they can, then return home and everything is okay. I started to worry that that was all the show would be—time fix of the week, episode after episode.

Not so fast. I’m happy to say that I was wrong. I don’t want to post any spoilers, so I’ll just say that by the time the first episode ended, it had become clear that there is going to be much more to this show than time fixes of the week. Turns out that time isn’t so easy to fix, and lines between good guys and bad guys aren’t necessarily very clear. At the time of this writing, I have seen the first two episodes. If you like a good time travel story like I do and unexpected plot twists make you grin, then I recommend this series.

FREQUENCY: Detective Raimy Sullivan has carried around pain and resentment over her father's death for 20 years, believing NYPD Officer Frank Sullivan was corrupted during an undercover sting and got himself killed. Everything changes when she hears his voice coming from his old ham radio, somehow transmitting from 1996. Raimy tells Frank about his murder, allowing him to survive the event, but the change has tragic consequences on the present, and the two detectives must find a way to rewrite the past without destroying everyone they care about.

The description pretty much says it all. As it infers, when Frank lives instead of dying like he was “meant” to, the resulting butterfly effect changes Raimy’s present. Again, I don’t want to post any spoilers so I won’t say anything more about the story, except that the plot twists in this series are every bit as interesting as those in Timeless. I recommend this series as well.