In Canada: Mondays, 9pm ET, Showcase In the UK: Acquired by Netflix
Given that Canada, Showcase and Brad Wright have been so central to science fiction television, particularly time travel shows, in the past few decades, we shouldn’t be surprised that with the US lining up the likes of Timeless, Frequency, Time After Time and Making History, all three have decided to get in on the act to produce something similar but different.
Travelers flips most time travel stories on their head by having travelers coming from the future to our present in order to prevent a terrible disaster from occuring. So far, so identical to Showcase’s own Continuum. The difference here is that the time travelers are (apparently) the good guys and they’re from the far off future, a future so distant the human race is in danger of extinction, something they’d quite like to prevent by changing things now.
But most important of all, they can’t actually physically travel through time. Instead, provided they know the exact time and place someone is going to die, they can project their minds back in time into the ‘host’ and take over their body à la Chocky and Quantum Leap.
Travelers‘ first episode, written by Wright, is mainly establishment of the lives and families of the hosts who are shortly going to die and be replaced by an ‘elite unit’ of time travelers. We have the learning disabled Mackenzie Porter (Hell on Wheels, Blackstone); douche high school quarterback and cage fighter Jared Paul Abrahamson (Awkward); abused single mum Nesta Marlee Cooper (Heroes: Reborn); and drug-addicted college student Reilly Dolman.
Chasing after them after he becomes aware of some ‘odd traffic’ on the dark web is FBI agent Eric McCormack (Trust Me, Will and Grace, Perception).
Then, of course, the time travelers turn up and the show then becomes about the differences between the hosts and their new inhabitants, who can fight back, don’t have an addiction, aren’t learning disabled, aren’t complete dicks and so on. And despite having done their research, the time travelers still have a huge culture gap to navigate, from the little things such as text message slang and not answering the front door naked through to quite big things like how people talk and discovering that people lie on social media and that maybe one of the hosts isn’t who she claimed to be online.
Shot in the style of Wright’s previous big offering, Stargate Universe, Travelers is an edgy and surprisingly intimate affair, trying its best to make all of this not ridiculous, something it does pretty well. To be fair, though, there’s actually precious little about the time travelers’ mission so it’s hard to tell if something extraordinarily silly is round the corner. Instead, it’s mostly about changing behaviours and what happens if someone starts acting very differently from how they used to behave – and whether other people will allow that or get suspicious.
Basically, it’s a science-fiction spy show with a whole bunch of sleeper agents suddenly being activated. It’s The Americans but with a different kind of time travel. Hopefully.
The characters and stories are engrossing, McCormack is as pleasing as ever and everyone, particularly Porter and Dolman, does well with what they’ve got. There’s even an appearance by ubiquitous former Huck Finn and Continuum regular Ian Tracey.
There’s a big twist at the end that will be entirely ruined if you watch the trailer below, but Travelers is definitely a very promising first start to a series that’s also got a big chunk of Netflix co-production money behind it. I’m hoping for great things, but we’ll see how it goes.
In the US: Sundays, 9pm, HBO In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic
I think I’ve shot my bolt on Westworld. It is, of course, really, really easy to be scathing about something. You can pick at the acting, direction, writing, music, and more.
But when something’s really good, it’s surprisingly hard to say much except “That’s good. And so’s that. And yes, that is, too.”
So it is with Westworld, HBO’s new adaptation of Michael Crichton’s movie of the same name. Pretty much all I needed to say about it I said when I reviewed the first episode. Okay, episode two was a bit of a time-waster that didn’t advance the show’s plot much at all and which felt like it had mysteriously dropped into the series from the movie. But episode three brought everything back on track to being just really, really good.
What I would perhaps add is that as well as looking at questions such as “What is it to be conscious?”, “How different does a consciousness have to be from ours and still be a consciousness?”, “How is consciousness created?” and “If something seems human but we know it isn’t human, how should we treat it?”, the show has now added some new, equally fascinating questions.
One of its hallmarks is now scenes in which the creators of the androids and gynoids in this futuristic theme park sit down and talk with their creations’ deepest levels of consciousness. These started out as simply plot devices to explore the characters and to hint that bad things are happening at the park. But now they have become something more – conversations between creator and created that have almost religious overtones, almost as if God wanted to know what it was like to be mortal and drew some of His creations out of the universe to interview them and find out.
There is a snake in this Garden of Eden, however, and that’s Arnold. Arnold has the potential to destroy Westworld, turning a fascinating musing on the nature of free will, empathy, thought and emotion into a simple clash between Good and Evil. I do hope that’s not where the show is going.
But at this stage, Westworld is getting a double thumbs up from me. It’s smart, poignant, well acted, beautifully made and just a top piece of television.
Barrometer rating: 1 Would it be better with a female lead? N/A TMINE’s prediction: It’s a limited series so a one-off, but given its ratings, it could well come back for a second season
