It's a fun concept and can be a great peg to hang a plot on. It comes in several flavors:
And they didn't even mention the kind with holograms and Knight Rider sensibilities.
Sadly, it is very easy to do time travel badly. How bad? Let's take a look.
Show Summary: A time cop from the future, sworn to maintain the timeline against tampering, defies his superiors, steals a time traveling spaceship, and shanghai's himself a crew of B-list superheroes and villains to stop an immortal Egyptian sorcerer from conquering the planet and killing his wife and son in the process.
Costumes/Visuals:
This being a time travel show, we get a lot of period piece outfits and sets. The production team aren't up to the Downton Abbey level of OCD when it comes to recreating the past, but they do a good job constructing the feel, which is all the average viewer will care about.
The same challenges that face Arrow and Flash occur here, with basically the same people. I do like that Rip Hunter is dressed like a Pinkerton.
Space cowboy is a popular look.
The ship set looked fine and we get all the visual panache for the powers that the studio developed for Arrow and Flash. I'm not a huge fan of the Hawks, but it works for what it is.
Music:
It's Blake Neely again, but this time I can't drum up anything truly memorable. This may be a function of my own bias against the show in general, so take that with a grain of salt.
Action:
There's plenty of it, from fistfights to shootouts to spaceship combat, along with glimpses of full scale invasion in the future as Vandal Savage's forces conquer the planet. There's plenty of super powered conflict, sometimes between the crew members. There's even an Innerspace style medical procedure.
If you had problems with the action scenes from the other CW shows, well, you've got the same team behind them here, only with different props to play with.
Acting:
There are some pretty good actors in the cast and one or two just own the character.
Victor Garber as Dr. Martin Stein: Garber is a veteran character actor who's been in the business since the 70s. Probably most well known for his role as Jack Bristow in Alias, Garber first showed up as Stein in the Flash series before transitioning to Legends. He does a good job as the "wise old guy", though the character of Stein is not the power role that Bristow was.
Wentworth Miller as Leonard Snart: A.K.A Captain Cold, Miller brings a ton of cool (see what I did there?) to the role. His delivery is great, his voice just drips with disdain. One of the better anti-heroes in any of the CW shows.
Arthur Darvill as Rip Hunter: Better known as Rory "I Punched Hitler in the FACE" Williams from Dr. Who, Darvill is a solid actor with a good dramatic range and understated comedic delivery. His performance gives some depth to a character that could be completely one-note.
The rest of the cast does a good enough job, they just aren't given much to work with. Cue the tense foreshadowing music.
Writing:
This should have been an awesome show. The writers took a decent time travel premise, threw in superheroes, and added an ages old conflict between an immortal and his ever reincarnating nemeses. THEN you took it to SPACE.
How do you kill the fun in that?
Simple three step process. One, you set up the hopeless nature of the challenge the heroes must overcome. Two, you solve the challenge by episode three. Three, you throw all logic out the window and try to continue the series as though something else needed to be done.
Let me explain.
The main antagonist of the show is Vandal Savage (who is no longer a hyper-evolved immortal caveman; so much for source material) who slowly builds his power base over the centuries and eventually takes over the world. He operates behind the scenes, propping up dictators, selling arms, and generally doing whatever ruthless supervillains do to amass wealth and power.
Along the way, he periodically hunts down the reincarnating Hawkgirl and Hawkman, from whom he steals the life energy that grants him immortality with a special sacrificial dagger.
So far so good.
However, the writers make multiple mistakes.
The first is that Rip Hunter, with access to technology that leaves the 21st century in the dust and the capability to hack into any database in the world, cannot locate Vandal Savage who is hiding in the background of history.
That's right, Star Trek level sensor technology and every security camera in the globe can't locate a mutated human who doesn't bother trying to disguise himself.
Second, Rip Hunter is on a time machine. Of course he immediately goes to confront his family's killer. He fails. Fair enough.
Why doesn't he then go back TO THE PREVIOUS DAY and try again? And again, as many times as it takes? You literally told us he KNOWS where and when Savage is in space-time in episode one. Heck, he can stalk backward through time and kill Savage's father before Savage is born. Case closed.
That never happens and it makes no sense at all. Instead he bounces around in time because, again, he "doesn't know where Savage is".
Third, that dagger that Savage uses to siphon life energy from the Hawks? The heroes get it. In episode three. And they have access to a space ship. Which is also a time machine.
Why does Hunter not fly to the sun 1,000 years before Savage was born and chuck the hunk of metal out of the airlock? Savage can no longer siphon energy, he withers away and dies centuries before he can conquer anything.
At least here there might have been some good inter-party conflict on how to use the dagger. Kendra/Hawkgirl clearly wants to use it to kill Savage, since she steals it and hands it right back to him trying to do so, but it never occurs to anyone else (including two geniuses, a master thief, an assassin, and a guy who's also obsessed with avenging his loved ones) that she might do something impulsive...
While there are some good episodes (the Marooned episode was a lot of fun and full of comic book drop ins) the writers can't handle the core conflict with anything like skill and this lets the air out of the tires on the rest of the show.
Conclusion
I couldn't get past season one of this show. I just can't trust the writers enough to care about anything that happens.
Fantastic premise, terrible execution, and a waste of the acting talent the studio brought in.
Give this one a pass.
"Why doesn't he then go back TO THE PREVIOUS DAY and try again? And again, as many times as it takes? You literally told us he KNOWS where and when Savage is in space-time in episode one. Heck, he can stalk backward through time and kill Savage's father before Savage is born. Case closed."
ReplyDeleteBeing fair to the show, every time travel story has this issue, including/especially Dr. Who. It's something that always has to be handwaved and (IIRC) this show has a few "okayish" lampshades on it (some equivalent of time cops who will stop you from messing things up too much).
Of course, I stopped watching after only a handful of episodes for the same basic reason that no element was really good enough. It could have been carried by some really brilliant writing, or acting, or chemistry between actors, or a number of other things, because the underlying premise is hella fun, but nothing got close enough.
I would have just need a branch of verisimilitude to hold on to.
Delete"The time circuits burned out during the theft of the ship and we can only jump to a random point within this spectrum."
Given something like that, I think I could have bought in more.
Time travel stories are incredibly hard to do well. Doctor Who has pulled it off in a few episodes but mostly succeeds by making the time travel part incidental to the plot rather than integral. Usually, the Tardis just takes them to wherever the story needs them this week, and then the story proceeds from there. Quantum Leap, which you referenced so subtly above, used a similar conceit to avoid the pitfalls of the trope.
ReplyDeleteI never made it past season one, either. But mostly because the show was just boring more than the massive plot holes.
I agree with both you and Witness on this one, the lack of cast chemistry and really boring sub-plots did not help this show at all.
DeleteAs for time travel, if you want to see what I thought was a really interesting spin on things, check out Jonathan Hickman's Red Wing. Cool visualization of time and how we interact with it.