Cult show Timeless fought the brave, if somewhat contradictory battle against tweaked history, evil conspiracies and primetime ratings, not to mention the headaches of keeping the rules of time-travel consistent. As news of its cancellation were / are / will be finally confirmed, John Mosby notes it’s the journey not the pre-destination…

 

To slightly misquote the famous maxim: time and tide wait for no fan. However over the last month or so, the opposite has definitely been true as followers of the NBC series Timeless hovered on the edge of their collective seats, TV remotes and keyboards to find out about its chances of a future of travels back into the past. In the bloodbath that boasted a tsunami of network cancellations, things were certainly unsure for the show. One after another the dominos tumbled for various cult programmes and even those with higher ratings. Amid the chaos, some shows were resuscitated and transplanted at the last second – SyFy’s critically-acclaimed The Expanse will move to Amazon, Brooklyn Nine-Nine moves from Fox to NBC and mainstream hit Lucifer will now rise once more, moving from Fox to Netflix. Could Timeless – a firm fan-favourite but an expensive show without quite being a ratings magnet – possibly hope to survive such a ruthless onslaught?

Well, as it turns out from the announcement that finally came on Friday morning, no. But the fight was one for the history books…

The show, for the uninitiated, featured Abigail Spencer as historian Lucy Preston, Matt Lanter as ex-soldier Wyatt Logan and Malcolm Barrett as pilot / navigator Rufus Carlin who are charged with bringing back Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic) who has stolen a time-machine from a secret government facility and intends to change significant parts of history. Each week the team would be chasing down leads in their own back-up prototype ‘lifeboat’. It slowly becomes clear that however ruthless Flynn is, he has future knowledge of the team’s actions and also claims to be working against a conspiratorial organisation called ‘Rittenhouse’ who have existed for centuries and were ultimately responsible for the death of his wife. Now they have a time-ship and history is becoming more and more fluid, it’s hard to know who the real bad guys are…

News broke on June 22 that after much discussion and weighing of options, NBC would not be giving the show a third season. They recognised the popularity but couldn’t see a way to make it pay. It’s not unfamiliar territory in television or even for Timeless itself. At the end of its first run the show was cancelled. The fanbase – not huge but clearly passionate – made it clear that they felt an injustice had been done and almost as if Sam Beckett had personally Leaped in to put right what once went wrong, NBC abruptly reversed their decision, giving Timeless a second run. Sadly, and somewhat ironically, history will not repeat itself.

On 13 May 2018, the show ended that ten-episode second season reprieve on a massive cliffhanger with several key bad-guys and one of the core good-guys fatally gunned down… only for a stunning final moment where future versions of the team appeared to try and reverse their fate. The fans gave a sudden intake of breath and held it – crossing fingers, eyes and possibly even ears that NBC would see a need to continue the show and resolve the story. NBC, aware of the consternation being caused and Timeless being one of the top ‘on-the-bubble’ series, promised that they would crunch the numbers and all the other factors in the ‘business’ side of show-business and make a relatively quick decision.

Quick is a relative term. In the six weeks that followed, the show’s writers encouraged fans to keep campaigning – tweeting out deleted scenes from the show and script pages to keep interest going. When actress Abigail Porter genuinely turned up as a guest-star at the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan, dressed in a retro-chic dress, everyone was joking that it was her character Lucy rather than the actor who was there to save the royal newly-weds from the machinations of Rittenhouse. It was the kind of publicity you couldn’t buy.

It still wasn’t quite enough. NBC finally announced that the show was not being picked up but confirmed there were early talks about filming a television movie to wrap up the story for fans.

Show-runner Shawn Ryan joined the cast and crew in noting the bad news via twitter: “This is a sad day for the writers, actors, crew and especially the viewers of Timeless. We are all extremely proud of what we made and know that it was more than just a show for so many of our fans. It became a passion and a cause for many of them. We’re proud of the impact @NBCTimeless had on so many people – the students who embraced history as a result of our show, the people who were inspired by our stories of inclusion and acceptance. We saw your tweets and were inspired by you. If NBC is sincere in wanting a 2 hour movie to give much needed closure to our amazing @NBCTimeless fans, we are ready to make it. We don’t want the journeys of Lucy, Wyatt, Rufus and the others to end yet…”

Such a TV movie would be costly and require new contracts – the existing ones, holding cast and crew, runs out at the end of this month. However, the actors have been as vocal as the production team and fans about their love and commitment to the show so it seems likely that such an element wouldn’t be a major obstacle if NBC decides to make it.

What triumphs and tribulations led to Timeless and its fate?

Time-travel stories, by their very nature need to be play to some familiar staples, but above everything they should always be fun. One can have an embolism trying to straighten out the timelines of Back to the Future, Terminator and The X-Men, not to mention the jaw-droppingly complex but under-rated Predestination, so there’s a solid argument for merely sitting back with a bucket of paradox-flavoured popcorn and enjoying the entanglements sort themselves out.

The strength of Timeless lay largely in the character dynamics. Spencer, Lanter and Barrett clearly enjoyed working together as the main dynamic trio and there was able support from the likes of Visnjic as possible anti-hero Flynn, Sakina Jaffrey, Claudia Doumit and Paterson Joseph. There was also the show’s sheer enthusiasm for featuring key moments in history through different eyes, often including impressive production design and strong and pivotal women. Before Taraji P. Henson and co released acclaimed feature Hidden Figures, Timeless had already tackled the often ignored contribution of women at NASA during the Apollo 11 mission and the second run featured the likes of Sara Sokolovic as Grace Huniston (who championed the rights of women and immigrants in the early 1900s and whose lawyering and deductive skills led her to be known as ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’) and Harriet Tubman’s (Christine Horn) role in the American Civil War. Teachers began to cite the show for their pupils’ renewed interest in history and its players.

That being said, it wasn’t always perfect. Timeless enjoyed that certain popcorn quality but arguably had trouble with scattershot story logic and the multitude of paradoxes it created as it left continuity in its wake. Never has a show been in more need of a more firm series-bible. Both situations were evident in the show’s final hours…

It’s one thing to have a nefarious conspiratorial cabal of bad guys careering through history, but Rittenhouse (once a sinister and subtle behind-the-scenes dynasty) were too often coming up with wild schemes worthy of The Man From UNCLE’s THRUSH or 007’s SPECTRE that really didn’t stand up to wider scrutiny. The supposedly intricate web of a plan to help carefully align their influence and dominance never seemed to have a strong core, haphazard at best and simply picking key moustache-twirling moments to kill key figures. Unlike most other time-travel shows, most of the time those plans seemed to actually work with history being changed on a weekly basis, if not as intended. In a reality where paradoxes were common place, it’s almost impossible to keep track of the world in which everyone except the core team accepted the new status quo as the true one (from altering JFK’s assassination details to even the timely term ‘witch-hunt’ being erased from the timeline).

The series finale Chinatown (with our heroes’ plucky programmer, Claudia Doumit’s Jiya, trapped in the past) gave the cast much to do and lots of drama and banter, but tied it all in needlessly contrived knots. An abandoned lifeboat managed to stay hidden under a pile of twigs for a century and the full Rittenhouse rat-pack arrive en masse to join the 1888 counter-offensive for no real strategic reason than to be immediate contract-ending collateral damage. (Susanna Thompson’s Mama Preston at least gets a deathbed speech, but Michael Rady’s ancestral racist patriarch, Nicholas Keynes, set up as the big bad at the start of the second season, is dispensed with via a single-bullet like a mere henchman).

Jiya – granted the very specific superhuman ability of seeing visions of the future that only focused on her beloved Rufus, after her exposure to the lifeboat’s time vortex side-effects in last season’s run – now suddenly needed to be immune from the debilitating side-effects and the writers achieved this with talk of off-screen zen meditation between the last two episodes. Even after years of planning, Jiya couldn’t find a way to save Rufus. (Suggestions: not taking a job at the venue she sees in her visions, perhaps leaving with Rufus the minute he arrives rather than waiting until the designated fateful time, not leaving obvious clues in books to her whereabouts if she didn’t expect her team-mates to try and find her? Y’know, just saying…)

The very final scene in the show’s finale was essentially clickbait for continuation – an in-your-face, out-of-leftfield cliffhanger that makes total nonsense of a rule cited earlier in the episode about crossing one’s own timeline (apparently the main reason they can’t just immediately return to save Rufus). It was clever in the sense it made no sense but demanded an answer. I’m not totally convinced the answer has yet being firmed up… as with many of Timeless’ elements, it felt very much “we’ll jump off that bridge when we materialise there, now here’s some romance to‘’ship in the meantime”)…

Will that answer come in that two-hour tv movie? That’s up to NBC. Timeless fans definitely want it and there’s currently more possibilities than ever to help move such projects forward, so only a fool or a fortune-teller should discount the possibilities. But the timeline is also littered with the skeletons of beloved shows that were not revived. Or maybe they once were, but history changed.

Perhaps Sam Beckett could manage one more Leap? Ziggy…. centre us on NBC!