Journeyman - season 1 thread

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Another great episode. 'Losing' Zach really hit home what can happen if something goes 'wrong' during time travel, and I too thought the explanation was quite a good one (obviously "timing is everything").

At first I thought Jack and annoying sister-in-law were exes, but evidently not. Nice to see Jack push hard to try and get information to help Dan (re the FBI guy and the dead rogue agent's file -- I do wonder to what extent the guy really was rogue, or is Jack's friend just covering for the Bureau?).

As another side point, sister-in-law (sorry, can't remember her name) caught Dan out by asking him about "the fire" rather than "the drug bust", and Dan not knowing any better fell for it. DIdn't seem to go further than that, though. Perhaps only to show that sister-in-law was assuming the worst in Dan's disappearances, e.g. asking Jack later about gambling.

Being Mr Niceguy is Dan's thing. I thought it wasn't unreasonable for him to be, well, reasonable the first time around, but the next time he wasn't going to take no for an answer, given the stakes. And it was a nice comeuppance for the security head to get shot by her own men. Given what happened by 2007, I seriously doubt she was a spy, it was all just corporate 'espionage' anyway, on behalf of whatever company ultimately developed all that tech and brought it to market in the altered reality.

Livia in her skivvies was 'nice' too

Absolutely. It is even more 'painful' watching these last few episodes knowing that 'the end is nigh'. I hated the feeling when watching Studio 60 run down last season, and I hate it now as Journeyman reaches its end. Damn you, NBC...

(As an aside, wasn't Studio 60 in the same slot that Journeyman holds now?)

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

The only thing that confused me a bit, was how Dan still had a picture of Zach, when he really didn't exist. I would think the picture would change.

A bit odd that he had a story, when his boss was at his home.

If I had to choose between Journeyman and Bionic Woman to renew, I would choose Journeyman.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

It was on his person as he was traveling, and the changes don't follow his trail back in time. After all, if the pictures changed, why wouldn't the contents of his brain?

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Dan and Livia were on an upper floor of an office building with its own security staff and the obvious ability to dial 911. It wasn't like they could grab the camera and make a dash out the front door onto the street and get lost in a crowd. There was every chance they'd be stopped, detained and eventually questioned by the police before they could get out of the building - and that's the kind of thing a time-traveller very much needs to avoid; especially one travelling within his own lifetime. (Not only does Dan have to be careful not to leave a paper trail or his full name with anyone in the past who could put it in a record, he needs to avoid being demonstrably in two places at once - like in a police station and wherever he really was at that moment in 1984.)

I thought it would have been an interesting twist if Dan had arrived in the present and found that he had both a son and a daughter. (Fraternal twins?) The incident with the child molestor suggested that Dan couldn't simply undo changes he'd made to the past and restore the normal flow of time. (And, indeed, he didn't, since presumably the security babe wasn't shot in the head by her own guys in either of the previous timelines. )

I wonder if Jack's meeting with their daughter will make him approach Katie about having another kid again?

I agree that Livia is probably marrying her man knowing from one of her jumps that she had married him, and knowing his fate. (Death? Capture? Disabling wounds? Who knows.) And yeah, it would be the Korean war that he's shipping out to.

I'm not sure why everyone hates Langley so much all of a sudden. My impression is that he acted the way he did because Dan (stupidly) showed up on his doorstep, in front of a witness, and nearly blew his cover. Langely had probably been affected by the FBI's investigation and needs to be very careful.


I think Annette is the type who lays that kind of trap for her own information and/or for possible use at the most opportune time later. So she had no reason to rat him out to Kate or confront him with his lie. She just files that sort of thing away for future reference. (The way she dropped the "Jack's new girlfriend is pregnant" bomb on the woman who broke up with Jack because he didn't want kids, when it got her the advantage in a talk with Kate.)

Regards,

Joe

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Great episode.

Except for the jarring addition of mysticism to the mix. I can enjoy a "sci-fi" show, and I can enjoy a "fantasy" show. But rarely do I find a jumble of sciencey and mysticy plotting satisfying.

I didn't know what was going on with Dr. L. I was torn between him acting to avoid an unexpected itneraction with Dan, or his involvement has been changed by the changes Dan caused in the past, or he's more "twisted" than we thought. I prefer the first: he requires conversations to be on his terms, only.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

+1

Although, truth be told, I'm not terribly fond of mistycism in any form, either. There's also a part of me that would have liked someone to at least make the suggestion that maybe the world was better off with a tech upgrade, and if the only difference is that Dan's got a daughter rather than a son, it's not necessarily something that needs to be "fixed".

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

I'm not sure we've seen an addition of mysticism to the mix - at least not of magic. Nor do I think the line between SF and Fantasy is as clear as some people think. Telepathy and clairvoyance are both SF tropes arguably as old as time travel. Just because the psychic uses tarot cards and believes she is using magic doesn't mean she is. A world in which time travel itself is possible certainly opens up the possibility of a scientifically explainable "sixth sense." If Dan and Livia can move back in forth through time, surely information can as well. If there is something unusual about them physically that permits their journeys, it is equally plausible that there is something about the psychic that allows her to tap into images of past or future events.

Carrie is often classed as a supernatural horror novel - mostly because Stephen King followed it up with a couple of genuinely supernatural books - but it was fundamentally a science fiction book in which a genetic mutation gave a young girl superpowers that were no more "mystical" than anything seen in the X-Men films. Nothing we saw in this episode really shows that the writers have moved beyond that kind of thing, however the characters in the story may perceive what's going on.

The fact that both Dan and Livia's births were connected with a comet suggests to me a physical reason for their odd gifts - one that presumably could be shared with other people born on the same days they were. It may be that they had the physical potentional for time travel but that some kind of technological intervention was also required to realize that potential. (Hence Dr. Langely.) The more I think about it, the more likely I think that it that the writer's planned to tie Livia into something like the so-called Philadelphia Experiment and/or the "Roswell Incident" as a way of explaining her time travel. It may be that by the 60s Langely and company figured out that only people exposed to the comet (exotic material from the tail) were potentional time travellers - hence his interest in Dan.

It is frustrating that the show seems doomed, but I can hope that the creators will at least find a way of answering the questions somewhere down the road.

Regards,

Joe

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

You would also think that with the resulting advancement in technology of having access to a 2007 digital camera in 1984, a lot more of Dan's life would have been different other than just having a daughter instead of a son, or some extra toys in his office/home. But I guess in a 40 minute show your options are limited.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

There might even have been evidence that the camera was Dan's. We know that there were pictures of his wife in the camera, maybe there was also one of himself. Or it could be those old pictures were already deleted by the kid.

Neil

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

To Dan, it was something that needed fixing. He loved his son. The daughter, while certainly a wonderful child, was a complete stranger to him (much like the wife was outraged when she gleened that he meant to take away her beloved daughter in favor of a son who was a stranger to her).

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

She did make a better paper butterfly for him though!

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

[quote]Originally Posted by Joseph Young
2. ... after all, there was no evidence that the camera wasn't Dan's. They knew better.[quote]

The kid knew better. His mother suspected that Dan was telling the truth, but she wasn't in a position to know anything. The security people knew nothing either way - but they did know the kid, who was the child of an employee and often around the office. He said the camera was his. Two strangers who had no convincing reason for even being in the building claimed it was theirs.

As for there being evidence that the camera was Dan's - how would pictures of a pretty woman prove anything? Sure, Dan could claim they were his wife, but so what? He obviously knew something about the camera - he could watched over the kid's shoulder while he was reviewing the photos. That's assuming that the pictures were even recoverable. The camera was obviously damaged in the crash. (Notice neither the kid nor the geek tried to turn it on or access the pictures.)

Its value was in what clues the advanced technology (the parts that survived) would give to anyone trying to reverse engineer it. In fact, a 2007 digital camera would have been so advanced back then that there is a limit to how much they could have learned from it. Some of the components would have been beyond their ability to analyze, others beyond their ability to fabricate. They wouldn't have had the tools to make the tools to make the stuff. Jack Northrup could have learned a lot if someone had handed him a model of an F-18 and a complete jet engine in 1944, but he wouldn't have been able to build anything like it because the machine tools, design aids and metalurgy to do so didn't exist. He would have been able to greatly accelrate the state of the art, but not so much as to make air travel unrecognizable.

Even if security hadn't automatically taken the side of the kid they knew against the stranger, there is no way they would have simply handed the camera back to Dan and sent him on is way. At the very least they would have insisted on investigating, and that, again, is something Dan had good reason to avoid. (And the business of "no evidence to prove the camera wan't Dan's" is a bit of a red-herring. Given the people involved, the burden of proof was not on the security people to prove that Dan didn't own the camera. And it is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. If anything they would have asked Dan to prove that he did own the camera - and as we've seen that wouldn't have been easy, either.)

Regards,

Joe

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

I loved the The Hanged Man episode.

My favorite scene is when Dan is trying to convince Katie that they have a son named Zack, and the daughter walks in on the conversation, and Dan saying he has to fix this.
Then Katie clutching her daughter and saying to Dan "Don't you change a thing"

It's sad this show is an episode away from being over.

I really hope Kevin Falls comes out and says something that would have happened in Season 2 and on.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Time travel sequences have now turned into a Matrix exercise?

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

I am now officially sad to see this show cancelled. I loved tonight's last episode. Confusing at first but answers slowly unravelled as the the episode went on.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

And there it goes...one of the best new shows of the year, certainly my favorite new program, one of the few programs that brought me back from DVD to TV.

And now... back to DVD. Unless it gets a reprieve somehow. I hope Journeyman will return.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

So, who was the other one (Livia?) or a Star Wars nod.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Livia.


They operated it. The kid knew it could play back video. I don't think grabbing it and running would have been such a bad strategy. Lie low with the camera, and you'll leap out soon enough. Basically, what Dan did when the stakes were higher. He should have known they were high enough when the kids were obviously fully intending to do what they can to decipher the technology.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

I loved the part where Katie wanted to see Dan vanish but when Dan tried to while she was watching he couldn't. Like it was like when you're in the washroom and you're trying to pee in the stall but you can't because there's someone in the stall next to you.

Of course it was a nice send off when Katie finally did see him vanish at the end.

When Livia told Dan it may be a while until they meet again, I wonder if that was just added at the last minute since they knew they were canceled.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

That was a sweet ending that Katie could finally see Dan vanish. And I like how Katie and Dan gave each other what they needed, he gave her a choice and she gave him support. That was a nice send off to this series, if this really is the end. I think a lot of answers were given and I knew right away when the other guy died, Dan was plunked into the fray to replace him.

I hope the series comes back, but the way it ended, I actually felt closure. All the characters had a proper send-off.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

This is an Odd Season with the strike, but if there had been no strike what does NBC see as value to replace this show with the Choir show? Yeah that'll pack in the advertisers. TV Stinks. Hopefully Life, my other favorite show, can get past it's Next order of episodes.

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Yes, it was quite nice that he made sure she could see him go off. Kevin Falls really did wrap things us as well as he could have for this limited run. It would have been better if he could have had a full run and then in the final episode do his plan of the Rube Goldberg device through all the people that Dan affected, but it was still a nice package. If it wasn't for the strike, we probably would have been limited to seeing half of the 13 episodes online or waiting for the DVD. So, I'm happy we at least got to see this much.

Neil

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

But what was with the Matrix green hue on the time travelled scenes?

And what's the better power: the ability to only go back in time, or to only go forward in time (but also return their normal timeline like Livia does)?

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Patrick, regarding the green hue, I wasn't sure what it meant, at first, I thought because Dan was in the future. But I think it meant to show the audience that this trip was different for Dan, it was a trip that defines his purpose. He finds out when he starts to jump and what appears to have been the trigger, the focal point in time for Dan. (If I can quote Spock from Star Trek)

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Also, it might have just been a decision by this episode's director to somehow differentiate between "now" and "3 months ago", since costume/set design/make-up wasn't going to be enough.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

This is also what I thought.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Right. There's no way the kid could have known it was also a video camera because is had "digital picture and video" printed on the body.


Again - grab it and run where? They were in a building full of people with no easy exits and security on the way.


And it was after hours and the building was empty. It is a lot easier to elude 3 people long enough to destroy the camera than when you're trying to elude dozens of people and possibly the police when your goal is to secure the camera and escape with it. How does Dan grabbing the camera running at that point prove that he should have grabbed it earlier when every possible circumstance was completely different? If I drive my car with the wipers going and my headlights on during a rainy night, does that prove I should have done the same thing hours earlier when it was sunny and dry?


He wanted the camera back regardless of what they were planning to do with it. That they would try to reverse engineer the technology probably didn't mean a hell of a lot to Dan, who isn't exactly a techie, and was irrelelvant to him at that point anyway. The stakes, as you pointed out, weren't very high yet. And he assumed he'd have more chances to get the camera back. The kid still had it, it hadn't been turned over to the company, and the mother still seemed sympathetic. There was no reason to steal it out of the kid's hands in front of twenty witnesses and risk arrest and leaving a record when he could just try again later.


Right. Because Dan always knows when he's going to leap.

***************************88

I liked the episode a lot, and for most of the reasons mentioned. The moment with Katie was especially nice. But I couldn't help thinking, "Dr. Samuel Beckett never returned" after Dan leaped out, though.

Evan certainly presented a case study in the dangers of trying to manipulate your own history. His death raises some interesting questions though. Did someone have to die so that Evan could start travelling? If so, who? Was he Dan's age? Did they both come in with the comet? Evan seemed to be like Dan, travelling into his own past and living a constant "present". Is that why Langely thinks Dan is the last of the Travellers, and doesn't seem to know about Livia? Is she an anomally, leaping into the future and connecting with another Traveller?

If she and Dan had a child would it inherit whatever ability the comet gave them?

I think Dan's instincts were right in not giving Langley any clues about Livia. And if Langley is always being watched, you have to wonder what the ramifications of Jack's little performance at the lecture might have been.

I really hope we get a novel or a TV movie or a detailed text treatment of some of the rest of the story on the DVD set if the show does not return.

Regards,

Joe

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

You have no more evidence that it was inoperable than I do that it was operable. I'm not even going to bother with the rest. This is just a discussion about a TV show. You don't have to pull out the nukes every time someone makes a statement you disagree with.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

One other question is whether there needs to be another candidate traveler nearby when one traveler dies in order for that person to start traveling. If that is the case, then that might be why the number of travelers was going down and was now down to just Dan in the present.

Maybe Kevin Falls will put soemthing up ont he blog site NBC.com > Journeyman Live Blog or somewhere else.

By the way, did anyone see him (or anyone else) say that the original show title was Traveler, but that was changed due to the ABC show that was dead before airing its episodes?

Neil

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Kevin Reilly was President of NBC Entertainment when Journeyman was green-lit. Now that he is the entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting it would be great if Fox would pickup the show and run with just as CBS did with JAG which was also an NBC first season cancellation.