Watched through episode 3, and it’s interesting enough for me to finish out the rest in the next week or two. I like the premise of consciousness transfer rather than physical time travel, largely just because it’s not used as much. They’re not particularly subtle about where they’re heading - I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t end up with the team having to fight back against a corrupt Operator organization at some point - but I think it’s put together well enough to enjoy the journey. I’m not putting this show in any top ten lists, but it’s good enough to be entertaining.
Just watched episode 6 and holy cats, the bit you guys are talking about was completely terrible. If that had happened in the first couple of episodes I’d never have made it any further. But now I’m curious about enough other stuff to keep going, especially since Adam has said it doesn’t carry over.
Here’s how I explain away the issues in Episode 6:
- The protocol against killing is strong, so the travelers will not break it unless explicitly instructed to do so
- Even if all those people will end up dead anyway, the manner of death may be important. A military unit dying to an explosion may produce different results than one succumbing to small arms fire
They both boil down to ‘butterfly wings’ theories, in that even the tiniest things can change the future. As you learn more about the Director, it may make more sense that the Director has gamed out these variants.
It’s still not a strong episode. But if you want to, the handwaving isn’t that hard to do :)
Yeah, you’re right, with this sort of setup it’s possible to hand-wave just about anything. I just feel like the writers were really lazy in this instance - 5 seconds of extra dialogue someplace would at least have given us a reason to think they’re not just morons.
Bah. I mean, we can just do some jazz hands and say “timey-wimey!” if we want, sure. I mean, you can do that for any sci-fi/fantasy plot. Doesn’t make it any less stupid.
Just watched eps 6 and 7; two to go, I think.
What I think is impressive in 7 is I can’t recall a similarly themed work (book or movie) which begs the question of our intrepid travelers, “now what?”. Mission accomplished but no way home; how do they live out the rest of their lives? Protocol dictates they sort of ‘play it straight’ I guess but its like none of them ever thought they’d even make it and now they have full lives ahead with things like ‘trees’ and ‘birds’ and ‘dogs’ (or maybe ‘bears’). But not all a walk in the park, obviously.
So I watched this whole thing over the holidays, because I watch anything with time travel in it, no matter how bad. And I thought this was really bad. It is far more about the personal troubles of the travelers (dealing with drug addiction and whatnot) than about time travel.
And maybe that’s good, because none of the time travel stuff makes any sense. They never make any attempt to answer even the most basic questions. Like, how does the Director monitor what is going on in the past? Does he just read newspapers and see what happened? What about stuff that doesn’t make it into the newspaper? How does he know what changed, because once the past changes, from the point of view of the future, it’s always been that way.
And if the Director is totally omniscient, why do missions ever fail? and why don’t they just take Major Dickless first??
And yeah, the end is a cliffhanger which may or may not ever be resolved, but which also makes no sense. The show really needed to establish the rules up front instead of just making them up as they went along.
Oh, and the music is freaking terrible.
Just finished watching through episode 3. I guess only the FBI guy’s dibbuk is vegan then?
I thought dibbuk was a typo. This gets answered.
Minor spoiler: Two other guys (the addict and the other young guy) have a scene where they eat burgers. One of them won’t touch it, the other one is like you don’t know what you’re missing. The implication is they eat some sort of vat or tube food in the future. They don’t even know what corn is.
In a later episode, Phil has a hallucination about their old food. It’s shown as almost like a runny porridge, similar to the slop they eat in The Matrix.
The scene @wisefool is talking about is short but well done. It goes something like “This is amazing, you should try it” “That’s beef, isn’t it?” “It’s GROUND beef” “You do realize that doesn’t mean it’s from the ground, right?”
I just finished watching episode 8. I agree that episode 6 is pretty crappy, in the grand scheme of things, but the rest has been solid. Episodes 6, 7 and 8 have started giving them insight in to what life is like in the future. They don’t spoon-feed it to you; it’s all done with hallucinations, questions and conversations. I’m finding it be an effective way of communicating what life is like while still leaving it open enough that they can revise things in future episodes without invalidating previous scenes.
No they explain this quite early, what they have to go on is mostly available video for major events but for individuals, they rely mostly on social media. We all know how honestly people portray themselves on social media. Which leads us to this:
The director is not totally omniscient, which become quite clear after the first episode. The director works with the information he has available, which is flawed to begin with. They are basically doing the best they can because they have no other choice. You work with what you have, then you roll the dice and take your chances.
This can be explained through to some degree quantum theory. We do not know enough to know if they are sending consciousness back in the same time line or if when they do send consciousness back, it goes back to an entirely different quantum timeline, one that is perhaps created by their very actions. If this is true a new time line is created with an entirely new future but the old time line still exists. If you believe that timelines are linear and set, then when they send people back it will not affect their timeline because it never did. Great now my head hurts.[quote=“JoshL, post:27, topic:127697”]
the end is a cliffhanger which may or may not ever be resolved, but which also makes no sense.
[/quote]
The end makes sense if you accept quantum timelines. The timeline their consciousness is in now is a completely different timeline with a future they have no real idea about because it is completely different from the timeline from which they were sent.
If you are stuck with thinking of time as being linear, with one timeline that they are changing, then it definitely does not make sense because of paradox. Quantum theory solves that paradox.
It’s interesting, too, because of something mentioned in episode 11 (I think). Spoilers for 12 below, also.
[spoiler]They can’t send a traveler back any further than the most recent arrival. In effect, this creates 1:1 correspondences between points in time between the present and the future that are fixed, or at least, affixed to one another.
This kinda, sorta helps with understanding the notion of waiting for the director to come back online in episode 12. You’d think that the director being offline in the future would be irrelevant, but with the other faction barraging the timeline with new arrivals it might make some sense. Otoh, if that’s the case, why couldn’t the faction simply cut off all new arrivals if they wanted by sending someone further ahead? So, not sur how well that justification works.[/spoiler]
After finishing I’m standing by it. I concede that others here have their issues and I’m willing to overlook some of that for the things that really please me.
One thing that I think some find off-putting is that, for a “Netflix Original” it certainly comes off like a first season of a show that could have been made for a major network. Sort of ‘procedural-ly’. But in a way they spend a good deal of time and effort subverting some of the standard TV procedural tropes while upholding others. At times I felt each episode was a little too centered but overall I liked the arc of the story. And no, I think they picked a poor cliff to hang it on at the conclusion of the final episode.
What I really like is how the backstory of our travelers is revealed mostly naturally. And interesting choices like the most senior member of the squad taking over the body and thus the life of a teenager. Also as I mentioned upthread I feel the decision to explore how travelers from the future would react after the mission was possibly over and they are now ‘stuck’ in their 21st century life.
I get the feeling I’m in the minority but I definitely feel like the shortcomings do not detract from the enjoyment of the 12 show series as a whole; whether or not they return for Season 2 and I’m hoping they do. (And don’t cheese it up.)
I also liked it overall but felt at the end it veered too much off course.
My wife and I enjoyed the show. It was good fun. But it certainly had some rough spots. The overall story arc seemed a bit confused, like having a fair bit of character-development eps toward the end when you might expect them to be building action/intensity more. In that regard, I’d say the show never really hit its stride.
So, I’m not going to put it on a pedestal or anything, but if you can not take it too seriously, it was a good time.
So what’s with the weird font on the computer screen?
Also, if they only send people’s consciousness back, what’s with the super modern medical equipment that Marcie has?
It’s implied they made that stuff in the field. When they make the in skull communicators he asks, “When did you have time to make this?” And the old man said something like “After school.”
If you notice they have only sent back their best and brightest engineers and doctors and such. Its implied that teams have been sent back earlier in time for the purpose of making tech to equip future teams. The team the show is focused on is apparently one of the major teams sent back to alter specific events.
Was an explanation ever given about each Traveler’s identifying number? Seemed that for the most part they were in the ‘thousands’; specifically three thousand something. But our highschool centenarian and the laser beam scientist and the two in the final couple episodes have very low numbers. I think highschool guy is like one-hundred something and some of the others had two-digit numbers.
They all showed a lot of deference to the travelers with lower numbers, like they were famous or important. But clearly they weren’t numbered in order of when they were sent back if it is a one way trip. So what is the underlying method or reason of their ID numbers?
They’re obviously numbered in the order in which they were sent back. Nothing says they can’t be sent back multiple times. Engineer Guy is “older than all of us combined.”