another new Netflix Show (Travelers)

I wasn’t sure if the reason the original host got weaker because of multiple traveler jumps, or if it’s that each time it tries again it has to be a few seconds later than the original time, so eventually it could only jump into the body after the in-air collision (the event that originally led to their deaths) and so the girl was concussed at that point.

Entirely possible.

OK, a couple of comments, as of mid-episode S02E09:

So the Faction can still send people back (viz. the people at the rave)? Also, WTF Marcy?? Playing a lottery number that you know is going to win 62K in the presence of a dude who’s totally in love with you and might play it as well? That sure won’t attract undue attention. :rolleyes:
Also, weren’t Hall and the other guy part of the Faction?

No, they all came from

the Quantum Frame which was set up at the center of the rave. It had a bunch of Faction consciousnesses stored in it.

I’m pretty sure she kinda did that on purpose. It was right after David was talking about how much even a small win would change his life.

No, they were a rival Traveler team who happened to be loose cannons and go off mission - just like our heroes. :)

Thanks for the detailed reply. I wasn’t aware that the Quantum Frame could buffer so many consciousnesses–there were the people at the rave, the people at the various timeshare presentations, etc.

About 11 minutes till the end of E12 and I don’t see how they don’t leave this on an even bigger cliffhanger than last season’s, grrr.

Reactions to the last episode and questions:

It’s obvious that Traveler 1 transferred his consciousness to the psychologist, essentially overwriting/killing her “native” persona. Not clear what happened with the formerly homeless schizophrenic dude who apparently built a new Quantum Frame for Traveler 1. Some other Traveler (Faction or ?) arrives in the former body of Traveler 1 (whose name escapes me).
My first question is, why didn’t The Director prevent the video confessions of our heroes by overwriting them? Why would he want the Traveler network exposed? Unless the Director is offline again in the future, or now reprogrammed by the baddies? And how does the show come back from this? Is it all going to be cat and mouse with the world’s counterintelligence agencies from here on? What about further missions to save the future from going to pot?

BTW, can someone remind me what the initialism TELL stands for again?

I really enjoyed the last episode of Season 2. Not because it raise the stakes, but for the human aspects of it. So good TV.

This has raised this serie very high in my ranking of favorite TV series.

It knows that they’ll get out of it somehow early in the next season I guess… :)

TELL is Time, Elevation, Latitude, Longitude.

Watched season 2 over the last week. Great stuff.

Enrico Colantoni was great. Hopefully we will be getting more of him.

Finished season 2. Spoilers follow; if you’re not caught up on this season, abandon ship and don’t read the rest of this.

Enjoyed the thoughts upthread - particularly the discussions about the potential repercussions of the 17 minutes episode. Particularly telling is that which said that episode - and the “new rules” - were penned by the show creator. Couple that with the multiple timelines that Phillip is now experiencing, and I think we may now be dealing with the potential for multiple timelines overlapping, as well as time travel.

Meaning - there could be a Director-free timeline. Or perhaps Victor simply knows how to manage things across varied timelines. Who knows? In any case, while I don’t think the status quo will remain the same next season, I also don’t think the majority will take place in a post “World knows about travelers” setting.

Finally, I’m assuming the schizophrenic traveler ended up in Grace. And it’s possible that the Director knew that outcome, given how it spared her earlier in the season.

Finished season one. I like this show. I think it generally has good casting, and very good guest stars. Jennifer Spence is excellent.

Some of the ideas in this show remind me of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Continuum, but so far it hasn’t managed to fully deliver on the potential in them. I liked the reveal of the Director, though, even though it was spoiled by the autoplaying Season 2 trailer on Netflix.

I’m hoping season 2 is good.

Grace, the high school guidance counselor / original director programmer, is fucking hilarious in this.

“good talk.”

We’re in agreement. Can’t you please use your Stack Exchange billions to bankroll a sci-fi series with Jennifer Spence and Anna Torv as co-leads?

S3 is in production. There has been no official announcement, but social media leaks and behind-the-scenes stuff more or less confirms that. Some of the details are in this reddit thread.

Good news!

I’ll take them at their word for now and say “Good News, Everyone!”

I’m finally watching season 2 and I just dropped in here to say that Alexa got all excited twice in episode 2. Clearly they didn’t properly smart-home-device-proof their dialogue. :)

Ahh but was that really Alexa or was it perhaps… The Director?

So I came down with a bad cold/flu after dodging it for months and decided to binge on this over the last few days.

I started out really enjoying it and burned through season 1. Midway through season 2 I started feeling a building sense of disappointment. Season 3 is approved it would seem but I just don’t like the writing on this in some key aspects.

SPOILERS BELOW

The Good.
It’s a wonderful concept. The basic premise is awesome. Time travel is tough sci fi to present because of the paradoxes inherit in the concept. The premise provides rules and limitations and feedback effects. The religious implications of blindly trusting the godlike AI and its plan…or rebelling. Great stuff.

Even better it shows and doesn’t tell. It presents the complexities without going into explanation and that enhances the mystery. You get the history of the whole project in little pieces and have to put it together. That’s a lot of fun.

The moral tension in the scripts concerning means vs. ends is well done.

The Problems

Most characters are pretty well developed. Some are annoying but still be entertaining. But they don’t behave logically or consistent with the idea that they are the elite of the future trained to go back in time and prepared to sacrifice themselves to prevent the horrible future that they live in. The writing is all over the place

For example. The group leader Grant MacLaren can speak multiple languages and is and excellent marksman. He is supposed to be the strategic thinker but he runs the group like it’s the ensemble hanging out in the cheers bar. His leadership is a mess. Each member demonstrates competence but as a group they are horrible. They have terrible opsec and commsec and sometimes forget things like a government car has a gps tracker. It feels like they are the B team but they got assigned the A team mission at the end of season 1.

The tactical/operations plotting is terrible most of the time while the conceptual writing is great. Think about this. MacLaren would never have shown up to his own death if the travelers who would become his own group had not jumped into their bodies, exchanged messages and arranged to meet…where MacLaren was supposed to fall to his death.

The minor antagonists are terrible and as they relate to the causes of mass destruction/disruption of our civilization are simplistic.

1st Stereotype straight from a Deadpool comic book. The incompetent major who is covertly running an anti matter project? Come on. Half baked drivel came out here and there about weaponization and arms races.

And don’t get me started on the geriatric bus that couldn’t violate protocol 3 and kill soldiers attacking the base even though they were all going to end up being overwritten in the reactor room. Yes it was dramatic and a cool scene but made absolutely no sense. And a shout out to the Prophet from the matrix…wait I mean the engineer lady who was so lackadaisically cool about failing to turn the key.

Number 2. Monsanto is going to kill us all. They are so greedy they are going to buy out our politicians and use untested genetically modified chemical to trick everybody into planting bumper crops for a few years which really will exhaust the soil. A plague results instead. Oh boy.

Look weapons of mass destruction are a great area for the show to explore but the writers should try and be a little more sophisticated with how that approach it. The antimatter is silly but excusable. The evil corporation doing unsafe lab work concept is fine but the way its presented is laughable.

I could go on and on. There is so much conceptually to like here but they need to hire a technical adviser to toughen up the team and add some grit to the plot.

And don’t get me started on the geriatric bus that couldn’t violate protocol 3 and kill soldiers attacking the base even though they were all going to end up being overwritten in the reactor room. Yes it was dramatic and a cool scene but made absolutely no sense.

I think the geriatric bus makes more sense with later revelations. The AI is hard coded with the ethics rules to keep it in check. They aren’t the rules of travel travel they really are just arbitrary hard-coded decisions made by the creators of the AI. For example the AI was perfectly happy to overwrite people who were only ‘about to die naturally’ because of actions the AI itself took in the parachute episode – very much a ‘letter of the law’ thing a computer might do. So yeah, the rules it follows are often silly, but it’s working within the rules it was created under.

Yeah, I realize that the protocols are programming directives but I would argue in the case of the defense of the anti matter site, they don’t make logical sense.

Protocol 1 is the mission always comes first. Combined with the meaning of Protocol Alpha…Even if you have to kill.

Protocol 3 says don’t take a life; don’t save a life, unless otherwise directed. Do not interfere.

The AI as I understand it is not a dumb machine. It’s Intelligent. It has a plan. It wants to fire the laser at the helios object. Why would it enforce a conditional rule that contradicts higher priority rules and jeopardizes the highest priority mission for The Plan? I just thought it was silly. Even if a little kid had shown up and said "Do not break the 3rd protocol, I would still think it was silly.

Maybe we will see more and they will explain/reveal more but right now I think the writing for the AI Director and the timeline effects of their actions is weak and not up to the standards that they have set in other areas. Sometimes it’s like they are just throwing too many clever/cool ideas out there and some do not stick.

For example, the kids as messengers phenomenon. It’s problematic at times because it implies an almost god like real time knowledge/ omniscience of the 21st century time line. Did I miss that reveal somewhere? I can be lazy and not pay attention sometimes.

I enjoy the show. Don’t want to slam it too much but I think the writing fails in some spots. Which is a shame because it’s brilliant in others.

Season 3 coming December 14