S01.E03: Atomic City

[Randomosity]

47 minutes ago, iMonrey said:

But we are now so far removed from an era where smoking was commonplace that - in a time travel show - it's downright silly not to use that visual as shorthand to suggest an era.

I won't be specific so as to not completely spoil anyone who may end up watching it, but this exact thing just played a major role in the new series "This is Us". So it can be done, and has been just a few weeks ago. On the same network, no less. Odd that they wouldn't go that extra mile here.

[Raja]

2 hours ago, dubbel zout said:

They never seem to have much time to prepare for a mission—it's always urgent, and the team has to get ready as soon as possible—so I don't really mind the sloppiness here.

The hair, yes we can see that. But then the character made a point about her clothes being wrong in the pilot episode and they went through Rufus having his cover blown because he wore the wrong regiment's insignia in the second so you would think they would slow down a bit before the chase.  But we get back to the normal people, unless we head canon Juliet Shakesman"s presence in 1865 began the war on public smoking two decades sooner than in real life.

Edited October 23, 2016 by Raja

[Netfoot]

2 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I know that showing a character smoking on TV has been taboo for decades, because networks do not want to be seen to be promoting smoking.

In one of Arthur Clarke's novels, the protagonist(s) work at digitally removing all signs of smoking from new prints of classic movies.  I always thought that to pretend that an old evil never happened is a first-class way of ensuring that eventually, it happens again!

[officetemp]

On 10/21/2016 at 11:12 PM, Wryly said:

This show needs something. A change that will make everything click, a new ingredient, catalyst, something. The team isn't really synergizing for me (I consider Wyatt to be the weak link), and the plot format is decent but needs better character writing to make it shine.

Even though this series is supposed to be a drama, I would really love it if the showrunners decided to turn this series into an off-the-wall science fiction screwball comedy, similar to the type of stuff that science fiction author Connie Willis writes.  The scriptwriters would have to be extremely skillful, however, because really effective comedy is much more difficult to write than mediocre drama.  One of the running gags could be that Lucy's fiance is a different person every time she returns from a mission.  Think of the guest star cameo possibilities!  And the world really isn't in danger of coming to an end--things just get more and more absurd every time the team goes back and tries to fix things. . ..

[legaleagle53]

36 minutes ago, officetemp said:

Even though this series is supposed to be a drama, I would really love it if the showrunners decided to turn this series into an off-the-wall science fiction screwball comedy, similar to the type of stuff that science fiction author Connie Willis writes.  The scriptwriters would have to be extremely skillful, however, because really effective comedy is much more difficult to write than mediocre drama.  One of the running gags could be that Lucy's fiance is a different person every time she returns from a mission.  Think of the guest star cameo possibilities!  And the world really isn't in danger of coming to an end--things just get more and more absurd every time the team goes back and tries to fix things. . ..

Yeah, no.  Not everything needs to be an off-the-wall screwball comedy in order to be entertaining.  Some of us prefer to be left with something to think about once in a while, so I prefer the show as it is, a show that actually inspires me to learn something about the historical figures the team meets and the events in question during each mission (until I looked her up, I had never heard of Judith Campbell, for example).

Now one thing that WOULD be interesting would be having one of the historical figures somehow manage to stumble across the time machine, stow away aboard it, and end up in 2016 as a result, with the crew scrambling to figure out how to send him/her back to his/her correct time without breaking the rules of time travel.  THAT would be a twist worth exploring, not some dumbed-down, painfully unfunny, screwball "joke-of-the-week" sitcom.  When I want that, I'll watch The Last Man on Earth.

[Dowel Jones]

By the same token, if you're going to use historical figures, use them in at least possibly logical roles.  I hardly think that Judith Campbell, whose main function in life was to be a mistress to a President and a gangster, to be the central character in a plot to waltz right into a nuclear base, steal a plutonium core, and never once mention it in her memoirs.  It would seem more logical to transport back to Hanford, WA, circa April 1945, and use someone there to steal the last batch of plutonium manufactured before the end of WWII, and accomplish the same thing. 

[Cranberry]

4 hours ago, officetemp said:

Even though this series is supposed to be a drama, I would really love it if the showrunners decided to turn this series into an off-the-wall science fiction screwball comedy

Do I have the mid-season show for you...

[MissLucas]

Hell, I'm already in - too bad I don't have a time-traveling duffel-bag to get to 2017.

Timeless does not need more humor but more brains. Let these people behave in a manner that makes sense for the situation they're in. The list of questions nobody asks but should be asking is already enormous.

And I still don't get why they need to rush into every adventure. Somebody mentioned that the life-boat is tethered to the mother ship. But they only mentioned that their CPU's are linked. Does this mean that the life-boat can only travel to the time period the mother ship is in? And is there a window of time they have to hit in order to make the trip?

[Raja]

1 hour ago, MissLucas said:

Hell, I'm already in - too bad I don't have a time-traveling douffel-bag to get to 2017.

Timeless does not need more humor but more brains. Let these people behave in a manner that makes sense for the situation they're in. The list of questions nobody asks but should be asking is already enormous.

And I still don't get why they need to rush into every adventure. Somebody mentioned that the life-boat is tethered to the mother ship. But they only mentioned that their CPU's are linked. Does this mean that the life-boat can only travel to the time period the mother ship is in? And is there a window of time they have to hit in order to make the trip?

As I  remember the lifeboat was the first prototype and is smaller than the high jacked "mothership". And so far Mason hasn''t built anything larger. All it can carry for the mission is an hit man to kill Flynn and the historian to be his local guide.

[Netfoot]

3 hours ago, MissLucas said:

And I still don't get why they need to rush into every adventure.

I handwave it as follows:

Flynn takes the time machine back to kill Winston Churchill in 1939 (say).  He lands in the New Forest, and makes his way to Chequers to perform the assassination. This will take time.  For sake of discussion, let's say six hours.  When Churchill is killed, time will change and the good guys will no longer remember that he was the British Prime Minister during WW-II.  Their memories will change, as will their history books.  So they won't know what needs to be corrected.  

Therefore, when Flynn jumps into the past on some mission, the flying eyeball and it's crew must hurry to follow.  Otherwise, Flynn will succeed and they will lose the ability to correct the timeline.  In theory they could wait two weeks before they depart, and set their arrival to when ever they want.  But if, during that two weeks, they forget their history because they remember Flynn's newly created timeline as the norm, they will think it perfectly normal that Neville Chamberlain was PM during the war, and won't have any idea of what was changed, and what needs to be corrected.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Netfoot
Spelling

[shapeshifter]

3 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

I handwave it as follows:

Flynn takes the time machine back to kill Winston Churchill in 1939 (say).  He lands in the New Forest, and makes his way to Chequers to perform the assassination. This will take time.  For sake of discussion, let's say six hours.  When Churchill is killed, time will change and the good guys will no longer remember that he was the British Prime Minister during WW-II.  Their memories will change, as will their history books.  So they won't know what needs to be corrected.  

Therefore, when Flynn jumps into the past on some mission, the flying eyeball and it's crew must hurry to follow.  Otherwise, Flynn will succeed and they will lose the ability to correct the timeline.  In theory they could wait two weeks before they depart, and set their arrival to when ever they want.  But if, during that two weeks, they forget their history because they remember Flynn's newly created timeline as the norm, they will think it perfectly normal that Neville Chamberlain was PM during the war, and won't have any idea of what was changed, and what needs to be corrected.

— or wonder why they are speaking German instead of English.

[MissLucas]

@Netfoot Ah, now that makes some sense - thanks!

[LoneHaranguer]

18 hours ago, iMonrey said:

But we are now so far removed from an era where smoking was commonplace that - in a time travel show - it's downright silly not to use that visual as shorthand to suggest an era. It's not as if kids are going to run out and buy cigarettes because the people smoking on the TV show looked cool. Especially considering how much they cost nowadays.

Cost hasn't stopped kids from following the fads and getting the "right" expensive sneakers or clothing, but I don't see anything about cigarettes that would pull anyone from the vape shops.

[OtterMommy]

11 hours ago, Cranberry said:

Do I have the mid-season show for you...

Stangely, this show is already more appealing to me than Timeless....

Also, am I seeing things, or is that Robert Downey, Jr?

Edited October 24, 2016 by OtterMommy

[iMonrey]

Quote

They never seem to have much time to prepare for a mission

Oh, I get that the time travelers themselves may not always get the costumes and hairstyles right. In fact that can sometimes be an important plot point. I'm talking about the characters native to the past. Judith Campbell's hair was not right for 1962, and she lives in 1962. Lucy can be forgiven if she doesn't get the 1962 look down quite right; Judith Campbell cannot.

There are two possibilities here: one is that the writers, or producers, or the director, or whoever is in charge, is worried that it will look "silly" if the women in 1962 are all walking around with hair-sprayed helmet heads like they're in a B-52s music video. But . . . that' should be part of the show's charm. Really duplicating the look of the era is going to sell it, even if it means unintentional humor here and there. The other possibility is that the show is just too damn lazy to make the effort.

[sjohnson]

Most TV producers put pants on ancient Romans and Greeks. Truth is pedantry for them. And the same applies to dialogue. God forbid someone in another time or world shouldn't talk just like us. Accuracy in costume and hairstyle is the visual equivalent of "technobabble," which all righteous people hate, hate, hate. Personally I don't quite feel the outrage, but then I'm not an artistically sensitive person, quite the opposite.

[saber5055]

Hairdos in the 60s were not all Aquanet-sprayed helmets. The fad was to poof or rat the hair up to give it lift, then flip it up all around the bottom, shoulder length. Google pics of Campbell/Exner and you'll see the actress's portrayal of her wasn't all that far off. Not a big deal IMO, and I lived that decade and remember Exner in "real time."

[officetemp]

18 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Yeah, no.  Not everything needs to be an off-the-wall screwball comedy in order to be entertaining.  Some of us prefer to be left with something to think about once in a while, so I prefer the show as it is, a show that actually inspires me to learn something about the historical figures the team meets and the events in question during each mission (until I looked her up, I had never heard of Judith Campbell, for example).

Now one thing that WOULD be interesting would be having one of the historical figures somehow manage to stumble across the time machine, stow away aboard it, and end up in 2016 as a result, with the crew scrambling to figure out how to send him/her back to his/her correct time without breaking the rules of time travel.  THAT would be a twist worth exploring, not some dumbed-down, painfully unfunny, screwball "joke-of-the-week" sitcom.  When I want that, I'll watch The Last Man on Earth.

Ah!  Quite the condemnation.  However, a 'dumbed-down, painfully unfunny, screwball "joke-of-the-week" sitcom' was not what I had in mind in my previous post.  (In general, I heartily dislike the current sitcoms because most of what goes on in those sitcoms are the characters either insulting each other or trying to get over on each other or both.)  What I did have in mind is a thoughtfully-written, thought-provoking, intelligent hour-long comedy that gets the scientific details reasonably believable and the historical details correct.  No slapstick, no overtly physical comedy, no laugh track.  Let the scripts and the stories and the direction and the acting and the dialogue lead to laugh-out-loud moments when appropriate and to more subtle bits of humor in other scenes.

 

12 hours ago, MissLucas said:

. . . Timeless does not need more humor but more brains. Let these people behave in a manner that makes sense for the situation they're in. The list of questions nobody asks but should be asking is already enormous. . . .

Indeed.  The show's IQ could stand to gain upwards of 20-30 points.

[DAngelus]

Rewatching this and caught a major error, and I checked through the thread and found that nobody mentioned it…or the other major error, which I had only found by research after my first viewing.

First off:  Kennedy never visited Vegas in 1962.  Not only was his trip planned for October, not "September 24", in order to support local Democrats (including Senator Alan Bible) during the mid-term elections, but it got scrubbed on behalf of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kennedy didn't get to Las Vegas until October, 1963.

So why didn't the show just use those dates?  Because after the missile crisis, JFK went to Palm Springs to relax, but as Palm Springs didn't have the hotel facilities a Presidential party would need, he used a private home.  Frank Sinatra had expected it would be his (he'd even had it renovated and expanded for Kennedy's use), but Robert Kennedy was like, "nope, you can hang out with Sinatra and his showbiz pals, but we can't have you staying at his damn house when mob types like Giancana might be there, too; it would look real bad if it got out."  So the Kennedys ended up at the home of squeaky-clean Republican child-beater Bing Crosby, Sinatra blew a gasket and kicked Peter Lawford (married to Kennedy's sister, Patricia) out of the Rat Pack, and so that's why you can't do any Kennedy/Judith Campbell/Las Vegas stories, because by the time you have Kennedy in Las Vegas, Judy is out of his life.

Annoying, I know; I'm sure the pitch sounds good, but for the show to be making up "historical" events for the crew to visit just doesn't work.  What's next, they visit General Grant at Gettsyburg?  (Grant was still in the west, wrapping up the capture of Vicksburg MI at this time; the Union commander at Gettysburg was George Meade.)  Ridiculous.  You can't do a time-travel show when the "history" you're dealing with never happened.

As for the screw-up I caught this time around?  Well, look at the establishing shot when we first go to the Sands Hotel early in the episode.  It's pictured as being across the street from a lovely (and accurate) view of the north side of Fremont Street in 1962…you've got the Mint, Binion's Horseshoe (which later took over the Mint) and the Las Vegas Club (before its tower got built in the 1970s).  And, across the street, the Sands.

Small problem, though:  the Sands wasn't on Fremont Street, it was miles away.  Located at 3355 Las Vegas Boulevard South, it was in the middle of the "Strip", where the Venetian stands today.  And there was pretty much nothing across the street but empty land, as seen in the 1960 Sinatra-starring Ocean's Eleven, which is what made the Sands a "star"; the most-distinctive hotel on that side of the Strip, Caesars Palace, didn't open until late 1966.

So I guess if you can move an entire hotel north to downtown Las Vegas, having Kennedy and the boys drop in is small potatoes relatively.  But "watch Lucy and the crew try to save history…that never actually happened, anyways" is a whole other level of ridiculous.

(And why don't people like Wyatt, aka Pocket Riley Finn, anyhow?  Maybe it's because I'm such a big BtVS fan, but anyone who looks like a junior-sized Marc Blucas is okay by me.)

[bros402]

3 hours ago, DAngelus said:

Rewatching this and caught a major error, and I checked through the thread and found that nobody mentioned it…or the other major error, which I had only found by research after my first viewing.

First off:  Kennedy never visited Vegas in 1962.  Not only was his trip planned for October, not "September 24", in order to support local Democrats (including Senator Alan Bible) during the mid-term elections, but it got scrubbed on behalf of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kennedy didn't get to Las Vegas until October, 1963.

So why didn't the show just use those dates?  Because after the missile crisis, JFK went to Palm Springs to relax, but as Palm Springs didn't have the hotel facilities a Presidential party would need, he used a private home.  Frank Sinatra had expected it would be his (he'd even had it renovated and expanded for Kennedy's use), but Robert Kennedy was like, "nope, you can hang out with Sinatra and his showbiz pals, but we can't have you staying at his damn house when mob types like Giancana might be there, too; it would look real bad if it got out."  So the Kennedys ended up at the home of squeaky-clean Republican child-beater Bing Crosby, Sinatra blew a gasket and kicked Peter Lawford (married to Kennedy's sister, Patricia) out of the Rat Pack, and so that's why you can't do any Kennedy/Judith Campbell/Las Vegas stories, because by the time you have Kennedy in Las Vegas, Judy is out of his life.

Annoying, I know; I'm sure the pitch sounds good, but for the show to be making up "historical" events for the crew to visit just doesn't work.  What's next, they visit General Grant at Gettsyburg?  (Grant was still in the west, wrapping up the capture of Vicksburg MI at this time; the Union commander at Gettysburg was George Meade.)  Ridiculous.  You can't do a time-travel show when the "history" you're dealing with never happened.

As for the screw-up I caught this time around?  Well, look at the establishing shot when we first go to the Sands Hotel early in the episode.  It's pictured as being across the street from a lovely (and accurate) view of the north side of Fremont Street in 1962…you've got the Mint, Binion's Horseshoe (which later took over the Mint) and the Las Vegas Club (before its tower got built in the 1970s).  And, across the street, the Sands.

Small problem, though:  the Sands wasn't on Fremont Street, it was miles away.  Located at 3355 Las Vegas Boulevard South, it was in the middle of the "Strip", where the Venetian stands today.  And there was pretty much nothing across the street but empty land, as seen in the 1960 Sinatra-starring Ocean's Eleven, which is what made the Sands a "star"; the most-distinctive hotel on that side of the Strip, Caesars Palace, didn't open until late 1966.

So I guess if you can move an entire hotel north to downtown Las Vegas, having Kennedy and the boys drop in is small potatoes relatively.  But "watch Lucy and the crew try to save history…that never actually happened, anyways" is a whole other level of ridiculous.

(And why don't people like Wyatt, aka Pocket Riley Finn, anyhow?  Maybe it's because I'm such a big BtVS fan, but anyone who looks like a junior-sized Marc Blucas is okay by me.)

 

Maybe the Hindenberg and Lincoln assassination changes led to some of those changes :D

[DAngelus]

1 hour ago, bros402 said:

Maybe the Hindenberg and Lincoln assassination changes led to some of those changes :D

Heh.  Entirely possible, I suppose.  It's not as if Lucy knew about "JFK visiting Las Vegas in 1962" from memory; she had to use (possibly-altered) Google.  This excuse could become this series's equivalent of "We're on a Hellmouth! It's a center of mystical activity!", if need be.

Still doesn't make it any less silly, IMO, though.

[ketose]

On 10/26/2016 at 3:27 AM, DAngelus said:

Heh.  Entirely possible, I suppose.  It's not as if Lucy knew about "JFK visiting Las Vegas in 1962" from memory; she had to use (possibly-altered) Google.  This excuse could become this series's equivalent of "We're on a Hellmouth! It's a center of mystical activity!", if need be.

Still doesn't make it any less silly, IMO, though.

I like the Simpsons "A wizard did it."

[Chas411]

Wyatt and his man pain combined by Matt Lanters overacting makes for an terrible lead male. It bugs me that they're always trying to shove Wyatt and Lucy down our throats. Lucy deserves better. She should have given that insta! Fiancé a chance.

Rufus is excellent though. Definetly the highlight for me so far.