Season 2 - episodes (2017)
Not Available in Canada
Created by: Brad Wright
Starring: Eric McCormack, MacKenzie Porter, Nesta Cooper
Rated: TV-MA
Plot
This sci-fi series stars Eric McCormack as FBI Special Agent Grant MacLaren. Technology exists to send a person's consciousness back to the 21st century, where they assume a random person's body and identity at the exact moment they die. Teams work secretly to save the world from a terrible future.
Verdict
Season 1 was a welcome surprise. Unfortunate season 2 gets bogged down in revisionist history. We meet traveler 001, and apparently he's been pulling strings from the beginning. What made the first season compelling was the character development. Season two doesn't completely abandon that, but the insertion of 001 into various character back stories is contrived and insulting. With the way this season ends, I have hope season three can recover, but this season was a step down from the first.
It depends.
Review
I really enjoyed season 1 (read my review). Travelers are fighting to save the future, but they don't know if their actions do anything. As opposing groups form in the future, who can you trust in the present?
With a lot of exposition we meet traveler 001 in the first episode. He volunteered for this experiment, to determine if people could be sent into the past. He was meant to die and didn't. He's the man behind the curtain that we didn't really need.
There's an unseen war between pro and anti director factions. We learn more about the director. The warring factions lead to many travelers coming to McLaren's time, fueling confusion. Allies and enemies are difficult to distinguish and there's no way to confirm the messages from the director are legitimate. This plot is enough to drive the season, but we get 001 too. It's not a bad plot point, but the show weaves him into everything. There is no way to make that credibly work. The show didn't need a big villain, and it didn't need to revise character histories to incorporate 001.
This season has a lot of similarities with season one, though we get the addition of a villain. All of the characters are working through their issues, though it's strange how committed they are to their lives. I suppose they have to maintain a cover, but it frequently goes past that. The finale episode confronts this issue head on without explaining the reason for the commitment. The characters have to choose between their friends and family or the mission. The mission has always been paramount, and I'm not sure it would be as difficult a decision as depicted.
The final episode is potentially a small reboot of the series. I liked episode seven. It's a bit of the repeating the same day trope, but it's got a new angle that makes it really compelling. While it fits within the larger framework of this season, it also works as a one off episode which is something many of the other episodes can't do.
It's not a bad season, but it's trying to introduce a villain we didn't need.
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