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Journeyman 1.2: "Friendly Skies" |
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Thursday, 04 October 2007 |
By John Keegan
Visit Critical Myth for an archive of John's TV Review archives, with more than 1100 entries.
In the series premiere, most of what happened to Dan Vassar was random, forcing the viewer to experience his disorientation with every new jump through time. The pilot was, as always, about setting up the premise and the relationships. The second episode is generally when the audience gets to see how the premise will play out, and this installment serves that purpose well.
The focus is less on the time travel and more on the impact of this phenomenon on Dan and his “real life”. It causes problems with his wife, his job, and his future plans. This sounds like a simple enough consideration, but the writers delve into some practical matters very quickly. Dan’s involuntary time travel makes it hard to plan on building a family, because how does he know he’ll be around? Driving is a chore, and as seen in this episode, flying is a recipe for disaster.
This immediately sets this show apart from “Quantum Leap”. The time travel aspect is treated like a subplot, equally a mystery to be solved and an ordeal to be survived. The writers will never be able to pick up on all the nuances, but I liked the emphasis on the practical changes from period to period. Dan has to make sure he has access to compatible technology and “current” currency, among other things, and that makes the situation a lot more interesting.
One additional aspect is his physical presence within the past. On “Quantum Leap”, Sam Beckett was more or less a consciousness within the form of a past individual; his interventions were well-hidden. Dan’s situation is far more complex, since he’s being brought bodily into the past (along with whatever he’s carrying). People remember him, often over the course of years. This brings up an aspect for future exploration: what if Dan runs into someone from a previous “mission” during a different trip into time? And what if someone in the past remembers him in the “present”?
This episode had better pacing than the premiere, and managed to communicate some of the rules of the game more clearly. For example, in the pilot, Dan had little or no warning that he was about to experience time travel. Now, he gets a certain kind of splitting headache that tells him the event is rapidly approaching (not unlike Cordelia’s pre-vision head-splitters on “Angel”). This avoids the problem of abrupt, confusing shifts in time for the audience, one of the elements that made the first half of the pilot challenging (and might explain the loss of viewers at the half hour during the premiere).
“Journeyman” is struggling in the post-“Heroes” timeslot, as would be expected, and that’s unfortunate. A lot of people won’t like how the various elements are brought together, especially in this age of snap judgments by the networks, but the focus on the effect to Dan’s present-day life gives this story more resonance. I hope that this series lasts long enough to give the writers a chance to show us what they really have in mind.
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