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"Timeless", culture, humor, insanitybytes22, movies, opinion
Timeless, 2016, was a cheesy Sci/Fi series we just finished watching. I say “cheesy” as if that’s a bad thing, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean, it was entertaining enough that I kind of looked forward to watching it every night, but it was nothing to rave about.
Ha! Something that makes movie/tv reviews kind of challenging, is that it really depends on the quality of the popcorn and the company you are with. For example, about a month ago hubby and I watched “Tremors,” 1990 cult classic with Kevin Bacon. Best darn movie ever! Actually no, not so much, but we had a lot of fun joking and laughing and being scared. I’ve watched this movie about five times just for the sentimentality. It’s like a grilled cheese sandwich and cup of tomato soup, which by the way I can’t stand, but apparently a lot people call that “comfort food.”
Anyway, “Timeless,” cheesy sci/Fi series, kind of fun, entertaining, kind of historical, little bit like a crime drama infused with some romance. I really liked the design and architecture of their time machine itself. I loved the characters. I liked the costumes. Basically the story revolves around how they have to go back in time and preserve the past in order to save the future.
First the drawbacks, what we shall call DEI, or just plain old brainwashing. Social engineering. It’s like a checklist every silly show now has to go through, make sure we have promoted homosexuality and gay marriage, advocated for women’s rights, proclaimed racism to be evil, and made sure the ethnically diverse background of every character is well established and constantly advertised with their victimhood named and labeled. It’s that naming their victimhood like a perpetual badge of honor that drives me nuts. It’s oddly demeaning, not empowering. It doesn’t honor them so much as it keeps them in their place.
You know what I call all that stuff? Boring. Knock it off.
The next drawback is more forgiveable in my mind. Time is not linear, time is not what we here in the physical world perceive it to be, but we really haven’t got a clue what it actually is! If your parents are murdered in the past, do you cease to exist in the present? Don’t really know! What happens if you travel backwards in time and encounter yourself? Don’t really know, we haven’t tried it yet! So they used their imagination to try to create some possible rules….and then proceeded to violate their own rules as if physics herself were just a suggestion.
Some of those inconsistencies got a little distracting, but who am I to try to fact check them?
There was a cool scene where a young JFK gets kidnapped into the present and goes to a drinking party with a bunch of young people. We get to see his image in the present melting right off of a coin as if the past were changing before our eyes. That however, opens up a whole new can of worms. We people tend to change based on our experiences and struggles. You might be able to fix things and put events in the past back in order, but people don’t remain stagnant. “You can never go home again,” because you just aren’t going to be the same person you were when you left.
The series did pose some great questions about the butterfly effect, about how we are far more important to the timeline than we often realize. It also touched on the issue of fate, determination versus predetermination. If you have a prophecy about your own death, can you avoid it by avoiding the whole area, or is it somewhat predetermined? How much freewill do we have? Will fate thwart your efforts?
So yes, I enjoyed “Timeless.”
See, there's this thing called biology... 
With the onset of winter and the terribly cold weather, I resorted to doing a lot of binge watching over the past few months. I have to chuckle at the series from almost fifty years ago. Most of them are very melodramatic, with actors who crossed over from silent films and were used to acting on big stages with large audiences. Today, everything is too real for my taste. I taught acting for years, but found that most folks like to escape from reality and all the icky stuff that goes with it when they want to be entertained. For most of us in the twenty first century, this is vital. We’ve been isolated by COVID, dealt with fear each day as we open our doors to face the world. Who needs reality. We need to laugh again.
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Absolutely, we need to laugh again! It’s good for us. 🙂
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The current world of Star Trek has gotten a bit DEI. (But wait… there was that first inter-racial on-screen kiss in the original series 60 years ago!), I personally never thought the first Avatar was all that great given as I was watching it in the theater it was readily apparent to me it was kinda “white people oppressing native Americans” theme. Since I am European white, I apparently had some ancestor who immigrated here from Ireland back in the 1870’s and joined the U.S. cavalry (it was the Irish immigrants back then who were not popular – where was ICE when you need them, right?), ended up in the 7th out west, one might assume this fellow was at Bighorn, Wounded Knee, whatever, doing the usual white-man’s bidding to “free” the West of the red savages… but it seems in his case the “rest of the story” after seeing his military discharge from duty… he ended up with chronic back problems (as they often did from hours/days on horseback) and got a medical discharge. His assignments leading up to that were hardly noteworthy, wasn’t serving a full enlistment, so apparently I have little or no ancestral link to oppressing Native Americans, enslaving black people, or running for public office. Now, that’s not to say an earlier ancestor wasn’t roaming through Europe looting and pillaging the country gentry. Although I do have a link to the Vikings, which right there gives me claim to raping along with the pillaging.
Fast forward to now… my blonde hair, blue eyes through life obviously has brought me elitist racial economic advantage over others.. which is why to this day I live off Social Security. Now… having some of that Viking blood surging through my veins also spins over to that perfect Aryan thing, which was a thing for a while in Europe. From the looks of things currently that might come in handy for me in the future… no disfigurements in the name of religion either.
Anyway… I have no issue with “softer” versions of DEI for some historical accuracy. But for DEI to work properly “my kind” has to accept being the villain-race.
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