Recap: TIMELESS Wins the Battle but Loses the War
Season 1, Episode 3 “Atomic City”
Written by Lana Cho
Directed by Charles Beeson
Or at least, they lost a bigger battle. For once, the team managed to keep time from changing. Unfortunately, they didn’t keep Flynn (Goran Visnjic) from getting away with something important and much more dangerous.
This time the urgent phone call from work saves Lucy (Abigail Spencer) from her amorous and shirtless fiancée. He’s very cute, but she doesn’t know him at all.
They find out that Garcia Flynn is going to Las Vegas, 1962. Lucy quickly Googles the date. It’s good that she doesn’t immediately know all about the time period, because that becomes unbelievable quickly. They come to the conclusion that it might be about JFK’s visit, and Garcia is planning to do him in a year early.
Mason (Paterson Joseph) calls Rufus (Malcolm Barrett) into the office to talk about Anthony, the scientist who was kidnapped by Flynn. He thinks that Anthony (Matt Frewer) was in on it. Rufus defends his friend vigorously.
We have a montage of Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me”. John F. Kennedy (Scott Bailey) is in bed with his mistress (Elena Satine). She gets up to watch the atom bomb blast. He stays in bed. Eventually he joins her at the window and Flynn snaps pictures of them together.
Lucy dresses in a cute little yellow dress and a whole lot more makeup than she normally wears. Wyatt (Matt Lanter) buckles her in and they have a little chat like they did in the last episode before they leave, this time about the fact that Lucy has a brand new fiance.
They land in the desert, well away from Vegas. I’m thinking that they need a cloaking device on this thing, or another form of transportation along with it. There’s no place to hide it, and a walk in the desert can be dangerous as well as uncomfortable. They are immediately greeted by an explosion and a mushroom cloud. Particularly chilling are the shots of people in swimming pools enjoying watching the blasts. Rufus comes to the conclusion that they got there too late. He assumes Flynn did it somehow. Wyatt tells them that they were doing nuclear bomb tests in the desert all the time during these years. He tells Lucy he knows his military history. I’m thinking it’s far more likely that the nuclear testing has something to do with Flynn being there, but they go forward with the JFK theory.
JFK is staying at the Sands Hotel where Sinatra is headlining with his mistress, Judith Campbell. They have some arguments on how to handle this — Wyatt is not listening to Lucy for most of this episode. Rufus goes off and finds some waiter uniforms for himself and Wyatt so they can sneak in. They’re very fancy, vaguely military and look good on the boys. Rufus says being invisible is his superpower. Lucy gets some help from Judith when she’s being sexually harassed.
Rufus sees Anthony going up to the bar. He wants to rescue him but sees that he is unescorted and under his own power. Anthony warns him about how dangerous Flynn is. He also tells him Christy Pit will be there soon.
Wyatt spots Flynn in the crowd. He has Judith. Wyatt goes after him and during their fight Rufus and Lucy show up, who escort her into a room for her own safety. Lucy and Judith bond a bit over their strange lives. Wyatt wants to use Judith as bait. Lucy doesn’t like this idea, but he’s not listening. Rufus tries to find Christy Pit.
Poor Wyatt. He’s susceptible to spunky blondes, nervous historians, and, so it seems, beautiful mistresses. Or at least he’s too trusting of them, because Judith picks up a phone and hits him over the head with it and escapes. She meets up with Flynn, who won’t give the photos back of her and JFK. He wants her to steal some keys first. She does and they get into the bunker full of atom bombs. Surprise, surprise.
At this point Wyatt tries to send a message to his wife, fifty years in the future. The gist of it was to go home with Wyatt and avoid getting killed, but it was basically just pleading for the past to be undone. He said it worked on the second Back to the Future. Lucy catches him but she doesn’t chew him out about it, she just empathizes with him. When he gets back we find out that it didn’t work. Wyatt is unfolding a bit. He’s always been quite contained and it’s obvious that all that’s inside is pain.
At the same time Rufus remembers that the Christy Pit is what they used to call the plutonium core of the A-bomb, named after Robert Christy, who made the design a reality. Rufus, Wyatt and Lucy need to go to the test site but they don’t have a vehicle. They step outside and Rufus puts his hand out to someone who just drove up and he hands Rufus his keys. Invisibility strikes again. They get into the car and steal it.
Anthony has removed the plutonium core from the bomb and put it in a suitcase. They run across them on the road and Wyatt plays chicken with Flynn. Everyone runs off the road and Rufus talks Anthony out of the suitcase. Lucy gets Judith to safety. Judith says she would never have done this if she’d known what they were doing. Bullets start flying and Wyatt has a clear shot at Anthony but Rufus steps between them and won’t let him do it. I can see why he wants to. Tactically, it’s a good idea. Anthony flies the ship and can handle the atomic materials so they would be lost without him.
They say goodbye to Judith, who apologizes for hitting Wyatt on the head and calls him gorgeous. Lucy says she has a sad life, which she knows all about. They really need to be careful to make sure Lucy doesn’t know everything, all the time.
They have to tell everyone that the past didn’t change but that Flynn now has the beginnings of a nuclear weapon. Rufus says he thought that they were getting together as a team. I thought so too, strangely enough, despite Wyatt’s stubbornness and Rufus standing in front of the gun. Wyatt tells their bosses that he didn’t have a clear shot at Anthony. They tell him to go ahead and kill Anthony off if he gets a chance.
Rufus thanks him afterward for not throwing him under the bus. He asks Wyatt if he ever wondered why. Wyatt says that he was trained in who, what, when, where but not why. Rufus asks, “Without the why, how can we know that we are on the right side of things?” Of course, he already knows that they may not be on the right side. He knows about Rittenhouse, whatever it is, and he was made to spy on his fellow time travelers.
Lucy comes home and tells her fiancée that she is moving out. It’s probably a good idea because if she gets too attached to him he could be gone in the next turn of the wheel. He takes it well and says he will wait for her. Sigh.
Flynn digs up his plutonium from the desert. He was smart enough not to take it with him on the time machine. Jiya has figured out a way to track down the physical location of the mother ship.
They did two things I was wanting to see in this episode. They let the guys have their own moments of historical knowledge, and they used a slightly more obscure historical event. I did have a little trouble with Rufus not instantly remembering the nuclear tests. Who doesn’t know that they were testing them in Nevada at the time?
Judith Campbell Exner was John F. Kennedy’s mistress. She had ties to mafia don Sam Giancana. The plot was probably taken from a historical event. While the FBI was watching her apartment (Hoover spied on people routinely in those days) they witnessed a break-in by two young men whose father was a chief of security at General Dynamics. Three months later the company won a huge contract for an experimental jet fighter. It’s rumored that they found evidence to blackmail the president with.
Aside from that, I found it a lackluster episode. It’s not a time and place I’m interested in, and I don’t find mistresses of powerful men fascinating. The best part was the sound track.
Next week: Nazis. Let’s see if there’s something original that can still be done with Nazis.
Timeless airs on NBC at 10pm/9c on Monday nights.
