Recap: TIMELESS Gets Stuck In the Past
Season 1, Episode 7 “Stranded”
Written by Arika Lisanne Mittman
Directed by Holly Dale
As much as I was bored by last week’s episode, I was entertained by this week’s. They are nothing if not inconsistent. There were several things I’ve wanted to see, such as more about what’s going on in the lab when they are out in the time machine, and Lucy, Rufus and Wyatt spending time together in the present time.
Our trio have traveled back to 1754 during the French and Indian Wars. When we first see them, they are running from the French, being mistaken for the British and having survived for three days there with no idea of why Flynn (Goran Visnjic) brought them there. Wyatt (Matt Lanter) blames Rufus (Malcolm Barrett) for their predicament. He lit a fire. Obviously our three heroes are not getting along after the revelations of the last episode.
They are captured. The French general (Salvatore Xeureb) who captures them is someone in history but Wyatt doesn’t want to hear about it. They squabble. Rufus whines. Wyatt says Rufus is taping them, while he is taping them. He asks Lucy (Abigail Spencer) how to say “I slept with your mother” in French. French is not one of the four languages he knows. It enrages the French guard, and Wyatt gets free and wins the fight. He kills one of them, the son of the general, and they free themselves.
Tromping through the forest, they admit that they don’t know what Flynn is up to. Wyatt throws away Rufus’s recording device since he spilled the beans about the fact that they know they’re being recorded on the recording. Rufus panics about it. They come across two of Flynn’s men planting C-4 on their time machine. Wyatt shoots one before he can detonate it, but the other one uses a gun to shoot the C-4 and detonate a hole in the side. He runs off and Rufus goes right after him. They need to get to the mother ship before Flynn takes off with it and they are stranded. They get to it but it’s powering up and Rufus warns Wyatt to get off it before it takes off or he’ll die.
They go back to the lifeboat and assess the damage. Lucy bemoans the situation they are in: in the middle of a war and a smallpox epidemic. Rufus decides that he can possibly fix the damage, with access to a forge and some supplies. Unfortunately, those things can only be found at the French fort, and Wyatt has already killed one of their soldiers. And even then, they won’t be able to navigate. Rufus remembers The Protocol. It consists of sending a message to the future by writing to them and putting the letter in a time capsule and burying it.
Back in the present, they’ve already noticed that Flynn returned and our people didn’t. Jiya (Claudia Doumit) appears particularly worried.
Our trio continues on their quest, ducking the French on the way. Wyatt is still irritable, not only because Lucy and Wyatt suck at survivalism, but because he doesn’t trust them. They find a body and Wyatt strips it so he can pose as a French soldier. Indians capture them. They are tied to posts, so they continue to bicker. It was an eerily familiar scene. I think it reminded me of an illustration from The Last of the Mohicans.
It’s the Shawnee and they are a led by a woman, Nonhelema (Karina Lombard). She’s not impressed with Lucy or Wyatt, but she is impressed by Rufus’s willingness to die for his friends, so she lets them live. We don’t get to see much of her but she looks like an interesting character in history. I definitely want to find out more about her.
Meanwhile Mason (Paterson Joseph) digs up the time capsule to discover that only two words survived, death and Millennium.
Wyatt and Lucy go to the camp while Rufus sneaks around gathering supplies. They fake a neck wound for Wyatt to cover for his lack of French. It also explains the bloody coat. They meet up with the camp’s doctor (Paul Rogan), who wants to bleed Wyatt and do other terrible things to him. Wyatt nods uncomprehendingly because he doesn’t understand French until Lucy tells him to just hit the guy.
I’ve said in the past that Rufus is no MacGyver, but this time he sciences the Hell out it. He makes a capacitor with bottles and learns to use the forge quickly to make a patch. They return to the time machine and patch it up.
Jiya figures out that Rufus wants them to grab the time machine like the death star grabbed the Millennium Falcon. She says that he said they would never be compatible because she was Star Trek and he was Star Wars. I differ on this subject. You can be both! Many people are. And not only that, but the two words “tractor beam” would have worked just as well.
The French surround them as they try to take off. Wyatt and Lucy hold hands; she also hangs on to Rufus. It’s a bumpy ride but they get home. Jiya finds Rufus in the wardrobe later and plants a big one on him.
Agent Christopher (Sakina Jaffrey) orders a bug planted on Connor Mason. Serves him right.
Lucy, Rufus and Wyatt go out for drinks and look up their UFO sighting, the sighting of the time machine by the French soldiers. Wyatt is so relaxed he looks like a different person. Lucy talks to Wyatt about why she didn’t tell anyone about the diary. She is afraid and ashamed of the fate that it shows for her. And she can’t dismiss it because she believes that things happen for a reason, and that if she is to protect history she can’t deny her own. Wyatt believes the opposite. He believes in free will and that she can write her own history. It’s a nice conversation about the sort of mysteries one should be contemplating while time traveling, but the most important part is that trust and camaraderie have been restored.
This episode, once again, points out that they need some cross training. Wyatt has too much responsibility for killing bad guys and keeping everyone alive in the woods. His part is crucial and important, but it’s also more easily taught than Rufus or Lucy’s expertise. Rufus and Lucy need to learn how to shoot, fight, and lose someone trailing them. And not on the job, either. It would take much longer and more intense training for Wyatt to become a historian or engineer. However, he and Lucy could learn to fly the time machine. There will come a time that they regret not learning it when something happens to Rufus. All of them could study about the time period they are going to, if they have time. And they have a time machine to give them that time..
Flynn was never going to leave them in 1754 permanently. He needs Lucy to write the journal because he’s using it as a Fodor’s guide.
Lucy mentioned smallpox twice. This bothers me. There’s no way they’re going to send anyone back in time to a period before smallpox was eradicated without vaccinating them. Besides putting them at risk, they could bring it back and kill everyone born after the seventies, when they quit giving the vaccination. This would be easily taken care of by someone mentioning that they were all vaccinated and her pointing out that it doesn’t always take, but they didn’t do that. Wyatt, in particular, should have been vaccinated against many nasty rare diseases by the military. If they use this in a future episode it will be a really stupid oversight.
Mason appears to be suspicious of the Rittenhouse agent’s (John Getz) interest in Lucy’s well being. He is questioning why Lucy was chosen when there were other knowledgeable scholars out there. Right, because nepotism is choosing your long lost love child to be sent back in time to be stranded in an era with no amenities, war between the British and the French, and a smallpox epidemic.
I am struck by how much Rufus is loved and anchored in the present. He has Mason, who does care about him, Jiya, and his mom and little brother back home. Of course Lucy and Wyatt are recent additions to the project while Rufus has been there all along, but she only has her mom since she rejected her instant fiance and Wyatt has no one.
In the next episode they will be trying to save the moon landing. I can’t wait.
Timeless airs on NBC on Mondays at 10pm/9c.
