khaosworks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
khaosworks) wrote2006-11-03 09:14 pm
khaosworks) wrote2006-11-03 09:14 pm
Entry tags:
Tic-Toc
So I bought the complete two seasons of The Time Tunnel from Amazon.com. I wasn't really intending to get the second season set, because that was when it went horribly horribly wrong as Irwin Allen series tended to do when he started introducing aliens and monsters into the mix.
However, what prompted me to get the set was two things. One was the Time Travelers TV movie from 1976 which I remember watching as a kid, about two men who are trying to cure a plague in the present, and have to find the cure in the past before it's destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire. The younger man falls in love (naturally) with a girl back then, which leads to a line that has stuck with me for 30 years, when the older man yells at him to leave her, "She's a ghost from the past, while you're just a phantom from the future!"
Okay, maybe you had to be there. I thought it was pretty cool when I was 10 or so.
The other thing that prompted me to get the set was the unaired pilot for a proposed revival of The Time Tunnel that was produced in 2002. Apparently it was axed because it was too similar to Stargate SG-1, which actually is a little unfair, because aside from a gate-like thing and a troubleshooting team, it wasn't anything like it — at least, not that you could tell from the pilot.
The premise of the new show is very different from the original. We open on a title sequence that shows us that history is changing: people vanishing from pictures, a headline of PEACE turning to WAR and the United States only having 49 states. As we're introduced to Doug Phillips (David Conrad), an investigator for the Department of Energy, we also find out that Boston's baseball team is the Yankees and that red means go in traffic lights. Doug, a nice guy with a wife and two kids, is approached by an old friend, Flynn (Kavan Smith, the guy who plays Major Lorne on Stargate Atlantis), who tells him that he has a job that only he is suited for.
Eight months before, a Department of Energy project to initiate hot fusion through a long tunnel tore a hole in time, creating a storm. It took them four hours — 240 minutes — to lock down one end of the storm in the present, but by that time, the "240" had created random changes in history. Only those at the core when the accident happened were protected, and remember what it was like before the 240. The interesting part is that they're not trying to fix history: what's done is done. They're trying to prevent any more damage.
The other end of the storm is still whipping around, and creating time ripples whenever history is in danger of being changed. When this happens, they try and figure out what's about to happen, send a team back and stop it from happening. Flynn approaches Doug because right now, the time storm picked up someone from 1546 and dumped him in 1944 in the middle of the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Doug, for reasons that become apparent, is an expert on the course of the battle and the terrain, and so he's pulled into this world and placed on the team, which includes the beautiful but deadly serious Toni Newman (Andrea Roth) and ex-CIA operative J.D. (Tawny Cypress, who's now Simone Deveaux on Heroes). Among the people overseeing operations back in the present, I even spot Alessandro Juliani (who's Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica).
It's actually quite good. This is a series I would have watched. The effects aren't amazing, but they're not shabby, there's a nice dark tension to the show, and the acting is enough to carry the premise through. The idea that they're not interested in fixing things as such (and in fact, Doug has a good reason not to want to fix things) is a cool concept on its own. Although they can only go where the time storm takes them, this doesn't have the "lost in time" concept, which is again a good thing because it's not a retread of the original but a re-imagining, taking the name "Time Tunnel" and just running a whole new show with it. And this, a couple of years before Ronald D. Moore. It's a damned shame that it never went to series.
So if you're looking into avoiding the Time Tunnel season two set because the season was crappy, these two things might be worth the price of admission.
However, what prompted me to get the set was two things. One was the Time Travelers TV movie from 1976 which I remember watching as a kid, about two men who are trying to cure a plague in the present, and have to find the cure in the past before it's destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire. The younger man falls in love (naturally) with a girl back then, which leads to a line that has stuck with me for 30 years, when the older man yells at him to leave her, "She's a ghost from the past, while you're just a phantom from the future!"
Okay, maybe you had to be there. I thought it was pretty cool when I was 10 or so.
The other thing that prompted me to get the set was the unaired pilot for a proposed revival of The Time Tunnel that was produced in 2002. Apparently it was axed because it was too similar to Stargate SG-1, which actually is a little unfair, because aside from a gate-like thing and a troubleshooting team, it wasn't anything like it — at least, not that you could tell from the pilot.
The premise of the new show is very different from the original. We open on a title sequence that shows us that history is changing: people vanishing from pictures, a headline of PEACE turning to WAR and the United States only having 49 states. As we're introduced to Doug Phillips (David Conrad), an investigator for the Department of Energy, we also find out that Boston's baseball team is the Yankees and that red means go in traffic lights. Doug, a nice guy with a wife and two kids, is approached by an old friend, Flynn (Kavan Smith, the guy who plays Major Lorne on Stargate Atlantis), who tells him that he has a job that only he is suited for.
Eight months before, a Department of Energy project to initiate hot fusion through a long tunnel tore a hole in time, creating a storm. It took them four hours — 240 minutes — to lock down one end of the storm in the present, but by that time, the "240" had created random changes in history. Only those at the core when the accident happened were protected, and remember what it was like before the 240. The interesting part is that they're not trying to fix history: what's done is done. They're trying to prevent any more damage.
The other end of the storm is still whipping around, and creating time ripples whenever history is in danger of being changed. When this happens, they try and figure out what's about to happen, send a team back and stop it from happening. Flynn approaches Doug because right now, the time storm picked up someone from 1546 and dumped him in 1944 in the middle of the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Doug, for reasons that become apparent, is an expert on the course of the battle and the terrain, and so he's pulled into this world and placed on the team, which includes the beautiful but deadly serious Toni Newman (Andrea Roth) and ex-CIA operative J.D. (Tawny Cypress, who's now Simone Deveaux on Heroes). Among the people overseeing operations back in the present, I even spot Alessandro Juliani (who's Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica).
It's actually quite good. This is a series I would have watched. The effects aren't amazing, but they're not shabby, there's a nice dark tension to the show, and the acting is enough to carry the premise through. The idea that they're not interested in fixing things as such (and in fact, Doug has a good reason not to want to fix things) is a cool concept on its own. Although they can only go where the time storm takes them, this doesn't have the "lost in time" concept, which is again a good thing because it's not a retread of the original but a re-imagining, taking the name "Time Tunnel" and just running a whole new show with it. And this, a couple of years before Ronald D. Moore. It's a damned shame that it never went to series.
So if you're looking into avoiding the Time Tunnel season two set because the season was crappy, these two things might be worth the price of admission.
no subject
An odd bit about the new pilot was that rumors were spreading clear to AM talk radio about "the 240", which seemed really strange if only the command center had any idea anything was wrong. If someone was revealing it, it wouldn't have been a vague rumor. Was also amused by which state they eliminated.
no subject
I thought about that radio thing in the remake, but the project had been going on for eight months and obviously people weren't staying in the core all the time, so maybe some vague rumors had leaked out/been overheard about some kind of nuclear incident, and the phrase "the 240" was being banded about.