Travelers (2016)

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1. 

   Siskoid

   Season 1: Travelers mixes Continuum with Quantum Leap, with a touch of 12 Monkeys thrown in. We follow a team of time travelers permanently beamed into the heads of people about to die, with a split focus on missions to change history and save the future, and the group dealing with the lives they've taken over. The show is very cagey about revealing its mythology - what the future is like, for example - but creates its mythology slowly over the course of the first season. I resented it at first, but while it's not always clear what the "Director"'s agenda is, up-time, it's a frustration the characters themselves share, and I came to appreciate the slower world building. The "resistance cell" conceit certainly makes it harder to guess where the show is going. Travelers does share Netflix programming's over-saturated shadows (a problem I had with Daredevil), making the screen sometimes too murky for watching in daylight, though that gets better over time.
   
   I liked the first season of Travelers enough to wait for Netflix to get Season 2. It arrived with Season 3 as a bonus! I'd previously described it as a cross between Quantum Leap and Continuum, but the way the mythology (and perhaps the real world) developped, it now takes the bent of Cold War era pod people narratives, but in reverse. Here, the pod people replacing our loved ones are the good guys, and I can't help but see the West's deeply divided politics/generation gap in this (the Travelers are Vegans who want to save the world from climate change, etc.). Well, they're not all good guys, because there's a faction who is a lot more ruthless about how it wants to go about it, and the show also creates a pretty cool supervillain that may or may not be connected to it. In spite of the conspiracy element, the two seasons try their best to tell complete stories each episode (with running subplots), and it ends on a high. If it ends. Season 3 gives us hope for more, but I don't think that's really the purpose of its short coda. Quite the opposite of hope, I should think. A warning perhaps. I don't want to give it away, but everything that's been set up culminates into a clever finale that make this series an easy to binge, satisfying, 36-episode time travel story for our times. 7 years 1 month ago

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