At Comic-Con, the stars and creators of new timey wimey TV show Timeless kept mum about which eras the show would travel to. They wouldn”t reveal any time travel destinations beyond the pilot”s Hindenburg disaster and Episode 2″s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
But at Timeless” TCA presentation today, the show”s talent opened up about where (and when) else the show would take its time travelers on a mission to preserve history.
The Watergate crisis, the space race during the moon landing, Germany during World War II, and the Alamo (presumably the Battle of the Alamo in 1836) were revealed as additional Timeless destinations.
Co-creator Shawn Ryan (The Shield) also revealed that the writers have broken stories through episode 8, and the furthest back in time they”ve gone is the 1750s (please let us see a young Alexander Hamilton).
At Comic-Con, Ryan told me, “We”re going to go back 250, 300 years. We”re going to be not just in the United States. We”re going to be all over the world. We”re going to be up until the early 1980s. And we”re going to be all over the map, something different for people each week.”
I went into watching a screener of the pilot looking forward to new show from Supernatural creator Eric Kripke and eager to watch a new time travel story. I soon realized that Timeless will be a show that gets the history lover in me geeking out too. The show is traveling to all these key historical events and playing with the fun “what if?” question – what if things had gone differently in Ford”s Theatre in 1865 or in that New Jersey field in 1937? How would the rest of history be changed as a result?
Though Timeless will play with changing history, don”t expect it to get too wibbly wobbly. Kripke told me that figuring out the rules of time travel “definitely makes me want to put a gun in my mouth,” adding, “What I don't want is there”s 19 clones of the leads, and they have eight doubles because they keep returning back to do it again.” Abigail Spencer, Malcolm Barrett, and Matt Lanter”s characters won”t be able to safely travel back to a time where they already traveled, which saves the show from having to double their actors with visual effects but also gives each mission the stakes of no do-overs. Mostly, though, on his trek through history, Kripke doesn”t want things to get “all mind-f–ky.”
Timeless premieres on NBC on Monday, October 3.