A Man. And His Blog.

The second season of UPN's time travel action aired during the season 1999/2000

Salvaging the material and technology from the spaceship crash at Roswell, the NSA secretly develops a spherical time-ship that has the limited ability to send one person back in time, up to seven days. Called ‘Project Backstep’, it is reserved for selective use, only to undo significant, recent, disastrous events. The pilot, or chrononaut, of the ‘sphere’, is Lt. Frank Parker (Jonathan LaPaglia). An ex-Navy SEAL with a loose-cannon/free-spirit quality, he is supported by a vast staff of technicians and his close colleagues: the agent in charge, Bradley Talmadge (Alan Scarfe), the scientists Isaac Mentnor (Norman Lloyd), John Ballard (Sam Whipple) and Olga Vukavitch (Justina Vail), Frank’s closest friend and military consultant, Craig Donovan (Don Franklin), and Chief of Security Nathan Ramsey (Nick Searcy). Not only do they deal with correcting disasters, but also the only-slightly-better-than-crude, theoretical, patch-work, barely-understood execution of time travel.

Episode 01: The Football
Well, I could say, the episode was pretty stupid with a ridiculous storyline and outcome (what? An ape?), but I could also say, the episode was completely hilarious and I could have laughed all the way through it. Let’s just say that the story about the missing nuclear football was bullshit enough, but that it was untraceable for the White House is just laughable. Okay, it is untraceable, so the terrorist don’t find it, but the White House must have a technology of their own to find it. And how can they lose the responsible guy in the beginning? That the football wandered through the whole city was laughable as well, every ten minutes the owner changed, muhaha. And in between Olga and Frank, who are working together to find the football. At least their behavior in the middle of the night was funny and brought a lot between the two, though it isn’t any kind of development and it never will be picked up again.
The ape was responsible for the world’s end? LOL!
A negative point was the fact that the writers didn’t even play the holocaust card, even though they showed two, three short scenes of the end of the world. But they could have at least shown that the team tries to live with the actual death of a billion people, among them Olga and Ramsey. But, no, between the screen with the rockets hitting everything and the backstep there were just 30, 40 seconds – no time to show some feelings.
Funny episode, ridiculous and hilarious episode, lame season premiere. It was just a normal episode. 6/10

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Salvaging the material and technology from the spaceship crash at Roswell, the NSA secretly develops a spherical time-ship that has the limited ability to send one person back in time, up to seven days. Called ‘Project Backstep’, it is reserved for selective use, only to undo significant, recent, disastrous events. The pilot, or chrononaut, of the ‘sphere’, is Lt. Frank Parker (Jonathan LaPaglia). An ex-Navy SEAL with a loose-cannon/free-spirit quality, he is supported by a vast staff of technicians and his close colleagues: the boss of the project, Bradley Talmadge (Alan Scarfe), the scientists Isaac Mentnor (Norman Lloyd), John Ballard (Sam Whipple) and Olga Vukavitch (Justina Vail), Frank’s closest friend and boss of the military section, Craig Donovan (Don Franklin), and security boss Nathan Ramsey (Nick Searcy). Not only do they deal with correcting disasters, but also the only-slightly-better-than-crude, theoretical, patch-work, barely-understood execution of time travel.

Episode 01/02: Pilot
Well, this was my first favorite television show. The first show I watched every week and the first show I recorded. So, it is time to look into my past ad watching the first season again after a long time. To make it short: The story is not new, but the plotting is good and plausible enough. The actors are alright, the characters not necessarily, the episode plot is boring at some points (the whole “dead son” story was uninteresting) and I was missing some action (the finale was lame and a bit short). Here and there some plot holes, good jokes and effects, character moments, but everything is not really interesting. But the big problems is the lack of real characters; they are good enough to watch them work, but not good enough to feel with them. But the pilot was good enough for the series. 7/10

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