Traveling through time might be a familiar theme of new fall TV shows, but the stars of NBC's Timeless want everyone to know they're the only ones actually exploring true, dramatic time travel.
"We're the only ones that actually travel through time continuously all throughout and have a machine," clarified star Malcolm Barrett.
Timeless follows three strangers -- a historian (Abigail Spencer's Lucy Preston), a soldier (Matt Lanter's Wyatt Logan) and a scientist (Barrett's Rufus Carlin) -- who are thrust together after a criminal (Goran Visnjic's Garcia Flynn) steals a time machine and sets off through history with unclear aims. Each episode takes the trio to a different time period as they chase after Flynn, making Timeless as much be a period historical drama as it is a time travel adventure.
"We've been having a blast going to every time period possible," said Lanter during a visit to the show's set. "We're getting to do something different every single week, so the chances of something getting stale is just not possible. It's been fun so far."
So far the show exists under a couple of basic rules of time travel -- rules which all the main cast members repeated again and again during the visit to the show's set to underline how Timeless keeps its time travel straight. The first: you can never double back on a time period that you already existed in. That presents an interesting dilemma for Flynn, who is trying to prevent the death of his family by traveling through time.
"My character, his wife and kids were killed and everybody thinks he did it and he's saying he didn't do that, but we blocked him from actually being able to go there and fix that event," Visnjic explained. "He has to go further down into the past and find a way to fix the event by, I don't know, killing the father of the person who killed his family or something like that. It presents interesting opportunities and interesting dilemmas for the show."
The second rule is that there are no re-dos; the characters can't return to the a time period they've already visited. That does leave open some room for debate, with Lanter saying he's still unsure if there's wiggle room to get around some of the time travel laws.
"What I'm personally not clear on is it a period that you've just existed, or we can't see ourselves or go back to that moment in that spot, because you could go insane from that? That's what I want to know from the showrunners: can we go back as long as we don't get near or spot ourselves? The only thing they've said is you can't double back, which makes our missions that much more imperative," he said.
These are the big no-nos of time travel because, as Barrett had it explained to him, doing any of these things leads "to ramifications that not everyone is completely clear of but they're disastrous." "Or can we?" Spencer was quick to question, implying that some rules are made to be broken. In Timeless, the laws of time travel might be defied when the moment feels right.
"I think they're establishing solid rules right now that kind of defines it -- puts it in a bit of a box, if you will -- so we all can kind of play," said Lanter. "Who knows how that can change in the future?"
Timeless will also explore the idea of ripple effects throughout history, where even the smallest change in the past can wipe someone out in the present. Visnjic said each episode explores the idea of "but what if?" and forces the audience to ask what they would do when faced with these big dilemmas.
"You are there sitting in the Ford Theater next to Abraham Lincoln and you could tell him, 'Dude, this guy is coming and he's going to shoot you.' Would you do that? OK, I would do that, and then what?" said Visnjic. "Slavery is going to be completely banished, there's not going to be any issues, it's going to move on in a beautiful direction, social liberties and all that -- let's say that America in that moment decides we don't want to invest all this money into nuclear programs to develop the Manhattan Project and Hitler wins the war, boom. One tiny move in the past, no matter how in the moment it looks like brilliant idea ... in today's day and age could wreak complete havoc."
Timeless premieres Monday, October 3rd at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Check out IGN's review of the pilot.
Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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