Notes for Episode 23: "Journeyman"

Hi everyone! Hannah here with another set of notes, a set that reveals my most humiliating secret. That's right: I promised in these notes that I was going to go on a lengthy tangent about the film Frequency (2000) and I simply did not do that when it came time to record. That's because I'm a fraud! A liar! All my cunning was for nought in the end, and Esther's honor has carried the day. Stay tuned for the first of our new run of bonus episodes, which will cover a beloved series of films directed by the creator of one of our LEAST favorite Lostalikes. Can you guess what/who?

• Plot / Structure Stuff:

  • These shows are obsessed with openings that are like “a seemingly normal day for a seemingly normal family…”

  • Why did he “jump” from inside a cab to inside a bar. Why doesn’t that immediately concern him

    • He’s a raging alcoholic and he loses time constantly

  • Okay the fact that Livia is also Journeymaning is actually REALLY cool. Okay I get what the show is now. Our interest is back in, after what was shaping up to be a really dogshit pilot overall

  • What is it with TV pilots and performing emergency tracheostomies. There’s this and Jericho and House

  • Citrus exploding when they time travel is a very fun little “let’s introduce a bunch of wrinkles to make this lived in” wrinkle

  • That RULES that his goal in episode 3 was to put a guy IN the earthquake

  • This story really moves, I gotta say. There are developments!

  • It’s crazy how like, this is explicitly an episodic show, there’s “a self contained thing that happens every episode,” and yet by episode five there’s like three full minutes worth of “previously on” material

    • New Amsterdam is a better show but its Previously Ons were the Super Jump like three times in a row. This is maybe the best we’ve covered SPECIFICALLY at balancing episodic and serialized stuff

  • The DB Cooper guy assuming Dan is special forces because “you knew my landing zone” and “nobody disappears that fast but us” is so funny, that’s a great use of your speculative conceit

  • By the way: are we meant to understand that he’s publishing stories about all these people he’s helping?

    • He was doing it for a little and then he just STOPPED

    • He does eventually start to get chewed out over this, I wonder if they were planning to go anywhere with that with a full season order

  • Livia being from 1948 is so cool. It’s so cool

  • The way solving the Bennett case causes Jack to forget how he was starting to believe Dan… that’s really good. All the plotting is so tight

  • It’s really nice that they did a Save the Paper episode

  • I think it’s a genuinely funny recurring bit that people seem to know who’s a time traveler “because of the shoes” and it’s never explained in more detail than that

  • Character / Performance Stuff:

    • Oh it looks like we are checking in again with MOON BLOOD GOOD

    • Dan is such a belligerent TOAD. It is at the very least a very different way of handling this kind of situation than most protagonists

    • Alright so immediately Dan’s a Jack Shepard. A strung out aggro loser. I feel like we haven’t had one of those for a little while

    • So how much of the show is gonna be characters being like “wow Dan’s a drug addict loser bitch we should put him in a cage and feed him wet food” 

      • Like I dunno man I think Awake did that about as good as you can do it? This is no Awake, let’s be frank

      • Fun fact: we ended up deciding this show is “about as good as Awake”

      • Good casting for the brother honestly they look exactly alike

    • Moon Bloodgood does a lot of great Furrowed Brow acting

      • I could watch her shaking her head while making a point for approximately six hours in a row. It’s a stretch to call her a GREAT actress but she is one of the most WATCHABLE actresses of this era

    • People just keep calling him good looking, and NO. NO HE IS NOT

      • This is Hannah saying this and she wants to clarify that he’s not ugly or anything, it’s just weird for people to say it so many times in a row when he’s not an especially attractive TV leading man

    • Is the “recovering gambling addict” thing their way of getting around the idea of him constantly placing bets on sporting events in the past

    • Even the kid brothers look exactly like their older selves. The casting on this show is crazy

    • Most unrealistic part of the show so far: that someone would be able to figure out what ethnicity Moon Bloodgood is from one glance

    • Dan’s dad is so much hotter than him, I mean Joker voice what happened

• Technical / Aesthetic Stuff: 

  • This pilot is intriguingly unconcerned with making anything feel like an interlinked series of events. I wonder if it’ll keep that energy up?

  • I’m gonna say it? It’s not 1998, Journeyman. Grow the fuck up

    • I don’t just mean like, the specific year as a flashback setting. I mean the entire idea of this is so painfully late 90’s / early 00’s. He gets to do the alternate timeline season of Felicity every episode

    • There’s toilet seat discourse on this show… how behind its time IS this thing. Was this pilot on a desk for a decade?

  • Okay there have been TWO separate Sarah MacLachlan needle drops in this pilot. There’s two. Tell me what’s going on

  • The title sequences where it’s just years flashing is so funny. C’mon. Make it a little more than that, please

  • There’s something about the writing of this show that reminds me so much of the shit screenplays I (Esther) would write in high school

    • I think it’s the lightly snarky explanation of Rules

  • These needle drops… YOU THINK YOU’RE REUNION

  • I do think it’s a flaw of this show that, presumably for budget reasons, he can never go back farther than the 1980s. I want to see him helping cavemen

  • He seems like he always Journeys while in public places with many potential witnesses, but nobody is ever looking at him at the moment

  • They do Sorkin walk and talk long takes SPECIFICALLY in the newsroom and then nowhere else

• Notable Quotes:

  • “I think I just started a family” “Well, that’s great! Why don’t you stick around and save this one?”

    • That’s like 40% of network TV dialogue by volume

  • Guy at his intervention says “I’ve been where you’ve been” he replies “Trust me, you have NOT been where I’ve been”

    • According to Esther, that was all over the ads

  • The “You’re not my brother” “What do you mean?” “I’m looking at him” bit was one of the first moments that really sold us on this show

  • As Dan starts taking a hammer to their patio: “What are you doing?” “Saving my marriage.” “Not really!”

  • Liv saying that “you do what you have to do” and “it’s the wild wild west” about the prospect of killing people in the past is INSANE

  • “You’re planting evidence” “I’m planting a fact”

  • “You could go back to the game and pose as yourself” now that’s TV magic

  • Opening an episode with someone asking “What year is it?” but it’s asking about a bottle of wine, that’s funny

• Cute Things We Said:

  • Okay this is gonna be the moment where Hannah just FULLY talks about the film Frequency because at first blush this just seems like sauceless Frequency

    • She ended up not talking about Frequency!! She’s a liar! A fraud!

  • Esther introduced the idea of a rival time traveler that makes everyone be more evil, and that’s a real treat

  • A few episodes into the show, they have a pretty narrow horizon for the kind of thing the changes can result in

    • I think they should get weirder with it. A guy he saves invents a new kind of sword. Is that good or bad? It’s hard to say

  • Hannah: “Okay, this one’s set in ‘94… cause that’s when Two Princes came out”

    • Esther: [pointing to self enthusiastically] “And one princess!”

  • It would be really crazy if he steps into the poker game in the past and he’s like “man…I forgot how GOOD this feels”

  • They should totally reveal that, in the timeline with the nanotechs, Jack is rocking the Needler as his service weapon

  • Esther: “If this TV show tries to tell me more, I’m running through that screen full speed. I don’t care what happens.”