I’d missed the hype of this show (assuming there was any), but the preview on Heroes reminded me of Quantum Leap, which some of you may remember from the early 90s, so I decided to take a look at this and see what it’s like. In brief, it’s a show about a man who travels through time, helping people he meets along the way.
Dan Vassar (Kevin McKidd, Lucius in HBO’s Rome) is a normal guy with a normal life and a normal anniversary (that he remembers) coming up. So, of course, that means something extraordinary is about to happen to him to change his life forever. On his way to his anniversary dinner, he hops into a cab, and we see a flash. He steps into a bar where people are celebrating a catch in a game… a game that happened 8 years ago. He sees a woman (his ex-wife Livia) standing outside the bar and chases after her, hopping back into his cab, only to reawaken in the present.
His hopes of it being just a dream were short-lived. Next time he wakes up, he goes into what he believes is his house and is greeted by an attempted whack upside the head with a baseball bat. His brilliant plan to get out of this is to be punched in the face. For some odd reason, that doesn’t seem to help matters any. Upon asking what the date is, he’s told it’s October 6, 1987.
Back in the present, his wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf) goes searching for him because she can’t find him anywhere. She asks his brother Jack (Reed Diamond) for his assistance since he’s a cop. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned but agrees to talk to the guys and put the word out.
Dan sees a man, Neal, standing in traffic and jumps to push him out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, preventing his suicide attempt over a woman. From there, he goes home to an angry wife, who tells him he’s been gone for two days. Since he missed a deadline in the process, his boss isn’t impressed with him either. While attempting to contact a source, he goes online and finds out that Neal is actually real.
Next time he goes back in time, he does it while driving. He disappears, but the car keeps on going, crashing into two other cars and making people think he fled the scene. His boss thinks he has a drug problem and needs help. Dan wakes up in the middle of the road just in time to not be run over. He heads over to the newsstand where a man with one of those really big 1990s cell phones makes fun of him wearing a receiver on his ear. This time it’s 1990. And who should be there but Neal, whose love life doesn’t seem to have gotten any better? He then also bumps into Livia, waiting tables.
Dan talks to Neal’s girlfriend, who’s pregnant but doesn’t want the child, and says he’d do anything to get back to his son Zack. But back in the present, he’s missing the piano recital he said promised he’d be there for, though he does show up in the nick of time, to a very happy son but a wife who continues to get angrier.
Everybody’s come to the conclusion he’s a drug addict. His brother shows up at the intervention his wife has planned. He tells him he’s under arrest for hit and run. When they get to the station, however, he tells him one witness says nobody was even driving, so he can’t charge him. He attemps to ask Dan what’s wrong but doesn’t get far. As he’s leaving, Dan turns around and says he saw Livia and warned her about things that hadn’t happened yet, making him concerned he may have creeped her out.
Further research into Neal’s family reveals that Nicole and her son were killed in 1997, Dan’s next trip. This time he’s learned his lesson. Instead of being attacked by a baseball bat wielding madman, he goes to where he used to live at the time. It’s not long before this turns out to be a bad idea as well, though. There he meets up with Livia. Is sleeping with your dead ex-wife before you marry your current wife cheating? Apparently the answer is yes, so he runs out of there before anything happens.
As he’s running out, he bumps into Livia, present Livia, who’s not actually dead because she left the plane before it went down. She’s well aware of his mission. She tells him he’ll probably mess up but shouldn’t mess with anything. He calls his brother from a payphone, but his brother sees him walking across the street, so he refuses to help. Is his brother going to be of any use at some point? So instead, he takes the place of past Dan and asks past Livia to help him out.
After finding out where Neal works, he tracks him down and pretends he knew him from high school. Neal lets him know they split up, and they’re moving to LA. He still loves her and isn’t planning on letting them go. As he’s yelling across the street at Nicole, Neal gets struck by a bus. When Nicole sees the gun he’s toting, she believes he was coming to kill her as promised. Dan thought he was there to save a family, which he did, just not in the way he expected. The ripple effect was more far reaching, however, as Neal’s son Jacob graduated pre-med from Stamford, and in one instance saved 6 kids from a bus wreck. Dan realizes it was all about protecting Jacob.
Then he gets home to a (still) angry wife. Before he returned, he buried a chest under the patio they put in when they moved in. It contained a newspaper with the date and his wife’s wedding ring. So at least she knows he’s not crazy now.
I like the premise of this show, even if it is derivitave. Anyone who wants immediate answers to their questions of why he’s got these new abilities will be left unsatisfied, but those two issues are the extent of the complaints I’ve heard thus far. Granted, a sidekick like Al from Quantum Leap wouldn’t hurt matters any.
Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another recap of Journeyman episode 2, which airs Monday at 10/9c on NBC.