Review: Journeyman

More by chance than design, Vicki and I ended up watching NBC's premiere of Journeyman last night. It just sort of started after Heroes wrapped up, and since it was about Time Travel - a favourite topic of both of ours - I didn't switch away from it. (I then had to prove to Vicki that it wasn't based on a book that we'd both enjoyed - The Time Traveller's Wife - despite the fact that all the two works had in common was a time traveller, and a wife!)

One of the odder aspects of the show, for me at least, was that the lead actor (shown here) seems like he ought to be playing James Bond, as reimagined by Daniel Craig, rather than a somewhat domesticated journalist with a wife and a (piano-playing) young son. I kept finding myself thinking, "He's an action hero, right? No, wait, he's a newspaper guy with no special talent for getting out of tight spots!" It didn't ruin the experience, but I did wonder about the casting.

The story was engaging, though: our man starts flipping uncontrollably back and forth through time, always staying in the same general area geographically, but ping ponging from 2007 to 1987 and back again (and several points in between). In each instance, he bumps into, seemingly by chance, the same stranger: a black man whose life he saves the first time they meet. Why are their paths continuing to cross? What force is making him move through time like this? And what happened to his former fiancee - who he also keeps running into in the past - that has left him so screwed up where she's concerned?

There was also an interesting dynamic between the hero, his current wife, his brother, and the aforementioned fiancee, who by episode's end we've discovered had died 8 years ago... or had she? As is the norm in our Lost-influenced TV landscape, many mysteries were introduced and most weren't answered in the premiere.

The drama featured a moment, at the end, though, that I personally appreciated. The tension between the time traveller and his wife had been growing steadily throughout the episode, with his inexplicable disappearances driving a wedge between them, not the least bit helped by his attempts to honestly describe what he'd experienced ("I've been in the past, visiting my former lover! Umm, I mean...") I feared that this would be a recurring motif for the show - and it still could, I suppose - but the final scene paid it all off with the leading man doing something very clever to prove his story, and his not-a-bimbo wife realizing that everything he'd said was true... ending in a long-overdue embrace. Ahhhh...

Journeyman is no Lost, and no Heroes (Hell, it's not even The Wire!)... but it was entertaining, and I'll watch another episode or two, at least. (Vicki, on the other hand, is probably hooked... just like what happened with Grey's Anatomy and Men in Trees!)

Rating: ** 1/2