The past is a freaky monster zoo on Journeyman. Last week, we went to a swinger “key party” and hung out with psycho hippies in the 1970s. This week, it’s a disturbing rave in the 1990s, where Dan meets his fellow time-traveler Livia — only to find she hasn’t met him yet and is being just as vacant as everyone else. And then he discovers a kidnapped girl imprisoned behind a wall. Contrast that with the cutesy meeting-Mark-Twain approach to the past of other shows. That’s just one reason NBC’s Journeyman is the best science fiction show right now, after a rocky beginning.
A bigger reason: Journeyman is forming a more and more complex tapestry as Dan Vassar travels into the past over and over again. He keeps changing his own past in small but subtle ways and entangling himself in more “coincidences” that look suspicious to outsiders. This week’s episode sets up two knife-edge cliffhangers that show how Dan’s meddling may finally ruin his present-day life: a kidnapper he put behind bars in 2001 comes back for revenge, and his brother threatens to have him committed. Linear time is a prison to most of us, but according to Journeyman, time travel isn’t an escape tunnel. It’s solitary confinement.
