Timeless Review: The Alamo (Season 1 Episode 5)
Timeless Season 1 Episode 5, “The Alamo,” is, without a doubt, the most entertaining episode we’ve seen thus far.
The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been in any given episode, it has more emotion packed in to this one hour than we’ve gotten in all the preceding episodes combined, and, for the first time, we really care about what’s going to happen.
That being said, we care about what’s going to happen in this specific episode. We care about whether or not Wyatt is going to stay and fight with the Alamo (even if we all know he won’t actually do it), we care about the men sacrificing themselves to buy the women and children time to escape.
We even care about Lucy writing that letter.
We care about what is happening in this moment, in this specific time period, on this date. We care about this specific mission.
But we do not care about what Flynn is hoping to achieve by coming here. We do not care about Lucy’s sister, or her fiance, or her Father. We do not even care about Rittenhouse anymore because we have been given absolutely no reason to. There is no intrigue. There’s nothing to hook us in to these plots — we aren’t invested in them.
Sometimes, it’s far too easy to forget that Rittenhouse is a thing that we’re supposed to care about.
These storylines — the ones that are, presumably, meant to be the main plotlines of the show — have taken such a back seat to the weekly time travel gimmicks that, by the time they actually get around to moving any of these “major” plots along, we’re really and truly not going to care anymore.
Hell, we may have even forgotten that they were meant to matter in the first place.
Timeless is so fun to watch — that is how the show garners viewership and followers.
It’s fun because we like seeing where our trio of loveable heroes is going to go next, who they’re going to meet.
But, thus far, the show has very little to offer in terms of depth.
It’s a super fun, week-to-week adventure series, but, if the writers want it to be anything more than that, they need to give their audience more insight in to these more complex plotlines so that we can latch on to them and start caring enough to speculate and to wonder.
Because, right now, it’s just not happening.
Another complaint worth noting with the show is that, upon doing a little digging, many viewers have complained that this episode in particular was full of historical inaccuracies (and, maybe, others were, too, and I just didn’t happen upon those complaints).
Now, these inaccuracies are not just the things that have obviously been changed by the characters in the show, but simple things like, for example, the fact that John William Smith was, apparently, actually in his 40s when this all went down.
And James Bowie was extremely ill during this battle.
Now, the show pushes the battle up a few days, so, perhaps he wasn’t sick yet, but the point remains.
I get it: it’s angstier if it’s a young boy.
It’s more inspiring if Bowie fights with his men and swaps war stories with Wyatt.
But, if you are going to be making a show where your characters travel back to historical moments in time, wouldn’t you want to be sure you were being historically accurate…?
To play devil’s advocate (because why not, right?), it could be argued that, maybe, these details changed because other historical events have been altered by the main characters and, therefore, history has changed.
But that sort of seems like we’re coming up with theories to cover up errors.
All of this being said, this episode is genuinely the most enjoyable to date. Wyatt is entrancing, Lucy is emotional, and Rufus gets to be a hero and work smack dab in the middle of all the action, for once!
Now, all we can do is hope that the show continues to be just as entertaining while, also, starting to allow major, show-carrying plotlines to begin to unravel a little more in the weeks to come.
What did you think of “The Alamo”? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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Timeless airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.
Becky Peters
Becky is a television, literature, and pop culture enthusiast who spends more of her time exploring fictional worlds than she does living in the real one. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian settings are her kryptonite, and she has a strange soft spot for anything that involves the walking dead (the creatures themselves, not the show -- but the show is good, too). You can usually find her engrossed in shows like Preacher, The Walking Dead, Sense8, or any one of the many other series that tickle her fancy. Follow Becky on Twitter: @epic_bcky