Journeyman--"Double Down"--11/5/07
 

Well, the show has made it to episode 7. I wonder if they have completed all 13 episodes of the original order. Because I assume that's all we're getting.

Synopsis:

Lots of interesting backstory developed in this one. The house of cards Dan has built looks like it's starting to fall down around him, and it was sad to see his brother sell him out. Ryan Chappelle's going to come down on Dan hard.

This was one of the best written episodes of the season so far. The only thing that was too 'convenient' were the thugs still holding onto all that money when they were shot and captured by the airport police.

Chris

Interesting ... I thought it was the worst story of the series. Not only does Dan's ex end up in a time where she's dead, she finds a plot-saving cache of cash. I almost kicked a hole in my set for that one. But the real kicker was Dan fighting Dan ... at least Nicki on Heroes had to look in a mirror.

I do like it that Dan's "past" is catching up ... but with convenient actions like tonight's it won't really matter much. There'll be an intervention ... just in time.

Livia (Dan's ex) isn't dead. She "traveled" from the plane before it crashed, which is why they never found her body.

They haven't revealed to us yet what she's doing in the present.

Great ep., but can I just say that
I REALLY don't need to be told to keep my car tires at the right pressure to save the earth
while I'm trying to watch a TV show...

Someone or something is clearly pulling Dan and Livia to times and places where they can do something important, and it's not like they just made this cash up on the spot. By arriving when she did she was able to kill two birds with one stone by getting the money Dan needed to buy into the poker game and get the money out of the house before the brother could confiscate it. I also thought it was fun seeing Livia put in a situation where she had to figure out why she was there instead of just being in her role as Dan's mentor.

Doesn't the continued existence of the B plot (all the stuff with Dan's wife and brother) after Dan accidentally leaves his card at the shooting make the entire A plot (Dan trying to fix his future) pointless? Wouldn't the timeline in which Dan is married be altered as soon as the hitman finds Dan's card until Dan "puts right what once went wrong". Since nothing ever changed in the B plot (Dan was still alive, still married to Katie, still had a son), obviously everything turned out OK in the A plot.

Livia leaps back to present day and takes the Dylan McCleen money from Dan & Katie's house. She then leaps back to the past and gives the money to Dan to use in the poker game so he and Katie can have their "moment" they knew they were meant to be together. Since that "moment" hadn't yet happened when Livia leaped (and would never have taken place since Dan had no money to join the poker game), how can the Dylan McCleen money (and Katie and their son) still be in the house for Livia to find?

Of course, all this might be explained once the show reveals what exactly is happening to Dan.

The way I see it nothing changes in the present until after the "moment."

There are any number of explanations one could come up with to explain why nothing changed in the present. You're going to run into paradoxes with almost every story involving time travel; it's best not to think about it too much.

The desire for a dramatically coherent rationale is the only reason I keep tuning in. But unless it begins to reveal itself, I won't be tuning in for much longer.

I hope that by the end of the season they let the brother in on the whole thing, rather than this stupid game of cat and mouse. Other than that, not a bad episode, although I hope they don't do too much of the "running into his own past" thing. It's a nice little way to establish some backstory for these characters, but eventually it gets to distract from the rest of the plot.

That and I don't think they ever established that this is like Quantum Leap where you can only jump to a time when you're already alive.

It's just more convenient to create a set that looks like its in 1970 or later than to create one for 1945.

Unless I misunderstood it, I liked how the whole reason Katie was in Dan's apartment when he woke up that day in the past was because of future Dan. That thing he could never explain (how she got in the apartment) wasn't just because he was too drunk to remember but because his, if i can borrow a South Park term, future self made it happen. At least in the "new" present it is.
Agreed that they need to establish some kind of arc. Though I think tonight was the first time we saw Livia outside of whatever time Dan was in and also the first time we saw her in the present. Continuing more with that bizarre phone in the past with the scientist should help flesh all this out I hope.
Also, maybe I'm just getting to be a big pussy as I get older or I love the song that much but the whole scene at the end set to Lucky Man by the Verve was great :)

Same here... and I really enjoyed this episode and been liking this show. Just find it all interesting and hope they have some cool scifi explanations for everything. I kept thinking "Enchantment under the Sea" dance throughout this episode.

The only thing I didn't like about this episode was that they didn't show the repercussions of his actions with the guy he saved. That guy was meant to get killed, and Dan saved his life. Surely his testifying, and the fact that the gang members got killed/arrested in the hospital had some kind of effect down the line. I get that the focus was on Dan saving himself, but since his "main goal" was to save that guy, I wanted to know the significance.

Interesting, I'd never heard that song they played over the end before and I thought it felt really out of place and was very distracting.

Has Livia given any explanation to Dan about why she never revealed to him that she "survived" the plane crash? I mean, I understand that it wouldn't be easy to come up with a rational cover story for why she didn't die in the crash, so maybe she went into hiding or changed her identity or something. But have they talked about this at all within the show?

And has Livia said what her "present" self does when she's not time-traveling? If I were Dan, I would have been asking these questions from the first moment I saw her, but he never does ask. It gets very frustrating--like when the characters on Lost never tell each other vital information and never ask the important and obvious questions that could save them a lot of trouble in the long run.

I'm glad they wrapped up the Livia arc instead of dragging it out a full season. It was going to get silly if they went too much longer with it. Some of you still aren't thinking 4th dimensionally. They've done a pretty good job spelling it out. They're just not spoon-feeding us.

das

Stuff like that has annoyed me from the start of this show. It's a poorly written conceit in spite of the setup of Dan and Livia being former lovers (and you'd think they would talk like normal humans given the fantastical time-traveling element of this show). This type of stuff (lack of asking the normal questions) exists only to heighten the slow tease of what's been going on with Livia and how her part in all of this is this season's big reveal.

OMG! Are you serious?!? The repercussions are the rest of the episode. Dan only knows what he knows as facts because it ALREADY happened!!!! Saving the guy got a hit put out for Dan. Somehow Dan survives and drunkenly escapes while completely oblivious to what these thugs waiting to kill him. Dan NOW knows that it was in fact he himself from 2007 that orchestrated that AND why Katie was really there watching him. This whole episode was constructed to explain how Katie ended up with Dan instead of Jack.

And since no one but das seemed to get it - Livia is gone. We have been watching her "mission" for the past 7 episodes. While Dan is jumping around in time, she is also jumping with him to coax him and correct what she sees as needing repair. So at the end of the episode once his timeline is ironed out correctly so that Katie and he end up together, she leaves. She said goodbye because she has completed her time travel task with Dan's timeline.

That whole over-arching mission of hers while we watched 7 of Dan's blew me away a little. But I'm fairly certain that is the end of Livia unless Dan has to jump in order to save her - of course they'd have to meet in the present first for him to figure out what is wrong...

^^^
Yeah, time-travelling Livia is done, but today's Livia isn't. I have absolutely no doubt that Dan & Livia will meet in the present.

My whole point was that I wanted to know what saving that guy did. Obviously the focus was on Dan this time, but there was a reason for saving that guy, besides the hit on Dan.

And I'm saying from Livia's perspective, that is what put everything in motion to create the ending of Dan and Katie. There wasn't much to Dan saving that guy from Dan's perspective. It was Livia's mission that needed that to happen.

No, I get all that. What I want to know is where is Livia living her "everyday" life. When she is not time-traveling to help Dan (or any other missions she has had previously and will have subsequently), what is she doing? Dan has a wife and kid and a job and a regular life apart from his missions. Does Livia have the same? These would have been among my first questions for her, were I Dan.