TODAY'S TWD: THE JOURNEYMAN STRAIN

With all of this free time, now that the regular TV season is over and my summer shows haven't yet started up (although I am adding 'In Plain Sight' to the mix), I'm trying to clear out the backlog in my DVR queue. Tuesday I watched 1 1/2 episodes of 'The Sarah Jane Adventures' (the second half of the "Revenge Of The Slitheen" and the full "Eye Of The Gorgon") and the first hour of the mini-series (really a two-part movie!) of "The Andromeda Strain". The original movie is probably my favorite "hard" science fiction movie but only read the book afterwards. Add to that my interest in this production being piqued by Medium Rob's advance review, I was eager to add "The Andromeda Strain" to the TV Universe.

Within fifteen minutes, though, that dream was dashed, once they introduced William J. Scott as the President of the United States [pictured]. As most visitors to Inner Toob know, the main Toobworld should reflect the real world when it comes to the POTUS, since so many sitcoms will eventually get around to making jokes about the current Commander-in-Chief, and perhaps even work the actual person into the plot. ('Here's Lucy' with Kennedy, 'Gomer Pyle' with LBJ, 'Angie' and Carter, 'The Nanny' and Clinton, and 'Whoopi' with Bush as examples.)

And then it veered off into the near future with the 'Star Trek' gadgetry of "vid-paper" in an early scene, and I saw a way to at least get a tenuous connection to the main Toobworld and with a link to another TV series to boot!

In the 'Journeyman' episode of "The Hanged Man", Dan Vasser accidentally left behind a digital camera. When he returned to his present, he found that the timeline had changed dramatically. The technology was far more advanced than it was when he left, and that included the type of "video-paper" seen in "The Andromeda Strain". (Of greater concern of course was that Dan's son Zack no longer existed but instead he had a daughter named Caroline.)

So Dan went back again and was able to retrieve the camera before it could be utilized for changing the future by the person who found it; and when he made it back to his own time, it was his original timeline again.

However, that old timeline, with the free-floating computer screens and the vid-paper AND President William J. Scott, didn't disappear. Once created, it remained in existence in its own plane of "reality". It continued without Dan Vasser's presence.

I have no clue as to how the alternate version of his family dealt with his disappearance. The counterpart of his wife, at least, knew of his time traveling ways and of his desire to go back and fix the offspring discrepancy, so she probably understood why he was gone. Eventually she probably even came up with a cover story - something along the lines that Dan had turned out to be no different from his father Frank in abandoning his family.

So that's not too shabby - only one hour viewed so far and already I have a connection to the main TV Universe - from before its home dimension splintered off to be a new TV dimension!

We'll see what the next three hours will bring..... (I think the coagulated blood may make for a connection to some 'Star Trek' series or another.)

BCnU!
Toby OB