As NBC Cancels "Timeless", Marshall Barnes, R&D Eng Emerges As Big WInner

Press Release (ePRNews.com) - LOS ANGELES - May 12, 2017 - Yesterday, the NBC television network ended a long waiting period for fans of the time travel adventure,
Timeless, with news they didn’t want to hear – the show is canceled.This was only shocking to Marshall Barnes, the leading science expert on time travel, popular writer on Quora.com, and author of Paradox Lost: The True Geometries of Time Travel, because of the timing of the news – less than 24 hours after his own press release announced his launching his own movie project, The ZeitNauts™, which he got the inspiration for, knowing Timeless was probably doomed, and the science of time travel is at the point it could become reality TV (see First Human Time Travel Test Subject Program Gets Launched Saturday May 13th) .

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “The ratings should have been higher all along, and I identified the reason early – the show was too predictable because the history was too well known and done before in other time travel shows. I call it, the Time Tunnel effect, because that’s what killed The Time Tunnel back in the ’60s – too much well known history and predictability goes through the roof, which equals boring TV. They also contradicted their own rules of time travel, which were wrong to start, making the show frustrating for hard core time travel fans, which have grown in number. That was the fight Shawn Ryan and I got into on Twitter. He heard about passionate time travel fans crying foul and dissed them with a back handed comment on Twitter, simultaneously saying time travel science didn’t even exist yet which isn’t close to being true. It proved how arrogantly ignorant he is. I’ll even debate him over it at WizardCon or ComicCon and let fans decide the winner, because this issue isn’t going away”.

It’s clear there’s a backlash to time travel fiction taking too many liberties with facts and science. A good example of a show that handled it well, Marshall says, is FRINGE.

“Look at that. Five seasons. The fifth was a struggle but they got it. They knew what they were doing. Look at Stargate SG-1. Ten seasons, and Timeless couldn’t get a 2nd one? I called it, months ago”.

The irony is Eric Kripke, one of the creators of Timeless, was a show runner for FRINGE. Marshall points out another.

“Writers should stay away from time travel TV unless they prove they understand it. Eric put out this tweet – ‘Strange to see this today, of all days. But turns out, the way the Lifeboat operates is REAL. pic.twitter.com/J2sFTA5vBJ (https://t.co/J2sFTA5vBJ)’ with a link to a Newsweek story about a paper written by Ben Tippett of the University of British Columbia. The problem is Tippet has his theoretical time machine inside a bubble that creates a closed time-like loop, but we see the Lifeboat on Timeless performing what is called, macroscopic quantum tunneling via torsion, which makes the time machine disappear and go to the past. I’ve heard references in the show that it makes a CTC but the ship itself doesn’t operate on that principle. Besides, Tippet says his model for a time machine wouldn’t work in reality, so Eric can’t read? It just makes me want to scream.”

Screaming aside, Marshall insists the cancelation of Timeless means there’s a case, unlike ever before, for more experts in the science to be involved with the writing, not just the productions. The audiences are getting too smart to accept sloppy time travel plot lines and the cancelation of Timeless proves it.

“The handling of the time travel aspects by Shawn Ryan alienated a sizable audience supporting the show. When the audience size started to recover, it was from a demographic not caring about the time travel plotlines because they weren’t really time travel fans. They were history fans and indentified as such. People like Angel Brown, Sheri VW, Colson Crowell, Tracey Roberts,Isabella F. McFarlin, Jillian Adge, Fiona Gallagher, Meaghan Cameron, Corey Adams and Karl Castleberry among many others. But that demo isn’t there for the time travel and time travel fans don’t care as much about history.12 Monkeys, Deja Vu, Source Code. Just three of the many time travel films that aren’t about history.

“The history Timeless did wasn’t that interesting and it could’ve been. Jesse James? Bonnie and Clyde? Why didn’t they visit Nikola Tesla? That would’ve been perfect and ties in more with the Rittenhouse conspiracy arc. In fact, they missed the opportunity to pick-up the whole steampunk fan base by ignoring that time period pretty much. But the Alamo? We already know what’s going to happen, so people like me ended up thinking, ‘I know the Alamo. Why am I watching this?’

“So, Timeless turned off many of the time travel fans, and gained history buffs but not enough to make the difference. If it had satisfied both groups, they could’ve gotten 5 seasons. But it would appear Ryan messed that up.”

Marshall’s appearing in Columbus, OH at the MarCon sci-fi convention this weekend. Among others, he’ll talk on how to write the next level of time travel fiction for this smarter audience, reflecting new science released frequently now, much of it his own research, like his experiments proving parallel universes are real, making paradoxes impossible.