Time Trax
Entry updated 18 November 2019. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (1993-1994). Gary Nardino Productions in association with Lorimar Television. Created by/Co-executive producer Harve Bennett, Jeffrey Hayes, Grant Rosenberg. Executive producer Gary Nardino. Cast includes Elizabeth Alexander, Peter Donat, Dale Midkiff and Mia Sara. Writers include Bennett, Harold Gast and David Loughery. Two-hour pilot January 1993, written by Bennett, directed by Lewis Teague. 44 one-hour episodes in all.
Another example of Harve Bennett's knack for the creation of populist, action-packed, comparatively routine sf adventure. Time Trax was more of the same, and ran in syndication to independent Television stations. In the year 2192 police officer Captain Darien Lambert (Midkiff) finds that major criminals are disappearing, and discovers that megalomaniac physicist Dr Mordecai Sahmbi (Donat) is sending criminals back in time to the twentieth century, indeed to our present day. He follows them there. Apart from the Time Travel, and a few super-scientific accessories for Lambert – including Selma, a mainframe Computer which is contained in something that looks like a credit card and can project a female hologram (Alexander) in visual mode – most of the action is not especially science-fictional, and is more concerned with running down a succession of criminals hiding out in our time. There is a degree of Humour in Lambert's attempts to adjust culturally to twentieth-century customs. Lambert has Superpowers by our standards (IQ 204, runs the 100 metres in 8.6 secs, can use "time stalling" to slow down visual perception via Time Distortion and thus react faster) but these are not unusual, we are told, for the twenty-second century.
Time Trax, according to surveys, was popular with young men. The series was filmed in Australia, and some post-production was also Australian. [PN/GF/DRL]
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