Voyagers!
Entry updated 19 November 2023. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (1982-1983). Universal. Created by James D Parriott. Produced by Jill Sherman and Robert Steinhauer. Directors include Allan Levi, Bernard McEveety, Ron Satloff and Virgil Vogel. Cast includes Jon Eric Hexum and Meeno Peluce. Twenty 50-minute episodes. Colour.
Phineas Bogg (Hexum) and Jeffrey Jones (Peluce) are Voyagers who Time-Travel to put History right – which is to say, the way we know it to have been (see Time Police). The premise could have been interesting, but generally remained trivial (reminding the Wright Brothers to invent the aeroplane, helping Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run and, more inventively, saving Jean Lafitte the pirate so that the British do not win the Battle of New Orleans and rescuing the Mona Lisa from the sinking of the Titanic), although a visit to 1969 and the first Moon landing in the episode "Pursuit" reveals that the timeline has gone astray and the US space programme does not exist; the discovered Jonbar Point is that the USSR rather than the USA acquired the best German Rocket Scientists after World War Two, and with the help of the Wernher von Braun of 1945 "our" history is restored. In the final episode, Jack the Ripper turns out to be a renegade Voyager trying to corrupt history.
Not helped by the woodenness of its handsome leading players, Voyagers seems to have received very little foreign distribution and to have been largely ignored by the sf community. [PN/DRL]
see also: Captain Z-Ro.
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