YMMV / Timeless

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Richard Nixon is actually a Doomed Moral Victor of the series, fighting Rittenhouse's attempts to subvert the United States government. In order to do this he has to take some pretty drastic measures, leading to Watergate in the main timeline and his probable assassination in the alternate initiated by "The Kennedy Curse" (the date on the Nixon half-dollar is 1964, indicating that Nixon died at least 30 years earlier than in reality). Nixon knew about Rittenhouse (the missing 18 1/2 minutes on the Watergate tapes reveal this) and was attempting to use his various 'ratfucking' schemes to attempt to root them out. Unfortunately he underestimated just how deeply rooted Rittenhouse was and of course had no idea about their access to time travel, and was brought down in at least two timelines. Nixon's own deep-seated insecurities only made their job easier.
• Complete Monster: "The World's Columbian Exposition": H.H. Holmes is far worse than any member of Rittenhouse. After abandoning his own wife and children, Holmes will go on to con and murder many women, eventually setting up a hotel during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair equipped with many death traps used to kill unsuspecting victims such as poisonous gas and soundproof isolation chambers designed to kill people through oxygen deprivation. When Rufus and Wyatt fell afoul of one of his traps after being tricked by Garcia Flynn to enter the World's Fair Hotel, Holmes would disguise himself as an unsuspecting victim imprisoned with them named George Henry just to see his victims expressing fear in their final moments. After Lucy saves them with the help of Harry Houdini, Holmes kidnaps and subsequently tortures Lucy when she discovers Henry's true identity, planning to kill himself and Lucy to avoid capture. When his plan was thwarted by Wyatt, Holmes makes one last con, lying about wanting to confess his murders to his victims' families in order to save his own skin.
• Genius Bonus:
  • A Ritternhouse agent tries to steal Citizen Kane for William Randolph Hearst, who's convinced of how damaging it would be just with the word "Rosebud." This was rumored to be his nickname for his mistress' genitalia.
  • Abby Franklin, mother of Benjamin, says a couple of his quotations: "Beer is proof that God wants us to be happy," and "If we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately."
    • After Lucy and company free the accused witches, Lucy tells the women to flee north to New Hampshire where they can be safe until things calm down. Truth in Television: the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire at the time had a very bitter personal rivalry and weren't known for cooperating with each other. The odds of New Hampshire (which never had anything like the Salem Witch Trials) honoring a warrant from Massachusetts to arrest several women on charges of practicing witchcraft were extremely low.
  • Harriet Tubman is portrayed as having prophetic visions that include the heroes' arrival from the Lifeboat. She actually suffered from epilepsy due to a head injury from fighting back against her master during her youth as a slave.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Disappointed by the 2003 movie adaptation of Timeline? Don't worry there's always Timeless for anyone who wants to see a good TV series based on the novel.
  • It's basically Rewind (2013) if it were made into a full-length show.
  • The show is also an American remake of the Spanish series The Ministry of Time.
  • It's also a modern day Time Tunnel reboot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • "Party at Castle Varlar":
    • Lucy starts shaking and becoming disoriented as she is overwhelmed by all that has happened. The first time this happens is in the present, but the next two times are in the past after she is poured a glass of alcohol. In both cases, Lucy doesn't take a drink with everyone else and her hands start shaking, until someone pressures her to take the drink, which she uneasily does. This looks like a setup for Lucy being a recovering alcoholic who is starting to fall Off the Wagon. But nope, her issues are resolved by the end of the episode and it's just a coincidence that two out of her three freakouts were around alcohol.
    • Lucy has some pretty good reasons to be going into Heroic BSoD. Her sister and best friend has vanished from reality due to her actions, and even if Lucy can get her back, it might mean the return of her mother's cancer. She's seen multiple violent deaths, nearly been killed repeatedly, is about to try to infiltrate a German Nazi event despite speaking no German, and basically all of reality depends on her not screwing up a possibly endless onslaught of violent missions. In spite of all that, her breakdown centers around a teenage accident that caused her to be claustrophobic - even though claustrophobia plays no part in the episode.
  • In "The World's Columbian Exposition" Lucy confesses to Houdini that she is claustrophobic, which Houdini helps her overcome. She had no such reluctance in "The Alamo" when the situation was no less urgent, having to escape the Alamo through a narrow tunnel. Continuity doesn't seem to be a strong spot for this series.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Over the course of season 2, Wyatt Logan leaves Lucy in favour of his late wife Jessica, who later turns out to be a Rittenhouse mole. This is, in itself, a perfectly reasonable acceptable thing to do. Less reasonable or acceptable is that he spends the rest of the season continuing to presume on his and Lucy's one-night relationship, to the point of repeatedly guilt-tripping her over having spent a night with Flynn and about her growing friendship with him, while having very noisy sex with his wife just down the hall from the sofa Lucy is sleeping on, attempting to touch her over her vocal objections and finally hitting her in the season finale. Despite this, in the Christmas special, they get back together despite Wyatt having never even apologised for any of this but hitting her.

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