Fucking Day: Time After Time

What if I told you hot young H.G. Wells has to chase his best friend, hot young Jack the Ripper, through time in his newly invented time machine, and they might kiss. "Sign me up!" You would say, right? "Please, give me six seasons and a movie of this show," you would beg. Yet, somehow a show with this exact same hot horny historical premise lasted only five episodes on ABC before it was cruelly taken from us. What happened, and how could we have made H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper kiss? Let's explore it.

Time After Time is based on a 1979 movie and book both with the same name. I actually think there are a few reasons this show didn't work. First, there was no framework for how they would keep the plot interesting once they ran out of book plot, which was already thin to begin with. Next, most of the acting was good, but the main female character is only special because the male main characters keep looking straight into the camera and telling us how special she is. And this is the big one; they were setting up a redemption arc for Jack the Ripper in 2017, right at the beginning of the MeToo movement. Usually, we love redeeming a serial killer, but the time after timing was off.

Also, they used lyrics from the Cyndi Lauper song "Time After Time" as the title of each episode, even though the song is never featured in the show! There are only so many lyrics in that song; most of them are time after time. If the show had gone for six seasons, there would have been at least ten episodes of Time After Time called "Time After Time." It really wasn't set up to be sustainable in any way.

If you didn't recognize him from the pictures, that's America's favorite twink, Freddie Stroma, playing H.G. Wells. He left a small role on Game Of Thrones to play the character, which wasn't the best career move, but he played a prince in Bridgerton after the show flopped, and now he's pretty beloved for playing Vigilante on Peacemaker so things turned out alright.

The show opens with H.G. Wells throwing a time machine party for all his friends, including his hot doctor friend John Stevenson. (They have might kiss someday energy). His friends are not impressed by the time machine and mostly call him a nerd and tease him about being divorced. I agree with them. Quit inventing time machines and get laid, you hot nerd.

But what if the time machine were a vehicle for getting laid? We'll get there. The first twelve minutes of the Time After Time pilot are some of the fastest-paced I've ever seen. The police knock on H.G. Wells' door as he's showing off the time machine. Jack the Ripper has struck nearby, and they're searching all the homes in the area. They notice a doctor's bag in the corridor belonging to John, and what's inside it? A big bloody knife! The police need to talk to John, but where is he? Still in the basement with the time machine, wuh oh!

H.G. built the time machine to always return to his basement in 1893, unless you have a special key that lets you keep it wherever you want. This allows H.G. to chase Jack the Ripper to the year 2017 where he meets a sexy assistant museum curator, Jane Walker. (They have will definitely kiss by episode three energy.) In the book and movie, H.G. Wells falls in love with a bank teller, but the TV show made her into a museum curator to give her marginally more to do. Obviously, they should have made her a cop and the show a time-traveling version of Bones. There, I fixed it, twelve seasons for time-traveling Bones.

H.G. Wells goes after John and ends up getting hit by a car. Since he had Jane's card on him, she got a call from the hospital and decided to let this time maniac spend the night at her apartment. There's an obligatory scene where she sees him shirtless and then pins him down to lovingly shave his mustache.

We get a lot of shirtless H.G. Wells in the pilot. He runs around the house with his shirt only partially buttoned while searching for Jane after she's inevitably kidnapped by Jack the Ripper. His future great-granddaughter tends to his six-pack ab wounds shortly after they meet, and then he just kinda hangs out with his shirt off for the rest of the scene. I'm very confident that off-camera, somewhere, a producer took his shirt and ran away in a valiant attempt to save this show.

While Jane is kidnapped by Jack the Ripper, she explains his role in history, and he's pissed because people think he kills prostitutes because he hates women. He claims he only kills prostitutes because they're easy targets, and then proceeds to only target and murder women for the rest of the show, so…I think someone is lying to themselves about why they do murders. It does seem like our attitude toward Jack the Ripper is supposed to be, "Maybe I can fix him." With a little bit of therapy, I think he could start murdering men, too!

In the few additional episodes I was able to get my hands on after the pilot, there's an attempt to make Jack the Ripper more sympathetic by having him try to save a son he wasn't aware he had, who died in World War I. It's probably one of my favorite episodes because it's one of the few that actually utilizes time travel. The time travel budget for this show is very slim. They mostly travel to times that look a lot like 2017, and it feels a little bit like the Star Trek episodes where they visit an alien planet that happens to look exactly like Earth! They travel to the year 1980 and basically do nothing but give the actors all bad perms.

The time machine itself is an anticlimax machine. There's no fun spinning through a wormhole sequence. The windows freeze over, there's no motion at all, and then it's a different year. It runs on a tiny crystal and complicated mathematical equations, I guess. There's something about the fourth dimension, but overall, they mostly don't even try to explain the show's sci-fi elements. Everyone knows that's not what we're here for unless H.G. Wells needs to explain how time travel works with his top off.

By the end of the pilot, H.G. Wells has both the key to the time machine and Jane, but Jack the Ripper remains on the loose. Apparently, the pilot of the TV show uses up most of the plot points from the movie, and everything after that would have to be new material, which is pretty clear if you're ever able to drag the remaining four aired episodes up from the pit of TV hell they were launched into.

No other show has ever been more clearly winging it. By episode 5, we meet an evil doctor who knows about Jack the Ripper, and it seems like maybe he has gone back in time and started an organization of evil doctors that will fight H.G. and his great-granddaughters' organization of philanthropists. Eventually, I imagine the two organizations would probably learn to get along, and H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper would kiss. Since not even a full season of the series aired, I guess we'll just have to assume that's what happened.

I wish I could accurately describe the menacingly horny energy of this show. I recently wrote about a novella where a woman has sex with the Kool-Aid Man, who is also her stepbrother, and I think this is hornier than that. We can look to the sequel to the book version of Time After Time to try and figure out what the future may have held for the show. It looks like the sequel is called Jaclyn The Ripper because somehow escaping from prison and time traveling turns Jack The Ripper into a woman. Hot, says some local perverts, including me.

We'll never know what Time After Time could have been other than mediocre at best. It clearly belongs in the landfill with the E.T. Atari games where it currently rests. No one is petitioning for its resurrection unless they're willing to change their stance to actually, Jack the Ripper was probably an irredeemably bad guy. I know it's controversial, but I think the premise could withstand it.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Waylan Russell, someone that knows the value of time traveling hunks who should kiss each other and then maybe kiss me too.

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