Timeless - 1x4 “Party at Castle Varlar” Full Reaction

I loved seeing your reaction to Sean Maguire from Once Upon A Time as Ian Fleming! It's good that no one spoiled it by telling you he was in this episode. If you haven't seen the Bond films, you might not have noticed the background music switched to the James Bond theme when Ian Fleming first appeared and in his final scene. My only small complaint about this episode is that they somewhat oversimplified the portrayal of Wehrner von Braun. Of course, that's to be expected in a one hour adventure show that is not really about him. But it's worth noting that the real von Braun had a much more complicated history than what they suggested in the show. In fact, the line "My concern is whether the rockets go up, not where they come down" was not a quote from von Braun. It was a line from the humorous song about von Braun by Tom Lehrer. The real von Braun was never so flippant about his role in the war. From a young age, von Braun was always committed to developing rockets for space flight but he knew he knew he could not get government funding for that, so he pitched the military potential of rockets to the Army during the years of the Weimar Republic before the Nazis came to power. By the time the Nazis took over, he was heading a major research program for the German Army. Like many professionals in Germany, he was required to join the Nazi Party in order to keep his job but he was never active in the party. In 1944 von Braun was arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of disloyalty to the Nazis and he spent two weeks in a prison camp until the General in charge of his program was able to exert enough influence to get him released. On the other hand, von Braun was aware of the terrible slave labor conditions in the V2 factory in which much of the rocket assembly work was done by concentration camp prisoners. It's generally believed he had no direct control over those conditions but he did choose to keep working on the project. One could argue that the more moral action would have been to resign, but remember that had he done so he would certainly have been arrested and probably executed. How many of us would have the courage to make the first choice? There's another distant connection to Disney in this episode, besides the presence of Sean Maguire from "Once Upon A Time." In the 1950s and 1960s, Wehrner von Braun worked with Walt Disney to produce several very popular Disney programs about space exploration.

Paul Fisher