Tightrope Walker

Yes, there were more than three episodes, and the last one aired pretty much leaves you wondering what's going on in the storyline. That's just the danger of television; a novel ends where it's supposed to end, but TV is a collective endeavor whose product depends on a thousand different judgments about business and programming. I'm sure that's no shock to you.

Ordinarily I wouldn't talk about where the arc was going, but then, ordinarily there's another half-season where you'd get to watch that arc play out. I know some people got really involved in the second season and you feel you were left hanging. So, for you:

I'm going to be talking about "spoilers," if they can be called that when a show is over.

First, I joined TC late in the first season, when the idea of Jack had already been introduced. I thought, "Good timing. I'm joining when the fun part starts!" We dived right into my episode, "Two Pair." By the end of that, it was clear to the audience that Tru had an opponent, someone who was working against her to maintain the timeline as it was. The idea was never that he'd be a villain in the classic sense, but that he had a different view of what was "good" or "bad" in these circumstances. The rest of the season expanded the cat-and-mouse game between the two of them.

Here's where I go into some of the mythology you never got to see explained before the show disappeared. Of course, canon can be boring when it's just written out, so let's play with this for your amusement. Suppose Tru rushes to save a woman about to die, only to find Jack in her way.

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JACK: You can't keep doing this just because you have the power. It's wrong.

TRU: I'm saving that woman's life! How is that wrong?

JACK: Who the hell are you to decide you can tilt the balance of the universe? Everything we do has consequences, Tru. Everything. You save one person, and what happens?

TRU (with her best sarcasm): She lives. I see what a problem that would be.

JACK: It would be, because there's a plan at work here bigger than anyone can comprehend. This woman lives, and that plan gets thrown off track. She's home when the next-door neighbor has his heart attack; she drives him to the hospital. He lives, and goes on to abuse his two children. One of them grows up to be the next Unabomber. The other marries a man who was originally destined for someone else, who would have been his partner in discovering a cure for cancer --

TRU: You can't know all this!

JACK: I know there's a plan, and I know you're destroying it, like a child who doesn't understand why Mommy won't let her paint on the walls.

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One of the aims of season two was to gradually outline the overarching mythology for the audience. There was a lot of discussion of this at the beginning of the year. I'm a big proponent of the idea that on any show it pays to have the mythology straight in the writers' minds, even when they aren't going to show all their cards to the audience right away. Because the audience can always tell when you're making it up as you go along, and they feel taken advantage of. Mind you, there are going to be some refinements and additions that are indeed made up along the way; and if they work, that's all you can ask.

I'll start with the big-picture idea here: There are two great Powers in the universe concerned with humanity's fate. (This particular part of the mythology I feel I'd better admit was mine -- because while television is a group effort, and most of the mythology was on the way to being implemented, I'm not 100 percent certain it would all have been. And should you find this specific idea incredibly dumb, I don't want anyone else blamed for it.)

World mythology has a lot of ways of presenting fate -- three old women weaving, that sort of thing. For the moment, interpret "Powers" as you will -- single forces, groups; religious, non-religious. But since Jack's calling was clearly to stop Tru, there had to be two warring forces at work here. (Or one with advanced schizophrenia.)

The first Power long ago laid out the original plan the Earth has been following for millennia -- to what end, we don't know. (Jack's side would have you believe that despite pain along the way, this is our best possible future.) Over time, a rebellious second Power arose that wanted to intervene and make changes. To "improve" things, whatever the risk of throwing the great plan off track. (Again, improve by whose definition? This was something to be gone into over the show's long term.) The rebellious Power -- and here I suspect I was influenced a bit by Philip Pullman's "revolt against Heaven" -- was more accepting of individual freedom and choice. So this is what they do:

When a person dies who is on the crux of some change of Fate, someone who could influence things more than usual one way or another, this Power… opens a door, you could say. And they offer that person a choice. You can go forward, or you can return and finish your life. If you truly want it, ask for it.

Every time Tru saves someone who asks for help, she steers our race's destiny a little further from what was originally planned, and a little closer to what the -- let's say, the editors -- want. It would be interesting if somewhere along the way we discovered that one of these plans will end in a barren piece of rock and no human race. But which one?

What we have are two competing Fates, battling for control of humanity.

And now back to the group process.

We would have learned that one of Jack's advantages over Tru is that his mentor, Tru's father, is alive, and can fill him in on the long line of knowledge from his predecessors. Tru's mentor should have been her mother, but she died unexpectedly; the episode I was writing when the show was cancelled would have taken place during a bank robbery while Tru's father was consulting his wife's old diary he'd left in the safety deposit. (Nice touch: Jack doesn't tell him about the robbery when the day repeats -- because Tru's Dad has to be there to choose the hostages who'll be shot, just as he was forced to at gunpoint on Day One.) Besides dealing with the main plot, he has to make sure she doesn't read the diary and learn a lot more than she should. (And Jack has to intervene in the hostage situation to make sure exactly the same people die on Day Two.)

That's the big picture. And now we come to the specific arc that the audience was dropped out in the middle of: the consequences of what happens when Tru uses her gift for her own plan, all fates aside; when she saves a friend who didn't ask for help.

(To be continued in part two.)