After another earthquake, Will and Holly find one of the previously sealed temple doors has been shifted and they can get inside to investigate. They find some kind of crystal embedded in a plaque written in Altrusian. They go to see Enik for help.  He identifies it as a “time crystal” and wants it for himself, convinced it will give him a way out of the Land and back to his own time.

With a title like Timestop, I was surprisingly disappointed with the story. It’s not that it’s not a good science fiction idea; it’s actually a really good one. The problem is that by this point in the series, it almost feels like we’re dealing with entirely different people to the ones we used to know. The Enik we knew in Season 1 has gradually become more annoyed and treats the Marshall’s as pests rather than friends, despite some of what they’ve been through together. He threatens them by trapping them inside the cave with him, claiming he won’t open the door until they give him the crystal. Yet for all his intelligence, he is easily duped by Jack. He lets Jack and Will escape but why bother even negotiating?  Either Enik can overpower them, or the Marshall’s just have to wait Enik out. Sooner or later, they’ll either drive Enik crazy or he’ll need to go out for food himself. Not to mention, he makes some really dumb choices when leaving the time-pylon. I’ll come to that in a second. Meanwhile, the Marshall’s don’t do much better. Jack tricks Enik which doesn’t paint him out especially well considering he’s supposed to be the good guy in the series, after all!

The worst part is that Enik didn’t have to be turned into a bad guy here.  In fact, this was a win-win scenario that goes horribly wrong.  Here’s the thing with the crystal: it works like a VCR – press forward, and things accelerate, press backwards and things rewind. Guess what, Jack? If you rewind time and you’re inside the pylon, you don’t go anywhere.  You could rewind time enough to send Holly, Will and Rick home – because rewinding time enough would bring their father back before it would send them all home.  It would also potentially work to send Enik home as well.  Unfortunately, there’s a risk to his niece and nephew.  Assuming the time rewind only affects the land, if the kids did get out, they’d get as far as the falls where they would plummet back into the Land, if they didn’t just die on impact from the falls.  This would allow them some form of escape at any rate and Enik could go back to his people and prevent the cataclysm that turns them into Sleestak. As we approach the end of the series, this would have been a good way to start wrapping it up effectively.  But none of this happens, which means, we’re in a storyline that could offer solutions but we get absolutely nothing instead.  Talk about a let down!

To compound the stupidity of it, Enik accepts the Marshall’s plan to give over the crystal while holding Will hostage. I can accept all that with a pretty heavy stipulation: Enik stays in the time pylon with Jack. Why does he step outside?? He becomes part of the rewind which means he will go back to before he was awareness of the time crystal.  This would be perfect if he told Jack to keep rewinding far enough to send everyone home.  Jack would be lost to the Land, but everyone else could have escaped.  Show me an uncle who would not happily save his family and potentially an entire race by twisting a crystal.  Jack could have rewound everyone out of the Land, and hey, maybe knowing all that was coming for him might have given him a leg up on things in the “repeated” future.  This is the problem with time travel stories; you find yourself hoist by your own petard.  It’s just a tragic shame that Enik didn’t instruct Jack a bit more.   Sure the series would have ended a few weeks prematurely, but it would have been a good ending at least.

After such a disappointment with the time travel elements, it’s hard to appreciate the things like learning what deja vu is – I mean that from the viewing audience’s perspective at the time. The surprise of seeing Torchy die was brief too because I quickly worked out that he’d be back when time rewound. What I didn’t see coming is the silly way the writers basically neutralized the time pylon by having Torchy weld the door shut. Surely crystal from another world would not melt like metal on ours?!

In the end, this is a lackluster affair after so many good time travel stories in this series. It’s still better than some episodes as it does have a foundation in science fiction but it’s on the lower end of the spectrum. Season three hasn’t been bad overall, but I understand why I bailed on watching it before; by contrast to the previous two, this one is a lot harder to press through. ML