This week, Timeless takes us back to the golden age of Hollywood, with episode 3 of season 2: Hollywoodland.  Spoilers are ahead in this review, so please be warned!

Visiting this period of Hollywood, and obviously including Hedy Lamarr (played by Alyssa Sutherland) is quite timely, with there being several recent articles and films, such as ‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ (produced by Susan Sarandon), highlighting her scientific, as well as artistic achievement.  This period also suited some of the character development aspects that needed to be dealt with, although unfortunately, this wasn’t always done without a little clumsiness.

TIMELESS -- "Hollywoodland"

TIMELESS — “Hollywoodland” Episode 203 — Pictured: Teddy Sears as Lucas — (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

The gist of the plot in this episode revolved around saving the footage of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from the clutches of the Rittenhouse sleeper agent (TV regular Teddy Sears), and ultimately William Randolph Hearst (John Colton), who is willing to give Rittenhouse an influential column in his paper in exchange.

TIMELESS -- "Hollywoodland"

TIMELESS — “Hollywoodland” Episode 203 — Pictured: (l-r) Malcolm Barrett as Rufus Carlin, Abigail Spencer as Lucy Preston, Matt Lanter as Wyatt Logan — (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

Like last week’s episode, the sleeper agent part of this story doesn’t entirely make sense.  You don’t need to be embedded in time for 15 years, just to steal some film.  There is nothing in the plot that suggests it was strictly necessary either, but that is apparently Rittenhouse’s plan, which seems ridiculous, and is signposted by the fact that they say they will be bringing him ‘home’ soon; if he was to remain embedded and the film theft wasn’t the end game, then I don’t know why they’d take him back to the modern day.

TIMELESS -- "Hollywoodland"

TIMELESS — “Hollywoodland” Episode 203 — Pictured: (l-r) Matt Lanter as Wyatt Logan, Abigail Spencer as Lucy Preston — (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

This relatively simple plot is really just a structure on which to build the character moments on though, and doesn’t really forward the main overarching story very much.  The primary focus of this episode seems to be a pretty clunky soap style addressing of the romance between Wyatt (Matt Lanter) and Lucy (Abigail Spencer), which has been touted for some time.  The cliché device of ‘couple about to kiss and someone walks in spoiling the moment before it can happen’ (the ‘moment killer’ or ‘almost kiss’ trope) has been employed a few times already, and makes an appearance in this episode, before the connection is finally consummated.  Obviously, you can’t upset the ‘status quo’ of having there be a tension between Lucy and Wyatt, so another trope is dumped on us at the end of the episode that blows everything up; hopefully, that will be subverted in the next episode or so.

The clunkiest part of all this, is the Hollywood party where Lucy is forced to sing a song, which then strangely echoes the sexual tension between Lucy and Wyatt.  It’s a little ‘on the nose’ and some eye rolling may occur when it is watched…

TIMELESS -- "Hollywoodland"

TIMELESS — “Hollywoodland” Episode 203 — Pictured: (l-r) Claudia Doumit as Jiya, Malcolm Barrett as Rufus Carlin — (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

What is more interesting, but gets less attention, is the Jiya (Claudia Doumit) plotline.  Her seizures and visions/hallucinations hint at something much more complicated and involved than we have seen before, but there has been little time spent on it.  Small tidbits have been dropped in the past couple of episodes, and the beginnings of a closer examination appears here; personally, I would have been more interested in this storyline than the romance that is essentially the central core of this episode, but I am denied.  That Jiya has apparently had previous medical conditions fixed by the jump in the lifeboat during last season raises many questions, yet none of them are answered, or even looked at here.

Despite the annoying cliché elements, this was still a very enjoyable episode, rattled along nicely and was very much a ‘paradigm shifter’, as not only do we have the main characters unsettled, we also have Flynn (Goran Visnjic ) joining the team.  The ‘sleeper agent’ issue needs to be addressed though, as continuing to have nonsensical plans in motion will surely undermine the future plotting, which looks so promising.  With Nicholas Keynes (Michael Rady) they have created an intriguing adversary, and it would be a shame to spoil a good development in the overall mythology of the show, by fudging the logic behind it.  Let’s see where we go from here…