TV shows we love: Travelers

Protocol 1: The mission comes first. But does it?

This is not your run-of-the-mill story about time travel. Instead of the whole person arriving in the 21st century to change things for the better, it is just their consciousness that is sent over. This, however, means that they will need a host body and usually – ‘usually’ being the operative word – they pick someone who is about to die and take over his or her body, and subsequently the host’s life.

Why are they here? Well, things – we are told – keep getting worse in the future, so the ‘Director’ sends operatives or ‘travellers’ back in time to prevent a global crisis from happening.

However, once the mission is complete, the team we are following finds out that there is more to come.

As the series progresses, we become very much aware of the butterfly effect.

Changing history also changes the outcome in unpredictable ways, creating a ‘faction’ that opposes the ‘Director’ and messes things up for our team in current time.

As if this is not enough, they also have to deal with their hosts’ lives, juggling not only work problems, divorce, abuse and sudden changes in identity, but emotional attachment as well, while concealing their true identity or ‘consciousness’ from the actual 21st century people.

When they come into contact with other travellers – Protocol 6: Do not communicate with other known travellers outside of your team – breaking protocol appears to be the only solution.

Our team of five seems to be set on breaking every single protocol.

The team comprises an FBI agent, a drug addict, a teen, a mentally challenged woman and the abused wife of a policeman, who on one hand have to keep up appearances and on the other try to make up a plausible excuse for why they keep disappearing for hours or days on end while on a mission they can’t talk about.

Protocol 4: Do not reproduce. Yeah, right.

Streaming on Netflix.