Perhaps, as Carly Simon once sang, these are the good old days.
In The Crossing, a sci-fi series launching Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, hundreds of refugees from 190 years in the future time-travel back to now – because life in 2208 turns out to be not so great.
Genetic modifications designed to rid the human body of disease have been further used to breed a race of superhumans who then decided to rule the world and eliminate the inconvenient mere mortals who lack their powers.
While these superhumans in The Crossing are known as Apex, it’s essentially the old master race gambit on steroids, and that’s only one of the metaphors galloping through this complicated show.
Jude Ellis (Steve Zahn, top) didn’t sign on for any of this when he left the big city to become police chief in the small town of Port Canaan, Oregon. Like Tom Selleck’s Jesse Stone and a battalion of other cops before him, he got burned out. He had separated from his wife and son. He needed to downshift.
Imagine his surprise, then, when several hundred bodies wash up on his beach at a time of year when no one goes swimming. While most of these folks are dead, 47 have survived, and that’s when the story really gets weird.
They’re refugees from America’s future, they say, and while that’s a tough story to swallow, the government is taking no chances. It sends Emma Peralta (Sandrine Holt, top) from Homeland Security to take over the investigation, stonewall the media and generally not let anyone know anything until they figure it out.
Officially, this is to avoid a panic and promote public safety. What we don’t know is whether someone in government has other motives. This being a sci-fi mystery series and all, not every agenda is immediately clear.
One unambiguous subplot, however, is established up front.
The first person who washed ashore still breathing was a young girl named Leah (Bailey Skodje, left) who wants her mother. We happen to know that her mother, Reece (Natalie Martinez, top), was among the survivors. We also soon learn that her mother is the first of the refugees identifiable as an Apex.
Exactly why a group of refugees fleeing the Apex world would have an Apex among them is unclear. It’s also unclear why people would go to the trouble of time-traveling if they were only going to end up drowning in a cold ocean 190 years in the past.
Truth is, the time travel that has worked so smoothly in productions from Back to the Future to Outlander is one giant screw-up here. Windows 8 looks like a technological triumph compared to this.
Addressing the implications of that issue turns out to be one of the many directions in which The Crossing will go. The refugees have a story. Many stories, actually. The government wants to craft a story. Sheriff Ellis wants to figure out what’s going on, especially after no one wants to tell him. Leah and Reece just want to get back together, though Reece’s superpowers make her a person of interest and not always in a good way.
Tuesday’s first episode focuses on setting up these multiple character dramas, leaving relatively little space for incidentals like the difference between life in 2018 and life in 2208.
We get a few hints, like Leah not knowing what a rabbit is and someone remarking in surprise that “meat” in 2018 comes from actual animals.
There will presumably be time to explore some of those differences as The Crossing rolls along. It will also explore the familiar question of whether time travelers can or should try to alter the course of history.
It seems most interested, though, in the people from now and then. Early indications suggest that however far we may advance in technology, there are good and bad chunks of our human personalities that don’t much change at all.