Former Timeless Fan Turns Against the Show: Calls for it's "Termination"

Marshall Barnes has just released a scathing rebuttal for a 3rd season for NBC’s time travel adventure program, Timeless, just as its fate hangs in the balance once again. Barnes, a well known advanced concept science and technology engineer who is also an expert in temporal mechanics and proponent for true time travel research, cites a number of factors as to why he not only quit supporting the show but now calls for it to be cancelled.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, we’re sure, he says it’s time for the show to be “terminated”, a take off of the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger line from the Terminator time travel science fiction series. 

“It’s pretty simple – the show doesn’t have the ratings to indicate that it even has the sizable support that it pretends to, the show’s writers haven’t a clue on how to write competent time travel fiction and one of the show producers went out of his way to insult the fans of time travel science and the science itself. As a member of both those communities, I’m not supporting a project that not only insults my own sensibilities but a producer who thinks he can get away with it. I’m the guy that’s saying he can’t – and I’ve been right so far.”

In his article, published by Futurism.media, Marshall points out that he predicted trouble for the show early on in its first season, and said that it would be canceled, which it was, but as he describes it, a tiny minority of fans threw a “hissy fit” and got the network to give the producers, what Barnes calls, a half-season - to see if producers Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan could get the ratings back up. As Barnes points out, they failed as did the “tiny minority” of rabid fans, known as “Clockblockers”, even when the producers, cast and crew made a plea for them to watch live and cause a boost in the ratings. The ratings went from a .5 to a mere .6, which they had been at two weeks before, anyway.

“Timeless needs to be canceled to teach all of these bad writers and producers that they can’t just run roughshod over this genre anymore. Get a flipping’ consultant on the latest science, for crying out loud because there is a sizable group of us out here that will not support crap that insults our intelligence anymore. This is where it ends, damnit, and I really don’t care what the Timeless fans think of our position. The ratings wouldn’t be collasping if I was wrong. If the Clockblockers mattered all that much, they would have kept the ratings of the show up – but they failed because there aren’t enough of them to even matter. Clearly there is something terribly wrong where you can show a steady decline in ratings from one season to the next and that means that alienating the true time travel audience was a big, big mistake.”

“I think we’re sick of it,” Marshall continued. “We’re sick of writers slinging out crap that’s as accurate to the science as the movie A Trip To The Moon was to lunar exploration. Imagine someone doing a film like that now and expecting it to be taken seriously? That’s almost as bad as all the time travel stuff is now because the writers don’t talk to any of us working on the science, and I’m sorry, but none of the science popularizers are members of that clique. I wrote a pretty good article on that already, and Shawn Ryan and Malcolm Barrett just made things worse by being insulting. So, as far as I’m concerned, and obviously millions of other people who have tuned Timeless out since it first season, they can go to Hell. Their stupid farce of a show will eventually end – no matter what, and since that show debuted time travel science has made leaps and bounds in repeateble examples of the experimental science supporting it.”

Marshall wrote, Paul Sutter (the Space Man) Makes My Points For Me – Why Physicists Know Nothing About Time Travel for Futurism.media to prove his point that most physicists know little or nothing about what he calls “true time travel science” because they rely on the theories of relativity, which have been proven inconsequential when it comes to time travel, and they aren’t serious about trying to solve it. Marshall points out that the real solutions are found amongst a wide ranging group of scientific areas and he gives a list of over 20 things that anyone needs to know to understand true time travel, as well as a list of scientific contributors to the study, ranging from well known physicists and engineers to those not so well known outside of their fields of specialization.

“What makes matters worse is that Malcolm Barrett, a two bit actor on Timeless, goes out and acts as if he knows the science for real, and then lies about the fact. He was on some stupid geek culture show, Only Stupid Answers, saying that he really is a time travel geek in real life and starts misquoting all these theories. When I called him on it, instead of owning up to it, he lies to his fans about me, saying that I expect him to know that stuff because of his character, when that’s ridiculous. It just proves what a coward he is, as well as an arrogant jack ass and I found it more than amusing that now, his character on the show has been killed and his ultimate fate is in limbo because of the question of whether or not the show gets a 3rd season. Another reason for me to hope it gets cancelled.”

It’s ironic that in real life, Marshall is like a combination of both the Rufus and Conner Mason characters. He’s a businessman who has just launched his own high tech start-up, Technologies of Infinity (see https://techofinfinity.wordpress.com), which is challenging To The Stars Academy and the Hover Brothers, in the areas of advanced concept science and technology, and he is a quantum physics trained, R&D engineer who knows temporal mechanics. But don’t mention that to him. He sees little in common with Rufus.

“Our backgrounds aren’t even close,” he protests, “he went to MIT and I opted out of college and proved I didn’t need it. Plus we think nothing alike. I wasn’t some poor kid growing up in the projects with a single mom, and our world views are radically different. I find more in common with the Wyatt character, though I was never in the military, I was in the civilian intelligence and investigation business, for nearly 10 years, had dangerous adventures were people got killed and I nearly died once as well. I got out because I had people pushing me to, because my potential in advanced concept sci/tech was too valuable to risk playing cloak and dagger across North America, although I was really good at it.”

And what if Timeless gets renewed again?

“It will only get renewed if there’s some heavy duty negotiations that happen, because it’s very clear, just on its business merits, the show is over”.

You can read his article, Why ‘Timeless’ Deserves To Be Cancelled AGAIN at https://futurism.media/why-timeless-deserves-to-get-cancelled-again

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(Photo: Marshall Barnes, R&D Eng speaks to audience, used with permission, Copyright 2014 Fame Plan)