Time Travel Television Top Ten [Commentary]

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect. But actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.” – David Tennant, Doctor Who (2007)

Matt Smith as the new Doctor.

For generations, time travel has engaged science fiction writers and led to some great books, film and television. Since my youth, I have been fascinated by time travel, and I make a point to see nearly every television show and movie that deals with the subject.

Almost every science fiction or fantasy series, from Star Trek to Charmed to Lost, has dabbled in time travel for an episode or two. But my favorite shows are those that deal with time travel itself, where every week characters are flung through time to deal with a new crisis.

To commemorate the latest season of Doctor Who, premiering on BBC America on Saturday, April 17th, I’ve come up with a list of my favorites.

While this list is by no means definitive, here are The FilmGuru’s Time Travel Television Top Ten:

Scott Bakula (right) and Dean Stockwell paired up for one of the great time travel stories in Quantum Leap.

1. Doctor Who (BBC: 1963-1989, 2005-Present) – This is where it all begins. Since 1963, Doctor Who has engaged viewers with stories of the Time Lord and his companions. Utilizing his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) time ship, the Doctor can travel from the Big Bang to the ends of the universe and back again – and yet, he seems to love England most of all. The show ended its initial run in 1989, but returned in a big budget remake on BBC in 2005. His list of adversaries has grown over the years, but he is probably best well known for fighting Daleks and Cybermen, as well as his fellow Time Lord nemesis, the Master. Over the past 40+ years, we have seen 10 different actors play the Doctor on television. Matt Smith is now the 11th incarnation of the Doctor.

2. Quantum Leap (NBC: 1989-1993) – Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) stepped into a machine of his own creation and vanished into the past. The experiment didn’t quite work as planned however. Sam awoke in someone else’s body, in the middle of a strange life and (as was often the case) an awkward situation. Every week, Sam would leap into a new life, in a new point in time in a period that spanned 40 years. He experienced everything from segregation to the fight for women’s rights – all from a front row seat. With the aid of his best friend, Al (Dean Stockwell), Sam would try to help those whose lives he has leaped into. Hoping each time that his next leap… would be the leap home.

Eliza Dushku is a morgue worker with a side job in Tru Calling.

3. Tru Calling (FOX: 2003-2005) – Time is not always on your side, as Tru Davies (Eliza Dushku) found out. For reasons she did not understand, she had the ability to travel back in time to help the recently deceased. But her power only allowed her to go back one day (repeatedly, if necessary). And she soon discovered there was a price to pay for saving lives. This excellent series not only died too soon, it was yanked from the air just as its complex mythology was dialing it up a notch. Not only did we find out that Tru’s dead mother had her gift, we were just beginning to discover the connection her father had to her counterpart Jack Harper (Jason Priestly), who used his power to make sure people died as fate decided.

4. Journeyman (NBC: 2007) – This short-lived series (13 episodes) followed a similar concept to Tru Calling. Kevin McKidd played Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter, who inexplicably found would find himself yanked into the past. Using his knowledge gained from one trip into the past, he would try to fix things on subsequent jumps. As his “disappearances” took his toll on his family life and his career, he discovered that his former fiancée (thought dead) was also jumping through time.

5. Time Trax (Syndicated: 1993-1994) – In this inventive series, police officer Darien Lambert (Dale Midkiff) traveled back in time from the 22nd century to recover criminals who had escaped through time to the 1990s. Darien had to “tag” criminals and send them home, but he himself could not return until his mission was finished. His only connection to the future was his credit card-sized computer, SELMA, which briefed him on cases and certain aspects of life and culture in the 1990s.

Ted King as Jack Logan in Timecop.

6. Timecop (ABC: 1997) – This VERY short-lived series (9 episodes) was based on the world created in the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie of the same name. In it, members of the Time Enforcement Commission monitored the timestream for possible tampering. Lt. Jack Logan (Ted King) worked with his partner to keep criminals from interfering with history. While the show was a bit formulaic, it offered one nice wrinkle to the plot. A villain used time travel to become Jack the Ripper and then created some of the greatest disasters in history – from the Titanic to the Hindenburg.

7. Seven Days (UPN: 1998-2001) – Using a time sphere engineered from salvaged wreckage of the UFO crash at Roswell, a top-secret government agency sent Frank Parker (Jonathan LaPaglia) back in time to stop unstoppable disasters. The only limit with the technology was that it could only send someone back seven days. As a result, Frank was always racing the clock to discover the cause of each crisis and the means to stop it.

Jon-Erik Hexum (right) and Meeno Peluce are a time-traveling duo in Voyagers!

8. Voyagers! (NBC: 1982-1983) – This series from my childhood is one of my favorite memories. The story followed Phineas Bogg (Jon-Erik Hexum), a traveler through time who helped give history a nudge in the right direction now and then. With the help of his Omnichron device, he could travel through time and tell when history has been altered. But when he saved a young boy, Jeffrey Jones (Meeno Peluce), he lost his guidebook and was forced to rely on Jeffrey’s knowledge of history to fix things. The series, while not great, was a nice adventure series and a fun look at history.

9. Primeval (BBC: 2007-Present) – My love of combining time travel stories with dinosaurs has been around since Land of the Lost aired on Saturday morning television. With this series, time travel took center stage and dinosaurs came to our world. Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) lead a band of scientists investigating temporal anomalies popping up all over the U.K. These holes in time, to both the past and the future, resulted in dinosaurs and other creatures rampaging through the streets of London. While the overarching story about Nick and his wife Helen (Juliet Aubrey) was at the center of the series, the apparent death of Nick didn’t stop the series from continuing. Even after it was cancelled in 2009, it was been revived for a fourth season (to air in 2011).

Even the concept of time travel took on a "groovy" look during the '60s in The Time Tunnel.

10. The Time Tunnel (ABC: 1966-1967) – No list of time travel television would be complete without this classic from the mind of Irwin Allen. When a government project in time travel was on the verge of being shut down, Dr. Tony Newman (James Darren) leaped through the time tunnel to prove it worked. Lost in the past aboard the doomed Titanic, he couldn’t get home. So, Dr. Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert) entered the time tunnel as well. Each week, the two men found themselves in a different time, often in conjunction with historical events. Though they tried to warn people of pending disasters, no one would listen. History always proceeded as it did originally. Although the show was simplistic, it dared to bring time travel to mainstream television in the U.S. only a few years after Doctor Who aired in the U.K.