Saving Kennedy

What if?Pic courtesy of Hulu

TODAY
It’s April 9th – we just had a weekend of blustery, rainy weather with gray, gloomy skies. My heater was going full-blast this morning. I guess it’s fair considering the 8-week run we just had of unseasonable blue skies. There has to be balance.

TECHNICAL ISSUES

The Gods must not want me to blog today – my MacBook had 30 minutes of updates to install and then the Starbucks Wi-Fi died. Here at home, my Logitech keyboard just died. I’ll see if I can make do without all my toys.

11.22.63 (Warning – spoiler alert)

In the last 2 months, I watched the 8-part Hulu miniseries 11.22.63. It’s based on Stephen King’s novel and stars James Franco as Jake Epping, a liberal-minded English teacher who discovers a “rabbit hole” – a time-travel portal that takes him back to 1960. Many what-ifs and technical issues are scuttled aside for brevity and artistic license. He appears in 1960 as his 2016 person, an adult still carrying an iPhone.

The premise of the series is that he assumes a new identity, Jake Amberson, and assimilates into Dallas-Fort Worth as a high school English teacher. His hidden agenda is to find out more about Lee Harvey Oswald and prevent the Kennedy assassination. The production values of the series are tremendous; the cars, clothes and musical backdrop take you to the doo-wop era of ducktails and finned cars. Franco is excellent as the addled time traveler. I had several impressions which I’ll list in bullet style – they don’t necessarily fall into any broad categories.

- They have him move to a fictitious Dallas suburb, Jodie Texas. Why was this necessary? DFW has 35 suburbs that would’ve served the purpose and made it more believable.

- In the time travel, the past pushes back against any attempt to change events. This was interesting.. Waiters drop their trays, houses catch fire and cars run off the road as if some force was blocking interference to the past.

- In the course of events, Jake tells both a fellow traveler and a woman he’s courting that he’s a time traveler dispatched to save Kennedy. They believe him and help in his mission. In reality no one would believe that – it would be a one-way ticket to the booby hatch. Poetic license once more I guess.

- (Spoiler!) Jake succeeds in saving Kennedy. Won’t give the hows or whys in case the reader wants to watch this great series. He comes back to the present only to discover a nuclear winter – his home town is a ravaged ghost town being terrorized by post-apocalyptic thugs. He corners one man that he recognizes and using the ruse of amnesia asks him to recount the last 50 years. It seems Kennedy was elected to two terms that were very liberal. He so enraged the radical right that they elected George Wallace in 1968, bringing on a 3rd World War. Wow. This slightly made me think of the current 2016 election, where two Obama terms seem to have generated a lot of angst in the GOP arena. Let’s hope nothing as dire results from that..

CONCLUSION

This series had several twists, turns and plot devices that compelled me to think some “deep thoughts”. Is time travel possible? Can the past be changed and what are the likely outcomes if we play with ultimate destiny? I would recommend this miniseries to anyone who likes history, retro pop culture and science fiction forays into time travel.

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