By Jennifer Larson

If Dan (Kevin McKidd) thought it was difficult to explain his disappearances to his wife, he aint seen nothing. Tonight Dan gets caught in the worst kind of lie you can tell your spouse. You know the one about swearing you haven’t seen or talked to your ex? Of course this would come as even more of a surprise to Katie (Gretchen Egolf) than it would to the average women, because her husband’s ex is supposed to be dead. She’s already trying to cope with the fact that her husband travels throughout time to help total strangers, and she’s being supportive about it, all things considered. But now she has major suspicions about whom her husband may be meeting up with during his travels. So, instead of meeting up at a sleazy hotel for a little alone time, these two are trying to catch up in-between their trips to the past. At least he has an excuse; I mean he can’t control when and where he goes, and apparently neither can Livia. So you see, it’s not really his fault the love of his life came hurling back into his life. Yeah, I’m sure his wife will understand that.

In tonight’s episode of JOURNEYMAN, Dan’s purpose seems to be to save a man from his own demons, when he goes back to the time of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. But he faces a bit of a dilemma, when he has a choice to make; either save the man he’s been sent there for, or save a friend. Wow, that’s really putting a guy on the spot. I mean if I didn’t think there would be any repercussions to the future, I’d save the friend hands down. This is the problem, because Dan doesn’t know how or why he has started time traveling, so if he doesn’t accomplish what he has been sent to do he keeps getting sent back. I just hate repeating my work, don’t you? The good news is that Dan can sense when he’s about to take one of his trips. So that means no more waking up in strange cabs and having no idea how he got there. Well, it’s a step in the right direction, I suppose.


So, Dan gets sent back to the time right before the San Francisco earthquake, and it just so happens that his boss’s sister was killed in that quake. You can see why it’s so tempting for him to take the opportunity to pull a friend from the clutches of death. It would be so simple, or so you would think. But life isn’t simple, so why would traveling around in it be? When Dan tries to warn the city officials about the upcoming disaster, he’s taken about as seriously as the people who yell out religious prophecies on the street corner. Besides, the guy he keeps running into in the past is really the one that needs his help. Turns out he’s a serious gambler – something our guy Dan knows a thing or two about – and is in some pretty dire straights. Dan gets the brilliant idea to send this fellow off to a local poker game to try and make the money he needs to get the loan sharks off his back Isn’t that kind of like sending a drunk to the local bar? Doesn’t make much sense to me. Of course that was just Dan’s first attempt, and as we have come to find out, it always take more than one trip to get it right. In fact, it takes more than one trip for Dan to figure out the true nature of the problem.

But Dan’s personal agenda is to save all the people that died that fateful day, so he’s spending most of his time trying to figure out how to get the locals off the bridges and out of the tunnels that killed so many of them, especially his boss’s sister. It’s a noble idea, but the time traveling Gods don’t work that way, which is why the poor gambling schmuck keeps popping up to derail Dan’s life-saving plans. Then again, considering the gambler ended up shooting himself two days after the earthquake, there are life-saving plans on Dan’s agenda, just not the lives he was thinking of. And we all know there is always more to the picture than just saving a life, so there had to be a pretty good reason Dan was sent back to protect this guy from himself.


As it turns out there was. The gambler turned his life around, after surviving the earthquake, and ended up saving dozens of innocent people from the gas chamber. Saving one life so they could go on to save many more, I’d say that’s a good day at the office.