Journeyman

So tonight is opening night of premiere week, which tends to signal the end of the summer and the back to school. All the networks are trotting out their new pilots, unveiling new seasons of the faves, and revamping second-chancers. I tuned in for Heroes and stuck around for Journeyman. Here's what I learned: the life worth saving is not a life at all--yet. It's the prenatal, or as the Christian fringe likes to call it, the "preborn."

The journeyman is (white) Dan Vasser, who is randomly transported back in time, apparently by forces beyond his control, where he inadvertently saves a (black) man, Neal Gaines. Gaines is attempting suicide as a result of a broken heart. However, Vasser leaps in to 1987 just in time to save him from being crushed by a street car. On his second trip to the future in 1994, he meets Gaines again, who this time is in the middle of breaking up with his (ambiguously racialized but definitely light-skinned) pregnant girlfriend. She want to abort, he wants to keep it. Our hero, Vasser, convinces the woman to continue the pregnancy with one well-timed line. So much for her career, which she laments was just starting to take off, her reason for not wanting to continue the pregnancy. Vasser reassures her that "we had to face that too." Yeah, ten years later. But hey, if a yuppie white couple can make it work, I'm sure anyone can, right? Fast forward again and it's 1997. This time Vasser has to stop Gaines from killing his wife and son (Gaines is evidently distraught over his wife leaving him and thus has devised to kill them both). As Vasser nears Gaines, who is approaching his wife and son outside their home, he calls out to Gaines to stop him. Gaines stops and turns and is immediately hit by a street car, dying instantly. His wife and Vasser run to the body, where they see that he was carrying a gun. So Gaines' life has come full circle, he is killed "as he was meant to be" before Vasser intervened.

Now, because I've watched a lot of tv in my time, I assumed that Vasser was sent back to prevent Gaines from making a mistake (killing his wife and child) by "talking sense into him" or some other easily reconcilable trope tv dramas love to interject to neatly wrap up their 60-minute dramas. But it wasn't Gaines at all that Vasser was supposed to save, as Vasser himself decrees. It was his "son." That's right, Vasser saves Gaines' son from being aborted, and then from being murdered by his father so that the boy could go on to save 6 people from a burning bus in 2007. Let's look at this more closely. So first he saves "the boy" from being "killed" by his mother, and then from his father. That is, the white man is saving the black child from the violence of his parents so that he can grow up to "contribute" to society. This is wide enough to allude to the problems of "inner cities" as well as to white American adoption of African babies.