Good news for Journeyman fans: Concerned that his struggling NBC drama won’t be returning in 2008 (viewership is averaging an anemic 7.3 million, and on Tuesday, the network let the option for a full-season pickup pass), creator Kevin Falls made sure episodes 11 and 12 (airing Dec. 17 and 19) would address Dan Vasser’s (Kevin McKidd) inexplicable ability to time travel. Those episodes, which fulfill the network’s order, expand on Elliot Langley’s (Tom Everett) experimentation on quantum leaping and introduce Dan to a fellow time tourist, who he finds in an insane asylum. “We felt like we started to see the handwriting on the wall, between the ratings and the writers strike, so we recalibrated how we would break the last few episodes,” explains Falls. “We do answer quite a few questions so fans will get a feeling of closure.”
Had the show gone for a full season, Falls might have taken all the people that Dan and Livia (Moon Bloodgood) saved this season and turned them into some “Rube Goldberg device for season’s end,” he says. “All these people would come into play, not so much to save the world, but their stories all culminate into a bigger-picture climax.”
But is he sure he won’t ever get that chance? Although NBC isn’t ordering a full-season of Journeyman, it hasn’t officially canceled the show either. In fact, there’s a remote chance it could get a second season pickup if the strike continues through the spring, when the town is usually developing pilots for the next TV season. “If there is scorched earth and there are no pilots, then that’s a whole different thing,” admits Falls. “There is probably a better than average chance that we would come back. But nobody wants that. I would throw my show on the sword if this strike would end beforehand. Too many people suffer from a long strike.”
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