Netflix's 100% RT Time Travel Series Deserves To Be As Big As Lost

While Lost is one of the most influential shows of the last few decades, Netflix’s underrated three-season sci-fi series deserves to be as fondly remembered as the ABC hit. Few shows have managed to incubate as many notable writers and directors as Lost. J.J. Abrams, Watchmen 2019’s Damon Lindelof, and The Cabin in the Woods’s Drew Goddard all worked on the series before going on to shape some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises on the big and small screen alike.

While Abrams later linked up with Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan for the underrated sci-fi police procedural Person of Interest, few of his post-Lost TV projects could hope to match the acclaim and notoriety of his breakout hit. Lost was a pop culture phenomenon, and even later sci-fi shows with ensemble casts focused on trippy time travel like Netflix’s masterpiece Dark were unable to replicate the cultural impact of the series.

On one hand, this is arguably understandable. Lost gets more credit for its storytelling innovations because the groundbreaking series introduced complex sci-fi concepts to a mainstream network TV audience first, meaning it deserves more plaudits for challenging its viewers. However, on the other hand, shows like Netflix’s underrated time travel sci-fi series Travelers rarely get their flowers thanks to the long shadow cast by Lost, even though this critical hit was a more cohesive and less frustrating watch than its predecessor.

Travelers Deserved More Attention Than It Got

Like Netflix’s later cyberpunk thriller Altered Carbon, Travelers was well received by critics but failed to become a breakout mainstream success for the streaming service. Starring Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack, the Canadian show began its story in a post-apocalyptic setting. After the world ends, the eponymous group of travelers, special agents who can have their consciousnesses sent back in time, are implanted into the bodies of people who are moments away from death.

This theoretically allows the travelers to alter the course of history without the show explaining away the tricky question of how their physical bodies travel through time or, alternatively, exist in town places at once. Where Prime Video’s later The Peripheral used quantum tunneling and futuristic robots to get around this issue, in Travelers, the fact that the owners of the bodies used by the travelers were about to die made them perfect receptacles for the consciousnesses of the agents.

Assigned missions by an AI supercomputer known as the Director, the agents were tasked with changing history enough to avoid the apocalypse, while simultaneously avoiding as many incidental changes to the space time continuum as possible. The travelers hid their true identity from those around them and, in a quirky twist, the Director was capable of temporarily inhabiting the bodies of nearby children in the past to communicate with the agents on the ground.

Travelers Is A Less Frustrating Watch Compared To Lost

If this setup sounds complex, that’s because it was. Like the aforementioned HBO hit Westworld, Travelers took advantage of the post-Lost cultural moment by setting up a lot of nuanced world building early on and assuming that viewers were au fait with ideas like body hopping, time paradoxes, and alternate realities. However, as complicated as all of this could get, the show still has one thing going for it in comparison to Lost.

As two shows about ensemble casts of time-traveling main characters, Travelers makes a lot more sense than Lost. Its setup might be complex, but it is also thoroughly explained, and the twists of the Netflix show’s three seasons feel earned and grounded in its established reality, instead of leaving viewers bewildered. Thus, while Travelers wasn’t as groundbreaking as Lost, the Netflix show does deserve credit for being a more coherent watch.