A baroness hires a detective agency in order to find out the truth about her brother, who has disappeared "urbi et orbi". (Being an unkind creature, she is more concerned about legal complications than about the fate of her sibling.) The young man, a dashing inventor and explorer, seems to have vanished into thin air. Now a strange question arises : did he get lost in a distant country or in a distant time ?
"Le voyageur" treats a classic science fiction theme : would a time traveller be capable of changing history and if so, should he do so ? It is a nicely made series laced with romance, wit and poetry. It also offers a good picture of how contemporary French - or at least some contemporary French - expected the near future to develop. Part of it has become reality, such as audiovisual systems of indoor surveillance and communication. (Watch Madame la baronne order her servants around. Where's the French Revolution when you need it ?) Other parts, such as a wild explosion of space missions and interplanetary travel, still remain science fiction.
Still, one cannot fault the writer(s) for a lack of ambition. There's something sweetly charming and bracingly cuckoo about the idea of twentieth-century Frenchmen flitting from Saturn to Jupiter...
One of the ideas being developed about the nature of time is this. All moments in time exist equally and simultaneously, like train stations along a railway, but under normal circumstances we humans can only travel in one direction, like passengers on a train going from station A to station B, and thence to station C. I've heard this idea before (it's pretty riveting, by the way) and I think that the late author Crichton used it for a time travel novel, although other reviewers should feel free to correct me.
Like I've said, there's good fun to be had, what with weird contraptions, sly jokes and funny plot twists. The series includes imaginative takes on some of the great and good from French history, such as Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette. (Wait for the puns.) There's also a pleasant inversion of the usual romantic trope : a dashing and chivalrous hero sets out to rescue his beloved, only in order to discover that she considers him a nutcase.
On the minus side, the viewer has to endure a few minutes of purely hideous singing, when the said beloved sings charming little songs in a voice you could use to cut barbed wire. And the ending isn't all that happy...
0 out of 0 found this helpful