Travelers episode 207, "17 Minutes"

[AtrusBatleth 0]

I am absolutely loving the Netflix series Travelers. Very interesting time travel story. And I was pleasantly surprised to see some skydiving featured in episode 207, "17 Minutes". If you have Netflix, you should check it out.

With that said, I had a few smack-my-head moments.

*SPOILER ALERT* - I actually don't think this really spoils anything integral to the plot, but just throwing this out anyway.


First off, the whole yelling at another jumper in freefall. At least they didn't carry on a conversation like other movies have done, and it was just a one time "you ok?" so you could pass it off as the guy yelling to himself. Plus I've pretty much resigned myself to movies always portraying talking in freefall, like how there's always sound effects in space. Eh, it's entertainment. But then the guy on the ground is yelling at a falling jumper to pull their chute. And he was not speaking out-loud to himself out of desperation, he was clearly yelling at the jumper as if they could hear him. I couldn't help laughing at that.

Next, apparently they weren't jumping with AADs. I know not everybody does, but it's a pretty damn high percentage that do. They didn't even need a no-out for the story to kill the jumper, because...

They had an unconscious jumper with the main deployed and the guy on the ground was worried about him because he was spiraling down and was still going to get killed. I know it's a little thing, but I was impressed with this detail making it into the story. Usually in the movies a skydiver is going to die because their parachute doesn't open, but here it was accurately portrayed that having a spinning canopy can be just as deadly. I even appreciated the video footage of a rough landing, giving some wuffos out there a little first person perspective of just how fast you can be coming in on landing.

I'm a little skeptical about the whole making a phone call under canopy, visor down and wearing gloves. I realize she could have had a bluetooth earpiece, and a nice helmet that doesn't fog up under canopy like mine does. and wearing gloves that have the touchscreen fingertips... but seriously how many jumpers jump like this? Does any skydiver out making a casual jump rig themselves in case they need to make a phone call under canopy? On the other hand, I thought it was pretty cool how the phone was mounted on her arm like that. Again, do normal jumpers actually do that? Are they using altimeter apps or using their phone GPS to track their aerial trajectory? Perhaps I'm just not that cool. Side note; as decked out with fancy gadgets as this jumper was, it seemed a little out of place to have a single old-school analog altimeter, but maybe she had multiple audibles to back that up.

My final observation was the complete lack of anybody at the DZ. There's just 2 jumpers and their 1 friend on the ground, waiting by his car at the edge of the landing field. NOBODY else is around for miles. And they jumped out of a reasonably large twin engine craft. I'm not sure if it was a twin otter, but the point is it was definitely not a 182. I could maybe believe these jumpers had a friend pilot with a small Cessna and this was a private jump, but a frickin twin engine plane? They obviously were not jumping at a commercial DZ, and had nobody else on the load with them. What the hell?

Anyway, despite my nitpicking these few things, I thought it was pretty well done. Kudos to the jumpers that helped film these shots, and it was an awesome episode and I highly recommend the series, if you like sci-fi time traveling type shows.

Max Peck
What's the point of having top secret code names, fellas, if we ain't gonna use 'em?