'Timeless' Recap: 'The King of the Delta Blues'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

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When we think of important moments in history, we often ponder upon the ones that had immediate impact upon the world and how it influenced everyone on the planet after it took place. But sometimes, we often forget that influential moments in our past, aren’t always massive and instantaneous. They sometimes take years to grow, and their influence upon others arrive in private or in passing and it just so happens that one of these ‘low-key’ moments in history was explored during last night’s episode of Timeless. 
 
Because ‘The King of the Delta Blues’ took the time to explore how creativity can change the world by taking us back to 1936, wherein Connor Mason finally traveled through time to help the Time Team save a blues artist named Robert Johnson, whose work influenced modern Rock and Roll and eventually the anti-establishment movement of the 1960’s and I have to be honest, I thought this was a supremely wonderful part of history to look into. Because artists really do change the world, and the wonder they influence upon others isn’t celebrated enough and by exploring this part of history, the show was able to take a far more intimate approach to its storytelling this week. 
 
In fact, the series more or less went to some inspirational territory in this one by giving Robert the spotlight, since there was a lot of subtle and not-so subtle discussions in this tale about doing whatever it takes to achieve our dreams and continuing to fight the good fight when life is doing its best to bring us down and the latter of those concepts was explored by way of Connor since his empire and notoriety was beginning to fade in present day and in many ways, his coming along on this mission to save Robert’s life saved his own soul from sinking into the abyss and really, when all is said and done, this ended up being quite the beautiful story to say the least and it’s one one that definitely left me smiling when the Time Team returned to present day.
 
However, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows in this particular tale. Because one cannot forget that Rittenhouse is the reason for all of this mess and seeing as to how Agent Christopher was in their clutches last week, she saw a grand opportunity to stick it to this evil organization and in a surprise twist, she kept Wyatt off the mission to try and put an end to these jerks once and for all by sending him to Rittenhouse H.Q. to wipe them out and it looks like Wyatt did some damage to the group since they tried to burn any and all evidence of their plans, and Wyatt’s arrival also forced Keynes and Carol to escape in the Mothership to keep themselves safe and this really was quite the cool little change up to the plot since normally in stories such as these, you save a moment like this for the end of the season, rather than plopping it into the middle of the year.
 
In the end however, I really appreciated the fact that this episode scaled things back a bit to focus on the characters, and I especially loved the focus on Connor in this episode since let’s be honest, he’s been in quite the funk for some time now and this tale also did a fine job of setting up a few things for the remainder of the season. After all, Rittenhouse is on the run at last, and the love triangle may be entering a new and weird phase since Lucy is making sure that Wyatt gets all the time he needs with Jessica and let’s just consider that whole moment with Flynn to be nothing more than a drowning of the sorrows with a drinking buddy. But, all character development aside, we do have to worry about Jiya’s latest premonition since they’ve all been right thus far, and it would be heartbreaking to see Rufus perish, so let’s hope there’s a way for him to alter his potential future. Until next time. 

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