Contributor: J.M.
Written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman
Directed by Stephen Reynolds
At the end of the episode, I was really excited and impressed with the work the writers and actors had done. Lucas Bryant did an especially good job of showing just how much Nate actually feels for Audrey and the conflict over his feelings between both Audrey and Jordan. But after looking back on the episode I felt like the writer really blew a chance to hit an absolute grand slam.
The Trouble of this week is the ability of Stuart Mosley to transport people back to a time and place that he determines, but only under great emotional stress. Quickly he sends both Nathan and Duke back in time to 1955 when Sarah Vernon first arrives in Haven. Despite Duke’s attempt to lay low and follow the usual rules of time travel, his inadvertent saving of his grandfather leaves him and Nate scrambling to find some way to kill his grandfather in order to save, as Nate so quaintly put it, save the space-time continuum. In the meantime, Audrey is left back in Haven to try and deal with the issues of how the timeline has changed.
The best part of the episode has to be Duke and Nate’s adventures in 1955 Haven. It’s the source of a surprising amount of humor, particularly the aforementioned utterance of space-time continuum and the discussion of the consequences of time travel. Duke’s impassioned pleas with an unsympathetic cop following his release from the bar fight also brought out a few laughs. Nate’s quick adoption of a fedora also lends quite a bit of visual flair to the character to make him fit into the time he was trapped in. But there was also a great deal of emotional heft. Watching Duke and Roy interact with each other was something quite enjoyable to behold.
In the meantime, Audrey was stuck in a rapidly degenerating Haven where she was on the run from the men of the Rev, who had seemingly taken over Haven while Nate’s father Chief Wuornos lived. It was a bit of an odd track, and it seemed like a wasted opportunity to enlighten the audience about the Guard and provide some vital information about potential threats or foes or something to foreshadow what’s coming up in the future, particularly given the renewal for season four.
It was a fun side detour into how things could be much, much worse in Haven, but ultimately it was just that, a detour. The only other thing that kept the episode from moving beyond into something much greater was a drawback of the razor sharp focus on the plot at hand. It didn’t address, at least directly, the rapidly approaching confrontation between “The Barn” and Audrey, or however one might want to describe it. But rather than totally ruining an episode, they took what could have been the best episode of the series and left it merely a great one. This after all could be far, far worse considering where “Haven” has delivered in the past.
Score: 8/10
