TV Rewind: Netflix’s Travelers Was Radical Environmentalism in Stealth Mode

Starring Eric McCormack, MacKenzie Porter, Nesta Cooper, Jared Abrahamson, Reilly Dolman, Patrick Gilmore, J. Alex Brinson, Leah Cairns, and, eventually, Enrico Colantoni, Travelers told the story of five highly trained specialists from some 430 years in the climate-decimated future who, with the help of a wildly advanced AI program called The Director, have had their consciousnesses transmitted through time into the brains (and bodies) of “hosts” at the exact moment before the hosts’ historical time of death. An enormously risky gambit—hosts are rarely in the exact condition the historical record implies, as the team’s doctor, Marcy (Porter), and historian, Phillip (Dolman), realize the moment they land in bodies that are, respectively, developmentally disabled and addicted to heroin—this form of time travel is being practiced for a single, existentially critical purpose: to save life on Earth.

How critical is this mission? Well, not only are our five travelers just a handful of more than four thousand (and counting) Travelers to have been sent back in time to execute their small bit of The Director’s ultimate plan, but they are doing so with the explicit understanding that their success will almost certainly mean personal obliteration: “We, the last unbroken remnants, vow to undo the errors of our ascendants, to make the Earth whole, the lost unlost, at peril of our own birth,” they recite in unison, prayerlike, before what they think will be their final mission in the middle of the first season (Episode 1.06, “Helios 685”). At peril of our own birth. A mission so important that, to save the fates of billions from the post-apocalyptic half-life humanity’s current trajectory is aiming towards, thousands of Travelers would risk their own existence to see it through.

Because that, ultimately, is what’s at stake in the climate crisis: our own existence. And as activists from the climate revolutionaries of the Sunrise Movement to the water protectors of Standing Rock to the forest defenders fighting to stop Cop City in the Weelaunee Forest of Atlanta to the indigenous land defenders across the globe to the desperate individuals like photojournalist and climate activist Wynn Bruce, who set himself on fire in front of the US Capitol on Earth Day 2022, the solutions to an existential risk are radical.

Of course, as a piece of televisual entertainment, the primary goal of Travelers wasn’t as lofty as compelling its audience to radical climate action. As with any streaming media product, its goal was to keep enough viewers hooked that they’d binge their way through an entire season, then go tell their friends to subscribe and do the same. And for all but the final season, Travelers succeeded, giving a satisfying payoff to the cat-and-mouse AI thriller Season 2 and 3 really built up. But in between the sharp writing and clever, gotta-hit-play-next plotting is the driving sense that whatever humankind thinks we’re accomplishing for our descendents now, we’ve just got to do better.

Of all the creative decisions Travelers makes to accomplish this sleight of hand, possibly the most compelling is that it never truly takes the viewers to the post-apocalyptic future the Travelers themselves are fighting so desperately to prevent. We get a few stylized glimpses—McLaren (McCormack) imagining the real face of his co-Traveler lover when kissing his host’s wife at one point; a sketch of the dome-like nuclear fallout shelters is graffitied onto a sidewalk in another—but we’re never allowed to spend any meaningful time there. Instead, series creator Brad Wright and his team make the intractable bleakness of life in that future visceral by repeatedly showing us the intimate jolts of joy and astonishment the Travelers feel whenever they encounter something utterly quotidian that the poisoned fruits of human folly are on a path to render obsolete: The feeling of pounding around the high school track, breathing in lungfuls of fresh air. The sight of more trees than you could possibly count. The taste of a fresh apple. The taste of cow’s milk. The taste of water that hasn’t been recycled so many times it can’t ever really be pure. Birds.

This oblique subtlety, ultimately, is as effective as Extrapolations’ harrowingly detailed realism in making the case that we, as a global society, need to get our heads right and do whatever it takes to turn away from the environmentally catastrophic profit first, all else second path we’re still so unnecessarily on. Or at least, in making the *artistic* case for that need. And if we, as a species, can’t be moved by art, I don’t know what hope we have to move at all.

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Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibliophile. She can be found @AlexisKG.

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