Overview:
Dan discovers, with Katie's help, Livia's long kept secret this week as he works to prevent a disillusioned girl from falling in too far with the wrong crowd.

Dan and Livia end up at a 1970's "key party" at the beginning of the episode. A few minutes in--as he marvels at the fact that he's watching Nixon's resignation speech live--Dan inadvertently sends a young (college age) girl into her mother's bedroom where she finds mom and the lucky owner of her selected key in a somewhat less than monogamous position. This causes the girl to freak out and run away from home, an act which results, in the unaltered timeline, to her disappearance and apparent murder.

In his next trip to the past, Dan saves the girl by chasing off a creepy guy in a green pickup who stops to offer her a ride, suggesting that she instead head off with a group of stoners on their way to a concert (the titular Winterland, it would seem). Unfortunately the lovable stoners are, in actuality, misogynistic criminals, the leader of which drags the girl into a life of crime and, ironically, an open relationship. In his final trip back, Dan and Livia talk some sense into the girl at the last moment, allowing her to trade a 30 year jail sentence for a tidy political career--one hopes that mom and dad were more discrete during the campaign.

In the present, all brotherly love--or at the very least the moderate brotherly understanding attained in Keeper--seems lost as the feds invade Dan and Katie's home, searching for the McCleen money. Katie manages to help Dan sneak the cash out of the house through some clever bluffing before the agents have a chance to find it, and crisis seems again averted--for now.

While cleaning up the mess, Katie stumbles upon a picture of a Livia in the 1940s, revealing that our journeywoman lives in the past instead of the present--1948 to be precise. Dan confronts Livia with the discovery, and we learn more about her side of things. She apparently journeys forward instead of backward in time, and for reasons she doesn't understand found herself on a decade-or-so layover in the eighties, where (when?) she met Dan.

The professor makes another brief and tantalizing appearance this week, advising Dan in a not-so-cryptic way not to let on about where the McCleen money came from. At the end of his scene he observes Dan disappearing back into the past with a knowing, audience teasing smile.


Thoughts:
The "putting right what once when wrong" subplot this week seemed to read like a questionable letter to Savage Love. While I can understand that walking in on your mom at a swinger's party is creepy and will undoubtedly lead to several uncomfortable dinners around the dining room table, I find it hard to believe that it shattered a nineteen year old girl's world so drastically. In his second trip, I really wanted Dan (either Vasser or Savage) to just talk some sense into her and send her back home.

Likely the whole "key party" scene was written in for the same reason Law and Order: SVU routinely starts episodes in strip clubs only to find out the victim of the week was the cousin of the guy who supplied the glassware for the bar. Still, I think it would have added to the episode to give the girl a better reason for running off into the night. I did appreciate Katie's (perhaps self aware) comment later in the episode that Dan ended up at a swinger's party with Livia only to be "turned on by Nixon."

So, I can understand why a newspaper reporter with unrestricted access to a continually correcting online news database makes a great time traveler. Similarly, a brilliant physicist with access--by way of a holographic pal--to a supercomputer in the future would also be well equipped to guide people away from terrible mistakes in the past. But how exactly does a nice farm girl (just sort of assuming she was plucked off a farm...I blame the sepia tone photograph) from the 1940s deal with all of this? Without succumbing to a worn out cliché on gender roles, I wonder if we'll learn that there is more to "putting right what once went wrong" than efficient research and macho heroics.

Resource concerns aside, I was thrilled to learn more about Livia this week. Up until now I've sort of assumed that she has been bouncing around time constantly, hoping to find her way back to the present one day--like a certain PhD we all know and love. I think the fact that her entire time with Dan was actually a decade long (or more) trip adds a new dimension to the whole story. They aren’t so much a couple pulled apart by this random time traveling as a couple that wouldn't exist without it.

This week also introduced at least two references to quartz. On a show like Lost, I would assume these were throwaway red herrings, but here I think they may come back into play. I will add for the record, that in my experience quartz is not the most accurate substance for regulating time as was suggested (admittedly by one of the stoners). They are cheep, reasonably efficient, and plentiful, but run of the mill quartz crystal oscillators (in a previous life I was an electrical engineer) have plenty of jitter and skew.

Still, does this brief introduction to quartz foreshadow a pseudo-science explanation of time travel in the near future? I think it would be a nice balance to pull away from the high theoretical physics concepts of things like tachyons and somehow tie in something simple like a quartz crystal--which are almost as classically Newtonian as a mass on a spring. Faithful readers of these reviews will recall that I am quietly pulling for some kind of "magic" to be in play. Magical quartz crystals might be a nice middle ground.

I thought Dan's line to Katie towards the end of the episode, "I'm happy with my choice" was telling and brilliantly subtle. What "choice" is he referring to? The love of his life hopped on a plane one morning and disappeared. It's not like they decided to break up. I read this as Dan trying to convince himself that he chose to be with Katie rather than simply ended up with her. And the fact that his "trips will be getting longer" and that perhaps he'll soon be spending more time with Livia in past than with Katie in the present adds some serious weight to this dilemma.

Great Moments:

• Dan grabbing the wine back before disappearing from the swinger's party. I thought this was a great example of the subtle touches that add some believability to the story. Even with all the craziness going on around him, Dan's priority remains getting back to dinner on time--with his expensive wine in tow.
  
• Katie hiding the money in Dan's jacket was a cool move. Doesn’t it seem that sci-fi stories always seem to have a special reverence for the plucky TV reporter? Here we watch Katie easily besting the FBI boys, almost taunting them with the little black bag.
  
• "You never could work the VCR." I thought this was a great line, especially when Livia snaps back that it was actually Dan who could never work the VCR. Although, I have to wonder if the original draft of the script had Dan asking something along the lines of, "no wonder you had no idea what a key party was."
  
• Jack smuggling Dan's ill placed $20 bill away from the FBI agent was great, and watching him use it as he drank alone in that bar at the end of the episode was an almost poetic touch.