"Someday I’m Gonna Form a Chrononaut’s Union"
    - Frank Parker
 

"Ever wish you could live your last week all over again? Well, my name's Frank B. Parker, and I do it all the time. I work for a secret government project experimenting in time travel. When things really get screwed up, I'm the guinea pig they send back to take care of it. The catch is, I can only go back 7 days."
  - Opening narration by Jonathan LaPaglia for the television series 7 Days

I know that more people besides my wife and me must be fans of the now-cancelled science fiction series 7 Days. The UPN show ran from 1998 to 2001 for some sixty-six episodes, and gathered a small but dedicated fan base. Most of us have finally gotten over being mad about the show being cancelled, but now we’re ticked off that it’s not yet been offered for sale on DVD. I mean, c’mon, you can already buy DVDs of the first season of the SciFi Channel’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, which is less than a year old. You can purchase absolute garbage like Doogie Howser, MD, and Chupacabra Terror (John Rhys Davies, what were you thinking when you accepted a role in that stinker?), so why not a quality sci-fi show like
7 Days? At present, this remains a mystery.

Basic premise of the show: An alien spaceship really did crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. While the government researchers who took charge of investigating the alien technology never managed to reverse engineer interstellar travel from the remains of the ship, they discovered an odd and useful side effect: time travel. At a secret government installation appropriately known as Never-Never Land (NNL), scientists have been working on Project Backstep for almost fifty years, and have at last managed to send a spherical capsule back in time seven days.

The pilot starts with a terrorist attack on Washington DC that kills the President and Vice President, throwing the country into chaos. The obvious solution: use Project Backstep to undo it. The problem: no test pilot has yet been able to survive a Backstep trip. Enter Frank Parker (Jonathon LaPaglia), an ex-Navy SEAL who is currently residing in the highly classified Hansen Island government sanitarium, where military and governmental agency operatives who have slipped their cogs are kept safely away from normal society. Frank is freed by a couple of MIB-types and taken to NNL, where he and volunteers from each branch of the armed forces undergo tests to see if they could possibly tolerate a Backstep. It will come as no surprise to the viewer that Frank is the only one who passes the stress and tolerance tests, and he is then clued in to what the project is all about. With only hours to spare before the seven-day window expires, Frank is sent into the past armed with the knowledge and evidence to prevent the terrorist attack from taking place. Arriving scant hours before the attack is to occur, he calls NNL with a pre-arranged codeword - Conundrum - alerting the Project Backstep leaders that a successful Backstep has taken place. The attack is prevented, and Frank goes through what becomes one of the recurring themes of the show: reacquainting himself with people who didn’t experience the past seven days of his personal timeline, because he changed what happened, plus being the only one in the world who knows the often horrific details of what happened in the original timeline. This first time is of course the most awkward, as no one at Project Backstep in the changed timeline has any idea who he is, with the exception of Captain Craig Donovan (Don Franklin), with whom Frank had served before he went off the deep end and wound up at Hansen Island. And of course even Donovan doesn’t know that Frank has been assigned to the project, as he, like everyone else, never experienced the timeline where that happened.

I enjoyed 7 Days immensely during its initial primetime run, and managed to watch (and record) the entire series again when it ran in syndication on Spike TV, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time around. The storylines were generally interesting and well written, and the show had what is most essential to any successful television series, a cast of characters that worked well together. What fascinated me most, though, were the philosophical ideas and implications of the basic premise: to go back and change catastrophic events, preventing or at least mitigating disasters and loss of life. It’s an intriguing “what-if”. What if the events of September 11, 2001 could have been prevented? What if the victims of the tsunami of December 26, 2004 could have been given enough warning to get to higher ground? What if the crew of the space shuttle Columbia knew about the damaged tile that caused the failure and breakup of their ship on February 1, 2003, or even better, that the falling foam debris that caused the damage on takeoff had been removed or better secured, preventing the damage from happening in the first place?

Of course, the disasters in 7 Days were specifically tailored as plot devices for the various episodes, but were mostly of the “what if we could change this” type. Whether it was preventing nuclear war, stopping a military coup, or keeping the entire human race from being wiped out, the idea was that the new timeline would be a vast improvement over the original. A subject that ran throughout the entire series followed from the fact that after the Backstep, the only person who had actually experienced what ever led to it was Frank Parker. This eventually led to Frank having lived through a whole series of events that no one else had to endure. The loss of loved ones, the feelings of helplessness in the face of calamity, the sense of rage at stupidity and evil, all happened for him, even though the events that brought them about were subsequently erased. The fact that he was already somewhat mentally unstable seemed to actually be a strength in dealing with what might otherwise have been an unbearable burden.

Another, mostly unmentioned, subject was the fact that every Backstep was the first one. Sounds illogical, Mr. Spock? Not at all. Follow the reasoning: In the first episode, no successful Backstep involving a living pilot had taken place. The President and Vice President are assassinated. Frank Parker is chosen to attempt the first successful Backstep mission. He succeeds and prevents the assassination, so in the new, altered timeline, there is no need for a Backstep. With me so far? Frank has experienced a Backstep, and the rest of the Backstep team is aware that one has taken place, but in the new timeline, no Backstep is initiated. (Yes, time travel can make your head hurt, and that’s just from thinking about it.) So the next time a crisis occurs, a Backstep is launched, Frank goes into the past, prevents the crisis from happening, and therefore no Backstep is launched, until the next crisis, when... And so on and so on and so on... And just to keep things simple, and to prevent multiple Frank Parkers running around, only one of anything can exist in any given point of space/time, so when Frank arrives seven days in his own past, he and the time travel sphere exist only at the point of arrival. It’s never adequately explained just what happens to the Frank and the time travel sphere that were minding their own business at Never-Never Land up until that moment, but the unspoken supposition is that they just cease to exist, superseded by their future counterparts.

This is good science fiction, thinking person’s science fiction, and it comes along all too rarely. Thought was actually given to the concept, and the idea that there would be consequences to meddling with events that had already occurred, along with the strain on the human psyche. Like all good fiction, 7 Days was, and is, thought provoking, and well worth watching, both for the entertainment value, and for the brain-stretching that trying to understand some of the concepts brings about. Well worth watching, even if you’ve seen it before. A word of warning; there are always events taking place in the world that you’ll wish could be undone. This show will make you wish that there really were a Project Backstep, so that they could be.