Tiempo

My summer entertainment has largely consisted of the first series of El Ministerio del Tiempo, a Spanish science fiction series available on Netflix.  (Don’t worry, there are subtitles.)

It’s smart, it’s clever, and once you accept its (somewhat ridiculous) premise, it explores that premise thoroughly and plays fair with its audience.   More than that, its avoids all the time travel cliches you might expect from TV writers who aren’t familiar with the vast body of time travel literature.

Spain’s Ministry of Time is dedicated to keeping history as she is wrote, and free from interference by other time travelers like, say, Heinrich Himmler, who appears in one episode as someone a little too curious about the possibility of changing the past.   The Ministry recruits people from throughout history as its agents, though sometimes at the cost of acute culture shock.

El Ministerio is allowed only to work within the Spanish borders, which however are a bit flexible— during the Armada episode they’re allowed to go to Lisbon, because Portugal at the time was a part of Spain.  This makes me wonder if they can then legally travel to other former Spanish possessions, like Cuba, Latin America, Sicily, and Guam.  (I imagine the series budget won’t allow for that.)

The agents soon discover that to deal with the fabric of time is to subject themselves to unending tragedy.  They are torn from their own time to a future when the everyone they love is dead, and (by the rules of the Ministry) they are not allowed to interfere to save even their own children.  Yet, to keep the time stream from becoming corrupted, they spend their days saving everyone else.

Yet the series shows its true cleverness in its lighter moments.  One of the Ministry’s agents is the painter Diego Velásquez, who dashes off a sketch to be auctioned whenever the Ministry needs to raise some capital, and who has an unfulfilled, ahistorical desire to meet Picasso. (He also accuses Dalí of plagiarizing his mustache.)  The swashbuckling cavalier recruited from the 17th Century wonders why people keep calling him Captain Alatriste, then finds out after he shoplifts a copy of the novel from a 21st Century bookstore.  One of the Ministry’s stolid bureaucrats bears an alarming resemblance to Tomas de Torquemada.  A melting iPad found in a Dalí painting triggers an investigation.  The team are first shocked to discover an American time traveler interfering with the past, and then are further shocked to discover the Americans have privatized their time travel service.  (“Next they’ll privatize health care!”)

The agents seem to spend most of their missions involved with famous people.  This sort of makes sense— if time travelers interfered with obscure or unimportant people, nobody in the present would ever find out.  So in addition to Dalí and Velásquez, the agents meet Lorca, Buñuel, Isabellas I and II, and Lope de Vega.  I see from episode summaries that subsequent episodes will encounter El Cid, Cervantes, Houdini, J Edgar Hoover, Columbus, and somebody called the Vampire of Raval.

I’ll look forward to meeting them.