More and more strange people are appearing each day in and around Oliver Wilson’s home; the explanation from the euphoric redhead leads him to believe they are time travelers gathering for an important event.

We may never know just how young Kivrin Engle wrangled her academic advisor and the powers-that-be at the University of Oxford into sending her to previously off-limits, 14th-century England, but her timing was not ideal given that she’dd just been exposed to a recently re-emerged influenza virus. Oh, and the inexperience tech who also got hit with the virus with the virus after the drop may have sent Kivrin to the wrong year.

In the year 2035, with the world devastated by an artificially engineered plague, convict James Cole is sent back in time to gather information about the plague’s origin so the scientists can figure out how to fight it.

Teenager Prenna James and her mother are two of the survivors of a future plague who return to the early 21st century to live out a quiet life under strict non-interference rules.

Same pandemic backstory as the movie, similar names for the characters, no Bruce Willis, and a mishmash of time-travel tropes along with tuneless minor-key chords in place of actual tension and slowly spoken clichéd dialogue in place of actual plot. Random discussions of fate brush shoulders with an admixture of possible time travel models from narrative time (when a wound sprouts on old JC’s shoulder while watching young JC get shot), to skeleton timelines (JC thinks that his timeline will vanish if he succeeds), to a fascination with a single static timeline (you’ll see it in Chechnya) and time itself has an agenda. Primarily, we’d say that the story follows narrative time from Cole’s point of view.

By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.

P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow).

When Flynne Fisher’s ne’er-do-well brother lands a lucrative gig testing new VR tech, he drafts Flynne to do the heavy lifting, and she’s bowled over by the future world the VR has created—until she realizes it’s more than a sim.