How about going back in time and meeting your parents when they were younger? This is exactly the question Kevin and Saffron will ask in the eighth episode of Time Bandits. And now I’m a little jealous that I won’t be able to see my parents as young people, or see my grandma again and have her show me how to make apricot pie. What a gift it is to even be able to imagine those scenarios. And when the episode is in that spirit, it’s at its best. The increasing complexity of this series’ time travel elements that “Home Again” introduces is also cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.
There really isn’t much – on TV, in film or anywhere else – that treats time travel elegantly (except perhaps primer), and this series struggles a little in that regard. People who love all the intricacies of this kind of storytelling either seem to enjoy finding all the resulting plot holes, or they delight in the time travel stories that really seem to get it right (ie primer). To be honest, I only care about it insofar as it gives us more information about the characters involved. Convoluted plots just for the sake of complexity are not really my style and fortunately not what TB Try. We can completely relax about these things if we want and focus on what’s happening at the character level.
Fortunately, the bandits only interact with their future selves in mirror image via a portal, so none of them are duplicated, imploded or anything like that. (That is, none of the Bandits be doubled; only Fianna does. We’ll come back to that.) What happens is that her perception of herself “destroys” her self-esteem. Penelope’s future self speaks through the portal and says that they need to go after the Haddock children who have already jumped through. Penelope in the regular timeline perceives herself as super bossy and does not likes her charisma. She spends the rest of the episode alternately trying to soften or justify her tone. The future Widgit tells himself that his understanding of the map is greater than he thinks, and gives himself the cryptic hint that “time folds,” a minor mystery that torments the timeline’s regular Widgit throughout the episode. The future Biddelig is not with the others and they cannot tell if he is alive or dead, causing the timeline’s regular Biddelig to assume the latter and go through a personal crisis to make sure he does something meaningful with his life. It’s all very existential.
So the bandits go through the portal back to the Bingley, which is no longer part of Ice Age – but this time it’s 1996. Now the meeting of the Haddock siblings with their younger parents comes into play. They decide to split up and visit the parents in their respective childhood homes. Saffron goes to mom, while Kevin goes to dad. If they manage to warn their parents somehow, maybe they won’t get “charred” later. That’s sort of the main goal of the episode, and the way it plays out is very sweet. (It’s also fun to see Felicity Ward and James Dryden dressed as Kevin and Saff’s grandparents, on either side, grandma with fluffy blonde mullet, grandpa with bald cap.)
Kevin has the best day of his life with his dad, especially after Grandpa Haddock confiscates the Gameboy the teenager was secretly playing with outside. Father and son play tag, dance to Jamiroquai and have a little heart-to-heart talk. Kevin’s dad even tells him he thinks he’s cool! When Fianna finally catches up with them and scares young Mikey Haddock to death with her laser eyes, the image of her is burned into his memory and haunts his dreams for years. This is how he manages to avoid be possible “char formation”.
Saffron has a slightly more complicated time with her mother, who is only six at the time of this visit. Still, it is special for her. Saff suggests they play a “mother-daughter” game, and uses this opportunity to apologize to her children’s mother for all kinds of things she can’t even begin to understand. The Haddock children’s grandma exercises good judgment, sees that Saffron looks completely disheveled in her Neanderthal outfit, and calls a state child protective agency. When the agents and Kevin arrive at the same time, Saffron runs off and tries to take her little six-year-old mommy with her into the future. The fear resulting from this near-abduction by a “wild orphan girl” leads her to practice hostage negotiation techniques throughout her life, which prevents her from her finally “coalification” when Fianna arrives. In none of the cases was the event that saved the parents something the children did intentionally to save them, which is interesting.
Kal-El Tuck in Time Bandits (Photo: Apple TV+)
Now let’s talk about these dual Fiannas and how it came to be. Pure evil, spying on Kevin through the eyes of a cat and happy to have found him (and perhaps the map), orders his hunter to emerge from her rock and retrieve him. Rather than this canceling out her emergence from the rock in 2024, the other Fianna, who jumped through portals to find the bandits, is still on the move. This leads to the two ending up in 1996 Bingley, where they attack the bandits and each other until Widgit and his crew escape through the old Ice Age portal and close it behind them, leaving the Fiannas in the 90s. Was that confusing? It confused me. But thankfully, that’s about as complicated as it gets.
Back in the Neanderthal era, the tribe members get a chance to say “see you later” to Saff. And Biddelig, who was actually just out getting medical supplies at the time of the portal conversation between the once and future bandits, gets a chance to tend to his rhino friend’s wounds. It seems his lesson was that learning how to heal others, or maybe just caring for one living thing, is enough to make his life meaningful. Widgit has apparently figured out what “wrinkles in time” means. (I guess just because he spent the whole episode thinking about it? Because of the clue he gave himself? I’m so confused.) Penelope has presumably come to terms with her own tone, Kevin realizes that the two pieces of coal in his pocket are gone, and he and Saffron are ecstatic, believing that this means their people are safe and haven’t been turned into coal after all.
Everyone seems to have succeeded and accomplished their goals for the episode, but then a saber-toothed tiger leaps at them, freezes in midair, and becomes a sort of intercom for PE. He reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Haddock are with him. He will only release them in exchange for the map. Instead of handing it over, they plan to search for PE in the “Time of Legends,” but that very corner of the map is missing. Now they must find it. Fans of Jemaine Clement, rejoice. It looks like we’ll be seeing more of him in the next episode.
Scatter observations
- • This is the first episode with noticeable pinpricks! (If “Georgian” contained some classical compositions, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to notice them.) Of course, they’re not the nerdy kind; it’s all mainstream. We’re talking “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, “Lovefool” by the Cardigans, “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai and stuff like that. They’re very, very fun.
- • I still don’t like the anti-cat bias that put my feline friends in league with the devil, but I’ll admit it was a handy gimmick for the writers this season. They needed a way for PE to track the team’s movements, and it was pretty ingenious to have the bad guy use a saber-toothed tiger as an intercom to threaten the bandits in the final moments of the episode.
- • The Bandits spend some of their free time/hiding from the Fianna in a shop that sells Sam Goody-style CDs, and I have to say, it’s a pretty perfect setting for a 90s-style visit.
- • When Alto tries to extract information from the goths at the party where the bandits enter through the portal from the Ice Age, he mimics their monotone tone and sulky demeanor. It’s a funny moment and relatable for neurodiverse people like me who occasionally resort to social mimicry to get through life.
- • At one point the bandits are looking for Kevin, but they have a hard time because all the little white boys from the 90’s had his rather long haircut (including my own brother).
- • When Fianna tries to attack Kevin’s family, Kevin’s mother is very calm and even gives the hunter some cables to tie her up. But where does she get them? Should we all carry cables around with us to offer ourselves as prisoners if needed?
- • In another key character twist, we also learn why some of the bandits weren’t exactly thrilled about this whole operation to rescue Kevin’s parents: They reveal that they had tried to save their deceased friend Susan and failed. She fell off a cliff and was then crushed by a huge boulder. It was “pretty conclusive,” they say.
