A peep inside Socrates' liver

I’ve been watching the American series DEVS on telly. Pure ridiculous nonsense, I won’t go into details but it presents the idea (using the latest technology from California of course) that we could see something that happened in the past, albeit without the full transportation of individual sentient beings through time. The familiar feature of such portrayals of time travel is that, as in this case you may see the Crucifixion of Christ or the death of Socrates as if you were watching a film, i.e. from a third party viewpoint, as you would in a cinema. The problem immediately arises: who is holding the time travel camera? My point is, if you could travel through time you might have just a decent a chance of emerging inside the head or liver of Christ or Socrates, as you might emerge in a microbe sitting on them or standing two feet away. What determines the view? How do you get to choose your viewpoint? Sadly, I can’t see how one could possibly emerge intact as a film director in another era, whizzing around with your camera, everything in sharp focus. But the appeal of sci-fi time travel is built upon such viewpoints, and our historical imagining of them. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to wander down a medieval street (c’mon, who hasn’t?) and hear the sounds, sniff the smells and observe medieval people going about their daily business, yet be invisible to those denizens of the past (it’s not as if I’d want to catch their diseases or pass on my own). I would insist on being invisible in order to get back into my own time unharmed, in order perhaps to listen to Carl Orff on the stereo after a nice hot shower.
 
So I have to ask myself how did I make it to episode five of DEVS before I had to say ‘enough?’ One or two of the central characters are interesting, but their ultimate intersection is all rather predictable. The addition of computer generated graphics in these situations can’t really compensate for the decreasing sense of drama. All the explanations can be figured out far too soon, not least because they’ve all been implicitly explained already. There are no mysteries left. We are left with something which is mildly watchable but is unthought provoking.
 
It may have been different if this was a David Lynch. In his work you are presented with the frustration of not really knowing what’s going on, and knowing that there are known unknowns (etc., etc.) and that’s the way it should be and will probably remain. Indeed that’s what real life is like, but what we expect from a decent Hollywood set-up is quite the reverse. We want our heroes to be as we project ourselves to be when we dream on it. That probably is all the time travel we need, imagining our glories of the future. Our longing for that future seems rather accentuated at the moment.