Plan B’s complementary but stand-alone second season has made a quantum leap dialogue-wise with screenwriter Celeste Parr joining Asselin as co-writer.Supplied
If we are on the darkest timeline, as the folks on social media like to say, Plan B is the time-travel show pitched just right for our times.
Imagine if Back to the Future’s Marty McFly actually slept with his mother? Wouldn’t be as disturbing as Plan B.
Or if Hot Tub Time Machine were about preventable drowning deaths? Still wouldn’t be quite as grim as Plan B, back for a second season on CBC Gem Aug. 11.
But while this drama is like the you-want-it-darker version of Being Erica, it’s also highly original, surprisingly plotted and consistently emotionally intelligent. It’s one of the most psychologically perceptive shows about intimate-partner violence streaming right now, to boot.
The anthology series, Québécois creator Jean-François Asselin’s English-language remake of his Radio-Canada series of the same name that premiered in 2017, consistently explored the grimmest of possibilities in a romantic relationship in its first six-episode season.
That 2023 serving of the show was about a workaholic lawyer named Phillip, played by Patrick J. Adams (Suits), who used a time-travel agency to go back and try to stop his musician-turned-paralegal partner from leaving him.
It wasn’t easy to crack as a viewer, seeming at first like a quirky sci-fi romantic comedy that had lost all its jokes after being run through a French-to-English artificial intelligence chatbot. There was some iffy casting and translated-sounding dialogue, too.
But if you stuck with that initial season, Asselin’s plotting rose above the limitations of the execution. Phillip revealed himself to be not a romantic lead, but a jealous, controlling anti-hero who eventually started to incorporate his ability to travel in time into his arsenal of psychological abuse.
Plan B’s complementary but stand-alone second season may retain a couple of the first’s ESL quirks – but it’s made a quantum leap dialogue-wise with screenwriter Celeste Parr joining Asselin as co-writer.
It starts, instead of ends, with horror. Montreal police officer Mia Coleman (Diggstown’s Vinessa Antoine, also time-travel veteran of Being Erica) comes to wish she could turn back the clock after she and her partner let a father of two named Paul Whitman (Vincent Leclerc) go after a domestic dispute – and that night he returns to murder his wife and their two young girls, before taking his own life.
If you can stomach its most twisted of twists, Plan B is much more than just darkness.Supplied
Fortunately, Mia has stumbled upon the number for the Plan B time-travel agency that Phillip used in the first season (in a way that hints that it's not always fortunate to stumble upon those digits).
She dials, plugs in her credit-card number and the date to which she wants to return – and soon enough a pair of identical twins show up and toss her in the back of a van, only for her to reawaken back in time. (A hokey device to be sure – but the show is wryly self-aware about it.)
The first few episodes of Plan B’s second season drip out details about Mia’s personal life that help inform her obsession with this case – the dysfunctional relationship she has with her father and stepfamily, and the unusual court battle she’s waging against her ex (Rossif Sutherland, the most underrated of the Canuck acting clan) to get visitations with her former stepson (and punish her ex for cheating).
While Mia’s distant past is expanded upon organically, she keeps going back into the near past to try to save the Whitman family, one of too many murdered each year by a man who’s supposed to protect them. At first, all she gets out of it are new traumatic memories to carry forward.
Family annihilation is the toughest of subject matter – and a time-travel show might strike some as a gratuitous avenue to do so.
But, in fact, it turns out to be a credible lens through which to look at this problem too often viewed as intractable. The lead character may be a police officer, but the show is the opposite of copaganda, showing the limitations of both law and order when it comes to dealing with domestic violence and abusive behaviour in general.
As the killer dad, Leclerc, who also played the same role in the French version of the series, pulls off what seems like an impossible character arc, as the show truly investigates, and not idealistically, the idea that the only way to really stop any violence is to treat the suffering of the people (generally men) who inflict it.
Asselin, again, uses time travel to look at how humans often torture themselves with thoughts of paths not followed rather than doing the work to make changes in the present – and how our fantasies about getting a do-over are often an unhealthy desire to exert control over others.
If you can stomach its most twisted of twists, Plan B is much more than just darkness.
P.S. If you’ve forgotten about Being Erica, Jana Sinyor’s time-travel therapy show that ran from 2009 to 2011, that ahead-of-its-time Canadian comedy-drama is streaming on Gem, too; a palate cleanser.