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Movie:

  • Adaptation Displacement: The franchise is apparently based on a comic written by future Battlestar Galactica scribe Mark Verheiden - who knew?
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Ricky looking at porn on the virtual reality set. All for fanservice, not important to the plot at all.
  • Complete Monster: U.S. Senator Aaron McComb dreams of becoming a plutocratic despot. Eager to abuse time travel for his own purposes, McComb initially uses it for financial interest schemes. To this end, McComb threatens his agents with erasing them and their entire families from existence, forcing them to kill themselves if the time agency tracks them down. After shooting one of his old business partners to grant his past self access to the victim's tech company, McComb rewrites history so that he completely controls time travel. Additionally extorting a time agent to become his mole against Agent Max Walker by again threatening to erase her family, McComb kills her regardless to tie up all loose ends and frames Walker when he goes back to save her. After having arranged several failed hits on Walker directly, McComb sends his goons back in the past to murder the younger Walker and his wife by blowing them both up in their home.
  • Funny Moments: The way the future McComb expresses disdain at his younger, dumber self when they meet before the younger Senator foolishly trades away stock in a company that would be important for time travel tech to work.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Fielding's comment to Max that she "already knows who's going to win the next 10 World Series." The movie was released in 1994, the same year as the infamous MLB players' strike which wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Senator McComb is running for President in 2004. He outright states that it'll be like the Reagan years again, the wealthiest 10% will flourish, the rest can flee to Mexico if they want. In 2004 Ron Silver (who played McComb) gave a speech at the Republican National Convention campaigning for George W. Bush.
    • This won't be the last time Mia Sara gets involved with time travelling police.
    • The infamous Cybertruck is basically what the 2004's "futuristic" car would evolve into. And it's real.
  • Narm: The scene of past and present McComb fusing and melting into a protoplasmic ooze due to a combination of Conspicuous CG and the way McComb awkwardly stumbles into himself rather than being properly launched forward.
  • Nightmare Fuel: McComb's body fusing with his alternate self.
  • One-Scene Wonder: The Stranger, the mysterious man from the opening, who ambushes a group of Confederate soldiers with modern machine pistols and is never seen or even referenced again (his "name" comes up only in credits). Now ask any random person what they remember about this film - it will be that guy.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Knives can fly out of time vortices without warning.
  • Spiritual Successor: The 2012 sci-fi film Looper is basically a Perspective Flip of this film; instead of cops policing time, it's about organized crime using time travel to make money.

TV Series:

  • Complete Monster: In this series spun off from the film, Ian Pascoe is a time traveller from the near future who, after killing both his parents in 2007, has traversed time and space to Make Wrong What Once Went Right throughout history, funding mob bosses, causing disasters and personally murdering countless people. In his first episode he kills the original Jack the Ripper to take his place, and proceeds to work on achieving Jack's bodycount five times over. When the protagonist tries to stop him, Pascoe ties a time-detonated bomb to a prostitute's neck before escaping. He reappears in 1950s Hollywood, where he electrocutes a famed actress's boyfriend before trying to crush her by tying her up and dropping a safe on her head. When the timecops arrest him, he stages a prison breakout, killing a psychologist and kidnapping the protagonist's colleague on his way out. He meets up with Al Capone in 1928 after previously having made him boss, and forces Capone back into his service. When Capone orders one of his goons to keep tabs on Pascoe, the latter murders the minion and gives Capone the man's bodyparts stuffed into a briefcase. Living solely for the thrill of murder, Pascoe's only goal was to become and remain "the greatest killer in history."
  • Informed Wrongness: The tech guy is portrayed this way. In one episode, he chronically suggests that they not time jump right away and let him tinker with the time machine to figure out why it's acting weird, and is always dismissed out of hand for not doing things "the police way". And then the time machine screws up again. This happens several times.
  • Spiritual Successor: The somewhat more successful Time Trax.


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