(Spoiler alert: Please do not read on if you haven’t watched Wednesday’s series premiere episode of “Frequency”)
A lot went down in the series premiere of The CW’s time travel show “Frequency,” and that ending seemed to set up for a lot more to happen as we move forward.
Through their cross-time communication via an old ham radio, in 2016 Raimy Sullivan (Peyton List) successfully kept her father Frank (Riley Smith) from being killed in 1996, creating a new timeline in which he was a figure in her life into adulthood, but her mother was murdered by a serial killer called the Nightingale.
Showrunner Jeremy Carver explained that things won’t get too confusing now that Raimy has created multiple realities by changing the past, as won’t be creating a new timeline every single time she does something to change the past.
“You see pretty clearly coming into Episode 2 that Raimy essentially has two sets of memories,” he explained. “She’s got the memories of life when dad survived being killed, and then she has the memories, which we call ‘remnant memories,’ of the life that was changed. So that was life when mom was alive, when Daniel was her boyfriend. So she’s got two separate memories there. That doesn’t change too much, that’s sort of our baseline that we’re building on.
“There may be other switches coming,” Carver hinted, “but it’s always building on that, those two memories will always exist … There are multiple memories she’s holding in her head, but it’s not like they’re changing every five minutes.”
And while that may seem complicated, Carver and the “Frequency” writers’ room will be the ones doing most of the head-scratching.
“We consider that the heavy lifting we do in the writers’ room,” he said. “To make it as easy to understand as possible on the screen. It’s like there’s a bunch of little elves running through your TV screen trying to keep this stuff in order, but for the viewer, I don’t think it’s that hard to understand. We don’t want it to be such a rule-heavy show that you have to constantly be reciting the rules to follow along.”
And as for the Nightingale serial killer, he or she has the same name as the killer in the original 2000 movie “Frequency,” but don’t expect things to play out the same way if you already know how that story ends.
“I think that would be not terrific to do the same Nightingale story from the movie, just because people have seen that,” he teased. “So from the setup on, things diverge from where the movie went.”
“Frequency” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on The CW.