A rookie time-agent is sent to a sun-bleached Guam pier to bring in a suspended operative — a man who insists he’s just a washed-up local named Jack, not the specialist the Chronology needs back on duty.
12 Monkeys meets Killing Eve’s procedural cool — a time-travel forensics duo who are only ever mandated to watch, dropped into a case where someone with the same clearance has already started changing the ending.
The story
The pilot episode (numbered 01.01 in the internal series bible) of an ongoing series. Cadet Surveillant Wyatt Rainier — young, earnest, jacket stencilled CHRONOLOGY — tracks Specialist Jack Twomey to a Guam jetty at dusk, mid-flirtation with a local woman, suspended and adamant he’s just “Jack” now. Jack is pulled back in anyway: Chronology’s UN-mandated forensic division needs him and his new cadet inserted into 1995 London to record, not prevent, the assassination of Felix Ali Shaheen, a minor Qatari royal. The wrinkle that should worry them — they’re dropped in three hours before the killing, a violation of Chronology’s own non-intervention mandate — is waved through by a UN oversight quorum with no explanation given. What plays out in the McPherson Hotel is a nested surveillance puzzle: security details arriving early, an unexplained “administrator” who shoots at Jack on sight, and finally a masked home invasion that Dynamic Chronology’s own undercover troops break up in real time — meaning someone on the inside has already been rewriting this event before Jack and Wyatt ever arrived to observe it. Chronolog plays procedural mechanics (launch floors, gyroscope insertion, DNA-locked return units, DNA-coded sidearms “for shooting yourself, if you’re stuck here”) as load-bearing worldbuilding, then uses them to spring a real mystery: whichever version of history Chronology thinks it’s protecting, someone with agency-level access got there first.
Coverage — plot points
- Cadet Rainier reactivates suspended Specialist Jack Twomey on a Guam jetty for a case Twomey wants no part of.
- The pair are inserted into 1995 London three hours before an assassination they’re mandated only to record.
- Security details arrive at the hotel two and a half hours early — the first sign this insertion isn’t running to protocol.
- Jack breaks into a guarded room and is shot at by an “administrator” he recognises from Chronology itself.
- A masked intruder takes the target hostage at gunpoint — then Dynamic Chronology’s own undercover troops storm in and shut it down, live, in front of Jack and Wyatt.
- The reveal: this timeline has already been quietly altered by another arm of their own agency, before either agent set foot in it.
The Black List — Coverage Evaluation
“The plotting and pacing of the script is immediately kinetic and crescendos to a — literally and figuratively — explosive finale that offers a compelling cliffhanger… INSERTION is certainly a strong, carefully conjured, TV-worthy premise.”
“No one gets away with anything in a world where all instants can be retrieved and combed through from all angles by later observers.”
“What they tell you at home doesn’t always match the facts on the ground, and we’re more than a million miles from home. One slip, and home can be out of reach for us. So we often play it by ear, maybe even act on pure instinct, then try to justify our choices later under the cold light of analysis.”
Read the sample
Below is the existing draft — a sample of the pilot script (68pp shown). Scroll to read, or download the PDF.
Seeking representation and/or a producing partner for television. Full pilot, series bible and beat sheets for the season available on request.