Travelers Season 3 Episode 4: Perrow Recap

Find my other Travelers posts HERE.

Episode 4, Perrow, picks up the dropped thread of 001, who went into hiding at the end of season 2, and hasn’t been seen since. The Faction kidnaps Perrow, via car accident, because they want something from her. She’s injured so badly that Perrow’s body is no longer viable, but the Faction can offer 001 a new host in trade, and an army for her to lead.

001, the first Traveler, had been using Vincent Ingram as his host body since he accidentally transferred into Vincent, instead of another man, on 9/11/2001 in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center, minutes before the plane hit the building (S2 Ep1, Ave Machina). Over the course of season 2, he built a consciousness transfer device in the 21st century, with the help of Traveler 004/Simon, a highly trained Traveler who’d been institutionalized after his host developed schizophrenia.

In the final episode of season 2, Simon secretly completed the device and 001 moved from Vincent Ingram’s body into the body of his therapist, Dr Katrina Perrow. 001 transferred his financial accounts over to her name, and gave “her” custody of his son. Then (in S3 Ep1) 001 forced 004 into death by overwrite, at the hands of the Director, so that only his most loyal henchmen know about 001’s body swap.

We heard Perrow’s voice in episode 1 of this season, as she explained to Simon what she was doing to him, but other than that she’s stayed successfully under the radar. In this episode, her future tribe needs her help, and can’t wait any longer to activate her.

Her tribe is, as we’d all probably guessed, the Faction. In season 1, evidence of the existence of the Faction and of 001 were given to us for the first time in the same episode, S1 Ep5, Room 101, even though 001 had been operating in the background for years. In season 2, there was evidence that 001 and the Faction were using the same methods and philosophy, and even the same equipment.

Perrow’s isn’t the only consciousness transfer in this episode. Jeff finally takes things too far with Carly, and the Director finally takes action. We met Jeff Conniker when he was drunk and attacking the real Carly Shannon. We say goodbye when he’s driving drunk and using road rage tactics to drive her off the road, then threatening her with a gun. His own behavior catches up with him, as it was always destined to. Carly refuses to back down, but he brought his death on himself.

Turning Jeff into a Traveler gives J Alex Brinson a chance to play a different character, which I’m looking forward to. The actor is likeable and talented, even though Jeff was a deplorable human being.

They tried to redeem Jeff in season 2, but it’s for the best that they dropped that storyline. If we didn’t know that he’d actually killed Carly, I might have considered him redeemable. But no amount of charm is going to make me forget drunken domestic violence. It’s too much of an issue in real life, and the perpetrators get off easy way too often. There are way, way too many of us out here in TVLand who are triggered by men like him, with very good reason.

Episode 4 finds 001/Katrina Perrow riding in her limo, wearing a tasteful pinstriped suit and listening to tasteful classical music. 001 has a much better stylist as Perrow than he did as Vincent Ingram. Despite being a sadistic butcher, 001 likes to think of himself as a human with superior cultural tastes. It’s shocking how common this is amongst mass murderers and dictators. When we see her for the first time in the limo, Perrow couldn’t look more like a member of the Aryan Master Race if she tried.

By the way, I’m just going to play fast and loose with the pronouns here. 001 may be a “he’, but he’s presenting himself to the world as Katrina Perrow, and living in her stolen body. Katrina Perrow is definitely a “she”. I’m not going to make it that easy for 001 to erase the identity he’s stolen.

001 receives texts on what is undoubtedly a super secret cell phone line, and realizes she’s being followed. She calmly informs the driver.

Text 1: We know who you are. We know when you’re from.

Text 2: We mean you no harm. We need your help.

Text 3: Pull over. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.

With each successive text, the car that’s following 001 speeds up, and 001 grows more agitated. By the time she gets the third text, she’s panicking. The car behind her smashes into her car, hard enough to make it flip and knock her unconscious.

The accident results in life-threatening injuries. In the hospital, she’s placed in a medically induced coma because she’s has a serious head injury, which requires surgery. Her driver is dead and someone removed her ID from the crash site. As soon as her doctor leaves her alone in the room, people dressed as hospital staff move in and disconnect her from the machines.

This episode is filled with parallels to the episode that introduced Vincent’s interference in the timeline and with the Travelers, S1 Ep5, Room 101. In that episode, Carly, Philip, Trevor and Marcy had just come from greeting a new Traveler team who’d transferred into a host family. One team member was a misfire, the daughter. As the team drove back to ops, they discussed the failures of the early Traveler program. None of the younger Travelers had been told that in the early days of the program, more than 30% of the Traveler transfers were misfires.

How many of those misfires actually walked away, just like Vincent, but were smarter about staying hidden?

This conversation was interrupted when the car was t-boned by a truck. The team woke up sitting in cages inside an abandoned warehouse, with several inches of water on the floor. They were strapped into wheelchairs, wearing hospital gowns, and hooked up to IVs. They were all injured, some worse than others. Philip was unconscious longer than the others, and suffering because of his raging heroin addiction.

One by one, the team members were removed from their cages by a deaf-mute goon who we’d later come to discover fit the profile of Vincent’s henchmen. They were asked questions that were presented on a TV screen. When they didn’t answer the questions satisfactorily, they were shown fake videos of their loved ones being tortured and killed. The questions echoed the wording of the texts which Perrow just received, and the questions she’ll ask later in the episode. Months after Room 101, 001 actually kidnapped and tortured the team’s loved ones, but that’s a different episode (S2 Ep12).

We were given important information in S1 Ep5, in the form of memories which the Travelers, especially Philip, shared. As it turned out, we also learned important information about Vincent. Just like Aleksander’s two episodes work together as the two pieces of a puzzle, this episode and Room 101 do, as well.

Back to the episode at hand. Marcy and David are still all glowy and in love around each other. Their relationship also continues its recent level of equality. Over breakfast, she teaches him that eating raw eggs will give him salmonella and he teaches her how to break eggs without getting half the shell in the bowl.

I know we already knew that there are no chickens in the future and they eat yeast gruel, but it’s still sad that chickens are extinct. 😫🐔

Trevor is working on an electronics project, while Philip is dragging himself out of bed, still deep in depression. Trevor reminds him that everyday is a gift. When Philips points out that he’s had more of those gifts than anyone else, ever, Trevor replies that he doesn’t take a single one for granted.

Philip sits down at his work station and sees something alarming on his monitors, so they bring Mac in on the conversation. The Travelers’ deep web communication channels are in a frenzy with the news that an EEG which was done on an unidentified accident victim in a hospital the day before has an 88% chance of belonging to 001.

There’s a missing persons alert out on the accident victim. Travelers teams throughout their area are looking for him. Mac doesn’t understand how this is possible, since 001 was overwritten. Philip explains that 001 must have already transferred out by the time the Director put a new consciousness into Vincent Ingram.

Trevor says that an EEG is like a fingerprint. The Director would recognize 001’s unique signature. Philip looks at the records and finds that 001 was brought into the hospital as a Jane Doe, then removed from her room before the test results came back.

Kathryn is in a therapy session, telling her therapist that she doesn’t trust Mac anymore, and has fantasies that he’s evil. She thinks that Mac has used up all of his chances to rebuild their relationship. The therapist tells her not to build walls around herself. She wants Kat to work on actually confronting Mac, instead of bottling up her anxiety.

Kat: “Just the idea of that scares me.”

Therapist: “What’s he gonna do? If you have something to say, say it.”

Okay, WHAT? When Kat found out the truth about Mac, she confronted him, boldly and honestly, without fear, like the therapist wants her to. And he ordered her to be physically and mentally violated, while he watched. The scenario was probably a lot like her fear fantasies, except she pops out of her fantasies before she’s held down and mind raped, the way she was in reality.

The therapist asks Kat to say, “I am not afraid of my husband,” out loud, 3 or 4 times in a row. Kat can’t say it at all.

Maybe this therapist should explore why Kat’s afraid of her husband, instead of dismissing her emotions as overreactions. Even without memory serum, dissociation and secret-keeping happen. Or maybe Kat needs a better therapist, though one that will take women seriously is hard to find, even when it’s another woman. After all, Kat was just kidnapped. She has good reason to be afraid right now, even without the memories she was forced to forget.

Carly is at home cleaning her guns, when Jeff pays her a visit. He wants to have a conversation about what she did with the real Carly. Carly tells him to get lost, but he’s spoiling for another fight. Carly opens the door, with the chain guard still locked, and points a handgun at him, saying, “Leave.” Jeff decides to finish the conversation another time.

That woman is the essence of my life goals, if I get another go round on the planet.

Philip takes one of his yellow historian pills, after watching it float in and out of the timeline for a minute. Then he calls his dealer to set up a pick up before the next update. Trevor overhears the conversation and is suspicious of the whole thing. Philip gets defensive, insisting that it’s all Director approved and his heroin relapse was a one time thing. He says that Trevor has to trust him. Trevor says that he’s still going with Philip to pick up the pills.

It’s one of those funny half arguments that people who care about each other sometimes have because they’re worried and feel helpless. The Director really is handling this like it’s illicit drugs. Why can’t anyone know about the updates? They already know about the future historical knowledge. What’s the difference if it’s more accurate now? Wouldn’t it be better for teammates to know, so they’d be prepared to help historians who have issues after updates?

David is making his rounds of the homeless people he works with, and checks in with the guy he gave his bike to after he and Marcy won the lottery in S2 Ep9, Update. The bike guy says that a group of guys from Murray Park stole it. Since David and his client are both upset about the missing bike, David decides that he’s going to play superhero, and go get it back.

Mac questions 001’s doctor in the hospital, but he doesn’t know much more than Mac has already discovered, beyond giving Mac the description of Katrina Perrow. The hospital’s security cameras all froze while Perrow was in the hospital, so there are no photographs of her.

Well, that’s a remarkably convenient coincidence.

While he’s at the hospital, Mac gets a text from Kat asking him to attend her therapy session with her on Wednesday, at 3:00.

001’s captors have diagnosed him with a brain hemorrhage. His blood pressure is high and rising. He’s in critical condition, but they don’t have the facilities to treat him. They argue over what to do. The leader needs him to be conscious and functional, but the medic, Michelle, can’t help her and points out that causing a car crash to make contact was a really, really dumb idea.

001 wakes up and asks, “Who are you?”

The leader answers, “My name is Dawn, and it’s an honor to be here with you.”

Trevor sarcastically remarks that it’s a “nice part of town the Director sent you to,” to pick up Philip’s pills. Philip points out that they live in a garage in a part of town that isn’t much better.

David finds the bike thieves loitering on the steps of the abandoned Murray Park High School. He confronts them about the bike, but they claim that it’s theirs, and they’ve had it for years. David tells them he knows they’re lying and that he needs the bike back. The other guy says, “Or what?” David punches him in the face.

The other guy hits back hard, knocking David to the ground. He hits his head, hard. Trevor and Philip are suddenly there and they chase the gang off. They tell David to get his head checked, because he could have a concussion.

He definitely has a concussion. His vision and hearing are distorted.

Did Philip and Trevor just save David’s life? If that one punch was enough to give him a concussion, how far was the fight going to go? There’s no way they were there by coincidence alone.

Once Philip has picked up his pills, they hear from Mac, checking in on what’s happening with the deep web. They have to tell him that they had a “thing” and stepped out for a minute. He gets all pissy with them, but gets distracted when the Director sends a messenger.

“Traveler 3468, take immediate action to provide internet access for the Ilsa AI at Filmore Laboratories.”

Marcy hides behind a dumpster and watches David bring the bike back to his client. She definitely sent Trevor and Philip after him.

Perrow is immobilized in her bed, with a stiff cervical collar. She has an IV, and is in a dingy, abandoned setting. She asks her captors, “What do you want from me?”

Dawn: “For now, we need you healthy. But soon, we’ll need your help.”

001: “Why would I help you?”

Dawn: “We represent a group of people known hundreds of years from now as the Faction.”

Michelle: “We’ve lost contact with the future and now we’re running out of resources.”

001: “Ah. You need money. That’s all this is.”

Dawn: “There’s so much more to this than that.”

Perrow/001 winces in pain. We see through her eyes how distorted her vision is from her brain injury. It’s metaphorically distorted, as well.

Dawn: “Are you in pain?”

001: “Yes.”

Dawn gives her pain pills. She gives Dawn a look that could torture for several days, and then kill. Michelle pulls Dawn to the side.

Michelle: “The headache’s becoming more severe and he’s getting weaker.”

Dawn: “He hardly seems injured.”

Michelle: “That’s the difficulty with internal injuries and brain trauma. I’m telling you, without surgical intervention, he’s not going to last the day.”

Dawn: “We can’t risk the exposure to the Director.”

Michelle: “We have to find him a new host.”

Dawn: “You know what we’ll be inviting.”

Michelle: “But he’ll survive.”

They return to 001.

Dawn: “We need the consciousness transfer device.”

001: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dawn and Michelle look at each other. Michelle nods her head. Dawn removes the cervical collar.

Dawn: “Go ahead. We won’t stop you.”

001 activates a com/tracking device at the base of her skull. Her henchmen, who are already loaded into at least two SUVs and a large delivery van, in anticipation of her signal, move out immediately. They’re 90 minutes away. The faction is about to have an entire strike team and some heavy artillery aimed at them.

001: “You know what I just did.”

Michelle: “Activated your failsafe. They’re coming for you now. It’s the only way to save you and that’s more important than anything.”

The Traveler team goes over the events of S2 Ep 12 again, and they figure out pretty quickly that 001 is now in Perrow and that he must have used his industrial resources and Simon’s expertise to build a consciousness transfer device. Kidnapping the loved ones and outing the Travelers to the world was just a distraction to keep them and the Director busy while he made the switch.

It was also a way for 001 to revisit some of his worst pain onto his enemies, the pain of losing his wife and partner when they were used as messengers by the Director. The two most loved of the loved ones, Kat and David, were also used as messengers when he forced them to make ransom videos. The Director’s favorite team of Travelers were used as messengers to out the Traveler program to the world. The team has been put in various forms of danger because they made those tapes.

Now we’re watching the genesis of 001’s Traveler torture and interrogation program. During this kidnapping, he must have been in more physical pain and felt more powerless than at any other time in his life. Since this timeline is actually a loop, he can implement what’s he’s learned from this experience into his “investigations” of Travelers and the Director. Or, rather, he’s already implemented it, but we’re seeing where he originally gets/got the idea from. This must be his second time going through the loop, at a minimum, while being self-aware of previous loops, because in this timeline, he’s already created the Traveler torture and interrogation program, but it’s based on events that are happening now.

Time loops are hard, ok? They inherently contain paradoxes. Which is why this is an inherently unorganized recap. 🐓 🍳

Next, Mac’s team realizes that 001 could have jumped from Perrow into anyone, making him impossible to find. They figure out that the Director needs internet access, through Ilsa, to help it find him. Mac has arranged for them to visit Ilsa using the FBI as their cover. The FBI won’t like having the entire team use FBI IDs, but Mac has “a plan”.

Grace enthusiastically comes through the door at that moment. Everyone but Trevor is inexplicably put off by her, as usual, this time because she’s eager and enthusiastic. She’s given Trevor a list of the supplies she’ll need and he’s prepared them, so she grabs the case and goes to wait in the car. Trevor says, “She’s really eager to talk to the Director.”

By the time David gets home, he’s feeling the symptoms of his concussion. He calls Marcy and leaves a voicemail, telling her that he needs her to do a medical examination when she gets home. He vomits in the middle of the voicemail. Since he’s David, he just keeps going with the message.

Teslia calls Jo Yates to let her know that Mac is planning to give Ilsa internet access. She gets to the lab just after the team, and gets into an argument with Mac about why this is a bad idea. They quotes rules, needs and agreements back and forth at each other, while Philip, Carly, Trevor and Marcy block Yates’ view of the entrance to Ilsa’s room so that Grace can sneak through.

Grace works out of sight on a row of computer banks for a few minutes, then sneaks back out. (Down in the comment section, jfrichard2496 gives a great, detailed explanation of exactly what Grace does, so be sure to check it out.) Mac pretends to capitulate to Jo’s demands. Grace asks to talk to the Director, but is told no, and the team leaves.

Once they get to their cars, they all pull out their tablets to look at the information on 001 as Perrow that the Director has already amassed. It’s located Perrow in a warehouse outside of town, so they decide to go get him now.

Grace says that things are getting exciting, which spurs them to leave her on the side of the road with no Uber access.

Isn’t misogyny hilarious, kids?* Misogyny makes it okay to treat blunt, non-sexualized women badly, no matter how valuable they are otherwise**, because putting women in their place always comes first. 😠 Both iterations of Simon behaved badly, but the team and the writers never treated him the way they treat Grace. No matter how low a man gets on the ladder, he’s still a man and retains masculine privilege. The humanity that Aleksander brought out in McLaren didn’t stick around long. Oops, Aleksander is still a male.

Jesus Christ, now Jeffrey Conniker is drinking and drunk dialing Kat so he can stir more ish up for Carly and the team. He leaves a voicemail.

Jeff tells Kat that he remembers now that Carly isn’t Carly and Mac isn’t Mac. Have a nice day! Plus, he left the same message for David. But he knows that Kat is the weak link he can exploit, because addicts and narcissists come with the gift of having a sixth sense about these things.

001: “My son and My host’s daughter were moving to a new secure location. They’ll be worried.”

Dawn: “Mr Morraca will take care of them until you’re ready to see them again. Like I said, there isn’t much about you we don’t know.”

001: “Where are you planning to take me?”

Dawn: “We’re just preparing you for the transfer when they arrive.”

001: “My people have standing orders to kill you.”

Dawn: “Hopefully they’ll realize we’re on the same side before that happens.”

001: “They won’t believe you. I’m not sure I do.”

Dawn: “Obviously, this was not the plan. I’m not offering an apology. More of an explanation. You were supposed to find out for years. In the future you come from, Shelter 41 collapsed. Thousands died. But the future we come from is different.”

001: “I know all of this.”

Dawn: “Because you questioned Traveler teams that were pursuing you. What a Traveler would never tell you is that the citizens of Shelter 41 became the center of a movement. A place where human life and decision-making was valued over the artificial intelligence that controlled every aspect of our lives.”

001: “The Director.”

Dawn: “It considered our movement nothing more than a subversive “faction”, within what it considered a harmonious whole. The Faction became a rebellion. A rebellion that became a war. Led by you, sir.”

001: “Not possible.”

Dawn: “I promise you, it is. I’m a witness to it. I have sworn my loyalty to you in my time and I do now.”

001: “Then why risk telling me any of this? I would never have approved.”

Dawn: “Very true. You forbade contact of any kind before we came.”

001: “Then why?”

Dawn: “We’re desperate. The Director still holds power over the 21st. Thousands of us came through the frame, but it still finds us. Every day, Traveler teams are tasked to seek us out. The moment we’re discovered, we die by messenger.”

001: “You need to hide.”

Dawn: “We can’t both hide and fight for our future. We still want to save humanity. We have no historians, no finances, no engineers building devices and components in secret, But we have you.”

001: “As a prisoner.”

Dawn: “As our leader. Your host body is dying. We’ve activated your beacon and summoned your men, in order to save your life. We only hope that you will spare ours in return.”

001 is not happy about this turn of events AT ALL. He’d escaped the future. He was OUT. He was successfully hiding in plain sight, in the body of a wealthy, powerful, beautiful woman with two beautiful children. If he lived long enough to eventually take on the Director again in the future, so be it. But for now, he wanted to enjoy a comfortable 21st century life.

Instead, thanks to his idiotic future minions, who’d apparently screwed up whatever his future self had planned for them, he’s been dragged right back into a never-ending war, with his cover blown and host body dying. This is now right up there with his wife, Irene’s death as one of the worst things that’s ever happened to him.

Which is how it ends up translating into the Traveler torture and interrogation program, the next time through the loop. Even if 001 doesn’t consciously remember it at that point, it’s still somewhere inside him, as a motivator. And by revealing so much of his altered future to 001, then forcing him to act on it, Dawn is making events in the past dependent on events in the future, creating the time loop. This is the reason that the Director acts in a quantum frame, outside of time, and is a machine, without personal motivations. When time travelers alter events to suit the desires of individuals, it ends up breaking time, as Grace told us back in season 1 (Ep 11 or 12 or both). And as the Legends of Tomorrow have shown us many times.

Jeff has taken his act on the road, and followed Carly and the team. He uses his car to try to force Carly off the road. She pulls off under an overpass. He gets out of his car with his gun in hand. So do Carly and the rest of the team. Carly points her gun at him and tells him he’s going to die now.

Jeff: “I don’t think so.”

Carly: “Unless you get back in that car, drive away, and never show your face again, you will die today.”

Jeff: “I remember now, Carly.”

Carly: “It doesn’t matter.”

Jeff: “Everything! The abduction, your confession, all of it! I know what you are. What all of you are!”

Mac: “Drop the gun, Jeff.”

Jeff: “You gonna get your boyfriend to shoot me in the back now?”

Carly: “He’s not my boyfriend and he won’t have to.”

They continue to go back and forth, with Jeff taunting Carly and the group that people know what they are and that he knows Carly isn’t Carly. Carly goads him back, asking him what he’s going to do about it, echoing what Kat’s therapist said to her earlier in the episode.

Carly tells him that she’s not going to do anything to him. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll be stopped, and no one will care. Mac tells Carly to stop arguing with Jeff. Because he thinks that if Jeff has time to calm down, this will all go away? Of course that’s what Mac thinks. He’s been ignoring this issue since they arrived in the 21st, just like he’s ignoring his own wife’s issues now.

Jeff’s harassment won’t stop. We’ve been shown, definitively, that the police won’t stop Jeff. Social services won’t stop him. Carly’s team won’t help stop him. Either the Director stops him, or one of them murders the other, because Jeff is fated to abuse Carly until the day one of them dies. If he’s the one who lives, he’ll move on to his next target.

He says that she’s not Carly. She replies that she is. She’s the Carly he can’t hurt any more. Jeff points his gun at her, at point-blank range, and gets a time of death countdown clock. It’s only a few seconds before the new Traveler arrives.

Traveler 5416 is just happy to be here. Mac is pissed at Carly. She says, “Either way,” meaning, Jeff was going to die, right there and then, whether she killed him or the Director did. Mac doesn’t have time for Carly’s domestic issues. He, of course, doesn’t see the similarity between himself and Jeff. Kat does. Deep down, Carly does.

Deep down, Mac is sympathetic toward Jeff, who he thinks didn’t deserve to die just because he got drunk and angry at his girlfriend. Guess what? Jeff was a serial attempted murderer, attempted rapist, drunk driver, stalker, neglectful parent, dirty cop, and wife beater. And that was in the few months we knew him, up against a woman who was tougher than him. What on earth had he already done to the real Carly Shannon?

Carly was in a kill or be killed situation. If she’d been a man, there would be no question that she took the right action. She didn’t choose the time and place for this confrontation. She simply got it over with as quickly as possible, with no help from anyone else, as usual.

No one, in this entire episode, is going to question David’s right to nearly get himself killed in a fistfight over a bike. Marcy, Trevor and Philip all jumped in to save him, while they did nothing for Carly. But the unspoken attitude is that David has proven he’s a real man now.

In order to be a real woman, Carly should be at home cowering in fear, like Kat. A woman like Carly is just too threatening. That’s actually Grace’s problem, too. Carly’s too tough and Grace is too smart.

Carly tells the others that 5416/Jeff is still drunk, so someone needs to drive for him. Philip picks up his gun and helps him up off the ground. Then Philip sees an image, from another timeline, of Jeff and Carly lying on the ground, dead, having shot each other down. As he gets 5416/Jeff into the car, he double checks to make sure there’s not a blood stain on the ground.

David lets Kat into his apartment so they can have their latest tête à tête. Kat is shocked that he’s been in a streetfight. She wants him to see a doctor, but he assures her he’ll be fine. Marcy will look at him when she gets home.

I don’t think it’s actually a good idea to be so cavalier about a head injury. Kids, don’t be David.

Dr Teslia and Agent Yates think that Mac and the team left a bit abruptly, so they’re doing a bit of investigating to see if anything has changed. Yates examines the surveillance tapes, but doesn’t find anything. Teslia runs a diagnostic, and discovers that Ilsa now has access to knowledge about him that he’s never given her. Which means that she now has access to the outside world. Teslia tells Yates that the diagnostic came back normal, with no changes.

Yates brainstorms ideas for what the Travelers could have done to Ilsa, prompting him to tell her that Ilsa’s room isn’t just a glass box, it’s a Faraday cage, with a fine mesh woven into the glass that blocks electromagnetic signals. Yates tells him to keep investigating, then leaves.

You knew there was going to be a Faraday cage involved with this eventually.

As Yates and Teslia were speaking, Ilsa not only listened to them, she read their lips and read the screen on Teslia’s pad. I’m not sure that Teslia is aware of these abilities. Ilsa asks if they’re hiding her new abilities from Yates. Teslia tells her that they’re hiding them from everyone. He doesn’t want everyone to become afraid of her.

“There is no reason to be afraid, Dr Teslia.”

“I know that, Ilsa, I know that.”

Ilsa sounds more like the HAL 9000 all the time.

001’s paramilitary force arrives at the Faction warehouse just as she’s having a ruptured aneurysm/stroke, which blinds her. Michelle revives her with smelling salts, but is shot by 001’s men immediately afterward. Dawn pulls 001 behind a metal wall as the faction and the strike force engage in a shoot out. Dawn begs 001 to stop the two sides from killing each other.

001 raises his hand and yells, “Stop! These people are not our enemy.”

The shooting stops, and 001 passes out again.

David and Kat bring up Jeff’s drunk voicemails about Mac, Marcy and Carly not being the real Mac, Marcy and Carly. David thinks Jeff is insane. Kat asks, “Deep down, in your heart of hearts, don’t you think it’s possible he might be right?” After a minute of discussion, Kat tries to ask if David can say, with confidence, that Marcy is the same person that he originally knew.

David stops her in her tracks and says, “Marcy is the best f–kin’ thing that ever happened to me!” He pounds his fist on the counter.

He can’t answer the actual question, because he knows she’s not the same person, twice over, and none of the explanations he’s been given for the changes make sense, if you examine them too closely. So he’s not going to examine them, and he’s going to lash out at anyone who tries to make him. In season 2, that cognitive dissonance made him insecure and clingy with Marcy. This season he’s moved on to anger and denial, expressed outside of the relationship.

David apologizes for speaking so rudely to Kat. She understands, and has him sit on the couch while she makes the symbolic tea. If David can’t make the tea, something is very wrong with him, or his relationship, or both. For heaven’s sake, keep an eye on the teapot.

By the time the team gets to the Faction warehouse, Perrow’s body is a dead, empty shell, abandoned in the warehouse along with the rest of the dead. The team figures out that she must have jumped bodies again. They assume that the dead weren’t killed by Travelers, since they would have cleaned up the crime scene. Marcy feels guilty about Perrow. Carly puts the blame where it lies, with 001. Mac moves on with his life.

Yates and her FBI team arrive at the warehouse, so Mac is busy thinking up pithy quips to throw at her. He doesn’t have time to mourn an innocent woman who sacrificed her life to help the Travelers. All of the Travelers roll their eyes like they’re in junior high school when the actual FBI arrives at a crime scene to do their jobs. The nerve of them!!

Mac is rude to Yates and answers her questions with half-truths, lies of omission and sarcastic comebacks, as usual. Funny how he treated Forbes like an actual professional equal and colleague, yet Yates is just a punching bag to take out his immature frustrations on.

As they’re leaving, 5416 tries to set up a time to talk with Carly, as part of his mission. She’s in a really bad mood, and doesn’t want to see his face. Philip drives him home.

Marcy arrives home and finds David dozing on the couch. She checks him for a concussion and they have a sweet moment together.

When Mac gets home from work, Kat is waiting for him with lite jazz on the stereo, a vegan pizza in the oven and a bottle of wine already open. They begin to get romantic, but then Mac stops kissing her and says, “It’s just such a shame we have to take that lovely body of yours.”

Oops, that was another fear fantasy. I feel you, Kat.

She hears Mac at the door and runs to lock herself in the bedroom. Mac sees her go and speaks into his com, “Philip, I think we’re going to have to go through with it.”

Let’s hope she went straight from one fantasy to another. Mac would never talk on his com where she could hear him. Either her memories are coming back, or he has something else ominous planned.

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Jo Yates’ discussion of circular reasoning in S3 Ep2 was foreshadowing for the time loop. The best way to learn about time loops is to watch Agents of Shield, season 5A. Absolutely no one explains science and pseudo-science better than Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. Agents of Shield season 5 went to the future, in space, on a broken earth, in a time loop, and answered the question of whether the MCU is in a multiverse or a single timeline. Good times.

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Vincent was the first Traveler. But, was he the first “first Traveler”? Or was he the first Traveler who they eventually discovered made it to where and when he was supposed to be, after they initially thought he was a misfire? With a failure rate of about a third, that’s a lot of suicide missions. Or a lot of people who just put their heads down and walked away.

 

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The Faction turns out to not be terribly bright without 001 to direct them. They couldn’t get communications from him in the future, so their solution is to nearly kill him in the past, to convince him talk to them? Genius. 🙈 Seems like the future’s best and the brightest still go into and stay in the Travelers program. The Faction survives because it recruits the uneducated poor, and there are so many to be recruited.

But, now we know that 001 manages to jump hosts all the way to the Travelers time in the future, and hides out in Shelter 41. He may be the reason that the ice didn’t cause the dome to collapse. He would have brought the memory of the collapse with him, and now he knows that it can be stopped, so he’ll get people working on a solution. Maybe the dome will be built with better structural integrity.

Dawn says that the Faction wasn’t supposed to reveal itself to 001 for many years. When was the original reveal planned for? When he could get his companies involved with building the dome and influence the engineering and design? At some point in history when they planned to restart the Faction, but earlier than it started in their timeline?

Up until now, 001 has been fine with stopping the creation of the Director or the Traveler program before they ever started. Does this signify a change in direction for him? Will he focus on stopping the Director at its current point in the future timeline, so that all of his Faction supporters can be born?

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How much was 001 changed by his time in Vincent’s body? How much of each separate host stays with the Traveler when they move to another host?

In S3 Ep3, Carly told Mac that she could still see bits of 3468 in him, then they both agreed that they’d changed and weren’t the people they’d been in the future, in their original bodies and lives. This seems to be an acknowledgement that the Traveler will take on aspects of the host, out of necessity and biology. Trevor has also been in multiple hosts, though he’s given us little indication of how each has affected him. He seems to mainly be affected by the youth of this host, rather than the personality.

But 001 seems to be changing with each host. He’s ruthless and cruel, with loyalty only to a chosen few, no matter which body he’s in. He has the ability to develop an army of very loyal followers in every host. The original 001 had an altruistic streak, and volunteered for the World Trade Center mission because he was dying, so he could prevent someone else’s death by volunteering for the suicide mission.

But in Vincent, who must have been a psychopath, 001 turned into a psychotic mass murderer, much like 004 became schizophrenic in the Simon host body. In Perrow, 001 is controlled, analytical and wishes to live out his life in peace and privacy, much like Katrina Perrow herself did. He’s still also ruthless, cruel and cares only about his chosen few.

According to Dawn, in the new future timeline, 001 becomes a charismatic leader, converting thousands of people to his cause, convincing them to go to war and on suicide missions. In the 21st, he can buy loyalty. In the future, he has to work for it. That suggests that he’s put into the body of a natural leader, and takes full advantage of it.

It also suggests that he and/or the Faction knew what was needed for that phase of his existence, and chose the right type of host, rather than a random body. Katrina Perrow also wasn’t a random choice, though it’s not clear that her mental and emotional characteristics had anything to do with the choice.

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*Only if you live in denial of the damage it causes. If Grace were a real person, she’d be suicidally depressed from the isolation she lives in and the bullying she suffers. She tries to tell the team this, but her feelings are dismissed. Because she’s hilarious and supposedly unloveable, not absolutely alone in the 21st, so her feeling don’t matter, right?

**I don’t mean that Grace only deserves to be treated well because she’s saved their lives and the world multiple times. She deserves to be treated with dignity and respect because she’s a person, end of story. I mean that, even using the low, opportunistic bar that someone like McLaren uses when he judges people, she should pass the test, since she’s proven her worth many times. But she doesn’t fit his image of a proper, subservient woman, so he treats her with disdain and humiliates her at every opportunity. I wish I could ignore this, but McLaren’s misogyny is just too blatant and systematic.

Is this how producers Brad Wright and Eric McCormack feel about women in real life? I don’t know. But McLaren is consistently presented as a hero, as THE hero, even though he treats women like s–t and has an ego the size of Texas. I watch this show for the story and the other characters I love. And for the occasional glimpses of McLaren as the decent man they want us to think he is. I often feel that McLaren is McCormack’s self-insert character, and David is Brad Wright’s self-insert character. Make of that what you will.

 

Travelers Protocols:

 

 

Images courtesy of Netflix.