Travelers Season 3 Episode 7: Trevor Recap

There are more Travelers posts HERE.

Episode 7, Trevor, focuses on Mac, David and Trevor. Trevor begins to feel the effects of his long life and multiple host bodies. He makes a pact with the Director so that his host body can be reused when his mind is gone. This doesn’t sit well with Grace, so she decides to find an alternative.

Assume that this recap should be filled with this emoji: 😭😭😭. I will do us all a favor and not overuse it. But, inside, I’m crying every time Trevor and/or Grace are on screen ripping my heart out. And Philip.

Mac continues his back and forth with Kat. At the beginning of the episode, he’s convinced her that all is well. Their relationship is saved, again. But he makes another mistake before long, which brings back Kat’s doubts and fears. This time, she uses reliable facts when she goes up against Mac, the kind that he can’t turn around and use to gaslight her.

I love it when we get to see Kat’s intelligence.

David continues to bury himself in willful naiveté, striving to see only the positive in people. While Mac’s illusions are being shattered, David is building a wall of illusion around himself as a form of protection. But, as Mac has found, illusions can’t actually hold back real life or weapons. David’s backup plan is his emotional dependence on Marcy. Thus, his balls are still in her purse. Handed to her, by him, on a silver platter.

Speaking of illusions, the beginning of the episode finds David out on a walk with his favorite client, an elderly man named Jim Bailey. Jim teases David about being in love, and says that he knows how David feels, because he felt the same way about his Sandra.

Jim: “I would levitate 10 feet off the floor when she came in the room. I mean every time. Took my breath away. Oh, and she would have loved you. Yes, indeed she liked nice boys. I miss her every day. I miss her right now.”

Note: Sandra is alive. They are divorced, due to his bad behavior during the marriage.

Jim moves on to pressuring David to ask Marcy to marry him. Then Jim grabs his chest in pain. David tells him to take one of his heart pills, but Jim didn’t like the way they made him feel, so he threw them away. David calls 911 for an ambulance. Once they arrive, he tries to hurry the paramedics to the hospital, but Jim insists on being chatty and friendly.

Jim is being set up for the tropes of Incorruptible Pure Pureness, which is just what it sounds like, and a variation on Too Good for This Sinful Earth. He’s so good that this cruel world has killed him. Or so David thinks.

Kat is awake and dressed up for a meeting to bid on another restaurant job, in addition to the redecorating job she’s already working on. Mac is surprised that she’s up so early and surprised that she’d take on another big job before she’s even finished the first one. She notes that he’s working long hours these days, so she needs to keep busy.

Establishing her own full-time income won’t hurt either.

Mac looks taken aback at her honesty about his work. He wants her to always be available to him and to act as though he’s always available for her.

They make plans to have dinner together that night and Kat insists that Mac call her if he can’t make it. She doesn’t want to eat vegan if she doesn’t have to. Meanwhile, Philip coms Mac with messages about the next mission, so Mac’s conversation becomes odd on both ends as he’s leaving the loft.

Trevor is riding his bike back to ops when he has another episode of locking up. He crashes his bike and cuts his face.

The mission is to shoot down a plane filled with Anthrax from a position on the waterfront. Trevor is standing by with a shoulder-fired missile launcher. When he’s given the order to fire on the plane, he locks up and freezes again. A second team shoots down the plane, just as it’s about to leave the target zone.

The team realizes something’s wrong with Trevor. Trevor decides that it’s time to confess.

Marcy comes home to find David sitting sadly by the phone. Jim didn’t make it and David is acting as the contact person for his friends and family. No one has called, not even anyone from Jim’s family. David experienced Jim as a warm, cheerful, gregarious guy, so he can’t understand why the family would abandon him.

I’m not sure how David has spent this long as a social worker and learned this little about human nature.

Now that she’s on her own and receiving an FBI consultant’s salary, Carly plans to move into a better apartment, but there’s competition for the one she wants. The building manager tells her he’ll make the decision based on references and terms. When Carly tells him she works for the FBI and he can talk to her boss, the manager wants proof. They arrange for Mac to meet with the manager.

Trevor explains the condition that’s causing him to freeze up.

Trevor: “The doctors called it temporal displacement aphasia. You see, it degrades the ability to perceive the passage of time. So I might think a second’s gone by, when, in reality, minutes have passed. Eventually, I’ll get so locked in, it’ll be like I’m catatonic… There’s only been one other case. It was the previous record holder for the longest living human.”

Mac: “You’re saying this only happens to people who’ve had multiple hosts?”

Trevor: “Yeah, yeah, that was the theory. The first case took a long time to manifest. It’s happening way faster with me. Boss, I never meant to jeopardize the mission. I thought I still had time.”

Philip: “There’s got to be something we can do.”

In an amazing coincidence of timing, Teslia calls at that very moment to tell Mac that the Director wants to talk to 0115. Teslia gets Mac’s name wrong. 😜 But he also doesn’t call Yates.

He’s gaining some excellent benefits from being part of the Travelers B team. No sense in giving Mom the chance to shut the project down.

Trevor goes into Ilsa’s room alone to talk to the Director. Mac, Carly and Marcy practically press their noses up against the window as they watch. When Marcy wonders what they could be talking about, Mac says, “The fact that he’s talking to the Director at all is incredible.”

Trevor’s talked to the Director before, as he told us early in season 2. While they were sharing a hospital room, he and Grace spoke about the conversations they’d each had with the Director. Here, we’re reminded that the youngsters are younger than the Director and see it as a Godlike being who protects them, while Grace and Trevor are older than the Director and know it’s just a machine. They seem to view it as a valued colleague.

As a historian, Philip is outside of this dichotomy. He’s been the Director’s minion since infancy and has few illusions about its benevolency, but he also understands how much power it’s amassed better than Grace does. He knows the Director runs his life and he has no choice about it, but he’s not sure that the Director is always making the right decisions. Unlike the others, he can see or guess some of the alternatives. If given the choice, I’m not sure if he’d want to talk to it and give it such direct access to his head.

When Trevor is done with the Director, he explains to the team that the Director confirmed that he has early onset temporal displacement aphasia, probably triggered by the AI extraction process. It’s incurable and will quickly progress.

Half the time that Trevor was with the Director was spent with the Director apologizing for this happening. But Trevor doesn’t blame the Director. He’s always known that this was how he was going to die.

They’ve decided on a plan of action. 0115 has lived a very long life and the host is young and healthy, so the Director is going to send a new Traveler into the body. 0115 has 36 hours to get his affairs in order.

The others are outraged, but Trevor tries to convince them that this is good news. They’ll get a new engineer so the team won’t be compromised. As he’s making his case, he freezes up again.

David calls Jim’s ex-wife, Sandra, to tell her where and when Jim’s funeral will be. He starts to give her the details, but then stops, listens for a moment, and drops his pen and notes.

David: “Well, the word “loser” just doesn’t sit well with me. And I honestly think that Jim was the furthest thing from it. So, no, I understand that your marriage was difficult towards the end, but to his dying breath, Jim had nothing but wonderful things to say about you. And I- I think that you missed out on getting to know what an incredible guy he was. And look, if you can’t get past decades old baggage just to pay your respects, I think that that’s, that’s sad. So hey- have a nice day.”

He hangs up the phone and throws it away from himself like it’s poisonous. It was, in a way, because it almost made him see Jim for who he really was. Not just the man he became after he quit drinking, and the man he presented to people he wanted to like him, but also the man his family knew, a man who likely never made amends, given Sandra’s feelings.

That was an incredibly disrespectful speech. Jim’s ex-wife has the right to whatever feelings she has about her ex-husband, and it not up to David to decide if they’re valid.

Trevor texts Grace to invite her to ops for dinner.

Mac meets with Carly’s building manager and she gets the apartment. Afterward, she invites him in to see the place. It’s furnished, and decorated almost completely in white, with touches of medium blue. These are Kat’s decorating colors of choice. She used white as the color of her house, and white and blue on the loft. Kat has come down in the world and Carly has come up in the world enough that they’ve met in the middle as near social equals now, each with her own cute, little, furnished urban place.

(Carly still faces racism, as her building manager’s doubt about her job showed us.)

Mac likes the apartment. He offers to help Carly move. She asks if it’s a real offer. He can’t understand why she’d doubt his sincerity. Then he tells her that he knows she misses her son, and he’s her team leader, so she can talk to him. She tells him not to “pull that team leader s–t with her.” Mac gives her the hysterical woman look, and says, “If that’s all you need from me…” then starts to walk out. Carly stops him again, saying, “What did you say?”

He says that he was just referring to the apartment and the move. I’m not sure if she thought he was referring to sex or if she was angry that he was continuing his BS of pretending to be helpful, and acting like he always had been helpful.

She literally begged him for help when Jeff was abusing her. She begged him to tell Social Services he was her boss when Jeff accused her of prostitution. Back then, he told her to solve her own problems. Now that her problems are solved and she appears to be of a more acceptable social class, suddenly he’s Mr Helpful Hypocrite. He’s lucky she didn’t punch him in the teeth.

Carly has learned her 21st century female behavior lessons well, and backs down instead of calling him on his behavior. She apologizes for her outburst and makes an excuse. Mac accepts that she was just a hysterical woman because of her emotions over Trevor, and all is right with his world again.

On the way out, they hear the couple next door arguing. Now Mac is concerned about domestic violence. Carly says it’s not her problem and goes back into her apartment.

Trevor has set up his dinner with Grace on a table for two, with a candle and a flower and music. And he made French fries, their special food. Grace becomes hopeful, but Trevor says that he just wanted it to be nice, he’s not trying to seduce her. This is a goodbye dinner.

Nooooo, Trevor! Don’t crush our hearts!!!

These two are my baseline for comparison with all of the other relationships in the show. No matter what, they’re honest with each other and deal with the reality in front of them. They make mistakes and get their wires crossed and fight, but at the end of the day, they respect and fight for each other.

Mac and Kat are having a nice dinner for two, as well. Mac starts to tell Kat about Trevor’s illness, but realizes that it’s too much trouble to figure out the lies and metaphors necessary to keep the story going, so he changes the subject. He asks Kat about her day, but before long she senses that he’s patronizing her. He gives her a speech about how everything he does is to make what she does possible, so her stuff is actually essential. It sounds like a speech someone used as part of their pick up strategy in bars.

Not much honesty, respect or dealing with reality happening at this dinner. It’s as though they have nothing to talk about.

But this is a seduction and they both know it, so they move on to that portion of the evening. Kat is as enthusiastic as always, but she has to stop to use the bathroom before they hit the bed. Mac makes a noise in exasperation.

Oops, reality just hit. We see Kat use the toilet from Mac’s perspective (it’s too blurry to see any detail). We’ve seen Kat disappear into the bathroom in Mac’s presence several times before, but it’s always been to soak in the bath or get clean. The fact that he’s acknowledging that she has distasteful bodily functions is a giant red flag. His fantasy woman has fallen from her pedestal.

Kat talks as she pees, mentioning that the Pattersons, whose restaurant she’s redecorating, have invited them out on their boat next weekend. Mac does a double take about taking a boat out onto the ocean, since that’s an experience 3468 hasn’t had yet, but something that Grant McLaren was probably very familiar with.

Then he makes his big mistake. He agrees to go, and says that he’d like to meet the Pattersons.

Kat blinks in confusion. “You introduced the Pattersons to me, years ago.”

And, we’re back in a Hitchcock movie. For a moment, the show acknowledges that 3468 is the villain in Kat’s story.

Then Mac dissembles, saying that he didn’t hear Kat right. Of course he knows who the Pattersons are. Kat doesn’t look convinced.

Grace is having a fit at Trevor and the Director. Her two best friends have gone behind her back and betrayed her, and the deal they made is stupid. She doesn’t even know which one she’s more mad at and asks how Trevor can be so calm.

Trevor: “This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through this. My wife and I were the first two successful consciousness transfers. You see, early attempts in the program, was one male, one female. She was a few years older than me in our first host bodies. A few years younger the second time. And the third time, our bodies were over a decade apart. But that didn’t matter. We were soulmates. Raised children in three separate lifetimes. She was my whole life. And up until now, she was the first and only case of temporal aphasia.”

Grace: “I remember the Director trying to work the problem.”

Trevor: “Yes, so you remember that the disease is incurable.”

Grace: “I’m so sorry, Trevor.”

Trevor: “Which is why it makes sense to let the Director use this host. I watched someone I love disappear. First for moments, then hours, then days. One of the last times we were together, she asked if she could see the sunlight one last time. I’m not sure if you remember, but before the ice completely covered our dome, there was this one patch uncovered where the sunlight could still stream through. It was beautiful. She never came back again after that.”

Grace: “You loved her.”

Trevor: “When you spend whole lifetimes with someone, it becomes a lot more than that. There isn’t really a word for it. But yeah, I did.”

Grace: “Those moments you had together toward the end must have been precious.”

Trevor: “Yeah, they were. They were.”

Grace, sobbing: “Well, what if I want those moments? You doing this is just robbing everyone who loves you of that time.”

Trevor: “I’d rather spare you what I went through. I’m happy…” He freezes. Grace waits. “With my decision. Oh, it just happened again.”

Grace: “It did.”

Trevor: “It’s just gonna keep happening, Grace. I hope you respect my decision.”

Grace: “I can’t compete with three lifetimes.”

Trevor: “How about these French fries?”

Grace, smiling through tears: “They’re amazing.”

It’s a terrible dilemma, played out with patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses all the time. Should the patient try to stay alive for as long as possible, by any means possible, in order to have as much time with loved ones as they can and time to finish lifetime goals? Or is it better to end life with dignity, without prolonging suffering and allowing the illness take away everything that made the patient who they are? There’s no right answer.

I suspect that Trevor’s illness is triggering his memories of going through the illness with his wife, which is bringing up all of his memories and feelings about her. That’s leading him into a deeper depression than the illness alone would, and the sense that he’s ready to move on and join her, or at least give someone younger a chance.

It’s notable that Trevor’s talked about the loss his children and his multiple lifetimes before, but he’s never said a word about his wife. Her loss is still too deeply painful to bring up in casual conversation and her memory is too precious to share. The fact that Trevor told Grace about her and shared his last memory shows how much he trusts and cares about Grace.

[Insert imaginary crying emojis here.] [Insert some more.]

Carly runs into her new neighbor, Jessica, in the hall and they introduce themselves. Jessica’s boyfriend interrupts the conversation and intimidates her into going back into the apartment. Carly begins to think this might become her problem.

David practices Jim’s eulogy in front of Marcy, so that he’ll be prepared at the funeral the next day. He’s a nervous public speaker and still isn’t sure that he can give the speech in front of the crowd at all. When he finds out that Marcy doesn’t plan to attend, since she didn’t know Jim, he’s ready to give up, until Marcy agrees to attend so that he can pretend that he’s speaking only to her.

Trevor meditates at a gorgeous spot on the shore, then suddenly Grace is beside him. She didn’t use magic, she just came during one of his temporal displacement episodes, and we’re seeing it from his perspective. He asks how long she’s been there, and she doesn’t realize that he was frozen for part of the meditation session.

Grace tells Trevor that she’s been looking over the plans for the sub-neural implant he began designing when his wife was diagnosed with temporal aphasia, and she thinks they can finish the implant and make it work to counteract his symptoms. When Trevor’s wife was ill, they couldn’t get the software to effectively predict when the episodes would occur, but Grace wasn’t on the project.

Grace: “I know exactly what its (the Director’s) capabilities and limitations are. That’s why we’re here. The Director needs programmers, people to collaborate. How many times have you been against the odds in the 21st but you still saved the day? Believe me, the Director is in awe of that. Why do you think you get away with breaking so many protocols?”

Trevor: “I never thought of it that way.”

Grace: “Well, I’m very intelligent. At least take advantage of that.”

Grace’s comments about the Director are noteworthy because she’s the only one who ever talks this way. She’s also the only one who ever talks about having conversations with the Director where they’ve debated ideas as equals. Everyone else thinks it should be either the Director making the decisions or people making the decisions.

Grace is the only person in the Travelers universe who sees herself/people and the Director as equal partners in creating and enacting the Grand Plan.

Trevor agrees to try the implant, so they gather the troops at ops and Grace starts assigning tasks. Mac interrupts to argue that this plan goes against the Director’s decision. Philip, who is always on the side of life, and Grace point out that maybe they can change the Director’s mind by giving it another option. Grace tells Mac to stop wasting time, since they all know that he wants to help Trevor, too. He backs off.

Trevor explains the implant: “It connects to the parietal lobe and basal ganglia, releases a combination of electric signals and a synthesized compound that would snap me out of a break.”

Philip and Carly will help Trevor build the implant. Marcy will do risky brain surgery to insert the implant into Trevor’s brain. Marcy is concerned about the surgery, but Grace points out that the alternative is that he’s overwritten.

For now, Grace, Marcy and Mac will time Trevor’s episodes and collect the data set which Grace will then use to develop her software, with the help of Ilsa. They’ll record the time each episode begins, how long it lasts (duration) and how long it is between episodes (interval). Ilsa will use the data set “to run enough simulations to build a predictive fractal algorithm because the displacement episodes are asymmetric.” In other words, because the episodes occur at random intervals, predicting them is complex, so she’s going to need Ilsa’s computing power to create a program to make the predictions.

Mac starts to say that as soon as Ilsa’s involved the Director will find about the plan, but Grace interrupts him to say that she’s counting on it.

Mac remembers to call Kat to tell her that he has to work all night, but she’s contemplating how to handle her latest discovery about him and doesn’t pick up the phone.

Carly asks Philip if her neighbors’ names, Brent and Jessica Moore, mean anything to him. She’s trying to figure out if she should help Jessica or if her interference will lead to more tragedy. Philip thinks about it and tells her he hasn’t heard of them. He admonishes her that he doesn’t know everyone’s fate. But then he has a vision of Carly being dragged kicking and screaming out the door by two police officers. This appears to be information from another potential timeline, rather than from his update.

As they work, Trevor’s episodes range in length from 12 seconds to 2 hours. After an episode causes him to burn his hand with a soldering iron, he’s relegated to supervising the work. Philip needs to ask for design clarifications in between episodes, and sometimes Trevor only has time to get a few syllables out before he goes under again.

Around the time that Grace decides they’ve collected enough data, they hand Trevor a wrap to eat that looks like a choking hazard to me. What if he freezes just as he swallows??? Shouldn’t he be living on some nice, safe smoothies and protein drinks?

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When it’s time to bring Ilsa onto the project, Teslia lets Grace and Mac into the lab and asks if it’s possible for him to stay “this time”. What? When was he kicked out? Has that little minx Grace been secretly working on Ilsa and the Director?

Grace tells Ilsa that she has something she’d like Ilsa to look at. Ilsa is eager to work on Grace’s project. Grace inputs and runs the data.

Trevor approves of the finished hardware for the implant. But, he tells Philip, he’s not sure if he wants to use it. Maybe he’s cheated death for long enough. Philip asks him not to talk that way. Trevor says that he’s supposed to die and his death should have been in Philip’s last update, so Philip should already know Trevor’s fate.

Philip says that he’s seeing multiple timelines, with both outcomes. Not all the time, at least not yet. Trevor is concerned that Philip won’t be able to live that way, and asks about the pills. Philip admits that he stopped taking them. “At the end of the day I want to be just as surprised as everyone else about what’s going to happen next.”

Trevor: “Buddy, you gotta keep focusing on the here and…” He freezes.

That’s some irony, right there. Now I’m going to go cry in a corner over my two lost time boys for a while. In their own way, they each have too much time. But it turns out, too much time isn’t necessarily good for you.

Philip calls Marcy over. She places Trevor in a more comfortable position and suggests that Philip get some rest. He says he’ll stay with Trevor.

Philip sees an alternate timeline where the rest of the team is comforting him as he grieves the loss of Trevor. He’s devastated. Last season, he saw an alternate timeline vision of the team comforting Mac after Kat died.

Grace has Ilsa run the data enough times that Ilsa can project the result of the next 70,000 variations. They are all failures. The Director steps in to tell Grace, “Further pursuit of this avenue will continue to result in failure.”

Grace gives the Director grief for taking so long to step in and for not talking to her in general. Then they discuss why it’s voice sounds different (Ilsa’s processors are different). Mac is amazed to hear the Director’s voice, like he’s in the presence of God or royalty, and gives Grace looks like she’s breaking royal protocol or swearing in front of the pope.

The Director explains that it can’t find a permanent solution because of the second law of thermodynamics. Mac adds, “Entropy.”

Entropy= Over time, order will always spin out into disorder, confusion and chaos. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, entropy always increases, never decreases. Sort of describes the premise of the series. No matter what they do, the relative order of the early 21st century becomes the disastrous future.

The Director tells them that it’s already explained this to 0115 and they’ve come to their arrangement. Mac and Grace try to convince the Director to let them give Trevor more time. No human life is permanent, so they’re not looking for a permanent solution. They just want more time.

Grace gets upset, and tells the Director that it’s not supposed to even be able to consider a plan like this one, which will take a life. The Director responds that it was Trevor’s idea. Grace becomes desperate, and tries to get the Director to understand how important Trevor is to her. The Director tells her that she wants to save Trevor for emotional reasons. Grace says that she saved the Director for emotional reasons, so why not Trevor?

The Director announces that it has to respect 0115’s decision, and he expressed doubt about using the implant 6 minutes ago. Director out.

Mac stands there staring at the Director’s dead eye light. Grace tells him to stop looking so awed, because the Director is being an idiot. Grace got what she needs to create the software anyway, so she packs up and they leave.

Mac looks confused. This isn’t how he thought his first meeting with the Director would go. And he never thought he’d take Grace’s side over the Director.

When Grace and Mac return to ops, they tell the team that they couldn’t get the Director to change its mind. You can almost see Philip’s heart stop for a moment. Then Grace and Mac tell them that Grace got what she needed from Ilsa and they’re going to give Trevor the implant anyway. Grace says, “Turn off the power and take the batteries out of your phones.”

She says it in a slinky, sexy voice. She’s very excited to go up against the Director again. It’s been a long time since she had a real challenge.

Mac looks at Grace with appreciation and they seem in complete agreement. It’s so nice to see them working in sync. He tells the team to turn off their coms.

Now ops is completely hidden from the outside world and the Director, so it can’t get the information it needs to establish a TELL for Trevor. Without a TELL the Director can’t overwrite Trevor.

The show takes a little time liberty with the editing here. Grace has to program the implant, then Marcy has to do brain surgery, then Trevor has to wake up from the anesthesia. But outside of ops, it’s nearly time for Jim’s funeral and David is getting nervous that Marcy isn’t going to make it in time. He leaves her a voicemail to remind her.

When Trevor wakes up from his surgery, the team explains what happened. He was out for an extended episode when grace and Mac returned, so they couldn’t consult him to get his consent. (Or his final consent. He did consent when they started the process.) They expect him to be happy that they’ve given him more time, but he’s not.

Grace: We went ahead with it anyway.

Trevor: Without asking me?

Carly: You were out.

Trevor: Well, it was my decision to make. I was at peace with it. Now I’ve broken a solemn arrangement I made with the Director. You erased what was supposed to be my final contribution.

Philip: We didn’t want to lose you.

Mac: It was my call.

Trevor: It wasn’t your call to make.

Grace: Oh, like the time you took Grace Day into the woods and tried to save her from being overwritten? Don’t be a hypocrite!

Carly: What are you doing?

Trevor: Keeping up my end of the bargain.

Mac: Trevor!

Grace: No.

Philip: Come on, man.

Trevor, shouting: Stop!! I’m not hiding. It can still take this host, like we agreed.

He opens the circuit breaker box and flips the breakers. As the lights go on, everyone flinches, waiting for Trevor to be overwritten. He’s not.

Mac: Maybe we changed its mind after all.

Trevor, in a flat, bitter voice like we’ve never heard from him: Or maybe this thing (the implant) compromised the host body. Maybe it’s not good to anyone any more.

He leaves the room. Mac calls Protocol 5.

Carly knocks on her neighbor’s door and offers to help Jessica with her abusive boyfriend. She makes the offer in veiled, but clear language.

Marcy makes it to the funeral, with David’s balls in her purse, just in time for him to give the eulogy. David met Jim when he was 16 and his own father had recently died in a car accident. When David’s mom heard that his father had died, she refused to believe it. Jim became a surrogate father to him after David’s mom lost their house, because his father had left them with too much debt for her to handle alone. His father didn’t believe anything as bad as dying could ever happen to him.

David’s mom wouldn’t leave the house, because she wouldn’t believe it was gone. She had to be forced out. David, at 16, was afraid that they would take him too, so he hid in the bushes across the street.

There is a distinct thread running through this story. David’s family has trouble facing hard truths.

Jim found David hiding in the bushes. He took David under his wing, and took him to social services. Their relationship continued, and Jim made David check in with him every other day. David gives Jim credit for keeping him off the streets. Jim cared about him, and gave him a steady adult presence in his life. He was a washed up, alcoholic old musician who lived on the street, and David wanted to be like him.

David: “Who didn’t? Who wouldn’t want to be that positive all the time? That caring?Who wouldn’t want to exchange how they feel on the best day with how Jim must have felt all the time? He was a force. He said he never had a bad day. He treated every day like it was a gift. He treated every person like they were a gift.”

It’s a lovely speech. It’s a tribute to the facade Jim wore. But it’s a fantasy. Even after all those years, David only knew one side of Jim. David only saw what he wanted to see.

He did manage to convince Jim’s ex-wife to come to the funeral, probably just for closure. Sandra briefly greets him, then walks away.

While David is talking about caring for other people, we’re shown a montage of the rest of the team. Carly gives her new apartment a new coat of white paint. Philip checks on Poppy. In another timeline, he sees her tank sitting empty.

Trevor is sitting on the couch in ops, silently crying. Grace sits on the other end of the couch. He ignores her at first. After a minute, Trevor leans back on the couch and reaches his hand out to take Grace’s hand. In voiceover, David is asking, “Who wouldn’t want to be that positive all the time?” Trevor isn’t as positive on the inside as he seems on the outside, any more than Jim was. Grace and Philip are the two people who already knew this.

Kat leads Mac down to the waterfront, to a spot with several large boulders on the shoreline. As they walk closer to the water, she looks at him expectantly, but he shows no sign of recognition. They climb up onto one of the boulders and she comments that this spots brings back memories. 3468 scrambles to share memories that might satisfy her, but the only ones he knows are the ones he recovered when he was in surgery after the plane crash in season 1. None of them happened here.

Kat finally tells him that this is the place where they met. It was an overcast August day, her 25th birthday, at exactly 3:00. She was waiting for her fiance, John who was an hour late. She was furious. They started talking, which led to dinner, which led to them spending the night together. The first thing he said to her was, “That I shouldn’t marry a man who’d stand up such a beautiful woman on her birthday.” At that moment, she knew he was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

“You’re not that man.”

---

I don’t think Kat and Mac’s relationship is coming back from this one.

Entropy vs a Permanent Solution>> Is this the problem with the Director’s vision of the Grand Plan? Is it trying to create a Utopia that lasts forever, instead of a future that’s more livable and maintainable, but will also succumb to entropy someday? Entropy/ the end of human civilization on earth is inevitable, since the planet will eventually be swallowed by the sun. There really needs to be a committee that has regular chats with the Director about its moral dilemmas and philosophical misconceptions.

Guesses on Trevor’s age? Assuming the host bodies were all adults at the time of transfer, and he and his wife were old when they transferred each time, maybe somewhere between 200 and 250 years?

It sounds like this is Trevor’s fourth host and his fifth body, but there might have been another body that he didn’t mention between his wife’s death and his assignment to the 21st. I’ve always wondered why they kept him alive so long. This suggests that he and his wife were ongoing experiments in longevity, and were going to continue being given bodies for as long as possible.

This also gives some parameters for Travelers and consciousness jumping in this universe.  Trevor’s story suggests that the mind/soul can only last about 200-250 years or 4-5 jumps before the passes through technology affect it too much and it degrades. That makes immortality out of the question, unless they can find a more durable vessel for the mind or less damaging transfer technology. Or if the time limit is due to some inner clock in the mind itself, that could be too complicated to overcome.

It’s interesting that Trevor’s wife experienced temporal aphasia when she hadn’t time traveled. Does consciousness transfer require a dance with quantum entanglement that fundamentally changes the mind? Could living for so long and in so many different bodies begin to create a sort of time dementia, where the mind gets worn out from counting time for so much longer than it was meant to, causing it to gradually lose the ability?

Since Trevor’s illness was triggered by his mind being messed with by the Director, that would suggest that it’s not actually the hosts that are the issue, it’s the mind’s passes through technology. It sounds like the more times the mind is filtered through a machine, and the more extensive the filtering, the more severe the illness. That would put Marcy at risk at an earlier age, especially since Grace had to filter some of her redundancies/backups out.

Trevor totally has feelings for Grace, but it would feel like cheating on his wife to admit them, even to himself. Look at that dinner set up: the flower, candles, the music. He even put on a tie! It mirrors Kat and Mac’s romantic set up. And he remembered her favorite food and made it for her!

He’s such a perfect man, sweet, caring, strong, supportive, protective. Who wouldn’t want a guy who loved and was faithful to his wife for 3 lifetimes, but was mentally healthy enough to go on without her afterward? And he’s not intimidated or threatened by Grace’s intelligence and position with the Director. 😍

But he’s tired of living. He’s lost so much. Raising three families means losing three families, and three sets of grandkids. Everyone he knew in his first and second lifetimes would be dead, except for a few others like him who have had repeated hosts. He’s lost his siblings, his lifelong friends, everyone with shared experiences. He probably became a Traveler to get away from the constant reminders of everything he’s lost and to ensure that this would be the last host body.

It makes me wonder how much of his cheer and zest for living is forced. Is he depressed most of the time, and pushing himself through it? He could be telling himself that every day is a gift in order to get through the days. Meditation, exercise, so many of his habits are also useful for coping with depression.

The conversation with the team after he woke up from surgery was very existential. That was a suicidally depressed man who was justifying his suicide by planning to recycle his body. He seems like his depression might be so severe and ongoing that it’s not immediately recognizable as depression any more, because it’s just his normal way of being.

Plus, there are 7 billion people on this planet, and more than 150,000 of them die everyday. I promise you the Director isn’t short of host candidates. He made way too big a deal over reusing a body that had already almost died from a major head injury, and is now going through another brain disease. That host isn’t as viable as they’re suggesting.

Parietal Lobe= The parietal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The parietal lobe is positioned above the temporal lobe and behind the frontal lobe and central sulcus. The parietal lobe integrates sensory information among various modalities, including spatial sense and navigation (proprioception), the main sensory receptive area for the sense of touch (mechanoreception) in the somatosensory cortex which is just posterior to the central sulcus in the postcentral gyrus,[2] and the dorsal stream of the visual system. The major sensory inputs from the skin (touch, temperature, and pain receptors), relay through the thalamus to the parietal lobe.  — from Wikipedia.com

Basal Ganglia= “In simplistic terms, the functions of the basal ganglia in motor control are to facilitate movement and inhibit competing movements. For example, when someone tries to make an intentional movement like reaching for a pencil, the basal ganglia help to facilitate the movement by allowing motor plans associated with that movement (reaching and grasping in this case) to be activated. At the same time, the basal ganglia cause motor plans that might counteract the movement (perhaps flexing in this case) to be inhibited. The result is a smooth and fluid movement… A balance between the ability to inhibit and facilitate movement is critical to making normal, smooth movements, and the proper functioning of the basal ganglia is essential to maintaining that balance. The basal ganglia, however, are also thought to have roles in habitual behavior, emotion, and cognition.”  — From Neuroscientificallychallenged.com

It seems like the historian’s updates are based on probabilities and not certainties, given Philip’s visions of near timelines. We’ve seen characters change the outcome of a prediction more than once, so the future isn’t predetermined. The odds and the variables may be pushing a person toward a certain almost inevitable outcome, but it appears that people can exorcise free will and step outside the situation. It’s just that most of the time, people do what’s expected. It seems that the Travelers are trained to follow cultural norms to blend in, but not to do the unexpected to change the scenario when needed. Mac’s team has instinctively discovered that a surprise move will work, but most teams still follow orders.

You get a tiny sense here that David is missing the person that original Marcy would have been to him, and 3569 is sometimes emotionally exhausted by him. 3569 is temperamentally colder and more interior that real Marcy, who was a natural caretaker (S2 Ep 10, 21C). Like all of the Travelers except Philip, 3569’s natural inclination is to stand back and watch the course of events without interfering, unless ordered to do so. David brings out the warmth and caring in 3569, but it’s not her natural reaction the way it was for original Marcy. He has to draw it out of her. But they are also absolutely committed to each other, as you can see in the screencap of them hugging at the end of Jim’s funeral. It’s David and Marcy, alone against the world. Everyone else might as well not exist. Their love will overcome whatever faults they each have.

 

Travelers Protocols:

 

Images courtesy of Netflix.