Travelers Season 3 Episode 9: David Recap

Episode 9, David, is the penultimate episode of season 3, but it actually feels like episodes 8, 9 and 10 are meant to be watched together as a trilogy, since they breathlessly flow from one to the next.

This season goes out with several bangs, beginning with this episode. It’s crazy and intense and will have you on the edge of your seat.

The episode begins in Shanghai, with a Traveler team infiltrating a dark building. Inside the building, they climb on top of a self-contained vault, similar to the archive in Seattle. Next, they wave a Geiger counter over the roof, then mark a spot with chalk. They drill through the metal of the vault, then lower a wire cable, hooked to a small tool, down to a device below. It’s a nuclear bomb, and they’re attempting to disarm it. The design for the bomb can be seen on a pad held by one of the Travelers.

Something goes wrong, and the bomb arms itself. The Travelers realize what’s happened, and try to run, but it’s too late. A nuclear bomb explodes in Shanghai, destroying the archive.

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In London, the nuclear blast from the end of episode 8 has created a firestorm that’s burning through the heart of the city.

As Philip and Carly watch the evening news and compare reports from London to what Philip saw in his vision, news of the Shanghai blast breaks.

It’s a little after 6:00 PM and Marcy still can’t find David, despite leaving voicemails. She goes to fill up the kettle to make tea, but is interrupted when she notices the bloody dish towel in the sink. (It’s covered in Archivist A-18’s blood.)

It’s a bad omen when either David or Marcy don’t get to finish making the tea.

Marcy turns on the David tracking device on her phone, which locates him immediately, despite there being no phone service in the vault. Strange.

Inside the archive, David draws a big breath and sits up, then scrambles back against a wall. He must have stopped breathing at some point. It looks like a war zone in the vault, complete with the dead body of A-18.

When he was shot, David was holding the bags of archivist blood, which is filled with medical/archivist nanites, in front of his chest. The bullets went through the bags, then through him, and he fell onto his back, with some of the bags still in his arms and blood soaked into his shirt. So, once he was lying down, the blood and nanites drained into his wounds, and the nanites got to work healing him. They are so powerful that they brought him back from the (mostly) dead.

The Shanghai team live-streamed the bomb op to their historian and other Traveler teams, so Philip has video showing the device schematics.

Trevor: “The devices went off exactly an hour apart, on the hour.”

When Philip pulls up the image of the device, Mac says that it looks like the Rothski device. Trevor notes that the device wasn’t supposed to be built for another 22 years. They agree that these bombs are being set off by the Faction.

They tell Mac that Philip saw a bomb go off in Seattle, too, at the same time that the bomb went off in London. Philip saw a projection from an alternate timeline, where the bombs went of in a different order. Mac says that the Faction stole enough uranium to make 4 or 5 nuclear bombs (S2 Ep6, U235). One of them must be in Seattle. He leaves to warn the FBI.

Marcy arrives at the old roller rink, with the “Historical Time of Explosion” countdown clock that’s appeared showing 31 minutes to detonation. Carly coms her to call her in to ops. Marcy says she’ll be there as soon as she can. Neither tells the other what’s going on.

Marcy pounds on the door of the archive and rouses David, then pushes the button on her com, and talks to him again. He startles, because suddenly, he can hear her in his head.

Being David, he assumes he’s dying.

He has a com, implanted by Marcy without telling him. Remember, back in season 3 episode 2 (Yates), when Marcy came home and found David asleep on his yoga mat? And she pulled out her auto-injector and injected him with something, under his left ear, where a com would be? It was a com.

She’s been using the com to track him all season. That’s how she knew about the fight over the bike, and how she knew he was buying a gun. That’s why she could find him, even in the vault. Future technology works in places cell phones don’t.

It’s both genius and a horrifying level of stalkery invasiveness. I have to ask again: Just what is going on in the future, that makes Marcy think this is okay? Is everyone chipped and monitored at all times?

Moving on, Marcy asks if he’s hurt. David says that, even though he got shot a bunch and is covered in blood, it doesn’t hurt the way you’d think it would. He tells her that he doesn’t think the blood is all his, because the room is filled with bags of blood. Marcy figures out that he’s in an archive.

David also says that it’s freezing cold in the archive.

So it is refrigerated, as you’d expect. Most of those cupboards that line the room are probably freezers.

David wants to go home and get into bed, because he’s cold and covered in blood and has bullet holes all over his shirt. He figures he’s either dreaming or he’s a zombie. He’d really prefer to be dreaming.

He could at least try the zombie lifestyle before rejecting it. Surely a transition as big as death calls for a little open-mindedness about change.

Marcy bursts his bubble, and explains about the healing nanites and the com in his neck.

The word “implanted” throws him, because that’s never a good thing, and he starts thinking about everything she could have been listening in on for the last few months. Marcy gets him to focus on the door, which has laser beams crisscrossing it. She tells him not to cross the beams. Now David is insulted. Every 21ster is practically born knowing not to cross the streams beams.

Since she can’t get him out of the archive, Marcy decides that it’s time to call in the rest of the team. David informs her that there’s also a big metal box in the room with him, that wasn’t there before.

Looks a lot like the Shanghai bomb.

Jeff has been captured by 001 and the Faction, and is tied to a wheelchair, sitting in front of a TV. The TV screen flashes a photo of the Traveler he was forced to kill as a Faction loyalty test, then a screen showing Protocol 3: Don’t spare a life, Don’t take a life.

Trevor and Carly rush to the archive. Carly wonders why the Director hasn’t assigned them to disarm the bomb as a mission. Trevor suggests that she’s driving too fast for a messenger to stop them.

Philip tells them that the traffic lights are taken care of, which he could have done from inside the van with them. Trevor says that Philip needs to stay outside of the blast radius, so that there’s a record of what they do with the bomb, that can be used to help other Travelers, should something go wrong. Philip doesn’t like the idea of being the last of the team left alive.

Mac calls Jo to inform her that his team has found the bomb and she should evacuate the area. After a little back and forth where Mac still tries to keep some secrets, Jo is on her way to the archive.

Mac arrives at the archive right after Trevor and Carly. Marcy has to admit that she imbedded a com in David, and that’s how she’s able to communicate with him. The rest of the team doesn’t approve of her giving him a com, especially without his consent, but it’s turned out to be a stroke of luck, so they won’t complain right now.

Marcy tells David how to activate his com so that the entire team is patched in (press 3 times gently, then hold it down until it beeps). He’s still more concerned with what she might have overheard, and now he’s upset because he thought the com was a tumor.

Once David has followed Marcy’s directions, Mac starts talking to him, quickly passing him over to Trevor, who’ll talk David through disarming the bomb. Carly is holding up her phone, so that Philip can see what she sees.

Trevor has David describe the metal box, then determines that it matches the Rothski device, so he should be able to talk David through disarming it. Marcy hasn’t told David what the box is, so she has to tell him now.

His head almost explodes, and he almost panics. The team tries to talk him through it. Mac says, “You told Agent Callahan at the farm that you wanted to man up. We are running out of time and you’re our only option. So, now would be the moment to man the f–k up.”

Marcy tells him that the terrorists only left him inside because they thought he was dead. David wants Marcy to get away from the bomb, but Philip cuts in to say that there’s no way for Marcy to get away in time. And time is getting very short. That’s what finally steel’s David’s resolve. He clears his head, straightens his spine, and gets down to business.

Trevor has him look for something to use as a screwdriver to remove the screws from the bomb casing. There’s nothing lying around, but the archivist still has the knife that she pulled out of her side. David unscrews the screws which hold the lid in place, lifts it up, and then removes the metal shielding he finds underneath.

Jo comes into the roller rink while David is working on the lid. Mac fills her in on the situation. He has to tell her that their inside man is Marcy’s boyfriend.

Once the shielding is removed, the working parts of the bomb are revealed. Trevor explains to David what he’s looking at, and which wire to clip to disarm the bomb. David finds the wire that looks correct, and cuts it, just as the countdown is about to reach zero.

The bomb springs to life, making the same whirring and clacking sounds that we heard in the opening moments of the episode, in Shanghai, as pieces move into place. Either David didn’t cut the right wire, or he was a moment too late. Either way, he wasn’t successful in disarming it. Based on what we saw in Shanghai, it’ll detonate in about 5 seconds.

Mac thinks quick and acts decisively. “David, grab the core with both hands, pull it out as hard as you can and throw it on the floor, now!”

The metal casing has just closed around the nuclear core, and the ball of nuclear material begins to glow. David does what Mac says. He burns his hands in the process. Marcy instinctively tried to stop Mac from ordering David to touch the radioactive material. Now she’s crying. Everyone looks like something awful has happened, instead of a success.

The bomb doesn’t explode and the nuclear material stops glowing. The bomb is disarmed. The lasers beams on the door have disappeared, so David’s able to unlock the biometric lock (which only archivists should be able to unlock) and leave the archive.

Carly, Mac and Marcy run to help him. He stumbles into them, getting blood all over Mac’s suit. Carly and Marcy help him out to a vehicle. Mac suggests taking him to a hospital, but Marcy intends to takes him back to ops, where she knows the Director can see him. The only chance he has of survival is for the Director to send a D team.

Mac tells Trevor to go with. As he begins to walk away, Jo asks what she’s missing. Trevor stops to explain, “When David grabbed ahold of the nuclear core, his body was exposed to lethal radiation. His internal organs will begin to liquefy in a few hours.”

Jo asks if future technology can save David. Mac says it’s possible the Director will send help for David, but right now, he needs her to warn the SAC that the Faction will target the archive in Moscow next. Philip breaks in to say that the Moscow archive just blew up. They detonated that bomb early when the Seattle bomb failed. The Seattle archive is the only one left.

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Jeff is still tied to his wheelchair and being questioned by the TV. He refuses to answer the questions. (What is your mission? & What is your blood type?) The goon who’s been sent to discipline him hits him.

Mac and Jo stay at the archive to wait for a clean up crew and guard against the Faction. When they take a look inside the vault, Jo is very confused.

Jo: “This is vital to the future?”

Mac: “Since they arrived, the Faction have been destroying elements of the historical record in order to blind the Director. This is our countermeasure… Nanites, placed in the blood, write and store information into dormant genes of DNA. You can archive a h-ll of a lot of data into a small amount of blood… Pretty much all the digital information in the 21st century. Well, all that’s useful to us. Traffic cameras, cell phone videos, phone calls… The genetically rewritten blood is transfused into known ancestors of people who survive into our time.”

He’s telling Jo all of this because he needs her to trust that they’re all on the same side.

The clean up team arrives. They’re not sure if they can save the archive. “Depends on how badly the blood was irradiated. Archival nanites are pretty susceptible to hard radiation… They’ll have to be replaced with military-grade.”

Mac leaves the archive.

Outside, she tries to convince him to come back to the office to do paperwork with her, but he needs to go change out of his bloody suit, then check on David and the team at ops. He suggests that she write the first draft of the reports.

Jeff has been badly beaten and subjected to another round of TV questions. Thinking Jeff is unconscious, one of the goons unties him from his chair. Jeff sucker punches him in the gut, then the face, dropping him.

When they arrive at ops, David has fun imagining that the garage is much more like a bat cave than it is.

It does seem to have expanding side rooms and nooks and crannies, like new Rooms of Requirement that appear when needed.

They get David up on the procedure table and Marcy gives him an injection of a future super painkiller. His face instantly relaxes, showing how much he’d been grimacing in pain before the shot, even though he wasn’t complaining. Carly and Marcy cut his shirt off, while David notices how worried everyone looks and bemoans the loss of his comfy shirt. He wonders why they’re looking so grim instead of celebrating with cake.

When Marcy and Carly pull off the front of David’s shirt, there are five, possibly six bullet wounds in his chest. They are healing up quickly.

Carly’s phone receives a message from Jeff, but she has it set on silent and doesn’t receive it.

Mac goes to the loft and tries to rush in and out, just stopping for clothes. Kat starts to ask whose blood it is, then thinks better of it. Mac says that he needs to get right back out there. She tells him that they just cancelled the evac alert, but he says already knows, because he helped find the bomb. Kay starts to show concern, but then stops herself, and almost rolls her eyes. “Course you were,” she murmurs.

He’s always involved in something huge and life threatening, leaving no time for normal, day-to-day concerns. He makes her feel inadequate for even having those feelings and expecting to be taken seriously. Then he’ll lie to her or suck up to her for a few days and it will all seem okay.

But now, she’s done hoping and pretending. She draws a deep breath and tells him, “Get what you need, get changed and go. I want you out.”

Mac: “What?”

Kat: “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.”

Mac still can’t figure out why forgetting how and when they met is important evidence against him. He tries to blow her off, saying they can talk about it when he gets home.

Kat tells him that this is her home, not his, so she’s the one who gets to stay. When they met and everything else is important, because it’s important to her, and she’s half of the relationship. Mac tries to use the “important FBI agent” card, again, saying he’s having a bad day and isn’t up for his wife throwing him out.

Kat tells him to get back to his important work instead of letting her slow him down. He “begs” her not to throw away all of their years together over something silly like her self-respect and need for a healthy relationship. Kat says that what she really threw away was her chance to be with her original fiancé, John. Instead she chose a man who swept her off her feet, the man he used to be. But, “That man is gone. The new one scares me.”

She’s already packed his bags. Now that he’s changed his clothes, all he has to do is take them and leave.

He stares at her for several seconds, no doubt considering whether he can get away with using memory serum on her one more time. But then he walks to the door, grabs the bags, gives her one last look, and leaves. Kat is nearly in tears, both because of the loss of the man she loved, and because of how afraid she was of Mac in that moment, and what he might do in retaliation. She was strong and stood her ground, and I’m proud of her for it. He fell right back into his self-centered, psychologically abusive patterns of trivializing and undermining her needs while aggrandizing and over prioritizing his own.

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David has been thinking about everything that’s happened, and can’t deny that strange things are going on around Marcy. He lists some of the oddities, like the nanites and the com, then asks her to tell him the truth. He admits that he’s been willfully naive, but he’s not dumb, and he’s ready to know the truth.

Marcy gives him more pain meds and he falls asleep. Boyd arrives moments later, with extra meds and nanites, but David needs military grade nanites, which they don’t have. Marcy still believes that a D team could arrive with the nanites to cure David. Boyd takes over David’s care, and tells Marcy to get some rest.

Ilsa begins receiving a transmission from the Director. She tells Teslia that, “It appears to be an upload, writing a large block of encrypted data into my racetrack core… If it continues, my cognitive ability will become significantly reduced.”

Neither Ilsa nor Teslia can stop the Director’s upload, so Teslia calls Grace. He tells her to get over to the lab, right away.

The entire team sleeps at ops, in chairs and on the couch. Marcy sleeps for a couple of hours, then stays by David’s bedside. In the morning, Carly checks her phone and finds a message from Jeff:

“Carly, this is Jeff. I got kidnapped. I got out of the room they had me in, but they’ve got people at every exit. I think it’s like an abandoned mall or something. I know this breaks Protocol 6 but I need you to…”

The message ends with the sound of gunfire. It’s at least 8 hours old.

Mac has Philip pull up all of the old malls in the area. There’s only one that fits the description. Trevor is frozen in a time aphasia episode, so Carly and Mac leave to get Jeff by themselves.

When he wakes up, David and Marcy talk about the future. He’s figured out that Marcy is from the future and trying to save the world, based on what the archivist told him. He’s not mad, just a little sad she didn’t trust him enough to tell him. She says that she does trust him, but he replies that she doesn’t trust him enough to tell him that he’s not going to make it.

Marcy: “I believe that help is on the way.”

David: “I know that you do. I love that about you.”

Marcy; “You saved thousands of lives. The Director has to save you for that.”

Marcy and I are not watching the same show.

David: “I had the balls to do that because you were there.”

Because she brought her purse.

David asks if she has some pain meds she can give him, even if it’s not the good future stuff, because the pain is getting really bad. Marcy pulls some out and injects it into his IV. As he’s falling asleep again, he asks if they can go home when he wakes up. She says yes. He asks her to stay with him while he sleeps.

Mac and Carly search the abandoned mall, which appears to be empty. They do find a blood stain on the floor, so at first they assume they’re too late. Then Mac notices the newly built brick wall near them, with mortar that hasn’t dried yet. Since burying Travelers alive behind walls exactly like that is one of 001’s specialties, they knock down the wall to look for Jeff. He’s there, and in bad shape, but alive.

The program the Director is uploading into Ilsa is huge, and Grace can’t stop it. Teslia is upset that it could kill Ilsa. Grace scoffs at him, since Ilsa has only become a sentient life form due to her contact with the Director. Teslia was fine with the Director’s involvement with his program, as long as it was also benefiting him, and he knew if he said anything the government would take Ilsa away.

Teslia still doesn’t think that it’s right to hurt Ilsa.

Grace: “Don’t worry, the Director can’t take a life. Ilsa’s capacity may be reduced, but her core consciousness, if you can call it that, will be left intact. The Director’s just getting rid of old coding, you know, redundancies and useless things.”

Grace hears what she’s saying and pauses. This is virtually word for word what she said about Marcy’s brain at the end of season 1, and again when she was on trial in season 2.

Teslia: “That makes me feel a little better.”

Grace: “I’ll feel better when I find out if this massive program it’s downloading is the one I think it is.”

Carly and Mac bring Jeff into ops and call for Boyd to treat him. He tells the team that his mission was to find out if the Faction and 001 are working together. They are, and they discovered him. If it weren’t for Carly, he would’ve died. Carly acknowledges his thanks.

Mac asks Marcy how David is doing. She tells him that David doesn’t have long. He needs a D team and nanites, now.

Marcy gets up to yell at the surveillance camera that’s pointed at the bed, as a way of talking to the Director: “You hear me? I know that you know who I am. I know that you’re watching. You saved my life when you reset my consciousness. [Points to Mac.] You saved him after a plane crash that he never should have survived. So why won’t you save the life of a man who, without any training, without having sworn any oath, and without any regard for his own life, saved thousands of people? Why?”

David calls Marcy back to the bed. Mac comes over to tell David how grateful they are to him. He saved 50,000 people. David asks Mac what his real name is, in the future. Mac gives Marcy the sideeye for letting David know about the future- maybe there’s still time to give him some memory serum before he dies. But he tells David his name is 3468.

David asks Marcy what her number is, but then decides he doesn’t want to know. He wants to keep thinking of her as Marcy.

David asks Marcy if they can go home now, and bring everyone with them to answer his questions. Marcy says they can. The scene shifts to a vision. The atmosphere is soft focus and gauzy, David is healthy, and Marcy is in a light, ruffled dress. They are sitting on the couch in their apartment, with the rest of the team around them.

David: Why didn’t you just tell us what was going to go wrong and how to fix it?

Mac: You already knew what was going to go wrong.

Trevor: And what you needed to do to fix it.

David: Yeah, maybe…

Carly: We believed if we just stopped enough bad things from happening, the future we came from would never happen.

David: “Right. Well, why all the secrets? I mean, why not just say, ‘Hey, we’re from the future, things are about to go rats–t. Let’s fix this.”

Mac: “Who would believe us?”

David realizes that nobody would. He suggests that they could use their knowledge of the future to prove who they are so that people would listen to them. Mac tells him that every government in the world would try to use them for their knowledge.

Mac: “The 21st century screwed things up, David. We’re just trying to clean up the mess.”

David: “But it’s our mess. Don’t you get it? We should be the ones to fix it. What if after all that you’ve done, it still doesn’t work?”

Mac: “We haven’t given up.”

Trevor: “So long as the Director exists, I doubt we ever will.”

David realizes that he’s getting tired. Everyone decides that it’s time for them to leave. As they say goodbye, Trevor gives David a hug, Philip shakes his hand and tells him how brave he was, and Mac tells him he’s part of the team now.

Once everyone else is gone, David and Marcy turn toward each other. They’re standing in front of a window, so they’re backlit with a soft, glowing light, as they have been several other times this season. They press their heads together, and David says, “Don’t you wish we could just stay here like this? Let’s try.”

Marcy nods her head yes. They kiss, but the vision is failing. It’s interspersed with flashes of the medical equipment in real world and real world Marcy. David’s blood pressure is bottoming out, and he’s fading fast. In the vision, he tells Marcy he loves her so much. Real world Marcy begs David to hold on a while more. She says, “I love you.”

David goes messenger and says: “Protocol Omega.”

He dies. Marcy is devastated. Everyone else looks stunned and horrified.

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Omega= Ω – As the last letter of the Greek alphabet, Omega is often used to denote the last, the end, or the ultimate limit of a set, in contrast to alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet. (Wiki)

Protocol Alpha was used to indicate a matter or mission of ultimate importance, such as a direct threat to the Director’s existence. Alpha, which is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, refers to a threat to the beginning of the Travelers or a top priority emergency.

Protocol Epsilon is a threat to the archives, which is a threat to the Travelers program, as it would blind the Director. Epsilon, which refers to a small quantity, refers to the need to relocate the tiny nanites and blood cells that store the rewritten DNA.

The protocols which are named after Greek letters, instead of numbered, are seldom used and pertain to emergency situations. The Greek letter Omega refers to endings and limitations.

Every time Kat tries to talk to Mac about her needs and their marriage, including in the therapist’s office, he pulls the “important FBI agent” card and walks out, just as he tried to do in this episode. Kat is terrified of Mac, and has been manipulated by him for months. She had to mentally prepare herself for this episode’s conversation in order to go through with throwing him out.

You could see that she considered, for a moment, putting off the discussion, but realized that there will always be some excuse why it’s not a good time to have the discussion she wants to have, so she plowed ahead with it. As she said, if Mac paid the slightest bit of attention to what’s really going on with her, he would have seen this coming. He didn’t because he only sees his image of her, not the real woman.

He’ll be fine. Kat needed to get this over with, for her own sanity, and her needs matter. She’s the injured party here, not Mac.

I’m so glad that the writers made Kat strong enough to remain firm, calm and rational in her responses to Mac. And that he gave in and eventually left, despite how hard he’s previously fought to stay. He’s developed some sort of obsession with her over the last two seasons that isn’t really about her, and his anger that she wouldn’t cooperate with his fantasies has bled into his relationships with the women he works with.

It’ll be interesting to see what he does next. Will he take stock of himself and figure out that he was the problem, maybe do some actual soul-searching? Will he blame her? Will he assume that this happened solely because he wasn’t the real Grant, and ignore everything she said about how much he scared her because of his abuse tactics?

Mac thinks of himself as a good man, and in many ways he is. But sometimes it makes people more dangerous when they have issues in addition to their heroism. What would it take to get Mac to see himself as the one who victimized someone else? He couldn’t handle the thought that he might have killed Aleksander, and tried to block it from his mind. The lesson showing what he’s capable of doesn’t seem to have stuck, and his empathy for Aleksander didn’t generalize into empathy for anyone else. There’s still a frightening potential inside him, even though he’s a hero and a good man.

I’d like to see Mac’s past explored in future seasons, to understand his issues with women. Were Andrew Graham’s relationship with his mother (S3 Ep8) and Aleksander Andrieko’s with his foster-mother (S3 Ep3) meant to be foreshadowing for Mac’s relationship with his own abusive mother?

It’s funny how Philip’s two closest friends, Carly and Trevor, snark at each other every time they’re alone together (see also S3 Ep3). If I were in the fan fiction business, I’d think they were jealous of each other and start writing about love triangles, but I’m not.

David isn’t just on the team, he’s an archivist now, right? He had the nanites and the blood with the encoded DNA inside him. He should go down on the Travelers Wall of Valor with credit for a major save, and for participating in a specialty, however brief his participation was.

Carly hardly had any lines during David’s vision, and didn’t get to say goodbye. Marcy also barely spoke during the entire vision. This was David’s “successful man up” vision, where he gained the approval of the men on the team.

In season 3 episode 7 (Trevor), David’s elderly client and mentor, Jim, was set up for the tropes Incorruptible Pure Pureness and Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Both tropes are just what they sound like. Incorruptible Pure Pureness describes a character whose pure goodness and able to resist all temptations toward evil and corruption. Too Good for This Sinful Earth describes the death of characters who are so good that they end up sacrificing themselves or being killed by the overwhelming evil in the world, then dying a lingering, dramatic death and being mourned by everyone who knew them, and probably inspiring the living to keep fighting.

The tropes didn’t really fit Jim. David, with his willful naivité, which allowed him to see only the best in people, just thought they did, and he used Jim as his role model. His death has been foreshadowed for a long time, and his self-sacrificing nature is legendary. In this episode, his desires to do good, to save people, to feel like a real man, and to be Marcy’s hero all come together. As soon as the Travelers came into his life, this kind of ending was probably inevitable. David wasn’t going to sit back and watch other people save the world without trying to help.

David has a thing about going home when he’s stressed, scared and tired. He told Marcy he wanted to go home when Vincent/001 had him, while he was in the archive, and two or three times while he was at ops, dying.

I think we can all agree that if there’s one improvement the Director needs to make, it’s to increase the availability of military-grade nanites. They seem to be the cure-all bomb this season. I don’t recall hearing them mentioned before S3. Trevor, Grace and Philip need to set up a manufacturing facility, stat.

I’d never heard of anyone doing what Mac had David do to disarm the bomb, but, according to my research, it seems like it really would work. And be very lethal, but I imagine none of us questioned that part. I haven’t found any information on how radioactive an unexploded bomb is. It surprised me that they could all stand that close and not also receive a large dose, but the story of Louis Slotin and the Demon Core, which was part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, has some similarities.

Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control- Nuclear Weapons Primer

The New Yorker- Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin

Demon Core at Wikipedia

001 asks about Jeff’s blood type during his TV interrogation. Do archivists have a particular blood type, like O negative, the universal donor type, that aids in transfusing their blood into known ancestors of future people? Did 001 wonder whether Jeff was an archivist, too?

The two creepiest things in this entire season are Jo’s mom and David suddenly going messenger just before they die. I’m definitely against the use of the dying as messengers. Marcy deserved those last moments. So did Jo. It seems so disruptive to what you hope will be a peaceful process.

The Travelers always speak as though only children are used as messengers, but at this point we’ve seen many dying people used that way. If you count the elderly people the Director used to speak to Grace during her “sentencing” in S2 Ep8, 0027, it’s probably used more dying people/adults than children.

It killed Vincent’s wife, Irene, and his partner, Oliver, and Ellis/0014, even though they weren’t dying. For dying messengers, it’s used: all of the people who helped it speak to Grace, Jo Yates’ mother, David, and the dying messenger in S1 Ep4, Hall, who told Mac to find Hall for the first time and give him medical assistance. There may be more that I’m forgetting. Let me know if there are.

I’m going to wait to analyze David’s dying vision in with the episode 10 recap. These 2 episodes are so closely entwined that I’m worried about accidentally spoiling something if I do any further analysis.

 

Travelers Protocols:

Images courtesy of Netflix.