Travelers Season 2 Episode 3: Jacob Recap

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This episode is a race against time, as more travelers who have been tortured while bound to wheelchairs are discovered, and the team realizes they have a serious problem on their hands. These travelers died instead of escaping, but their team leader was spared, so Mac and the gang race to find him and the man responsible for the abductions. There is also a significant time jump, allowing the team to become old hands at living in the 21st, and the spring flowers to become dreary fall clouds.

We open with Mac watching Kat through his rainy car window as she approaches. She’s all out of focus and flowing, idealized and soft. Here we go again. He gets so annoying when he decides to be the perfect husband to his perfect 21st century model wife. Future girls never looked like that.

She gets in the car and asks if he’s told Walt about the baby. He replies that he hasn’t told anybody. They share a soft, secret smile. Ha, he’s not keeping it from people solely for the reason she thinks.

Cut to an abandoned building with bloody, tortured travelers bound to wheelchairs, being asked familiar questions by the screen in front of them. What is your mission? When are you from? The sound of a gunshot can be heard as the screen goes dark.

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Travelers Season 2 Episode 2: PROTOCOL 4 Recap

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The travelers take a minute to deal with their personal lives in this episode, after the events of the last few episodes have left them in an upheaval. Phillip finds a missing family member and a new friend. Mac and Carly seem to have given up on each other for the moment, and instead work on their hosts’ separate relationships. Marcy and Trevor spend time with David and Grace, as they all heal from injury and trauma. The team is finally starting to settle into their new lives and personas.

Phillip frantically searches headquarters for Poppy the turtle, who is safely crawling around on the floor. He picks her up and gives her a heartfelt apology. You’ve gotta love a man who loves his turtle.

Meanwhile, several people experience the worst timeshare sales pitch ever, as the salesman locks them in the room after they’ve already been there for hours. They’re quickly turned into travelers, even though there’s no visible threat to their lives. The consequences of the timeshare pitch just aren’t worth the free meal or whatever they promise you, kids.

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Travelers Season 2 Episode 1: Ave Machina Recap

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Welcome back to the 21st, fellow Travelers! It’s been a long year for us since we’ve heard from the Director, but only a short time has passed for the characters. We get a huge new mythology infusion this episode, courtesy of an important new character. We also check in with virtually every character from season 1, answering the question of who is and isn’t coming back this season, along with picking up the story within hours of the finale.

But first, we meet Vincent Ingram, who is in the process of describing his recurring nightmare of his experience as a survivor of the 9/11/01 tragedy. Only this nightmare has a twist, because he isn’t the original soul to live in his current body. He’s traveler 001, sent as a test case, then meant to send the future an email confirming his arrival and die in the attacks. No plan survives contact with the past, including the first one, which went wrong from the moment of arrival.

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Travelers Renewed for a Second Season by Netflix

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Okay, we can all breathe now. Netflix and Showcase, the network that airs Travelers in Canada, have announced that they’ve picked up another season of Eric McCormack’s time travel show. There’s no word yet on the number of episodes in the season, or when the season will premiere.

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Travelers Season 1 Analysis and Speculation

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Whew! What a wild ride this season turned out to be! I love it when you get to the end of a season of television, then have to go back and question everything you thought you knew about the previous episodes. They gave us a lot to think about over the hiatus. When Travelers returns, it’ll seem like a different show, now that the Faction’s role has been revealed. All of these changes open up so many new plot lines to contemplate, so many directions the show could take its mythology and characters.

The goals of everyone, as far as we’ve seen, continue to be saving the world, environmentalism, and respect for the sanctity of life. (In a global way, at least. It’s accepted that individuals of a certain class are disposable in order to further the greater good.) They all want a future living somewhere that’s green. It’s the method of achieving that future that’s at stake. At the very least, there will be a power struggle in the future to see whose Grand Plan will be implemented from here on out. There had to be competing philosophies before the director’s decision-making parameters were programmed. The faction or factions are revisiting those alternate philosophies, to see if changing the program’s if>then protocols will achieve better results. We could be in for experimentation and a rapidly changing future, a reign of terror as the faction tries to secure its hold on the director, or civil war as future society fights it out to decide who will be in charge of the director’s decision-making process, or if the director will be making the decisions at all. Another option is for a faction to steer the changes by human reasoning alone.

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Travelers Season 1 Episode 12: Grace Recap

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Wow, these last couple of episodes have been an intense information dump, while still being filled with plot and character development. So much to sort through. Travelers is suddenly doing my job for me, with the characters throwing out every question and variation on the conspiracy they can think of. I’ll do some analysis here, but to keep it from getting too long, I’ll save the bulk of it for my Season 1 Analysis and Speculation post.

Ellis’ hack allows travel back to the future. That’s why it was so important to get him out and do it off the books. But Grace screwed it up with her reboot. She opened a two-way door between the future and the past, then left the director open to the rebel faction. If the rebels didn’t already have access to the traveler technology, they do now. Travelers will be able to jump back to the future now, and travelers and messages won’t necessarily be sent to further the director’s Grand Plan. This could potentially change the character of the show completely next season.

The episode opens a few minutes after Marcy ends, with David and Marcy having a cup of tea. David, as hung up on the mundane details of life as ever, is fussing about his broken teapot. Marcy dropped it when the forced personality reboot started. I suppose it’s symbolic of the warm, comforting Marcy he lost, though he doesn’t know it yet. Marcy doesn’t remember the tea. David hopes she’ll recover some of her memories. According to the mythology we’ve been given so far, she shouldn’t, but McLaren did still have a few of original McLaren’s memories, ones expressing strong love. Marcy is working with a damaged brain and an experimental procedure. Anything is possible. If McLaren’s example holds true, her love for David is what she’s most likely to remember.

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Travelers Season 1 Episode 11: Marcy Recap

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OH MY GOD. ALL OF MY DREAMS HAVE COME TRUE. MY CONSPIRACY THEORIES AREN’T JUST PARANOID DELUSIONS. THERE IS A RIVAL FACTION TRYING TO TOPPLE THE DIRECTOR. 014 AND 027 SAID SO AND THEY HAVE SUPER LOW NUMBERS AND ARE SUPER IMPORTANT SO IT MUST BE TRUE.

But they killed Grace, and Trevor hates them, so what does that mean? But Trevor might be the inside man, so maybe he was stopping the transition into Grace not just because he cared about her (please don’t take that away from me, show), but because he was trying to stop 027 from escaping from the rival faction in the future. Or, maybe 027 and 014 are the rival faction. My head is starting to hurt. Conspiracy theories are complicated. Also, I might still be a little paranoid.

Hold on to your hats, fellow travelers, we got a lot to unpack in this episode.

We start with Marcy and David in bed, Trevor checking the stitches from his organ donor surgery, and the travelers’ wet dream, a farmer working his farm. The farmer gets into trouble using his giant drilling tractor (?) and promptly becomes a traveler. Farming machinery is more dangerous than people realize. The traveler is elated to be outdoors surrounded by plants and animals.

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Travelers Season 1 Episode 10: Kathryn Recap

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The team has loaded Kathryn into the van after last episode’s plane crash and is getting her, and themselves, out of Dodge. They can’t be linked to the crash site in any of the news reports. As they speed away, Philip and Trevor restrain Kathryn while Marcy sedates her. Marcy calls McLaren’s cell phone. One of the EMTs answers it and tells them to deal with the Kathryn situation, then go to headquarters. The team takes Kathryn home, gives her a memory inhibitor, and puts her to bed. She’ll forget most of the last day. Philip and Trevor pour out several bottles of wine to make it look like Kathryn and McLaren got blackout drunk the night before to explain her headache and memory loss. They head off to headquarters.

There’s a medical team at headquarters, with a complete medical suite set up in the garage. The head doctor introduces himself as D13. D for doctor, or, Derek. They are an elite team that usually works on heads of state, but also treats whoever else the director sends them to, world-wide. Told you McLaren was one of the director’s favorites. 😉 Mclaren’s injuries are so extensive that even Future Medicine™ might not be able to save him. He’ll need an organ transplant, so someone will have to volunteer to be the donor who grows the new organ. Medical nanites will do most of the other work. Trevor ends up being the donor to grow the organ. It’s an extremely painful process. McLaren also needs multiple surgeries.

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Travelers Season 1 Episode 9: Bishop Recap

The opening scene of this episode might be one of the best scenes of the entire series. Secretary Hayes and his wife are jogging through the woods when he gets a phone call. As he takes the call, he stops to sit on a wall overlooking a steep drop down to a bay. He’s boasting about pushing a pipeline through despite ethical and environmental objections. When Hayes hangs up the phone, he complains that he’s sweating, and that the exercise is going to kill him. Mrs. Hayes pulls a towel out of her waist pack that’s way too big for the size of the pack (traveler magic? 😉 probably an extremely tight fold) and replies, “Oh, honey, don’t be silly. That isn’t going to be what kills you.” Hayes looks confused as she shoves him off the wall, down the steep drop, to his death. She looks around to double-check that she wasn’t observed, then starts crying and calling for help. Well-played, Mrs. Hayes, well-played. Who of us hasn’t had that fantasy about someone?

Cut to Marcy and David enjoying a cup of relaxing, snobby, organic morning coffee. They are in Seattle, after all. The sexual tension has finally gotten to David, so he asks Marcy to find her own place. But he feels really, really terrible about it. Marcy must have lost her subsidized apartment when Ken found out the truth about her, because she had her own place when we met her.

Baby daddy Jeff is continuing his hobby of harassing travelers. This morning it’s McLaren’s turn. Jeff shows up at the FBI office to warn McLaren off his woman. The guy’s got some balls for a beat cop. Aren’t law enforcement agencies a bit territorial, and prone to pulling rank on each other? Showing up on McLaren’s home turf is nervy, either way. Next he’ll go straight to peeing on Carly to mark his territory. Great guy.

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Travelers Season 1 Episode 8: Donner Recap

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All three male members of the team are talking to prostitutes online and I am very confused. McLaren, in particular, has both a wife and a girlfriend. The man must be insatiable. Ooooh, it’s a mission. And the sex workers end up dead, because that’s what always happens on TV. Wouldn’t want to appear to condone prostitution. It has nothing to do with misogyny at all.

So, anyway, all three male members of the team are chatting up online prostitutes for purely platonic purposes. Philip is giving the prostitute a hard time about intimacy, but she just asks if he’s hard. Maybe Ray was on the right track when he asked if Philip had a boyfriend. Or maybe Philip isn’t interested in cybersex with a girl who’s about to die. McLaren gets told he’s “dad hot,” just to yank McLaren’s (and Eric MacCormack’s) chain a bit. Trevor gets lost in listening to his assignment’s happiest memory. Once again I wonder just how old a soul Trevor is.

The death countdown clock hits zero and the travelers enter the prostitutes without a hitch, but a minute later their feed is lost. The bomb that killed them wasn’t defused by a fourth traveler, Donner, like it was supposed to be, so the three women are all dead. Once again, I wonder why the director cuts these transitions so close.

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