THE TEAM IS IN WAY OVER THEIR HEADS. In this episode, pretty much all of my questions from this season are answered.
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Also in this episode, Marcy, Carly and Jenny wear choker-style jewelry of various types, confirming that all style trends eventually come back around, even in the dystopian future the Travelers originate from.
Spoilers ahead!
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Jenny is the Worst
This episode begins with Philip, in more than a super-high stupor, writing down a whole bunch of chemistry (?) data on a whiteboard while Jenny watches.
Jenny’s whole demeanor has changed, and once Philip is done writing, a man enters and begins to photograph the whiteboard data, very excited about the whole thing for some reason.
Jenny ushers Philip out of the room, and when Philip wakes in the morning, he has no memory whatsoever of the entire incident. Jenny doesn’t tell him what happened, and explains Philip’s self-reported hangover-esque state by saying he “hit the drops pretty hard last night”.
So, my guess is that Jenny put a million drops in Philip’s eyes specifically to prime him for the Messenger’s transmission that night. Maybe that’s what the drops were for all along, and why Jenny targeted Philip in the first place. They needed a Historian Traveler, for some reason, to receive and transcribe this specific message.
To Philip’s shock, Jenny then immediately breaks up with him, saying she “got a new mission” and that “lightning struck”. Jenny leaves Philip with enough eyedrops to last him a few months, if he doesn’t abuse them.
Philip is sad and confused. I guess now that Jenny completed her secret mission targeting Philip, she now moves on to the next phase with the data they received.
Carly’s Baby is Sick, But He’ll be Okay… RIght?
Carly calls Marcy to give her little baby son a checkup, and Marcy gives her some normal (not future) medicine and determines that baby will be okay.
Carly and Marcy have a heart-to-heart, talking about how Carly has bonded with her son. Carly responds by telling Marcy she isn’t sure if Marcy’s memory reset last season was consensual. Marcy doesn’t get it, because if she hadn’t received the memory reset, she would have died.
Of course, we know that she was considering death instead of losing her memory because she didn’t want to forget her time with David. Carly then says she’s starting to understand Old Marcy’s hesitation to save her own life, obviously because she would never want to forget her relationship with her infant son.
Grant and Kathryn’s Baby is Out of Danger For at Least 5 Seconds
I guess Marcy’s magic future medicine worked. Yay! The couple is naturally very happy with the news, and hold hands.
The Team Gets a Mission: Mitigate a Flu Outbreak
Trevor and Philip pick up some special Flu shots from a Traveler couple, then distribute them to the Team. Apparently, there’s supposed to be a pretty bad, but not catastrophic, flu outbreak this year, according to history.
The Team is ordered to administer flu shots to a few (probably) strategically-chosen people who were historically killed by the flu. The implication is that these targeted people were prime spreaders of the virus, and that their specific targeting is to lessen the effect of the overall outbreak.
The Team does as they’re told, covertly dosing their targets with the anti-viral. While this is going on, we see that Travelers in other countries are doing the same thing with their own targets. Mission complete! Hurray!
The Team Go Back to Their Lives
Grace is bored, and being a teacher at the same school Trevor attends, approaches Trevor at school, talking loudly about The Director in front of everyone there. Grace says that the kids are too stupid to notice their conversation, and Trevor doesn’t seem to really mind.
Carly and Jeff have a little argument about who takes their baby to the babysitter, but they work it out. Jeff seems to be trying, and Carly is somewhat receptive.
Trouble Arrives: Travelers Are Getting Sick
Officer Boyd arrives at Team HQ with a gravely ill fellow-Traveler, looking for Marcy’s help. Marcy is at home gazing at surveillance photos of David. Photos that Marcy acquired when the Team hacked Vincent’s computer. Creepy, but hey, a good picture is a good picture I guess. Marcy calls David and is leaving a message when she gets commed in to help at HQ.
Boyd doesn’t know what her co-Traveler is infected with, saying that she’s checked every known pathogen for a match and found nothing. This is a totally new virus that’s never been seen in the future, present, or past. That’s obviously a very bad sign, and the Team is at a loss. Boyd is also infected, and isn’t looking good.
Marcy tests the Team, and finds that Trevor, Philip and Carly are infected with the virus, but that she and Grant are somehow immune. No one understands this. Marcy predicts that the infection rate of the virus will be 40%. That’s a lot.
Grant heads to the hospital to get an ingredient Marcy needs to analyze what went wrong with the anti-viral the teams received. Carly wants to pick up her son, but Grant tells her to stay away from the baby because she’s infected.
David calls Marcy back, and she tells him about the very dangerous flu that’s spreading. Marcy tells David to stay home, but David decides to head out and help his social work clients instead. Good guy David is on the loose.
The Mystery Deepens
Carly and Trevor head out to the Traveler couple who was their source for the antiviral. When they arrive at the couple’s home, they find the anti-viral gone, and the couple executed. They comm Grant and let him know what happened. Grant is flabbergasted, saying that none of this makes any sense.
Grant calls Walt and tells him that he thinks Travelers are the main transmitters of the virus.
Jenny is sick, too, coughing in her house, and stares at her eyes in the mirror. It looks like she knows what’s happening to her.
David brings one of his clients, a homeless man (who can’t speak due to not having a speaking role), to the hospital, and a nurse gives him some.. masks, I think? I think they’re breathing masks to prevent transmission and contraction of the disease.
David bumps into Grant at the hospital and asks Grant to pass on a message to Marcy that she please help medically treat those sick at the homeless shelter. Grant makes no promises, saying that Marcy has her hands full.
Grace arrives, sick, at Team HQ. She’s out of the loop, and hasn’t heard about the virus yet. Philip tells her about the severity of the outbreak and that The DIrector’s anti-viral didn’t work. Grace look absolutely horrified, saying that what has happened shouldn’t be possible.
Another Traveler arrives at HQ. It’s the no-name Traveler man from the start of the episode who was excited to see Philip’s data on the whiteboard at Jenny’s house.
The No-Name Traveler thinks that Philip remembers what happened and wants to go over the data he wrote down, which was apparently used to formulate the anti-viral. The man wants to check for mistakes in the anti-viral composition with Philip, but Philp doesn’t know what the man is talking about, and they determine that Jenny must have dosed Philip with a memory inhibitor.
Because of this, the Team decides that Jenny did all this on purpose, and Philip heads to her house to find her. The house is empty except for an unconscious Jenny on the bathroom floor next to an empty bottle of pills. Philip is distraught, and tries to help Jenny.
Boyd is doing very poorly, and Marcy, with the help of the no-name-Traveler, sedates her.
We see that Jeff and the baby are both very sick at home while Carly is at Team HQ, and she’s not picking up her phone when he calls.
Marcy and the No-Name Traveler explain how bad the virus is, saying that by tomorrow, 10 million people will likely have been infected. In other words, it’s real bad.
Philip arrives with the unconscious, overdosed Jenny, and Marcy revives her. Jenny in typically villainous fashion, is very talkative.
Jenny Spills the Beans
As I suspected, Jenny is a member of the Faction, a group from the future that opposes the Director, and was using Philip, a Historian, to mentally record the Messenger’s data. Messengers and Travelers, as we know, cause static on recording devices when they are being transmitted from the future, so the Faction needed a photographic memory, like a Historian’s, to record the data long enough to write it down.
Jenny explains that when the Team reset the Director at the end of Season 1, the Faction lost the ability to Travel to the 21st century. With the Director reset back to normal, it would now be beyond Faction control, so none of the Faction would be allowed to do much of anything.
Because of this, the Faction had no choice but to shut the Director down completely to prevent their own destruction. Basically, with the Director reset, they lost.
Just before they totally lost control of the situation, however, the Faction sent thousands of Faction-members’ consciousnesses back to the 21st, storing them in that dang quantum frame. and have been releasing them in groups ever since.
Now we finally know what that Timeshare business was all about. It was Faction members being Traveled in groups from cold storage in the quantum frame. As I previously supposed, an army is being built.
Jenny goes on to explain that since the Director reset (and subsequent shutdown) in Season 1, every mission the Team has done has been a Faction mission. Every Messenger a Faction Messenger. Bad, yes, but it gets worse.
The Faction, believing overpopulation to be the main problem in the future, formulated the brilliant plan is to kill 30% of the world’s population with the new virus they engineered. So let me get this straight:
– Save people in the future by killing literally billions of people
– Save people in the future by killing their ancestors… causing them to never exist in the first place?
I can see why the Director never tried this, because it doesn’t help. At all. I think I’m with the Team on this one. The Director, evidently, is a better guide than a maniacal group of foolish humans.
Oh, and by the way: Walt, those FBI Travelers, and all Travelers that arrived since the end of Season 1 are Faction members.
With this in mind, it appears Walt has led the National Guard to the quantum frame to get replaced by Travelers. Great. Just what we needed. Thousands of National Guard Faction members. This is going to be a rough one.
Final thoughts
I think the Team needs Grace to make a new Director in the 21sr to fix this mess, providing that she, and all the sick Team members, don’t all die first.
The timeline for fixing this without Grant and Marcy being the only surviving members of the Team is pretty short. I really don’t know how they’re going to get out of this one, but I definitely want to find out. Consider me compelled.
That no-name Traveler is Traveler D13 host name Derek.
Thank you so much, Mark! I totally forgot that he was in Season 1 as well. Another commenter pointed out that he helped assist Grant after the plane crash.