Travelers: 21C
December 28, 2017 8:39 AM - Season 2, Episode 10 - Subscribe

The travelers guard a little girl who has a big future, while Marcy recalls more than expected when she attempts a procedure to recover her memory.

*Marcy finishes writing a letter to David, then texts Carly to say she's undergoing a medical procedure and to come to the apartment at 4pm sharp. She wires herself up to some sensors, gives herself an injection, and submerges her body into an ice-cube-filled bathtub.

*At the condo, MacLaren turns off the kitchen faucet as Kat stares aimlessly at nothing, and pulls her into an embrace.

*On a suburban sidewalk, 4 little girls are walking and talking when suddenly 3 of them freeze. Hall drives up, with Luca and Kyle, and tells the remaining girl (Anna Hamilton) that he's FBI and needs her to come with them. When she is unconvinced, Kyle grabs her into the car and they speed away, and the 3 girls unfreeze and call out for their disappeared friend.

*At Ops, Carly joins Philip and Trevor, they've been assigned as tactical support for another traveler team. She tells them Marcy won't be joining them - MacLaren isn't responding to coms so Philip collects him from the condo.

*At a diner, MacLaren arrives to find Hall and his team with Anna, still trying to gain her trust/cooperation. MacLaren says his team were told by Messenger to give tactical support at these coordinates. Hall says his mission is to protect Anna, who is destined to be the 53rd President (though in MacLaren's original timeline she lost in a close race). Shots are fired on the diner and a gunfight ensues, with the Director eliminating the final shooter via Messenger.

*The teams drive to an FBI safehouse, a farmhouse that was once used as a meth lab. Carly gives MacLaren and Hall claymores to set up around the perimeter, and a drone does a flyby before they can shoot it down. Later, Trevor and MacLaren talk on the porch. Trevor knows he's grieving the lost baby and wonders if the Director sent him on a mission to save a child because of it, and reminds him that he's old enough to have seen two of his sons die of old age. Suddenly, multiple cars approach the safehouse, and a Messengered Anna tells them that Protocol 3 (Don't take a life, don't save a life unless otherwise directed) has been suspended, they must protect Anna Hamilton at all costs and hold until reinforcements arrive.

*The enemy travelers arm themselves and approach on foot. Carly reminds everyone that the Director will be able to turn them into hosts or kill them via Messenger as soon as they’re on camera, and the gunfight begins. Eventually, the team realizes that the attackers must have an STA (space-time attenuation device) to create a field that the Director can't see through. Carly spots it in one of the trucks, and MacLaren gives Trevor a grenade, and Trevor makes his way towards it while Kyle provides cover. Meanwhile, some of the attackers make it into the house from the back, but Luca and Philip kill them. A military-grade vehicle with a machine-gun turret approaches and stops short of the claymores to prepare to fire on the house, but Trevor lobs the grenade at the STA just in time, and the Director turns all the assailants into new hosts.

*Anna's parents arrive at the safehouse. They are both travelers now, as in the original history they died that afternoon trying to protect Anna. Hall and MacLaren shake hands, somewhat reconciled, and Carly races away to make her appointment with Marcy.

Marcy in the bathtub, memory recovery procedure:
*Original, mentally-impaired Marcy reads out loud with a friendly orderly, Ted, when an abusive orderly, Drake, drags her away for her "treatment". She is strapped to a chair, by Vincent Ingram, in a room with some quantum-frame-ish technology. He says he doesn't want to hurt her, and wants to make her whole. Afterwards, a blond guy (Simon) asks if it worked this time, and when Marcy shakes her head no says "I told him the information transfer was way, way too slow. I tried to fix it. To get you back in. You're still in there. You don't know because you're not here. He knows. I'll keep trying, squib transistors barely exist here now." Later, with Ted again, Marcy keeps repeating that she works there. Drake interrupts and he and Ted get into a fight, and Drake says Ted will be the one fired.
*In an earlier memory, a non-impaired Original Marcy is working as an orderly in the facility. She tries to give Simon his pills; he is drawing a person he says is 0092, and talks about the future with no ozone layer and living under the ice. He says he shouldn’t take his pills before his treatment, and Vincent appears and says he's right. Marcy expresses concern about the treatment, as she has noticed that some of the patients treated don't return to the ward, but Vincent says it's because they've been transferred to another hospital as promising candidates for further research, and says he could use her help.
*Marcy signs a waiver/payment agreement for Vincent's scan. When she enters the room and finds Simon tinkering on the machinery, saying he helped build the first one in the future, she tries to back out, but Vincent says it's too late now that she’s seen the device, and calls for Drake to prevent her from leaving.
*Afterward, Drake pushes a now-mentally-impaired Original Marcy (post-treatment Marcy) in a wheelchair. Vincent says there was a malfunction in the scan and some information was lost, that Simon is working on it and until then Marcy is now to be considered a patient of the facility. He gives Drake a big envelope of cash and tells him to bribe or get rid of any staff who remember Marcy as an employee.
*Marcy 1.0 injects Philip with his heroin, and tells him about her seizures getting worse.
*Post-treatment Marcy is abandoned on a city street, and bumps into David. He sees she's in trouble, and walks and talks with her, then later gets her situated in an apartment and helps her fill out paperwork to get on disability. He gives her a 'birthday' present purse. Later, post-treatment Marcy says he's her boyfriend, but he says that would be inappropriate, but that they can be BFFs.
*Back in the present, Marcy 2.0 in the bathtub goes into cardiac arrest.
*She recovers the memory of Marcy 1.0 reading the newspaper to David on the bus.
*Carly arrives at the apartment and pulls Marcy from the tub to start CPR. Marcy recovers the Marcy 1.0 memory of making love with David. David arrives at the apartment and takes over CPR while Carly gets the defibrillator, and Marcy recovers the memory of Marcy 1.0 and David playing Operation. Marcy’s heart starts beating again, to the memory of Marcy 2.0's first meeting David.

*As Marcy recovers in bed, David sees the letter on the desk and reads it. When Marcy wakes up, she says he wasn't supposed to have seen it unless she had died, and he asks how she could have done this knowing that he was probably going to be the one to find her, but Carly says that they need to let her rest.

*Back at the condo, MacLaren tells Kat that he saved a kid today.

*Later, Marcy awakes to an empty apartment. She finds David out working, and tells him she had to do the procedure to find the missing pieces of herself, to find him. David asks if it was worth it and she kisses him, passionately. Then she notices a futuristic drawing on a manhole cover. David says one of the homeless guys did it, and she asks him to take her to him.
posted by oh yeah! (14 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I did not expect the plot twist of Vincent being responsible for Original Marcy's mental disabilities. Was he trying to transfer someone into her, or just trying to test the machine by transferring her consciousness in and out of it? I think it's the latter, but I'm curious to find out where Simon came from.

I am so onboard the David/Marcy ship, I hope this show doesn't stomp on my heart.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:50 AM on December 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING

omg now I see why David is all about her. and goddamn fucking Vincent. ugh he's just the worst.
posted by numaner at 1:08 PM on December 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Was he trying to transfer someone into her, or just trying to test the machine by transferring her consciousness in and out of it? I think it's the latter, but I'm curious to find out where Simon came from.

I gathered that too. And since I peeked at the next episode's title ("Simon"), I'm sure we'll know soon. He said he was 0059, so he must be an early one, sent back years ago, and it was before all the protocols and training went in place, or he actually went insane but still knew about the future.
posted by numaner at 1:16 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I can't even watch the rest of the episode before coming here to scream "WHY IS MARCY SUCH AN ASSHOLE TO DAVID?!" at the top of my lungs. She needs to find herself? Ok, I get that. Find yourself by doing something that risks David coming home and finding you maybe dead in his bathtub? Like there is literally nowhere else in the world she could have done this?

Maybe Grace really did chop out her entire capacity for empathy and she's just faking it like any good sociopath. Ugh.

Sorry, that just really set me off, especially after all the shit she's involved him in. It would be one thing if she explained it to him before the fact, but just up and doing it in his apartment without so much as a hey maybe don't come home until after 6, that's just..abusive.

And now having finished it, just ugh. David is rightly angry, but she kissed him again so it's all ok. Her complete thoughtlessness that she didn't even apologize for, just made excuses that don't even begin to justify going about it in that way is just tossed aside. Ugh again.
posted by wierdo at 1:42 AM on December 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, when I realized that Marcy was running her experiment in David's bathtub... I can't even anymore.

Ok, maybe I do. The only people I've heard say "defibrillator" are those who don't have modern medical/first aid experience - they're typically referred to as AEDs ("Ae Ee Dee").

The 001/Vincent plot thread, I'm really hoping it resolves. Now it kind of makes sense why Faction wanted the room temperature superconductor MacGuffin in the Groundhog Day episode.

And ok, fine, I concede. Faction is at least allied with 001/Vincent, if not his outright goons. The question is whether 001 created Faction after Shelter 41 was not asteroided, or he's just come to an agreement with Faction members in the 21st that he, presumably, managed to kidnap or otherwise contact.

Liked the dig re: Anna (the abducted little girl) "in this timeline she actually wins the election." So... the Faction's motivations are a little bit more complicated than just "solve overpopulation" ?

What if her parents dying is the reason she went into, and succeeded in, politics?

--

No fault, but I think Simon was mumbling about SQUID transistors, a pretty common trope in scifi for scanning brains/simstim/etc. (qv. 'Strange Days' (1995), Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic, &c.).

--

Marcy having held a job as a psych nurse/assistant - why were there no records of her life prior to her brains being scrambled? I guess the Director's vetting process was pretty superficial (news of Marcy 1.1 being manslaughtered and webpage that she was a librarian, no need to dig further).

Just caught the bit about David checking in on Marcy's claims that she worked at a hospital (true), but the hospital claims no record of her being a patient (which is what David would have asked - and presumably legit records of her working there would have been scrubbed by Vincent/Drake) - but didn't she have any friends/family who might put out a missing persons on her?
posted by porpoise at 1:07 PM on January 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


No fault, but I think Simon was mumbling about SQUID transistors, a pretty common trope in scifi for scanning brains/simstim/etc. (qv. 'Strange Days' (1995), Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic, &c.).

Ok, thanks - it sounded like "squid" to me, but the Netflix subtitles said "squib" (and it was all technobabble to me, so, I went with what I could see :-)
posted by oh yeah! at 4:55 PM on January 2, 2018


=)
posted by porpoise at 10:59 PM on January 2, 2018


Marcy has always had the toughest backstory to sell, although I loved them sending her back to this host all based on a fictional backstory. The show was vague about Marcy's deeper backstory before this, with her being in a generic institution and it was plausible she'd been in the care of the state. But even if she was a candystriper, nevermind her being a full-on orderly, any young woman living out in the world in a major urban area would presumably have enough of a trail that she'd be listed as a missing person.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:46 PM on January 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was a bit confused, probably because I was half-watching.

It took too long for me to get what was going on with the Marcy backstory; I first thought it was a dream sequence. So, if I get it: she wasn't impaired when she started work. the impairment was due to the treatment.

Simon (actor Chad Krowchuk) is not the bad tribunal (actor Vincent Gale).
posted by Pronoiac at 3:52 PM on January 8, 2018


You got it.

She was normal, got conned into "an experiment," experiment failed, Marcy is disabled, further experiments are carried out until they give up and just dump her on the street. David assumes that Marcy's condition is congenital.
posted by porpoise at 4:57 PM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, she did ask Carly to come by at 4, so she had a plan. A "just in case" note is a backup.

I always love Marcy and David together so this made me go "awww" a lot. Yes, it was worth it to her. And as already said, Vincent was a shocking surprise there. I was relieved to find out that Marcy had been brain damaged and not just uh... like that from birth, somehow. Makes more sense.

So we finally get a female president by 53, eh? Go Anna!
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:04 PM on January 28, 2018


Was this filmed before or after the election? The whole “a divisive election that tears the country apart, but in this timeline she actually wins” was screaming “We’re so sorry, Hillary” to me, don’t know if that was anyone else.

Also, I’m hoping this is a lie, but I’m getting a bad feeling like maybe Jeffrey is going to let something happen to their son? That look when the crying interrupted him getting close to Carly was...chilling.
posted by corb at 7:09 PM on March 7, 2018


I've been binging this series since last week. It's way better than I expected, and as a fan of Stargate Universe it's been fun to see so many alumni of the show (Jennifer Spence, Patrick Gilmore, Louis Ferreira, Haig Sutherland, Glynis Davies, etc.,) show up in recurring and one-off roles. Plus others from Stargate SG-1 (Teryl Rothery!) and even Continuum (Stephen Lobo.)

Did not see Marcy's plot twist coming. Holy cow.
posted by zarq at 12:45 PM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I liked the repeated references to the importance of getting to 1600; it is both 4:00 PM and 1600 Pennsylvania.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:22 PM on April 6, 2020


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