Travelers: Room 101
December 26, 2016 10:44 AM - Season 1, Episode 5 - Subscribe

Kidnapped by a faceless nemesis who seems to know their secret, MacLaren's team is held captive and interrogated while he scrambles to find them.

*MacLaren's team waits at the top of a parking garage for the arrival of a new team, whose hosts are a family of four about to be killed by the dad driving the car off the roof, but there is a 'misfire' and only 3 of the 4 are taken over by travelers, leaving the young daughter who was to have been the group historian completely confused.
*MacLaren drives the daughter to her grandmother's, and as Carly, Marcy, Trevor, and Philip drive elsewhere, their car is t-boned by a truck.
*Trevor awakes to find their comms have been removed, they are strapped to wheelchairs in cages, and have had IV's and catheters inserted.
*Marcy regains consciousness several hours after Trevor and Carly, and the silent captor wheels Carly away for interrogation via a webcam and a TV screen showing questions - "Who have you told?", "Do you know this person?" (photos of Hall, MacLaren, and Jeff), "When are you from?", "What are the protocols?", "What is your specialty?", "What is the name of your son?", "Is this your son?" (showing video of someone holding baby Jeffrey). Carly says if anyone harms her baby she will hunt them down whenever they are.
*David, waking alone after a night of worrying about Marcy not having come home for dinner, finds MacLaren's card and goes to the FBI office, and MacLaren finally discovers that the comms are all offline.
*The silent captor (aka Mr. Giant) brings back Carly back to the cages; she tells them about her interrogation, the captor injects an apparently dangerous amount of heroin into Philip's IV and takes Marcy away.
*Marcy's webcam interrogation also asks "When are you from?" She is shown video of a relieved David receiving a phone call from who he thinks is Marcy, then the webcam question asks "Does he know?"
*Philip realizes that the second injection was not heroin but something designed to work on someone modified to be a historian. It unleashes a flood of memory as big as "the Helios tidal wave" and he begins babbling memories of the future - the way the re-recycled water tasted, the smell of metal in the air, and a deadly accident at Shelter 41. He is wheeled away for webcam interrogation, and is able to counteract the effects of the injection by answering the questions "What is the master plan?", "What is your mission?", and "How does the world end?" by using famous quotations. We do not see his answer to the question "What is shelter 41?"
*Mac goes to Philip's but finds no clues. He gets word from his FBI assistant that the car has been located and goes to the impound lot but learns nothing aside from that the airbags deployed.
*Trevor is the last to be taken for webcam interrogation, shows no sign of cracking.
*MacLaren goes to Officer Boyd for help in finding his team and/or completing their mission; she thinks his team may have been taken out by another team on the director's orders, but says she'll help if he gets an actual lead.
*Marcy gets another webcam interrogation; the tv shows video of Philip in his wheelchair after "Who is this?", then shows him being shot in the chest, causing Marcy to freak out and go into seizure.
*Mac meets the misfire-family travelers' helicopter on a helipad and tells them the mission is canceled.
*When Marcy is returned to the cages and Trevor is about to be taken, Carly asks Mr Giant to wipe the blood from her eyes again and bites his wrist to the vein.
*MacLaren somehow locates the team's coordinates (via webcam-view footage of them on the traveler-net?) and raids the location with Officer Boyd. Mr. Giant has bled to death, and the team is all unconscious.
*They were in captivity for 3 days.

Showcase Blogs - Episode 5 recap
posted by oh yeah! (4 comments total)
 
Poor misfire-girl; assuming the non-misfired team follows Protocol 5 and tries to maintain the lives of their hosts while they're waiting for a new mission, she's like the lone human left in 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. She's been orphaned but doesn't know it/will never be able to prove it.

And 3 days sitting in wheelchairs? Ouch. (Curious to see how Trevor's absence was explained to his parents; don't see how any kind of faked video/phone call would have kept them from reporting him as missing.)
posted by oh yeah! at 10:56 AM on December 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


With catheters!
posted by gt2 at 9:40 PM on December 26, 2016


With catheters!

I know! I mean, it makes for a change from the current sf-series trope of toilet-less glass prisons, but, yikes. (And, it's ridiculous in its own way -- shouldn't they all have woken up in hospital gowns? Why/how would you put an unconscious person's jeans back on after inserting a catheter? And were they given enemas too? Maybe the initial car crash would have taken care of that, but, all the more reason for them to be in hospital gowns or scrubs. And 3 days being strapped into one position, I can't imagine how torturous the muscle spasms would get.)
posted by oh yeah! at 7:20 AM on December 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes Trevor's absence. (and also Trevor having more life experiences than the age of the host implies)

Being chained to a wheelchair for 3 days would wreck anyone; in addition to tortuous muscle cramping, that's bed sore territory.

As for bowel movements, it depends on how "full" it was at the time of their abduction. They were also drugged/sedated between the abduction and when the audience encounters them (about 18 hours since Philip's last dose). mu-opioid induced constipation is a thing. There may be other ways.

But yeah, hospital gowns would have made more sense (and maybe even increased the 'vulnerability' of the abductees).

Also, it seems like they're solely sustained by an IV drip (0.9% Sodium Chloride Injection USP, 1000mL), without solid food, not a lot of feces is generated despite ongoing red blood cell turnover (one of the reasons why feces tends to be brown).

I was hospitalized and on an IV drip for about 20 hours; I was admitted while rather intoxicated and they let me 'sleep it off.' Strangely, the expected hangover symptoms never manifested, never felt thirsty, and it was hours after I was discharged before I felt the need to urinate. This was also afterf a massive dinner and I didn't feel the need to defecate until the following morning (at my regular time).

I actually like the chain link cells; a lot cheaper to construct the set instead of plexiglass cells which would be expensive to make look like a realistic restraint and to look not terrible in HD - and gives a grittier grimdark feel, too.

The re-recycled water thing, I take umbrage with; yes, double distilled water (ie., chemically pure including the removal of dissolved gasses) tastes really weird and flat; but running it through a wine aerator restores the "taste" of water. It would also be trivial to re-mineralize the water for taste purposes.
posted by porpoise at 2:40 PM on December 29, 2016


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