Thanks for the update, Tangent! I was just thinking about this show the other day and wondering if we were getting a season 3.
I started binge watching this over christmas break. I’m on season 3 now.
If the AI is so intelligent, why did it keep using the skydiver woman to try to save the team?
Wouldn’t it have been easier to take over the body of someone else a few days earlier, then have them drive out to the site with ample time to get there?
Also I dislike how the plot used to be about changing the future for the better, and now is about the civil war. I liked the older plot ideas more.
Here’s my ‘timey-wimey’ fanwankery:
Regarding why the Director didn’t just send someone to warn them days earlier, we know that the future undergoes changes due to actions of the Travelers in our present, so it is possible the Director did not have knowledge of the danger to the team until it was too late to take any other action than using the skydivers. How the Director perceives the timeline(s) and changes that occur is not fully explained.
One of the rules of time travel in this show is that the Director can only send someone as far back in time as the most recent Traveler that was sent. So if a Traveler is sent back to, say, January 1st, 2019, 12:20 am, then the next Traveler has to be sent back to some time later than that.
Presumably the skydiver was chosen because the team was in a remote area and she was the closest person with a known time-of-death that could warn them in time. When the first Traveler in that host failed to reach the team in time, the Director sent another Traveler into the same host body but a few seconds later than when the previous Traveler had been sent. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I rewatched the previous seasons to get ready for season 3, and yes, this is exactly what happened. The Traveler program is only able to send Travelers back to just after the last Traveler, which is why the Director had to keep reusing the female skydiver over and over (until she was no longer viable).
Interestingly, the Director wouldn’t normally be able to use a skydiver as a host- because to do so it needs to know the Time, Elevation, Latitude and Longitude (TELL) of the host’s historical death. The skydivers were filming their jumps, and their altitude was tracked (and, presumably, that information survived to the future).
Also, the only reason the brother could be used as a host was because when the female skydiver was overwritten, the pain caused her to collide with her brother and knock him out- which caused him to die upon impact with the ground. Since he was (now) going to die, he became a valid host… which was an interesting bit of circular reasoning. The same thing happened to the truck driver- he only died because of events put into motion by the Director.
When I first watched the episode, I was a bit confused because a lot happened really, really quickly and with not very much explanation… but on watching it the second time, it became one of my favorite episodes.
Speaking of circular reasoning, the scene where Carly is about to shoot a soldier and that allows the director to take over their body was iffy too. Why not just have the travelers randomly kill people when they want to create a new host.
Also why couldn’t the director send a message through a child several days before the attack at the lake? Does that also follow the same rule about each one must be after the last one?
Yep. And there was an episode where that was brought up- the rule exists, but there is an easy loophole around it. So it’s really more of a guideline.
My theory on that is that it’s because the Director can only react to events, but only *after *they’ve actually happened. It can predict what might happen- but until the event is a historical fact, all the Director can do is try to stack the deck. The Director presumably didn’t know that The Faction was going to ambush the team- at least, not until it was too late to warn them through a child Messenger. It was established at the beginning of the episode that the team was outside of cell coverage, so they couldn’t even be warned once the Director found out about the ambush.
That’s why I like the show so much- sure, time travel may be logically impossible, but the writers do a good job of maintaining internal consistency. Once a rule is established, they stick with it. The only exception is, possibly, the final episode in season three ( McLaren/4678 going back in time to before Traveler 001… but even *that *was sufficiently explained away… not being able to send a traveler before a previous traveler is also affected by the length of time between the origin and the destination- it takes too much “energy” to get over the “speedbump” of the latest traveler when the origin is too far in the future.
Watching this show is where I discovered nixie tube clocks several years ago. (David, Marcy’s boyfriend, has one in his apartment) I bought one from a dude in Poland several years ago. It is definitely a conversation piece, in my office at work.
Coincidentally, I just recently watched the anime series “Steins;Gate” which is also about time travel. (The anime is based on a video game, which I haven’t played.) Most of the time travel involves a certain scientist sending his consciousness back in time (to his own body), and this scientist uses a nixie tube device to monitor the timeline divergence caused by his actions. Makes me wonder if David’s clock in Travelers is an intentional nod to Steins;Gate.
Well, they address this a bit in Season Three. Apparently the Director’s fundamental programming does not allow it to deliberately take a life, which is why it’s set up to only take people who were about to die. But the humans can make the decision to take a life, which creates the loophole that the director can exploit. Essentially, the humans have an executive override on who can live or die as a result of the time travel stuff.
As for the randomly killing part, that’s part of the protocols the humans swore to uphold:
As with most “Prime Directive” types of rules, the Protocols take a beating as their mission progresses, but this is what they strive to achieve, so making random choices to kill people for convenience would be their last resort (which they actually do use as a last resort, so that’s helpful).
I liked season 3 but I didn’t really care for how it ended. It seemed like every other show where they think they might be cancelled so they rush in a (semi) happy ending that could serve as a finale, while at the same time leaving loose ends and enough wiggle room for another season if it got picked up. I hate that. My biggest question is who the hell was the Marcy in the bus scene?
3569/Marcy’s history is actually the most convoluted.
She was originally a normal nurse who worked in a mental hospital, where she was experimented upon by 001, and the result of this was that she became mentally handicapped. Some time after that she was attacked outside the library, and was supposed to have died… at which point 3569 jumped into the host body.
Then, thanks to the mental damage, she had to be “rebooted” with 3569 v2.0 (technically an optimized version of the original 3569).
The Marcy on the bus at the end was the original Marcy. 3468/McLaren had jumped back to 9/11 and sent a warning to the Director that the Traveler program would fail, which resulted in 001 never having been sent back in the first place. Since 001 was never sent back, the original Marcy was never experimented upon… so we see Marcy (with her normal intelligence) living a life after having left the hospital and running into David on the bus.
So this seems like they really mean to end it. That essentially renders David and Marcy (not to mention Kat) irrelevant no matter what happens.
It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? The final scene shows the Director basically rebooting the entire Traveler program… but I don’t see any logical way that can include the original team, at least not the versions we’re used to.
Well, I guess that’s okay, if they’ve run out of good ideas. Better to end the show on a somewhat high note than drive it into the ground.
This does give them a lot of flexibility, though. They can bring in new actors without having to explain away where the old ones went, while at the same time, any returning actors get a chance to re-imagine how their character would be different.
And we do have a new version of Grant McLaren who remembers the whole first three seasons, and has a couple of decades to spend thinking about them before the events of Season One start happening, so he could track down any of the original members he wants to, which might be interesting.
Just started this one (on episode 6) and am enjoying it, though I lol’d a bit when I saw what 10 grams of antimatter would cost: $630 trillion.
I can’t stand Phillip. Hope they drop the junkie bit soon.
Holy hell, I’m on episode 10 (after plane crash) and I had to stop it and come here to say that Philip is just a stupidly drawn character. The entire drama in this “get the car out of the airport scene” is whether Philip can slip past the guards looking like… well, like a junkie.
And it hit me: Why does he still look like that? It’s a completely new person in Philip, why does he keep the junkie haircut and wear the junkie clothes? Of all the characters, he has the least amount of contact with his “Earthmates” and, even then, they would be thrilled to see Philip start to clean his act up. I mean, I get it about keeping the addiction from a plot/character standpoint… but you can also be a junkie in a suit and a $50 haircut, and you’d think SOMEONE would say, “Philip, by the standards of the 21st, you have a look which will constantly draw the attention of authorities. Go bet $400 on some 20:1 longshot and spend that money at a barbershop, spa, high-end clothing store, and start to look like a damn professional. Got it?”
And had he bothered to take the time to get his hair cut, and buy new clothes, we could actually focus the show on other matters not involving Philip, especially the idiocy of him driving a car out of a parking lot, in one of the dumbest pieces of filler I have ever seen.
Back to the show! 
2 minutes later:
:rolleyes:
Episode 209 just started and it appears the writers jumped forward in time, saw my post 38, and went back in time to save Philip, make him less idiotic. While not mentioned by me as a solution, getting rid of the addiction (regardless how convoluted) and putting him in Silicon Valley suits works just as well (but it still wouldn’t have gotten that SUV out of the airport).
Great show. I just assume that the world makes sense, so that makes it easier. Fast-forwarding through any and all scenes with Carly’s baby and baby-daddy helps with the pacing quite a bit. I enjoyed the skydiver episode because lord knows I played many a video game level over and over again because I kept dying at the same spot. The Director is also a gamer! 