FIRST THING: Travelers is a Canadian science fiction TV show written by Brad Wright and is co-produced by Netflix and Showcase. Check out of the link for more info.
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SECOND THING: If you haven’t watched seasons 1 and 2 of Travelers then you should go watch it and then come back and read this. If not feel free to read this and get lost in the mind fuck that was season 2 finale and then go watch it either way this is your WARNING!
I work as a field biologist and that means that I tend to work outside at field sites, usually alone and in remote locations. This also means that I’m usually standing alone in a field and thinking about random things. With that being said, I just finished season two of Travelers and the ending is by far one of the wildest season finales I can remember for any show in recent memory. It left me with unanswered questions and thoughts that have been plaguing my brain over the past few days. So, like I always do, I texted Kate a lot of my thoughts. I realized after sending that text that it was so long that I had to open Google Docs to read the entirety of my text message (It was almost 300 words) and decided to turn this text message into a blog (actual message will be at the end, I am not ashamed of my poor texting skills).
Here are some of my questions, thoughts, and maybe even a little ranting before we go into season 3 – which was finally confirmed as renewed on March 1, 2018. I would also like to say this will just be thoughts and questions since we have no idea what will happen, I do not have any answers. Feel Free to leave a comment or @ me on Twitter with your own thoughts or questions.
The Madness Begins: All of these mainly relate to the Season Finale
1. In the season finale of Travelers, why didn’t The Director just kill the Travelers? The director has already proven It will kill anyone that messes with “Grand Plan” and you could tell everything was about to blow up in their faces. The only reason I can think of is the simplest of answers: You obviously can’t kill all of your main cast off.
2. In season finale all the of the main characters have their closest family members and friends taken hostage but that leaves me wondering: why didn’t they grab Trevor’s parents? So odd that they kidnap 5 people including another traveler yet do not take his parents hostage.
3. In the end, all of their family members and friends find out they are time travelers and hate them, which I understand because I assume they just need time to process all the information, but the travelers also saved them from the super Flu outbreak that would have easily killed all of them along with a few other incidents along the way. Also, their loved ones that they hate dearly now would have just died from the beginning.
4. This is where things for me – and from readings, various other threads and articles about the show – go off the rails. This whole group of travelers called the Faction. I understand their premise: not listening to a CPU aka The Director and following It blindly to complete the “Grand Plan.” But what are they actually doing to change anything? I’m still not sure what exactly their “Grand Plan” is or any plan for that matter. It is really confusing. Which leads to…
5. If the Faction has the same goals as The Director but going about it in a different way why are they just killing random people for really no apparent reason? I understand their logic behind the Flu Outbreak to decimate the population as a way of stopping overpopulation, but besides that everything else they have done has made no sense and especially in how will help the future.
6. This brings to, who is the main villain of Season 2? Vincent Ingram or Traveler 001 (the very first Traveler)? Is he part of the Faction? You can tell when he is introduced that he is definitely not part of the Faction, but as the season progresses the is he or isn’t he Faction line gets blurred. The show does not directly say he is Faction, but some of the characters start saying things like: “must stop the Faction,” when it is in fact 001 doing everything. This is very confusing because 001 arrives on 9/11 (he was supposed to die, but decided against it and been hiding ever since). The Faction does not form until the team stops Helios-685, a meteor, from colliding with the earth and decimating the population causing wars over scarce resources. The team doesn’t even know who or what the Faction is until end of Season 1 as it did not exist when they traveled back. So, how the hell would Traveler 001 know what the Faction is or be apart of it??
7. Speaking of Traveler 001, I am confused by his goals. What exactly is his plan? The only thing we know for sure about him is that he wants to live and keep his family safe. He claims that The Director is hunting him and you get a few flashbacks to how The Director supposedly killed his wife and business partner, but still not sure? I mean, you can understand why The Director would want him dead since he breaks every protocol the travelers are supposed to abide by, but also 001 starts hunting travelers and killing ALL of them just out of paranoia. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy like of course, The Director is hunting you! YOU are hunting and killing all of the travelers! Also, there are moments where it seems like The Director could have easily killed him if it wanted to, especially when It gives 001 a message through his son. He just seems like a paranoid psychopath, but it is weird because he keeps telling Hotch-2.0 (This is what Kate and I call Grant MacLaren since he reminds us of Agent Hotchner from Criminal Minds) that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone if they just leave him alone to finish his mission then everything will be okay, which of course we have no idea what this mission is, and this is even harder for them to believe since 001 is just killing travelers, including torturing his own team before they were rescued.
8. This all leads to what seems to be the biggest thing I don’t understand about the Faction or 001. They both want to destroy The Director or prevent It from existing yet as we learned in Helios-685, if they change the future for the better then supposedly they would cease to exist. If 001 or the Faction prevent the existence of The Director, wouldn’t that mean all of the time travelers would cease to exist? As it was The Director and various programmers who developed this whole time-traveling program with the purpose of saving the future by changing the past. Also weird they chose 21st century, but that is a question for another time. Which leads to…
9. We learn at the end of season 1 of Travelers and especially throughout season 2, that they are in fact changing the future, they created the Faction unintentionally, so with all these changes to the timelines when does this theory actually start to kick in? It is mentioned and used basically in Helios-685 episode and the following but then they just like never mentioned again. Back to the Faction, do they not know this concept? Do they not care? They just seem to mess up timelines as they please with no regard to anything, I still don’t understand them.
10. It almost feels like Helios-685 was supposed to be the season finale or like a tester for one those, we will give you a short season to see how it goes and then everyone loved the show and they were like oh shit need keep writing.
11. Going in a little different direction from previous thoughts and into I hate Carly, as a character, so much. She bugs me since her host was in an abusive relationship, and she was only able to take that body because the boyfriend was going to kill her the night she time-traveled. She keeps him around when you can clearly tell that he’s a terrible person and it is truly hard to watch sometimes. The show and people within it, give her so many chances to get rid of him and then Carly just messes it up and back to being stuck with him. She messes up so badly that it requires her being with her abusive boyfriend just to be able to see her son, and it just sucks. She traps herself in this terrible relationship, obviously at no point is she threatened since she is the soldier of the group and basically kicks his ass every chance she gets, but still. Season 2 ends with her basically losing her son to this guy all because she couldn’t do the right thing. Side-note, it really bugged me that she calls out Hotch 2.0 for wanting to be with his wife and uses Protocol 1 (mission over everything) against him yet she refused to give her baby up despite being a terrible parent. Her whole character is just hard to watch in my opinion. I can understand she doesn’t have her host’s trauma of being beaten and never once is threatened by him, so she just uses him to be able to keep her child, but damn is it hard to watch and obviously have not been in one of those types of relationships, so I do not want to speak for those who have, but it would be really interesting to see what other women think about Carly especially since she is given so many chances to get rid of him and just shoots herself in the foot every time…Bleh.
12. David (who I am pretty sure Kate would leave me for), you just feel for the guy because of everything he has gone through, but also he is confusing at the end since of all the non-travelers he should have been the one least surprised by finding out Marcy is a time traveler. He went from a social worker to a woman who couldn’t form a sentence to her becoming a literal doctor and falls in love with her. Come on David, you are amazing but you can’t get mad at Marcy now after you fell in love with the new Marcy and even when she was rebooted with no memories you tried so hard to get her to remember. At this point with everything David and Marcy went through he shouldn’t be surprised nor mad and just go with it. Which leads to…
13. If anyone should be mad it is definitely Kathryn, who I won’t go into detail about but just wanted to mention the 2 episodes of season 1 which are kind of dedicated to her: one of the Episodes is even called Kathryn, and they are amazing and I totally feel bad for her and realize that the true difficulty of being this time-traveler is being placed into someone else’s body.
14. Last but not least: what about the fact we learn that Marcy wasn’t born with cognitive disabilities and it is actually the result of 001 experimenting on her and then dumping her in the streets? That is how she ended up the way we are introduced to her and yet no one ever notices she went missing and after Marcy gets her memories back she never says anything about this even when Simone is brought into the picture. I feel it could have changed and made this huge difference by actually researching this, especially when she found out that 001 was the reason her host ended up being damaged. Also, how did The Director not know this either?
Well if you have made it this far I just want to say: “Thank You,” for hanging in there. I know there was quite a bit of information thrown at you and most likely this reads as chaotic, but that is just how crazy the season finale for this show was. I really enjoy and love this show and unlike another science fiction show that I loved but had an ending that left me annoyed and upset – cough Altered Carbon cough – I am super excited for season 3 despite the craziness of the season 2 finale.
I am hoping a lot of these questions and others are answered now that it has been confirmed after almost losing my mind for awhile. I was really worried there wouldn’t have been a season 3 and most likely would have canceled my Netflix in protest (it is the hip thing to do in 2018). As promised my initial text message that started this blog is below (warning: there is some bad language and poor grammar, not sure which is worse). Feel free to let me know your thoughts, questions, and rants about this amazing show. If you have not watched it yet and read anyways, I hope you decide to go check it out.
