Three Season In- Travelers
We just finished up season three of Travelers and it felt very much like a series finale. There’s a back door left open for future seasons but by necessity, it would have to be very different. Spoiler warning always assumed in reviews but have one anyways.
The whole concept of the show plays out in two very different ways. On one hand, there is the idea of time travelers from the future trying to fix the future and make the world a better place. Very Quantum Leap. On the other hand, they are taking over people’s lives, people who are now dead. Time travel requires murder to work. Sure, those people were going to die through other means but clearly, they could have survived, since each traveler does end up surviving.
The show makes no effort to avoid this dark part of the concept and really digs into all the uneasy consequences. This makes it a show that’s both a fun sci-fi adventure/mystery case of the week style story and one that is very disturbing when you stop and think about it for more than a minute.
Overall it was a very entertaining show and you can really invest in the characters, both those from the future, the hosts lives that they took over and the people connected to them.
The rules for time travel are a bit weird though. It’s not clear if new timelines are created everytime something changes. In the end, the Faction appears to “win” in the future and take over the time travel equipment. Since the rule is that they can only travel to a point after the last traveler, it makes sense that they can’t take over the world before that part of the episode.
So the Director has access to historical records. It sends a Traveler 3468 (the guy who takes over Grant MacLaren) back to stop an event. So, now time has changed. Traveler 3468, in the future exists in a world where that event never occurred. Does the Director, looking at the historical records, need to send nuTraveler 3468 back to the past to create a predestination paradox, or could it send nuTraveler 3468 back to some other time to do a different mission? Or is there now nuTraveler 3468 because the timeline has been changed so drastically he is never born?
That really raise questions about the whole show. Think about it like, we are now the Director. We have the historical record, ie the show. Was the “Grand Plan” merely getting Traveler 3468 to travel back to 2001 and stop Traveler 001 from arriving? Whether or not that stops the future from getting wrecked is irrelevant. It does stop the future from occurring where the Faction “wins”.
Or is it more of a loop? Traveler 3468 comes from a time where Shelter 41 collapsed, and there is no Faction. The future sucks. The Director is created and tries to fix the past. Everything in the show plays out. Traveler 3468 travels back to 2001, stops any time travel from occurring and the future plays out to be the one he originally remembers, creating himself?
Time travel hurts your brain.
Despite the darkness of the show, it managed to have a happish ending, but like everything else in the show, only if you don’t think about it. David and original Marcy survive. Original Marcy doesn’t have brain damage. They meet and presumably are happy. But this isn’t the Marcy we all know. It’s the original. Presumably she travels into someone else or is never born.
As for the others, we can assume they all died just as they would have. Grant MacLaren dies in 2001 when he’s overwritten. Phillip still OD’s. Carly is beaten to death by Jeff. And Trevor dies in an underground cage match. But again, those are the originals. We have no idea about the Traveler versions.
It’s a fun show and worth a watch. Even if it might hurt your brain.
