Prologue[]
A group of Chinese-speaking soldiers break into a sealed container. Drilling a hole from the top, they slide in a camera to check the interior. Realizing they found something, they attempt to retreat, but it is too late. Somewhere in Shanghai, China a nuclear detonation occurs. News agencies cover the event and a similar explosion in London, UK.
At the Mailer apartment after 6:00 PM, Marcy Warton leaves a voicemail for David as he's nowhere to be found. However, Marcy finds a bloodstained towel at the sink. She turns on a tracking device showing David's location, somewhere between Sea-Tac airport and Renton.
Inside the archive, David gasps back to life despite being shot multiple times. He finds nobody else in the container apart from Karina's corpse.
Bomb Defusal 101[]
At Ops, the Core Traveler Team monitor the reports regarding the attacks. The Chinese soldiers were Travelers livestreaming their feed with their Historian, and Grant MacLaren identifies the nuke as the Rothski device, built 22 years before its time, definitively pointing to the Faction as the ones responsible. With news that the explosions happened one hour apart, Trevor Holden reports Philip Pearson's vision of an explosion happening in Washington, meaning he witnessed a timeline where the bombs went off in a different order. The Faction stole enough uranium to make 4-5 bombs, meaning Washington and a few others are in danger.
31 minutes before another bomb goes off, Marcy arrives via taxi to David's location. Proceeding with caution, she approaches the archive vault and confirms David's inside. Marcy uses her comm to activate David's and talk to him. David's confused and believes he's in a bad dream, until Marcy explains he was implanted with a comm and still alive because he was infused with nanites from the blood bags he carried that repaired his bullet wounds. David reports the vault door inside is lined with lasers, meaning he cannot simply open it and go outside, and there's a big metal box that wasn't there before he went in. Marcy calls in the team for help.
Grant notifies the FBI about the bomb and tells Joanne Yates to coordinate evacuation in the area around the old skating rink at Wallace. Philip stays at Ops to hack the traffic lights and give Trevor and Carly Shannon a clear path; he wanted to go, but Trevor reasons someone has to stay outside the potential blast radius and warn other Travelers of the situation. When Grant and the others arrive at the site, Marcy instructs David to patch his comm so he can talk to the others on her team.
Based on David's descriptions, Trevor confirms the metal box is the casing for another Rothski device, and it will detonate if they try to force their way in; David will have to disarm it himself following precise instructions. David freaks out because this is way beyond what he signed up for, but Grant reminds him they have no other options and this is an opportunity to "man the fuck up," as he told Agent Callahan after his kidnapping. David calms down and begs Marcy to leave, though she assures him she's there for him.
David frantically searches for tools he can use to open the box in the 3 minutes remaining before historical detonation. He finds a knife in Karina's body and uses it to take off the top. Trevor guides him through the delicate process of identifying which wires to cut, but he momentarily locks out. Fortunately he recovers fast and tells David to cut the thinnest wire, which he does, causing the core of the device to activate. Grant quickly orders him to grab it and throw it to the floor, and David does it, albeit the device burns his hands.
The bomb is disarmed in the nick of time. Marcy covers her face in anguish, and the rest of the team are stone-faced or dejected. Yates, who has just arrived, hears the bad news: David has been fatally exposed to radioactive material. Marcy and Carly take David to Ops, where Marcy wants to make sure the Director sees him so it can send a D Team. Yates supposes Traveler technology can save David, but Grant tells her it's up to the Director's discretion. He wants her to notify the higher-ups about the Faction targeting archives, and one in Moscow, Russia in danger, though Philip informs him a nuke just went off there. The Washington archive is the only one left.
Grant explains the archive's purpose to Yates. The Faction has been destroying elements of the historical record to blind the Director, and the orthodox Travelers devised a countermeasure in nanites. Historical information encoded in blood, to be transfused into known ancestors of people who survive in the future. Once reinforcements arrive in the form of Traveler 6117 and his team, Grant and Yates exit the building.
MacLaren Dissolution[]
Kathryn MacLaren watches news of the nuclear attacks while drinking wine, then turns the TV off. When Grant arrives later for a quick change of clothes she's startled at the blood in his shirt, though he assures her it's not his. Despite Grant saving the day by neutralizing the local bomb threat, Kat is still mad and orders him to get out of her house. She finds it irredeemable that Grant "forgot" their first ever meeting at Whytecliff Park 17 years ago, and muses she could have had a life with her ex-fiance John. She realizes the Grant she once knew was gone, and the "new" one scares her.
Infiltrator Blues[]
Jeff Conniker wakes up strapped to a wheelchair. The TV in front of him briefly shows a shot of Tristen's dead face and reminds Jeff of Protocol 3. He is subjected to the same interrogation methods Traveler 001 used on other kidnapped Travelers, and a henchman steps in to give him a beating. After the standard questions Jeff gives flippant answers to, the TV ominously asks about his blood type.
001 continues asking questions about Marcy and Carly through the TV while Jeff eventually stops answering altogether. The henchman loosens his straps thinking he's unconscious; Jeff uses this opportunity to take him down and escape, calling Carly's phone. However, she's busy attending to David. Jeff leaves a voicemail of his status, but cuts off abruptly.
It is over 8 hours later until Carly even looks at her phone. She notifies Grant and Philip traces Jeff's location. Trevor is locked in again, leaving only Carly and Grant to mount a rescue. They find Jeff behind a freshly constructed wall, still alive, and take him back to Ops for treatment. There, he tells the team his mission was to find out 001's involvement with the Faction. He confirms they have joined forces.
Supercomputer Plot Thread[]
At Filmore Laboratories late at night, Ilsa informs Ivon Teslia that she's receiving an encrypted transmission presumably from the Director. The upload will impact her cognitive abilities, so Teslia calls Grace Day for assistance.
Grace reports that the incoming program has reached over a petabyte and still counting, but she also doesn't know what it is, nor can she stop the upload. She assures Teslia Ilsa's core consciousness will remain intact even with her cognitive capacity reduced, as the Director is prohibited to take a life. When she tells Teslia the Director is just getting rid of old things and redundancies in Ilsa's coding, she begins to suspect the nature of the transmission.
The Episode Namer[]
David is placed on a gurney at Ops and given something for the pain. Marcy looks at a camera and is worried as the D Team should have arrived by now. David still finds time to joke around despite the circumstances, though he pieces together that Marcy's cover story of being an FBI doctor is bunk in light of everything he just went through, and asks her to come clean. He's sedated and then Victoria Boyd comes in to help. David has been given more nanites, but he's still deteriorating, and will require military-grade nanites to have a chance of recovery.
When he wakes up in the morning, David feels worse. The nanites have to be rationed, and help from the Director is late. By now David has picked up enough terms to ask Marcy about this Director, and Marcy begins to tell him the truth of who she really is. Karina mistook David for being a Traveler, so David has accepted that Marcy is someone who came from the future with a mission to save people. He's just a bit mad at Marcy not trusting him enough to tell him he won't make it, though she fervently believes that help from the Director is on its way.
Growing desperate, Marcy talks to a camera addressing the Director. She reminds it saving her when it repackaged her consciousness and Grant from the plane crash of Flight 329, so it should do the same for David, a man who had no training and took no oaths, yet saved thousands with his sacrifice.
With few secrets to be kept from a dying man, David is hooked up to a black box. In a representation of his apartment, the team answer his questions. The Travelers came because things weren't going well in the future. They worked in secret because nobody would believe them, and if someone did, they would inevitably use it for their own gain. David suggests it's the 21st century's mess and responsibility to fix, and is worried that things would still go wrong even after all the Travelers' efforts. Trevor tells him they'll never stop trying as long as the Director exists. One by one the team congratulate David as they leave, and Grant even dubs him an honorary member. Marcy stays the longest, and they kiss as he fades away, professing their love for each other.
In the real world David's eyes suddenly snap open, and he declares Protocol Omega. He has been turned into a Messenger just before death.
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