A Royal Finale
(This review contains
spoilers!)
With this being the season finale we’ve
got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get right into it.
I honestly had no idea how they were
going to wrap up all the loose threads of the season in one hour-long episode,
but they managed to tie almost everything together neatly, of course
leaving a few cliffhangers for a potential Season 2 (#RenewTimeless).
Everything was cleaned up in a way that was hard to not be found satisfying,
and as any good season finale should, it left you wanting more.
Picking up right after last week,
Rufus has been shot and just barely made it home. Unable to get him to a
hospital out of fear of Rittenhouse, Lucy calls on that creepy kinda-sorta-boyfriend
she had in the first few episodes. Turns out he’s a doctor. In this we get our
first bit of closure, as he ends their “relationship” once and for all. In all
honesty I’d assumed they ended it off-screen weeks ago considering how long it’s
been since he made an appearance.
But the Rittenhouse guys storm the
warehouse just as Flynn jumps back to 1954, leading Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus to
chase after him, bringing Jiya with them despite never travelling with a fourth
companion before, and leaving Agent Christopher to clean up their mess.
This episode is much slower and
quieter than last week’s, being more of a character-driven piece than an
action-driven one. A lot of the episode is spent on Lucy’s relationship with
Flynn and trying to solve the Rittenhouse problem peacefully instead of blowing
a room of guys to smithereens, taking out Lucy’s grandfather in the process.
Whereas Flynn wants to take out the entire meeting room via use of explosives,
Lucy has another idea.
Instead, she meets up with her
grandfather for the first time ever, and tells him about the time machine and
that she’s his granddaughter from the future. It’s a fantastically acted scene
by both Lucy and the grandfather, and they both sell it. Equally as nice is the
scene where they meet up with him in the present where he fulfills his promise
of infiltrating Rittenhouse for them, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Rufus and Jiya stay out of the main
storyline and have a small arc of their own, but it’s mostly a conclusion for
the “will they/won’t they” storyline that’s been going on all season and serves
as a way to set things up for Season 2 (#RenewTimeless). Since the time machine
was only built to support up to three people, Jiya being the fourth causes some…complications.
She grows sick fast, her symptoms ranging from a bleeding eye to a full-on
seizure. This leads Rufus to finally confess his love for her, in hopes it’ll
bring her back. Of course she turns out fine, but again, that’s something
better talked about later in the review.
The third and final arc this week is
the smallest overall, but is still just as great as the others. Focusing on
Agent Christopher, she’s rescued from Rittenhouse custody by Mason, who finally
explains his plan. He’d been pretending to side with Rittenhouse only so they
would give him access to all the information he could ever want, and wanted to
use it against them to save Rufus from their wrath. For a character that’s
seemed so undeniably villainous the past few episodes, it’s actually pretty satisfying
to learn he’s just as good as we thought he was back in the first half of the
season.
The only character that doesn’t really
have much to do this week is Wyatt, and that’s honestly understandable. While
it’s nice to have him around, his overall storyline kind of ended after he failed
to bring his wife back. He accompanies Lucy on her mission this week and has a
cool scene of taking out some guards, but honestly he kind of feels like he’s
just there because he’s a main character. He has a nice talk with Lucy towards
the end of the episode about not trying to change the past anymore, but that’s
it. He doesn’t do much overall, kind of giving me
the feeling his story is over.
So, the end of the episode. Let’s get
into that. Thanks to Lucy’s grandfather and Mason’s connections, they now know
the identities of every single Rittenhouse member, both past and present. They
use this to retrieve the name of the man who murdered Flynn’s wife and
daughter, but before he can rescue them and destroy his time machine his
meeting with Lucy is intercepted by Agent Christopher, who arrests him on
account of terrorism. Swearing revenge on Lucy for betraying their truce, there’s
no doubt he’s going to come back as a villain again next season
(#RenewTimeless). Maybe he’ll bring back a T-rex to destroy Rittenhouse. That’d
be cool.
As for Rufus and Jiya, they officially
become a couple, and Jiya makes a full recovery…sort of. There’s a weird moment
where she spaces out and suddenly her view of the Golden Gate Bridge transforms
into a bridge in ruins. By the looks of it she can travel in time by herself
now, which definitely adds an extra wrinkle to everything. I do wish we’d
gotten a bit more focus on that plot point however, because it did feel like a
bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment.
The biggest and most shocking moment
of the finale comes, of course, from Lucy. Fulfilling her end of their bargain,
Agent Christopher permits Lucy to use the time machine one last time to bring
back her sister. While waiting for it to recharge, she visits her mother to say
goodbye one last time before returning to the timeline where she dies of
cancer. After attempting to explain everything that’s been going on and what
she’s about to do, her mother consoles her…by telling her that Rittenhouse
would never allow her to use their time machine to save one person.
Wait, what?
Yeah, apparently Lucy’s mom was
Rittenhouse this whole time! Even worse, it turns out Emma has also been a
sleeper agent for Rittenhouse as well, and has stolen Flynn’s time machine in
his absence. Plus, with both Lucy’s mother and father being members of
Rittenhouse, that basically makes Lucy the Rittenhouse equivalent of Draco
Malfoy: pure-blood royalty. And that’s where the season ends!
Honestly, while this episode is very
solid, I was kind of hoping for something bigger. Last week’s episode was so
fantastic in mixing in the current character drama with the events in the past,
and this week the period in time they visited was kind of a footnote. The new
character of the time period wasn’t particularly explored and was only in a
small fraction of the episode, making him feel like more or less filler content.
Other than that, I felt that the
episode overall was extremely satisfying, especially for those who’ve been
watching since the beginning. Every character got a moment in the spotlight
regardless of how small, and the twists at the end made it very exciting for
Season 2, should the show return. I sincerely hope we don’t have another Agent Carter situation on our hands, where
a season finale ends with a ridiculous twist only for the show not to be
continued. I’ve heard conflicting reports over the likelihood of Timeless’s renewal, so I can’t say
anything for sure, but I’d like to close off with this:
Watching and reviewing this show has
been just fantastic. I loved seeing Timeless
grow from a very “meh” show that I only checked out because I had nothing
to do on Monday nights to something I actively looked forward to, theorized
about and discussed with friends and family. While it’s had rough patches here
and there, once Timeless found its
footing and decided what show it wanted to be it truly proved it was worth
tuning into every week. I’ll sincerely miss checking out what the Time Team was
up to every Monday if they don’t return, and if they do you can bet I’ll
be there every step of the way.
#RenewTimeless
FINAL SCORE
8/10
Great
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