Titled: “The Red Scare”
Well, on the plus side, the season finale of Timeless tied up plenty of loose ends — from Lucy’s complicated Rittenhouse ancestry to Rufus’ gunshot wound. But this last episode left us with even more questions than we started with, and as season 2 has yet to be officially announced, this could be the last we see of the Time Team. If this is a season finale, it’s a darn good one. If it’s a series finale, it’s going to be maddeningly frustrating.
This episode kicks off with Lucy finally finding a use for her fake fiancé, asking him to come to a warehouse in Oakland in the middle of the night and stitch up Rufus’ gunshot wound. Apparently he’s a doctor? I definitely forgot that. She then gives him a very generic breakup speech, which makes a lot of sense if you know that she’s a time traveler and zero sense at all otherwise. I also had to look up the fact that Fake Fiancé’s name is actually Noah. That’s how much of an impression he made. Alas, and fare thee well, Hot Noah! We hardly knew ye.
After Hot Noah leaves, presumably never to be heard from again, Rittenhouse storms the warehouse, capturing Agent Christopher but just missing Lucy, Wyatt, Jiya, and Rufus as they escape in the Lifeboat and chase Flynn to 1954. Flynn figures that the easiest way to find a member of Rittenhouse is to go to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man who’s obsessed with finding and weeding out secrets in 1950s Washington. There’s something especially, um, timely about McCarthy, especially in the way he lies and stokes the public’s fear of evil, un-American outsiders. So it’s really no surprise that one of the most evil figures in American political history was actually a member of Rittenhouse — and apparently, not a very high ranking one, either. Flynn intimidates him into giving up the location of the secret Rittenhouse meeting, but not before leaving McCarthy one parting gift — the photos and names of two supposed Communist spies: Wyatt and Lucy.
Lucy and Wyatt are immediately captured by McCarthy’s men, and before he heads off to destroy Rittenhouse for good, Flynn pops by for one final visit with Lucy. He reminds her that her grandfather, Ethan Cahill, was a high-ranking White House aide and a reluctant member of Rittenhouse. Flynn calmly tells Lucy that he’s going to kill her grandfather and that he has no idea what that will do to Lucy. He says this with about as much interest as someone who’s experimenting with a different kind of milk in his coffee — rather than tinkering with the existence of another human being.
