TIMELESS Season Finale Recap: (S02E10) Chinatown

Leona Laurie

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flynn lucy rufus wyatt timeless chinatown nbc

Kudos to Timeless for putting on a season finale that feels like a SEASON finale. Cliffhangers abound at the gripping end of “Chinatown,” so cross your fingers and tweet your tweets that NBC will have a heart and give the Time Team another season. 

At the end of the first in this two-parter, Wyatt (Matt Lanter) sees Jessica (Tonya Glanz) kidnapping Jiya (Claudia Doumit) at gunpoint and stealing the Lifeboat. When we pick up, everyone rushes in to find out what’s happening and Wyatt is forced to confess that he actually did have reason to suspect that Jessica was Rittenhouse, but he was trying to do the right thing and didn’t want to jump to conclusions. 

Rufus (Malcolm Barrett) isn’t cool with this explanation, and he tells Wyatt that if they don’t get Jiya back safely, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forgive him. 

It turns out that Jessica’s mission wasn’t to get the Lifeboat, but to gather intelligence and then kill everyone in the bunker. However, showing up with the Lifeboat and a spare pilot endears her to Nicholas Keynes (Michael Rady) and Carol (Susanna Thompson), who seems to have succeeded in regaining her standing with Nicholas after their graveyard outing. Emma (Annie Wersching) isn’t the pet of the leader or the only pilot around anymore, which makes her position tenuous. 

Elsewhere in Rittenhouse’s dingy warehouse hideout, Jiya has been given a sleeping pill and locked in a bed chamber. She falls audibly out of bed, forcing her guard to come into her room to try to revive her. She isn’t in a vision trance, though, she’s faking! She springs on the guard and strangles him with her twisted sheets, then makes a run for the Lifeboat and escapes as Emma fires at her. 

Emma’s gunfire and Jiya’s drugged state combine to impair her piloting abilities. She triggers all the alerts in the bunker as she approaches, but she doesn’t “stick the landing” and the Lifeboat bounces away without leaving a trace. 

In a lengthy nod to Back to the Future III, the team scrambles for a message from the past. Rufus uses the Internet and Lucy digs through books. She gets a flash of inspiration and looks into a book about San Francisco in the 1800s that she and her mother co-authored and Jiya loved. There in the middle is a photo of Jiya taken in 1888 in Chinatown. 

Under Jiya is a message written in Klingon for Rufus. It offers coordinates and the message “don’t come.” The coordinates are for the Lifeboat, which she stashed in a wood (?) in the 1880s and is now rusty and overgrown with vines. (These people are supposed to be near San Francisco, and they want us to believe that a giant metal ball went unnoticed for more than 100 years on prime property? OK.) (Also, a mine shaft is a better place to store a time machine, obvi.)

Nobody considers heeding Jiya’s request not to come, so as soon as Rufus and Connor (Paterson Joseph) get the machine fixed and charged enough for the mission, Lucy (Abigail Spencer). Wyatt, Rufus and Flynn (Goran Visnjic) all pile in and head to 1888. Rufus wants the extra muscle Flynn offers, so his plan is that they’ll take Jiya, leaving Rufus behind, and then she’ll come back for him. 

When they arrive in Chinatown, they track down the photo studio where Jiya had the photo taken. A little Chinese girl greets them and tells them that the photo was actually taken three years earlier, and she claims not to know Jiya. This is because the Time Team isn’t the only group looking for her– Carol, Nicholas, Emma and Jessica are hiding behind a backdrop, holding the girl’s father at gunpoint. They want Jiya, too. 

The little girl signals to Wyatt that something is happening behind the backdrop, but before the Time Team can take action, Emma throws a curve ball and shoots both Carol and Nicholas! Now she’s in charge of Rittenhouse, because she has the time machine. She and Jessica make a run for it, and Lucy rushes to try to care for her dying mother. 

Once it’s clear that Jiya is in danger, the little Chinese girl admits to knowing her and tells the Team that they can find her in the nearby saloon where she lives and works. Rufus goes to Jiya, Wyatt takes off after Jessica and Flynn chases Emma. 

Carol tells Lucy with her dying breaths that she regrets not raising her openly in Rittenhouse and that she took Lucy’s sister away from her. She says that there’s so much Lucy still doesn’t know about her family and her role in Rittenhouse. Then she dies. 

When Rufus finds Jiya, she’s playing poker and holding her own with grabby saloon patrons. They embrace when he reaches her, but she’s angry that he ignored her. This is where she has seen him die in her visions, and she’s spent the last three years refining her skills at controlling them, so she’s 100% sure that he will die if she agrees to go home with him. 

Wyatt catches up to Jessica, and she confirms that Rittenhouse saved her brother and then raised her to be one of them. The Jessica in his timeline was just a bartender, but she is part of something bigger. She can’t hurt him, but she chooses Rittenhouse over him. She escapes– and she is actually pregnant with his child. 

When Wyatt gets back to the photo studio, he arrives moments after Flynn. Flynn and Lucy are about to have some kind of moment, but it gets stopped before it starts. They all go to the saloon to join Rufus and get Jiya. 

At the saloon, Jiya is adamant that she can’t go with them, but nobody accepts this. Emma and Jessica arrive, guns blazing, and the Team has to go into battle mode. Flynn and Wyatt take on the shooters while Lucy is tasked with getting Jiya and Rufus to the Lifeboat. She runs ahead, and then all of the elements of Jiya’s vision start happening. 

Jiya doesn’t just stand there and take it, though. She springs into action and succeeds in saving Rufus from being stabbed by a thug.

It looks like they’ll get away clean, but as soon as they exit the saloon, Emma shoots Rufus, and he dies with a look of incredulity on his face as Wyatt and Jiya look on. 

Lucy is furious. She grabs a gun and takes off after Emma, ready to kill her. She shoots and shoots, hitting Emma and knocking her down. Lucy is hysterical and not ready to just kill, so it takes her a while to muster the determination to pull the trigger with the gun pressed to Emma’s forehead. When she does, there are no bullets left and Emma seizes the opportunity to fight for her freedom. 

They have a major brawl, in which Emma yells at Lucy for having willingly abandoned her Rittenhouse role. Wyatt comes running, and Emma gets away, leaving Lucy bruised and bloodied. 

When the Time Team returns home, Agent Christopher (Sakina Jaffrey) and Connor greet Jiya with much rejoicing, and then they find out what they’ve lost. Everyone is heartbroken, especially Connor and Jiya. Wyatt is taking it personally, convinced that his reluctance to give up Jessica is responsible. 

Wyatt and Lucy find a moment together in a quiet corner. He expresses his guilt about messing things up with her and causing Rufus’ death. She assures him that he did what Rufus wanted by getting Jiya home safe. Then Wyatt tells Lucy he loves her. He tells her she doesn’t have to say anything, but that Rufus had wanted him to admit it and he should have told her a long time ago. 

She doesn’t say anything, and Flynn witnesses their moment with a look on his face that suggests that he has feelings for Lucy. 

Just then, the alarms sound. Everyone comes running in time to see the Lifeboat arrive, but a fancy, upgraded Lifeboat. The door opens, and out come Braveheart-looking Wyatt and Lucy. They look like freaking warriors! The whole room is dumbstruck–especially Wyatt and Lucy. 

Braveheart Wyatt and Lucy ask what they’re waiting for– don’t they want to go save Rufus? 

RELATED: Catch all of our season two recaps here!

Thoughts!

  1. I’m guessing Flynn will reveal that the five-years-in-the-future Lucy who gave him her journal is someone he had a relationship with. 
  2. I am totally there for Braveheart Wyatt and Lucy.
  3. Carol and Emma’s comments in this episode suggest that Lucy could just take control of Rittenhouse if she wanted to. 
  4. I’m so glad Nicholas is gone. He wasn’t much of a character. 
  5. I do not need a Wyatt-Lucy-Flynn love triangle.
  6. I guess there’s no payoff to Agent Christopher humiliating Connor so much? Or the institutionalized former pilot saying that Connor is worse than Hitler? Or just no payoff this season?
Leona Laurie

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