The Timeless team travels back to 1981 to stop Rittenhouse from meddling into the outcome of the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, only to discover Rittenhouse’s motives are entirely different than they appear.

This episode of Timeless does a wonderful job of setting up the red herring of John Hinckley’s obsessive infatuation with Jodie Foster and his attempt to get her recognition by killing Ronald Reagan. The first images we see are of John Hinckley preparing for his assassination attempt while the letter he wrote to Jodie Foster is read in voice over. The preparation, and Hinckley’s body language during it, is very reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle character from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, as he plots and prepares to kill a presidential candidate to impress Cybill Shepherd’s character Betsy. The visual reminder of Hinckley’s influence from Taxi Driver is nicely done, as is the little touches in his room we see later.

The real Rittenhouse target is a young Agent Christopher who was nearby during the assassination attempt. If Rittenhouse can kill her, all resistance to Rittenhouse, as well as the team Agent Christopher put together when she discovered them, would completely disappear from the timeline. It would allow Rittenhouse carte blanche to change history and recreate the future however they see fit. The team doesn’t know about the real Rittenhouse intentions since Agent Christopher was not there when they left in the Life Boat to enlighten them. All she can do is sit around and wait, trusting the team to figure things out so that she and her family do not get erased from the timeline.

With Flynn and Mason bowing out of this mission, Jiya goes along with the team back to the 80’s and she cannot be more excited. She has an irrepressible grin on her face the entire time she and Lucy are with young Agent Christopher, especially when she introduces themselves as Cagney and Lacey. Though she’s excited to help Lucy keep the future from falling apart, things are not going well between Jiya and Rufus. The knowledge of his impending death has made Rufus sulky, and he’s actively avoiding Jiya in an attempt to push her away. There’s no proof her visions always come true, but Rufus is afraid it will and there’s no stopping it. When Wyatt finds out, it’s clear he’s been in the dark about the visions the entire time. Can Lucy, Wyatt, and the rest of the team find a way to keep Jiya’s vision from coming true, or is Rufus doomed to die in the past during one of their missions?

Once they arrive in the 1981, Wyatt inadvertently saves Agent Christopher’s life while trying to stop Hinckley’s assassination attempt, which both thwarts Rittenhouse and allows Hinckley to escape. Changes to history are still in play after Agent Christopher’s mom puts pressure on her to marry a family friend after she’s wounded in the assassination attempt, and Hinckley is on the loose. The problem with Agent Christopher is her mother never found out she has a wife and family in the present. She was always worried that if she came out to her mother she’d be disowned. It’s why Agent Christopher has kept her family secret from her mother. Now that she’s been in harms way, she gives in to her mother’s encouragement to marry a family friend even though it goes against her own feelings. If she sticks with the engagement, she’ll never work at the FBI, and she’ll never put the team together to stop Rittenhouse. If Lucy and Jiya can’t convince her to change her mind, the entire future may be in jeopardy.

There’s an interesting aspect about the sleeper agents that Rufus and Wyatt find out after capturing the man tasked to kill Agent Christopher. His family was ruined, but Rittenhouse swooped in to save the day, and offered them help, but with strings attached. The man’s brother bought into the entire Rittenhouse agenda, but this man wasn’t so sure. Rittenhouse blackmailed him into going back in time, and he’s been stuck in the past for over a decade waiting to be activated. Once activated, he was told to kill Agent Christopher. If he failed, Rittenhouse would kill his wife and kids in the present. His own brother was sent back to activate him and make sure the job got done. Is Rittenhouse blackmailing all of its sleeper agents? Rufus feels like he could have easily been like this man, since Rittenhouse was holding threats against Rufus’s family over his head last season. It also begs the question of how Jessica could have been manipulated by Rittenhouse. We find out at the end of the episode that a brother of hers that was dead in Wyatt’s original timeline is still alive, somehow overcoming the leukemia that killed him. Jessica won’t say how her family afforded the experimental treatment that saved him, but the revelation has Wyatt on high alert. Jessica dodges his questions by announcing she’s pregnant, leaving Wyatt’s biggest fears unanswered about why Rittenhouse saved her life.

The key to keeping young Agent Christopher from doing something that’ll alter the future comes from present day Agent Christopher. At one point she gave Lucy a flash drive with pictures of her family on them to keep in the Life Boat. She did this so she could be reminded of them if they were ever erased from history, but Lucy uses it in an ingenious way to show Agent Christopher what the future has in store for her. There’s a wife and beautiful family she’ll miss out on if she marries a man, and its this photographic revelation that gives Agent Christopher the strength to come out to her mother, and keep the future safe. This episode is a touching lesson to be true to yourself and never compromise. No matter how bad things seem, the reality may be much different in the future. I’m sure this episode, and its message will be met with anger by homophobic viewers (which I’ve seen evidence of in some of Malcolm Barrett’s tweets), but the future is leaving these short-minded people behind, and eventually they’ll all die out of our timeline.

Another interesting thing this episode teases, is how Flynn came into possession of Lucy’s journal. According to him, she appeared in a bar in Sao Paulo three weeks after Rittenhouse murdered his family. He believes Lucy was maybe five years older than she is now, and she told him he could stop Rittenhouse and left him with the journal to guide him. What leads Lucy to the point where she does this, and does this mean she and the team fail in their own attempts to stop Rittenhouse? Would her giving the journal to Flynn create a new time loop where they attempt to defeat Rittenhouse all over again until they get things right? With only a two hour finale left of the season, we’ll hopefully get some answers to these questions, and (fingers crossed) an announcement of a third season order from NBC.