Travelers – Season 3

Rating:

I travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s looking for something…

Main Cast: Eric McCormack, MacKenzie Porter

Creator: Brad Wright

First, before you read any further, have you seen seasons 1 and 2 of Travelers? If not, stop, watch them (read my reviews first of course – Season 1 and Season 2) and then come back here. This is not a program you can jump into mid-stream (so to speak).

So, now that we have everyone caught up, let’s dive right in! We begin Season 3 of Travelers more or less where Season 2 left us. Traveler 001 has forced the team to reveal their true identities and details of the Traveler program live on the internet. Well, that was shitty of him, and he got away in the process. Now our team is forced to deal with the fallout while still completing the missions set out for them by the director.

Our cast of characters remains the same:

• Grant MacLaren (Eric McCormack) is team leader. He is married to Kat (Leah Cairns) who definitely notices that he’s different. He is also an FBI agent, something that comes in handy.
• Marcy Warton (MacKenzie Porter) is the team doctor and is in a serious Protocol 5 (living the life of your host body) relationship with David Mailer (Patrick Gilmore) who was once her disabled host’s social worker.
• Trevor Holden (Jared Abrahamson) is the team’s engineer and super old in lived years, so very much enjoying the robustness of his 17-year-old host body.
• Carly Shannon (Nesta Cooper) is the muscle. And the weapons. And the tactics. Her Protocol 5 has been particularly thorny.
• Philip Pearson (Reilly Dolman) is the team historian. In Traveler parlance, that means he knows what happens in the future so can guide the team in their attempts to change it. He gets updates occasionally and is supposed to keep his knowledge to himself. Philip is my personal favorite. And a heroin addict.

By the beginning of this third season the team has managed to find themselves in a rather unsustainable position. They were prepared long ago in Season 1 to disappear when they completed their main mission, presumably fixing the future and likely eliminating their own births. When they did not cease to exist, it became clear that the future was going to be recalcitrant. So we’ve met new peripheral characters, gone through new missions, and seen the establishment of a rebellious faction from the future that endangers them all. The pace continues to be quick but not breathless – leaving us time to have some quiet moments with our characters – and each episode both answers old questions and asks new ones.

So where is there to go from here? I’m obviously not going to tell you, but the writers are not fooling around. There are juicy plot lines galore and surprise character developments popping up all over the place, and no one is afraid to take things to the limit. The actors have all really found their rhythms with their characters and they feel more like a real team with each passing season.  We get a lot of content involving the primary mission(s) but we also get a lot of the team dealing with their lives in 2018 and the extent of and limitations on the technology they have brought with them from the future.

Time travel is always hard, but Travelers is some of the best out there. Season 3 does not disappoint, and raises the bar once again for anyone out there looking to follow in its footsteps. The show has not yet been renewed by Netflix (COME ON NETFLIX) for a fourth season, but I cannot wait to see where they go from the end of this season – there is rampant speculation on the interwebs due to the explosive Season 3 finale (nope, not saying anything else – and don’t look, you’ll spoil it for yourself!)  The show was renewed for this season last March, so we may have to wait a little while. In the meantime, we can soothe ourselves with the positive reviews from this season and keep our fingers crossed. Oh, and the season is super binge worthy, but I chose to watch no more than two episodes a day in order to savor.

(Update – Travelers has been canceled. I am sad)

All three seasons of Travelers are currently streaming on Netflix. Seasons one and two are also available on DVD.

Sue Millinocket

Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills  She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.