Recap: TIMELESS Finds the Missing Watergate Tape

Season 1, Episode 6 “The Watergate Tape”
Written by Kent Rotherham
Directed by Greg Beeman

This episode, quite frankly, bored me.

And I think the reason is that we are getting more into the conspiracy part of the story and it is just as we have already surmised. No surprises or unknown details, so far. One of the reasons I gave this show a chance is that when Supernatural first started, the supernatural that they fought was all based on urban legends, but soon Supernatural had its own mythology and rules. They were interesting. So far, the mythology of Timeless is not. Their equivalent of the Cigarette Smoking Man doesn’t even smoke. I was hoping that Kripke could turn this into something richer and more strange as it went along.

Rufus (Malcolm Barrett) is at home with a broken coffee maker. We find out that his little brother flubbed the last shot of the big game last night and his team came in second. We also find out that he has been supporting his mom and brother in an upper middle class lifestyle, but we always knew he was a good guy. He gets a call from Connor Mason (Paterson Joseph) and goes outside to sit in a car with Connor and their Cigarette Smoking Man (John Getz), the mysterious agent who threatened him before.

They tell him he’s going back to the time of the Watergate scandal and that he is to retrieve the missing 18 minutes and that no one, not he or Wyatt (Matt Lanter) or Lucy (Abigail Spencer), can listen to it. They give him a number to contact in that time and give regular reports to. He balks of course, so they talk about his brother and the shot he missed at the end of the game. It appears that old and creepy’s main way of manipulating people is to threaten their families.

The wardrobe closet comes in handy. Lucy and Wyatt discuss Lucy’s issue about whether or not to contact her father since her mom gave her his name. Wyatt looks ridiculous in a blue striped suit and a pink shirt. But he still looks good. They give Lucy press credentials so they can get into the White House.

As soon as they get there they run into a conflict between Vietnam war protesters and Vietnam war soldiers. Flynn’s men taser and chloroform Wyatt. In the next scene, we find out that all three were captured. Only Wyatt is waking up, so I’m assuming the other two were just grabbed. The room they are in is the one they stayed in during Lincoln’s assassination. Returning to one room over time is something they’ve been doing on 12 Monkeys all during season two. I like seeing it here.

Flynn (Goran Visnjic) has the missing tape, and plays it for them. So much for no one hearing it. Rufus is petrified. The tape is of a terrified Nixon. He’s terrified of Rittenhouse. He says he needs to find a “doc”to be safe. Flynn doesn’t know what the document is, but he wants Lucy to find it because he killed two guards and the law is looking for him. You could almost be sympathetic with the guy if he weren’t so ruthless. He lets slip to Wyatt and Rufus about Lucy’s diary and the fact that they have talked before. This does not go over well with the others. Flynn is holding Wyatt hostage until Lucy gets back. Wyatt tells them to leave him and go straight for the lifeboat.

Of course they don’t listen.

Rufus gives Lucy a hard time about her secrets, which isn’t fair, considering his own. They find Deep Throat, which is the undercover name of the man who alerted Woodward and Bernstein. You should have seen the looks I got when I got that one right on a trivia game once. It was similar to the look on Rufus’s face when Lucy says it. Deep Throat leads them to the BLA, something Rufus knows all about.

Meanwhile, Flynn tells his story to Wyatt. He stumbled on money being sent to Connor Mason for time travel research. The name Rittenhouse came up. They came and killed his family, but he escapes. One question and his family is gone and he is framed for the murder.

This is something that he and Wyatt have in common, this unbearable loss. The problem with this scene is that the audience has already figured this out by now.There’s nothing revelatory about it. It might be for Wyatt (probably not for Lucy) but there’s nothing new for us. Wyatt doesn’t react much.On the other hand, we get a lot more detail about Wyatt’s wife’s death, and he reacts very strongly to Flynn reading from Lucy’s diary about it.

Rufus and Lucy find out that the “Doc” is a person (Tiffany Mack). She is part of Rittenhouse and has already hidden her husband and child away because she was born into it and didn’t want her child to be. She has all the information about membership in her head.

This puts Lucy and Rufus into a quandary because they don’t want to give a live person to Flynn. Rufus calls the number he was given and they tell him to kill her. What in all their experience of him makes them think he is capable of that? Of course, past Rittenhouse doesn’t know him as well as current Rittenhouse. Rufus gets caught by Lucy and throws the recording device into the sink. Lucy yells at him and they have an argument about betrayal and what to do with Doc.

Wyatt asks Flynn if there is a way to separate his vendetta against Rittenhouse with America’s history and Flynn says there isn’t. Which is a conclusion I came to in a previous recap, that this is why Flynn was trying to destroy American history. Wyatt then tries to make a break for it. It’s a valiant effort, but it doesn’t work.

Lucy and Rufus call their respective extortionists and tell them where Doc is. Then they hurry away and leave Rittenhouse and Flynn’s men in a massive gun battle. Clever.

The best part of the episode is Lucy rescuing Wyatt. It’s easy, because only one guard was left behind. She falls into the room through the window and tries to pick his handcuffs with the same nail he used earlier. He points out that she doesn’t know how to pick a lock and she says she was just trying to be helpful. And she stands behind him with a lamp while he takes out the guard.

Doc is spirited away. I’m sure we will see her, or her son, again.

Wyatt is angry at them and tells them Rufus has to become a double agent now. He’s mad at Lucy, too, and says he doesn’t trust either one of them.

Rufus gets contacted by the old guy and Connor Mason and finds out that their Cigarette Smoking Man was the voice on the phone. Lucy knocks on the door of her biological father, Benjamin Cahill. She has a younger brother who looks just like her. Her father (John Getz) turns out to be the old dude in the car that keeps threatening Rufus and Mason. She chickens out about revealing that she’s his daughter. He makes a phone call after she leaves. “Guess who just showed up at my door?”

After the last few episodes where everyone stood up for each other and declared their trust for each other, it is painful to see everyone divided. In the last episode Lucy declared passionately how much they needed Wyatt, and now he finds out that they have both betrayed him. Lucy and Rufus are both feeling guilty and will probably forgive each other soon, but Wyatt, with his black and white view of the world, will have a harder time. This should lead to some problems, like him not divulging information to them, or taking on missions without them. It will probably just lead to some lame infighting, though. He’s probably sorry he didn’t get fired in the last episode.

We heard something intriguing about Lucy’s diary. Flynn said that sometimes she sounded like a different person. If they screwed up the timeline enough, could she be a different person if she were raised by her natural father? Rittenhouse is something you’re born into, after all.

Next week they’re going to be stranded, which should give them some time to settle their differences. One thing we haven’t seen on the show is the three of them in any kind of downtime. As soon as they are off work, they go their separate ways.I would love to see them in a more relaxed atmosphere.

 

Timeless airs on Mondays at 10pm/9c on NBC.