Spoilers
E7: “Catch Me If You Can”
E8: “Know You are Loved”
I have been hoping to finish this limited series on Netflix for awhile now, but it always seemed as if something got in the way. Well, it is Thanksgiving and I have the day basically open and so I finally got the chance to watch the remaining two episodes of this thrilling limited series.
Time travel is always mind-bending.
In episode seven, things really go wrong, for everyone except Harker/Mannix. Things for him go exactly as they are meant to go… the same as they have gone since the loop began.
However, in 2053, Iris Maplewood makes a decision. She saves Defoe in her timeline and they hatch an attempt to go back to 1890 and prevent Elias Mannix from his plot.
Unfortunately, she does go back in time, but does not realize that the technology that helps her walk does not exist in 1890 and that leaves her as a cripple.
So much is going down in this episode that I continued to wonder exactly what was going to happen to stop this time loop from continuing. Who knew that it would be Alfred Hillinghead?
Hillinghead had confessed to the murder to save his lover and, as we saw in ep. 7, he is strangled to death from Mannix’s orders. Mannix, as Julian Harper, goes to Hillinghead’s daughter, Polly, and ends up marrying her. She gave birth to a son that began the lineage that would lead to Mannix’s own birth and all the tragedy that occurs.
In episode 8, Maplewood was able to get to Hillinghead, when they were both in holding cells, and she let him know about everything. This time, when Hillinghead is visited by Mannix before being strangled, Hillinghead went on to insert doubts and uncertainty for Mannix.
Things went along, basically, but the marriage to Polly winds up being compromised and they are anything but happy. On his deathbed, Mannix records one more record telling his future self that everything was a lie. Before Charles Whiteman kills him, Mannix gives him the record and begs him to put it in a safe place and get it into the hands of Shahara Hasan.
Whiteman take the record with him and hides it at the police bar. Shahara, from 2053, goes back in time and finds the record, playing it in 2023 for Elias before he detonates the bomb.
Elias chooses not to explode the bomb and the future is changes, the loop is broken, and Elias and future Shahara disappear, having technically never existed.
This was a compelling 8-episode series that was well-written and very smart. It required the attention of the viewer and I like that kind of show.
we went back to the past to see that the lives of Whiteman and Hillinghead were better, and the people that had died in the time were back. There was a strange ending to the show. 2023 Shahara was in a cab talking about life in general, and the camera revealed that the cabbie was Maplewood and that she used Shahara’s name.
I am not sure how that happened or what that meant, but it put an odd button on this sci-fi series that was really well done.