Timeless Recap: The Watergate Tape
Last night's Timeless episode brings up a very important question that needs to be answered: why is Rufus always wearing the same clothes when he's in the present? Doesn't he have anything else to wear?
I mean, I guess I can see why. If you're just going to be gallivanting off to the past every day in some cool new outfit, I probably wouldn't spend much time worrying about my present wardrobe either.
This time, Rufus, Wyatt and Lucy's cool outfits are from the 1970s, as Flynn pops up on June 20, 1972, the day that President Nixon records the missing 18 minutes of tape from the Watergate scandal. They believe that Flynn is going after the missing minutes of tape before it can get erased.
Rufus is first hijacked again by Rittenhouse, this time with Mason in the car. The Rittenhouse guy warns Rufus not to use that name, and threatens his family again if he is unable to continue to secretly record his trips and keep tabs on Lucy and Wyatt and make regular reports to them in the past.
Meanwhile, Lucy sits outside of her father's house and hesitates to go in; the name written on the card is "Banjamin Cahill," not "Garcia Flynn," as I was so sure it would be. Before she can do anything more, however, she's off to the past.
This mission goes differently for them from the start than their previous ones. They land close to a hippie protest, and a hippie starts a fight with a police officer (you know, those fight-loving hippies are always doing stuff like that), and out of nowhere Flynn appears and tasers them all.
Cut to a darkened room somewhere, and they're all tied up. Flynn already has the Nixon tape, but he had to shoot a White House guard to escape with it and now there's a price on his head. He pays the tape for them, and on the missing minutes, Nixon talks about Rittenhouse to an aide who implores him to stop using that name. "Do you have any idea how deep I'm in with them?" Nixon frets. He keeps mentioning he needs to get the "doc" back. Flynn also reveals Lucy's diary that he's been using for his missions and drops that he and Lucy have met a few times in their travels. The boys aren't too happy to hear that Lucy kept that little secret from them.
Flynn lets Rufus and Lucy go, telling them they have five hours to find this document and get it back or he'll kill Wyatt. They start with Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, the Watergate informant, since they know this is all connected to Watergate. He tells them about a symbol that was supposedly left at the scene of a fist with horns. That leads them to the Black Panthers, who are indeed hiding the "doc" - a young woman with a PhD in history. She is in hiding because she was a part of Rittenhouse and tried to leave. So we finally get some background into who Rittenhouse is. Doc explains that Rittenhouse is a long-standing secret society that you are born into whether you like it or not, stretching all the way back to 1778.
Rufus, maybe Conor can loan you some money for a new hoodie?
Back at the hotel, Flynn tries to convince Wyatt that he's on the wrong side of the fight. Wyatt tells Flynn to explain to him why he's not just a psychopath. Flynn tells him his story: he found out that Conor Mason's time travel project was funded by Rittenhouse. He passed the info on to an NSA contact, and several nights later, his wife and daughter were murdered and he was framed for it. Wyatt starts to soften a little to Flynn's predicament, until Flynn decides to read to him from Lucy's diary about Wyatt's wife's death.
Apparently future Lucy knows a lot more than she currently does about what happened. Flynn reads her version of events to Wyatt: he and his wife were out and had a fight. He was drunk, they were fighting, and he left her on the side of the road. When he went back to find her, she was found strangled in bushes. Her killer was never caught. Wyatt, to put it mildly, doesn't love reliving this particular memory.
As Rufus and Lucy squabble over what to do with Doc - Rittenhouse wants Rufus to kill her, Lucy insists that she is the key to saving Wyatt, and they both no longer trust each other. Lucy overhears Rufus reporting to Rittenhouse and flips out on him. He throws back in her face her secret meetings with Flynn without letting him or Wyatt know. For a moment it seems like the whole team is going to devolve.
But they come up with a plan: they tell both sides, Flynn and Rittenhouse, to come and get Doc, while absconding with her and going to save Wyatt. They get Doc off to safety, and she explains to Lucy that the she was fleeing Rittenhouse to save her family. She didn't want her son to be locked in to serving a shadowy, murderous organization the way she was.
Once the team is safe and all secrets are out, Wyatt says he can't trust Rufus or Lucy. But he wants Rufus to keep spying on them, so that THEY can spy on Rittenhouse. "Like a double agent?" Rufus says. "I can barely single agent." But it doesn't matter. Wyatt wants to get to the bottom of this Rittenhouse business, once and for all.
Back in the present, the usual: Wyatt obsesses over his notes on his wife's murder. Rufus winds up in a car with Rittenhouse again and discovers the man he is meeting with is the voice on the other side of the phone he was reporting to in 1972.
Lucy finally knocks on the door of Benjamin Cahill. A young boy answers the door, and she is about to have second thoughts. But Cahill comes to the door and she does decide to bow out. She says she has the wrong house and leaves. But Cahill makes a phone call to someone we don't see and says, "Guess who just showed up at my house?"