[low ambient music]
♪♪
- "There once was a serpent...
who only traveled one direction:
always forward, never backward."
[soft piano music]
"Until one day,
the serpent came upon a demon."
♪♪
"The demon cursed the serpent,
driving him insane,
causing him to eat his own tail."
♪♪
"The serpent was blind,
but a few, those who were serious,
knew the serpent's true path,
so they created a weapon,
a weapon to destroy the demon."
[music swells]
♪♪
[low ambient music]
[echoing crack]
[light splatting]
- [panting]
♪♪
Ticky-tock...
those eyes...
left, right, swaying
like a granddaddy clock.
♪♪
- Jennifer, where have you been?
- [groans] - Whoa, whoa...
Whoa, hey-hey-hey. Cole!
Hey, Jennifer, hey, stay with me.
- Jennifer... - Ms. Goines, what happened?
- It was all in here...
♪♪
Now it's all in there.
♪♪
Told you, Otter Eyes.
If you gave me yellow...
I could paint you the world!
[voice echoes]
♪♪
- Oh, my God.
[mysterious music]
- What the hell is this?
Some kind of Primary message?
- The Primaries had ample time to say what they mean.
This isn't a message.
[low ambient music]
They've given us one final mystery to solve.
[dramatic music]
♪♪
- Deacon's?
- I miss him.
- So do I.
I cleaned the wounds,
but they're just gonna hurt for a little while.
I'm sorry, there isn't much more I could do.
[low ambient music]
- You're a good doctor, Cassie.
[mumbles, clears throat]
[grunting]
♪♪
- The symbols...
♪♪
What do they mean? What are we looking for?
♪♪
- The center.
♪♪
- 54 unique symbols, by my count,
in no apparent order.
The various strands and pieces don't even align,
so there's no telling the logic.
- Far too many to be numeric;
twice too many to be alphabetical.
There doesn't appear to be a pattern.
It's completely random.
[tense music]
♪♪
[footsteps running, approaching]
♪♪
- We're looking at them from the wrong angle.
♪♪
Start at the center.
- It's a spiral.
♪♪
- They're puzzle pieces.
They fit together.
♪♪
[keyboard clacking]
- Ten macro-symbols,
representing zero through nine.
- Presented in a logarithmic spiral.
[slow, solemn string music]
This is a program for a machine.
- There seems to be a pattern
of two symbols repeating in groups of four.
♪♪
- These are dates.
With which of these are we most familiar?
- 1-9 and 2-0:
the 1900s and the 2000s.
- Given four numbers, I should be able to decipher the rest.
- The Primaries built a machine for you, Mr. Cole.
Perhaps this can tell us
where it was meant to send you.
♪♪
[dark tones, high-pitched ringing]
[distant siren wailing]
[tense music]
- Get dressed, Marion. We have to stay on the move,
find a way back to my mother.
We should drive down to Raritan.
Katerina and Elliot clearly know you.
Hey, Marion, this is... - My name is Emma.
Marion is just a name I made up...
[solemn string music]
The name that I chose for myself.
It was the first choice I ever made.
- Now you can choose to help us.
- You cannot stop what never began.
Not you, not Katerina, not James Cole.
- Your son.
♪♪
It may begin and end with her,
but somehow in the middle is you and him.
- That's impossible.
No, I haven't had a child. - You will.
That's why I was sent here, to find you,
to find out how James's mother knew the legend,
and now I know.
♪♪
- [echoing] What's it mean?
- [echoing] I don't know.
I didn't write it.
♪♪
- Who did?
- [sighs]
Your mother.
♪♪
- You're not meant to destroy the world, Marion.
You're meant to help save it.
♪♪
[crickets chirping]
- What if Katerina and Elliot don't believe us?
- I'm their daughter.
- DNA...
Yeah, we can prove it. - Yeah.
- I'm going to be a mother.
[laughs]
[car crashes] - Oh!
[tires screeching, engine revving]
- [gasps] They found us!
[gunshots]
- Hold on!
[dramatic music]
[gasps, grunts]
♪♪
[engine revving]
[car bangs] [gasping]
♪♪
[engine revving]
- [grunts] - [gasps]
♪♪
[car crashes, items clatter]
[low ambient music]
- Within the Primary code,
we found dozens of temporal coordinates,
more specifically, our coordinates.
- 2013, then 2015: Philadelphia.
1987: Tokyo.
'44, '75, 1491, and so on.
Everywhere, every-when you've ever been.
- Except one.
A set of coordinates which doesn't match
anything in our system.
April 3rd, 2018:
New York, JFK Airport.
♪♪
- That's two days before...
♪♪
- The plague.
[music swells]
[low, tense music]
Our first mission.
- The best weapon to kill Olivia?
Destroy the one that made her.
- The first reported cases of the virus
were global and simultaneous...
Argentina, London, Prague...
New York, on the 5th and 6th of April.
- Why two days before?
- The plague has an incubation period of 24 to 48 hours.
You can't survive it.
You can only spread it.
And in 36 hours, the world will realize...
it's over.
- And JFK is one of the most traveled
international airports in North America.
- This time...
this place...
- Is when they release the plague.
[intense percussive music]
- If we stop 'em, there's no time travel,
no Army of the 12 Monkeys,
no Witness.
This could be it.
- Initiate splinter sequence.
[machine whirring, accelerates]
♪♪
[soft, high-pitched ringing]
[aery ambience]
[heavy breathing]
- [screaming]
- [echoing] Everyone, clear the area!
We have an active shooter: Terminal One concourse.
Officer down! Officer down!
[ominous tone]
[tense, pulsating percussive music]
[ominous tone]
[tense music]
- Cole!
The virus! - [grunts]
[siren wailing]
[glass shatters]
[dramatic music]
Behind you!
[dramatic tone]
[tense music]
- We need to restart.
[dramatic music]
♪♪
[low ambient music]
♪♪
- It's definitely M5-10.
- We never knew how it was released.
- We do now.
- If they only had one remaining sample.
- Well, then this is how you maximize its impact:
turn a building full of innocent people
into traveling time bombs.
♪♪
[siren wailing, people clamoring]
[dramatic tone]
- So what now?
Go back and stop the tall man from dropping it?
- Or... steal it out from under him
before he can.
One guess where they've been keeping it.
[music swells]
[dark tones]
[high-pitched ringing]
[crickets chirping]
After Jennifer vanished, the whole business collapsed.
Scrapped and sold off for parts.
That'll happen when your CEO promises
to genetically engineer a unicorn.
- The plague,
another Markridge facility.
It's too easy. Something's off.
♪♪
- Come on.
♪♪
- This feel familiar to you?
- The Night Room.
[sparks buzzing]
[echoing laughter]
♪♪
[mechanical hissing]
- [echoing] What is that thing?
- [echoing] The origin.
- ...inside that'll make a centuries-old virus.
- There's something about its eyes.
♪♪
[echoing] It's eyes...
[low ambient music]
♪♪
- I think that's us.
♪♪
[eerie, ominous chords]
♪♪
- Power's still on.
♪♪
- Cold storage.
[music builds]
[electronic beep]
[door clicks, mechanical hissing]
♪♪
[dramatic music]
♪♪
That's it, the one from the airport.
- [exhales] Now we just need to destroy it.
♪♪
[elevator dings] I just don't wanna
accidentally release the damn thing
in a hotel in Midtown.
- Well, viruses need specific conditions to thrive.
They take time to die.
We burned it last time,
but since you don't want to set the hotel on fire,
we'll drown it.
[ominous tone]
[gun clicks]
[eerie, ominous chords]
[low ambient music]
- Hannah?
♪♪
- You've been stranded here for years.
Why didn't you find us sooner?
- And risk it all? Causality?
Accidentally undo something that shouldn't be undone?
I couldn't, so I waited.
- What happened?
[prolonged car honk]
[eerie music]
♪♪
[horn stops]
♪♪
[engine revs, tires screech]
[dramatic music]
[door clicks, opens]
[tense percussive music]
[door thuds closed]
♪♪
- We gotta go. Come on. - [groans]
- Come on. - [groans sharply]
[dramatic music]
[gunshots]
[insects chirping and buzzing]
[both panting]
Okay...
Hello? Help!
Somebody's hurt!
Hello?
[dramatic tone]
- Jones sent you to find my mother?
♪♪
- Hey, hey, what's going on?
What happened to you? - No, it was not me.
The car crashed, um, the man was shooting, then...
- It's okay. It's okay. - Please.
- It's... it's all right.
[soft piano music]
♪♪
- Marion was the name she chose.
Before that, there was Emma.
She was from Titan.
[ominous music]
[electrical blasts]
♪♪
She was born with a single purpose...
[slow, intense percussive music]
To complete Titan
so that it could initiate one final sequence,
something that my father called
the Hartle Hawking State:
space...
without time,
their Red Forest.
[machine droning]
[rumbling, whirring]
♪♪
Titan will create a paradox of time itself,
moments over moments,
so great that it could never be undone.
[towers whirring, droning]
♪♪
Its effects will be felt across every hour, every minute,
every second simultaneously.
Every day that ever existed
will be the last day on earth.
♪♪
[alarm chiming]
♪♪
- Ms. Goines?
- Doomsday alarm woke me up.
- The readings from Titan are unprecedented.
The sheer volume of temporal energy is astounding.
♪♪
- My mother once said that time travel
was both the cause and the effect of all of this.
- But none of that matters anymore.
We have the virus.
The Primaries sent us here to destroy it.
♪♪
- Once Olivia turns on her weapon,
begins her Red Forest,
she'll exist outside of causality.
Destroying the plague won't stop her.
- But it will rob us of the only weapon
we have to use against her...
[dramatic music]
Time travel.
♪♪
The Primaries didn't send us here to stop the plague.
♪♪
They sent us here to release it.
♪♪
- No, no!
This whole mission has been about saving 7 billion people,
not killing them.
You can't ask me to do this.
For what?
- Either 7 billion people die today...
Or everyone dies forever.
[gentle orchestral music]
♪♪
[record crackling]
[machine whirring]
[women singing in foreign language]
♪♪
[audio rewinds]
- James Cole.
[explosion] - [yells]
- James Cole.
[voice echoes]
- Why do they know him?
[audio rewinds]
- The only one of true importance
is James Cole!
- Why?
[audio rewinds]
[pattering]
You shouldn't be here.
You have work to finish.
[voice echoes]
- The virus was taken by James and Cassandra
on the eve of its release.
They've interfered again.
Broken yet another cycle.
- James Cole somehow remains a threat to our perfect realm.
Today, I will end his cycle,
and then...
I will ensure the plague is born
not as you may have intended,
but as it always has.
- The Witness has spoken.
♪♪
- Mothers die for their children.
Yours died protecting you.
- What was she like?
- Lost, I think.
She always said she felt trapped between two worlds,
the one she was raised in and this one,
the world she came to know.
[soft ambient music]
She grew up without her mother.
Never knew her father.
I don't think she realized how much that it shaped her,
until she was faced with the idea of giving you up.
♪♪
- So she left,
handed me off to my dad
with nothing but that bullshit story.
- No.
The story's not over yet, James.
[slow, purposeful string music]
♪♪
- We should go.
♪♪
- Go home.
[door clicks open]
♪♪
[door closes]
♪♪
- You sent them where?
- We found the coordinates in your code:
hundreds of dates,
our splinters,
and among them, the origin of the plague.
- Even for a mad hatter, that doesn't make sense.
Wh... why a thousand dates when you only need one?
You don't gift-wrap a needle with a haystack.
- But the Primaries built a machine.
- That you needed a machine to get to.
- Unless it wasn't about the machine
but about its function.
Maybe...
it was...
maybe it was never meant...
meant... [stammering]
[engine whooshing]
[tense music]
[baby crying]
♪♪
[indistinct chatter]
♪♪
- Cole...
there was a time we made a promise to these people.
- [exhales]
Just remember what you told me,
over and over again, before we even met...
♪♪
Sometimes terrible things happen...
both: So that great things can happen next.
♪♪
- All this time...
♪♪
It was always us.
[suspenseful music]
♪♪
[dramatic music]
♪♪
- Okay.
It's okay, Jonesy.
It's okay.
[slow, soft music]
- I need to see this to the end.
I have to.
[soft string music]
- You will.
I'm here.
I'll push you until the clocks stop
and the road runs out.
♪♪
- I did my damnedest
to enter every coordinate, every date,
but it's little more than a jumble of data.
- Okay...
a weapon to destroy the demon...
But how would you do that exactly?
- The loops and tangles of time.
To stop something that never started,
to end something that never began,
you must break them.
Untangle...
♪♪
Dr. Adler, run a simulation:
the Primary code against the current time stream.
[musical thrumming]
[dramatic music]
♪♪
[tense music]
♪♪
- This is a simulation
of the current time stream as we know it.
When we initiate the Primary code sequence...
♪♪
[beeping, chirping]
- The serpent's free! - Yeah.
- Only traveling in one direction again.
- The loops are broken, erased.
- Julian, show me those splinter coordinates again.
♪♪
- [screaming]
♪♪
- You were right, Katarina.
These dates do not represent all our splinters.
- No, only Mr. Cole's.
♪♪
[intense percussive music]
♪♪
This is every time he has traveled,
every moment he has affected the time stream.
It's his entire life.
[tense music]
This was never about splintering.
[music builds]
[tense music]
- Let me do this for you.
♪♪
- This was designed to destroy a Djinn,
and a Djinn cannot be deleted from just one moment.
It has to be removed from every moment.
♪♪
The Primaries built a machine
to erase James Cole.
[music swells]
[tense music]
♪♪
- No. Cole can't be a Djinn.
You said yourself, this is something
that can only be born of time travel.
Cole's father wasn't a traveler.
- His mother, Marion.
♪♪
[gun clicks]
[low ambient music]
♪♪
[gunshot]
- Hannah...
♪♪
[gunshot] - [groans]
- No!
- [gasping]
- Hey... - Hi.
[people screaming]
[gunshot] - Ah!
[eerie music]
♪♪
[people screaming, alarm blaring]
♪♪
- Hey, it's... it's okay.
[gasping] It's okay.
This was my choice.
♪♪
This was all I could do:
be here...
protect you one last time. [gasps]
Mothers die for their children.
Yours died protecting you.
[voice echoes]
- [echoing] So she left...
- [echoing] No.
The story's not over yet, James.
[echoing] ...yet James.
♪♪
I never wanted any of this for you.
♪♪
[gasping]
- Hey...
Hannah, hey... hey...
♪♪
[alarm blaring]
♪♪
[people screaming, alarm blaring]
♪♪
- [echoing] Before the day is done,
I imagine you'll understand,
that without time's will,
its shackles,
there is the after of a Red Forest...
♪♪
Where one never has to choose anything
over the ones they love.
♪♪
- That's unfair.
♪♪
You know, time is cruel.
[soft music]
♪♪
You know, I watched the ones I love die,
defeated by time.
[muffled gunshot]
♪♪
In the end, we all lose...
♪♪
Yet you may yet win...
if you choose to.
♪♪
Good-bye, Cassandra.
[solemn music]
♪♪
[harrowing music]
♪♪
[glass shatters]
[shards pinging]
- "Dear, James"...
[soft string music]
"I'm not sure if you'll ever find this"...
[machine whirs, rattles]
[rumbling]
"If there will come a time when you need the truth."
♪♪
"Perhaps someday, I will have the chance
to tell you myself."
♪♪
"But however you hear the tale,
I want you to be certain of one thing"...
♪♪
"It was...
is...
a love story."
♪♪
[warm, gentle music]
♪♪
- You all right?
♪♪
[ominous music]
♪♪
Hey, hold on!
Help me get her in the truck. - Okay.
"The first time I met your father
was an act of bravery:
a good man risking all and asking nothing"...
You're okay. Breathe. Look at me. Be calm.
"Fighting to save the life of a stranger."
[engine turns over]
[solemn music]
[engine revs]
♪♪
"He reminded me of you,
of the man you would become."
♪♪
"If for a moment,
the future taught me anything"...
[soft piano music]
"It was the peace of a simple life"...
♪♪
"Of hunting, fishing"...
♪♪
"Of quiet moments away from the world."
♪♪
"He lived like I was raised."
♪♪
"I knew your father before I ever knew his name."
♪♪
[solemn music]
♪♪
[truck pulling in]
♪♪
[poignant music]
♪♪
- She didn't make it.
I'm sorry.
♪♪
She kept calling for you.
Marion, right?
♪♪
I'm Matthew.
♪♪
- "Why did I stay?"
♪♪
"To protect him, should they ever come?"
♪♪
"Or was it because,
for all my mother's talk of causality and eventuality,
I'd finally found something that felt like fate?"
♪♪
"Every day, I thought about leaving"...
♪♪
"And every day, he gave me a reason to stay."
♪♪
Teach me.
- [chuckles]
- Yeah... she's a stubborn one.
- She?
- A car like this, it gets you where you're going,
points you straight,
kicks back when you hit the wrong gear.
- [chuckles] - She's definitely a woman.
I just can't get her running.
- Well, my father used to say,
"The common core of all great achievement
is failure."
- I like that.
Fancy way of saying,
"The only failure is giving up."
- [chuckles softly]
- Will you hold that in place right there?
Let me get in here with this.
- "He was kind, honest.
He made me laugh." [giggles]
[soft piano music]
"I knew we would never grow old together,
but I loved him anyway."
[fire crackling]
♪♪
"Timeless and without hesitation."
[warm string music]
♪♪
[engine turns over]
[engine revs]
[cheerful piano music]
♪♪
"I wanted it to last"...
[soft string music]
"But I knew I couldn't stay...
♪♪
For him...
for you"...
[engine humming]
"For all those we've yet to save."
♪♪
"I told you this was a love story,
and it is.
Not just of a woman for a man"...
[distressed breathing]
"But a father for his son."
♪♪
"This letter, James,
is the last story I have left to tell you.
The first, I think you know."
- [sighs]
♪♪
"Thank you, James.
You saved my life when I was a child.
You saved my soul when you were born."
♪♪
"I was, in my life, proud to be a Daughter"...
♪♪
"But proudest to be your mother."
♪♪
[dark tones, high-pitched ringing]
[distant siren wailing]
[fire crackling]
- We had to tell you.
That should be your choice.
- For years, I was by myself,
but I was never alone.
I saw you once, sitting in the park,
looking down at the luckiest little girl.
The way you looked at me,
the way you're looking at me now...
[soft string music]
And I wondered how anyone could ever love anything that much.
[chuckles]
And I saw you.
♪♪
I was there when you lost your father.
And I was there when you found your brother.
♪♪
I'll be there at the end, at the airport.
♪♪
- I can't bear to say good-bye...
Because when we do...
this moment between the three of us...
♪♪
[sighs]
It will be over.
♪♪
- So, maybe...
one minute more?
♪♪
There's still time.
♪♪
[thunder rumbling]
[thunder crashing]
♪♪
[dramatic music]
♪♪
[electrical blasts]
♪♪
[thunder rumbling]
I'm the demon.
[ominous music]
♪♪