“Chinatown” is episode ten of season two of Timeless and the series finale.
At the end of the previous episode, “The General”, Jiya was abducted by an armed Jessica, and both left in the lifeboat. Jessica did apologise to Wyatt as she left, and he was blown back by the lifeboat leaving.
The others rush into the room and Wyatt explains what happened. Rufus checks the system, but they can’t track the lifeboat and the system seems to be down. Rufus is not happy with Wyatt, and says that he asked Wyatt to let him know if he suspected Jessica was Rittenhouse. Lucy says that Wyatt didn’t, but he says that he did – Jessica’s brother. The one who died as a child from leukaemia, but was saved by some sort of stem cell therapy that probably wasn’t around in the Eighties. Which is a fact that Wyatt had neglected to tell the others. Rufus mentions the photos of Jessica found in the Rittenhouse files, which is something that nobody had told Flynn. So Flynn and Wyatt get into it, and Lucy gets hit as a result.
Jiya is in definitely in Rittenhouse’s custody. Carol wants Jiya to take a pill that will help her sleep. Saying no is not an option. Keynes is pleased that they have the lifeboat. Emma, when she discovers this, suggests killing Jiya. It seems she didn’t know about this – and Carol says that they now have a backup pilot. And points out to Emma she isn’t blood. That probably annoyed her a lot.
Rufus wants Wyatt to fix this. Wyatt says that he will, although how is a good question.
At Rittenhouse’s lair, the guard enters Jiya’s room to find her passed out on the floor. Except she isn’t; when he lifts her back onto the bed, Jiya strangles him with the bedclothes. Rather effectively. Jiya then flees for the lifeboat, but Emma sees her and starts shooting. Although Jiya manages to get away in the lifeboat, Emma’s shots have damaged some of the controls.
At the bunker, the others detect that the lifeboat is online again. The system say that the lifeboat is back, and it looks to nearly arrive. But then fails.
Connor says that Jiya is alive somewhere in the past, and that she will find a way to communicate. Rufus is performing a computer search, and Lucy goes and looks through her books. In the book Lucy and her mother wrote, she discovers a picture of Jiya. In San Francisco, Chinatown, 1888.
There is a rug at Jiya’s feet in the photograph, and Rufus says that the writing on it is in Klingon. Part of it is GPS coordinates, but there is also the phrase ‘Don’t come.’ The coordinates lead to the lifeboat, so now they have it, but it’s very, very old. 130 years old now in fact.
Still, it’s made operational again and the team heads back to San Francisco, where the mothership has already arrived. Given that this is the season finale, and given the rough location, date and Jiya’s warning, it seems likely that this is where Jiya had a vision of Rufus dying in “The King of the Delta Blues”. In the past, it looks like Emma has had enough of how Rittenhouse operates.
The episode ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger. Although, yet again, the series wasn’t renewed, a special, sometimes shown in two parts, to wrap things up was done, staring with “The Miracle of Christmas Part I”.