“The Day Reagan Was Shot” is episode eight of season two of Timeless.
The episode opens in Washington, D.C. on March 30th, 1981. A man is writing letter to a woman called Jodie. He says he would abandon what he is doing, which will probably result in him being killed, if he could simply be with her. This is the last chance he has to impress her. The woman he is writing to is Jodie Foster, and the man is John Hinckley Jr. – the man who tried to kill Ronald Reagan.
In the present, Agent Christopher is at home with her family before heading in to the bunker. In the bunker, Rufus is being rather stand-offish with Jiya. She realises that he’s pushing her away in preparation for him dying, as she foresaw in “The King of the Delta Blues”. She is not impressed by this tactic, having been through it before with her father, and tells him so. Lucy and Wyatt want to know why Rufus has been in a mood all week, and get him to open up. Wyatt didn’t know about Jiya’s visions, and he and Lucy list all the times they could already have died.
They get a warning about the mothership, and Lucy recognises the date as that of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Neither Flynn nor Mason can go, as it’s a bit too recent and both are already alive at that time. So Jiya volunteers, and Rufus says it’s a good idea. It also appears that Jiya is a big fan of the Eighties. Lucy says that no-one is supposed to die on that day, so the assumption is that Reagan will probably be killed.
Agent Christopher arrives at the bunker after the lifeboat has already departed, and when she is told the date, Christopher says that the Reagan assassination attempt isn’t why Rittenhouse has gone to that time.
The team arrives outside the hotel where the attempted assassination is done. Wyatt, as well as Hinckley, also sees another man, a Secret Service agent, taking aim at the back of one of the police officers on the scene. Wyatt manages to prevent the officer from getting serious wounded, but Hinckley gets away – which he isn’t supposed to do. When Wyatt speaks to the officer he saved, he gets a bit of a shock, for he recognises her name. Officer Denise Christopher. A rather young Agent Christopher.
Lucy says that this must be Rittenhouse’s goal – Christopher’s death. For if Christopher is dead, she wouldn’t be able to form the team and Rittenhouse would have the lifeboat too. Wyatt and Rufus go after the Rittenhouse sleeper and, in the process, discover that not every Rittenhouse operative is doing so willingly. Lucy and Jiya go and find Christopher – posing as Cagney and Lacey, which Lucy points out to Jiya, who said that was their names, premieres later that year.
It turns out that there are other ways by which Christopher’s life path could be derailed than by simply killing her, and it already looks like it’s going off the tracks. Which is a major problem, calling for an odd solution.
In the previous episode, “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes”, Mason had been searching through the debris recovered from when Keynes blew up Rittenhouse’s base. He finally found something and, when going through the data with Agent Christopher, had discovered a picture of Wyatt’s wife, Jessica. It had been hypothesised that Rittenhouse saved Jessica to cause problems in some way, but what isn’t known. Some clues towards this may be revealed at the end of the episode.