Alcalá de Henares, 1605. Two obviously foreign men speak with a man and mention they have heard about the literary work he has been recently writing, and offer to buy it off him for a large sum, even if it means that it will never get published. The latter accepts the offer, and hands them the manuscript of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, revealing himself as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The two men leave (not without crashing into a young boy on their way through a market) and when they find themselves alone, one of them (who turns out to be Walcott, whom the Ministry already met in 1981) begins to bleed from the nose. Shortly after, the two vanish, taken to the future.
When a Ministry agent sends out the alarm about Cervantes not bringing Don Quixote's manuscript to the print, Salvador promptly sends Gil Pérez, who finds out what happened, and calls the Ministry, warning them that they are in a big mess.
Obviously, the loss of Spanish literature's most famous piece cannot be allowed, and Salvador tasks Amelia, Alonso and Pacino with finding out what happened, regain the manuscript and ensure Cervantes will go back to do his part in history. The trio soon finds itself in a pickle, because Cervantes is using the money he earned from the sell to fund his play, Los Baños de Argel, and hopes this will bring him the fame others already enjoy.
To put a stop to these plans, the trio decides they must sabotage the play, and Alonso and Amelia join the play after getting a couple to quit. While the two go around, playing antics to get Cervantes to drop his dream, Pacino begins to investigate: Cervantes' Purple Prose description of the buyers allows the Ministry to find out Walcott and whoever he's working for is behind the mess, and the boy that crashed into Walcott managed to steal a pendant off him that actually contained an USB device with their plans: they are planning to buy the manuscripts to several Spanish works so they can sell them in the present for a lot of money... and one of their objectives is Lope de Vega, who already has plans to meet with Walcott and his partner.
An awkward situation takes place: Alonso and Pacino want to use Lope as bait to capture the two men, but Amelia is all against it, not wanting to put her idol at risk. The situation gets tense when an old man approaches them and recognizes Alonso as a fellow soldier from the fighting in Flanders, amazed that he has seemingly not aged a day since that time. Alonso leaves, telling the man he is clearly drunk.
The situation with Cervantes' play continues, as Amelia manages to convince the other actors to go on strike, playing on their greed to get them to join other plays, but Cervantes manages to convince them otherwise, and Alonso actually sides with him: as he tells Amelia later, all Cervantes wants is a chance to prove himself, and he cannot bear to hurt the man further.
The trio lay out their trap on the Americans, learning where they are to meet with Lope, but while Alonso and Pacino go there, Amelia decides to visit Lope de Vega, who is surprised to see her unchanged after so long: the two talk for a long while, which means Lope misses the meeting. Alonso and Pacino try to capture the Americans, but the two manage to escape using their time machine.
A later argument with Amelia turns ugly as the two men feel like she has put their mission in danger, but while Alonso and Amelia are going to the theater for their last rehearsal, the old man from before appears again and states aloud that he knows Alonso is his former partner, claiming that his youth can only be witchcraft: Alonso's angry rebute causes the old man to have a heart attack and die. This leads to an order to halt all plays until otherwise stated, completely sinking Cervantes' hopes to see his play represented. Alonso and Amelia try to console the man, but he is not at home: a note he has left behind (straight out of one of Don Quixote's stories) clues Amelia in that he has gone to hang himself. The trio manages to save him in the nick of time, but Alonso finds a problem: the words in the Don Quixote book he bought earlier in the episode are starting to vanish.
Their solution? They bring Cervantes to the present, disguising it as a dream. They show him around Alcalá de Henares' streets, the monument to both himself and Don Quixote, and how that book will leave its great mark on humanity. Thus restored in his spirits, Cervantes rewrites the book once back in his own time, starting with a different beginning: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..."
