5 years before the main story, Vincent Ingram runs into the Mac Larens on a charity event for a hospital. He becomes captivated by drawings of a patient, which contain the patient's memories from the future - prominently displayed is the Vault and faces of people yet to be born. Ingram proceeds to buy them all.
In the present, Mac arrives at work to everyone's surprise, crankier than ever - foreshadowing a breakdown he has later that night. A few nights later, he gets a visit at work from Kat. She proposes an adoption, with a positive reaction from Mac.
Carly's day starts with a song from Philip and a kiss from Jeff Sr.. A fed days (and half an episode) later, Jeff comes home drunk, handsy, and with an attitude. They fight and she's pummelling him, just as Philip starts singing over the comm to calm her. Turns out he knew (from his update) that she would kill him that night.
Trevor is being driven to school by his father, assuring him he wasn't molested by the PE teacher. Later on, his girlfriend needs to talk to him... Yeah, that kind of talk.
Marcy and David seek the homeless painter, following his works - exactly the same as what Ingram bought in the teaser - to find Simon in the present. Marcy brings the artwork to HQ and tells Mac how she remembers Simon from the institution. Mac tries to get through to him and Simon reveals that he is a very skilled specialist, but a vision of Vincent Ingram shuts him up. He spills that Ingram is Traveller 001 and is forced by the vision to cut his tongue out, though the team stops him.
His work at the console is so impressive that Philip calls in Mac to check it out and the whole team discusses Simon's past as Traveler 004 and his mental breakdown caused by a damaged (schizophrenic) host brain. This leads them to the realisation that 001 is spying on their communications in the Deep Web.
In a flashback arc to his Traveler days, Simon receives a package and an eerie hallucination from 001, which wakes him into the present, at night at the HQ. The vision of Ingram still looms. In the past again, Simon is found out by the law enforcement while setting up the Traveler infrastructure, which imprints another (or perhaps the first) layer to his psychosis. He is "helped" by being put into a mental institution.
In another flashback timeline, continuing from the teaser, Ingram, now the wealthy sponsor of the institution, is introduced to a patient - yes, of course it's Simon. He explains that he was given a new mission by the Director - to make Simon whole again. Ingram talks to the Institution head, bribing her to allow him to continue his experiments with Simon. They continue to work on what appears to be an attempt on a quantum frame, but they lack the materials from the meteor and reach a dead end. This makes Ingram withdraw all funding for the institute, putting a lot of patients (including Marcy and Simon) out on the street.
The team turns the spying infrastructure against Ingram. His psychiatrist is calling him from an unsecured line, telling him his therapy with her is over. They are able to get her location and Mac and Carly subsequently visit her. They convince her to keep her appointment and help them spy on Ingram. Joined by Trevor, they follow her to a remote barn with no surveillance and no power, where they found the doctor's comm and a ransom note, setting up the continuation for the next episode.
In the present, Marcy is cooking dinner for David, but they scrap that plan and go straight to the bedroom. The next morning, Marcy demonstrates her restored memories and confesses her love...
Simon is back on the street in the present as well - Marcy drops him off after he requests to go home. His promplty picked up by unseen assailants
Tropes
- Beautiful Singing Voice - Just go read the trope page and see how the very first sentence describes Philip's soothing Carly.
- Call-Back - Simon and Marcy waking up is eerily similar for the previous time they woke up together.
- Lethal Chef - Marcy is cooking for the first time! Good thing David had a late lunch...
- Scenery Censor - Simon spends a good part of the episode naked and this method is used to obscure the obscure.
- Technobabble - refreshingly, Philip's description of Simon's work is more techno than babble, rooted in the OSI network model
