Characters / Travelers

Core team

^note The names given for the Travelers are actually the names of their hosts, who suffered Death of Personality when they were possessed. Since we don't have any other names for the Travelers, and since the hosts don't appear in their own right, the names refer to the Travelers unless noted otherwise. Where the distinction is needed, the prefix 'Original' means the host prior to possession, and 'Traveler' means the Traveler possessing the host (instead of using the Traveler numbers, which are never used as a form of address in the show).

Grant MacLaren

Traveler 3468 ("Grant MacLaren")

Played by: Eric McCormack

The team leader. MacLaren is a FBI agent.

• Becoming the Mask: He falls in love with his host's wife, partly because a near-death experience causes him to absorb the memories of some defining moments of his host's life.
• The Chains of Commanding: Downplayed but it's still there. It's implied that the future sees a lot of potential in him and his team, which is why their main mission (and several other ones later assigned) are very important in the grand plan, forcing him to blindly make difficult (often impossible) decision on his own. To his credit, while this visibly puts a lot of stress on him, it doesn't seems that he would have it any other way.
• Cowboy Cop: The original MacLaren already had this personality, which is what got him killed. Traveler 3468 develops this reputation as well, both among his FBI colleagues (because he's constantly going off mission for Traveler business) and his fellow Travelers (because of his habit of "improvising").
• Friend on the Force: Averted. Being a high-ranking FBI field agent actually creates more problems than it solves. Given that all the intel and equipment needed can be acquired though Philip, and any request for resources will draw undue attention. Its only perk is being able to pull rank on some people and even then, it's not as useful as it sounds.
• I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: In the end, after being forced to accept that he's not the man Kat married and never will be, he goes back in time to the moment when Original!MacLaren met her, and encourages her to give another chance to the boyfriend Original!MacLaren seduced her away from.
• My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: When undergoring surgery for a severe injury, MacLaren has glimpses of the real Grant MacLaren's life.
• The Leader: A fairly collaborative one.
• Meat Versus Veggies: One of the first major tells that the original MacLaren has been replaced is that he goes from being a serious meat lover to a vegan overnight. (All Travelers seem to get culture shock at the idea of eating meat, but it sticks with 3468 much more than the others.)
  • Grant's extreme aversion to meat makes it all the more poignant when he forces aside his disgust to share a meal of freshly killed rabbit with young Aleksander, and appreciate that hunting was a skill the boy needed to survive rather than recoil from him as a killer.
• Not What It Looks Like: Him constantly going off the grid while he's supposed to be at work or with his wife, plus his changes in behavior (going vegan, acting like he's hiding something... makes love differently), and Jeff ratting out to Kat that he and Carly have been seen together leads to Kat thinking he's being unfaithful.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Repeatedly willing to break protocol to protect his team and Kat.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Is assigned to correct Philip's mistake and assassinate Aleksandr Andrieko before he grows up to become a monster. Delays until the last possible moment, until the Director calls off the mission. Partially subverted — he had his gun out and was just about to pull the trigger when the new order came in, and the knowledge of how close he came traumatizes him so badly he orders his own memory wiped.
• You Are Number 6: Each Traveler introduces themselves by their number, of course, but when asked what his real name was Mack implies that his name really was 3468.

Marcy Warton

Traveler 3569 ("Marcy Warton")

Played by: MacKenzie Porter

The team's medical specialist. Marcy suffered from severe physical brain damage. Her being taken over by a Traveler has negated the effects of this somewhat.

• Actor Allusion: David notes that Marcy's favorite genre of 21st-century music is country. MacKenzie Porter is a country singer.
• Broken Pedestal: She outright begs the Director to save David's life after he saves the city from a nuclear bomb. The Director ignores her pleas and lets her sit through David's agonizing death throes, until it shows up at the last minute... by overwriting David's brain with a Messenger giving the "Protocol Omega" order, then killing him. Marcy ends up with her faith in the Director and the mission utterly destroyed.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: A downplayed version, as the original Marcy being mentally disabled causes her to act oddly at times—like not noticing she's naked—though she's mostly able to deal with it.
• Dark and Troubled Past: A throwaway line in the pilot states that the original Marcy grew up in a Bedlam House.
• Driven to Suicide: Her One True Love David having died, and her mission having been perfunctorily declared a failure ("Protocol Omega"), she has nothing left to lose when 001 comes for the backdoor code to the Director hidden in her brain, and promptly puts a bullet in it. This may have been the Director's plan all along and the reason it refused to save David.
• Dying as Yourself: She considered this when told she had the choice of succumbing to her host body's inability to support her mind or be rebooted. In the end, she didn't get to choose.
• The Heart: Openly emotional, although still far calmer than the average civilian.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: She's forcibly overwritten by her pre-traveling consciousness in order to save her life and reset the Director, causing her to lose all memory of her life in the 21st.

• Ms. Fanservice: Marcy spends a lot more time nude or in her underwear for various reasons than the rest of the cast, though this is sometimes Fan Disservice.
• Near-Death Experience: She deliberately triggers one through hypothermia to try to regain her lost memories, based on Grant's experience of glimpsing the real MacLaren's memories while comatose (though her experience is far more extensive). This leads David to believe she might be suicidal.
• Team Mom: Less in spirit and more in function. It is established that she's supposed to be not just a combat life saver, but also responsible for the health and well being of the team even off mission.

Carly Shannon

Traveler 3465 ("Carly Shannon")

Played by: Nesta Cooper

The team's tactical specialist.

• The Big Guy: Carly is the team's tactical officer, and the one seen kicking the most ass (mostly Jeff's).
• The Lancer: To MacLaren.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: She's thin, lanky and beautiful, and yet she can beat the crap out of Jeff her burly husband.
• The Nth Doctor: She appears in MacLaren's hallucination in "Protocol 5" played by short-haired, Caucasian Erika Walter. We only know it's her because she has '3465' tattooed on her neck. This is implied to be what Traveler Carly actually looks like.
• The Spock: To a degree. She is quite capable of solving her problems through the precise, tactical application of violence, without ever having to use diplomacy. Because of this, though, she finds her problems piling up thanks to a vengeful, humiliated Jeff, starting with a visit from Child Protective Services in "Protocol 5".
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Her basic mode of solving any problem is violence, whether to apply it herself on others, or manipulating others to react violently. Talking things through rarely comes up for consideration.

Trevor Holden

Traveler 0115 ("Trevor Holden")

Played by: Jared Abrahamson

The team's technology expert. Trevor is still at school, while his Traveler is the oldest within his cell.

• Body Surf: It's eventually revealed that the reason for 0115's extreme longevity is that he was an early test subject for the consciousness transfer technology and thus ended up in several different bodies over the course of his lifespan. (He then stayed in at least one of these bodies long enough to become dependent on machines just to breathe, explaining his antipathy to smoking.)

• Cool Old Guy: Definitely, being knowledgeable, spiritual and kind. Downplayed that his age really doesn't come across as much other than being implied and stated here and there.
• Delinquent: Basically, every episode that shows us Trevor in his civilian life portrays him following his friends and girlfriend into a new kind of criminal activity. Bullying, stealing, (illegal) underground fighting, drug dealing, shoplifting, sex in a dressing room...
• Defiant to the End: Almost literally and overlapping with Villanous Valour. The original Trevor is beaten, bloodied, bruised and can barely stand, but even with his friends, the audience and even his opponent telling him to stay the fuck down, he just gets up and fights. It would have killed him had the Traveler Trevor not conceded the fight.
• Fictional Disability: It turns out that a human mind that's greatly exceeded its normal lifespan through Body Surf eventually dies of its own form of old age, manifesting as the inability to perceive the passage of time ("temporal aphasia") and appearing from the outside as increasingly long periods of catatonia. 0115's wife originally died of it, and he knew he would succumb to it within a few years. Unfortunately, the stress of the Director resetting his mind causes it to show up ahead of schedule.
• Freudian Excuse: While his mom does seem to suffer it just as much as he, it's clear that life under Trevor's domineering and pressuring father was anything but pleasant. In season 2 it's revealed the original Trevor was a victim of sexual abuse by the high school coach.
• The Gadfly: His approach to being kidnapped and interrogated is to be as annoying and taunting as possible to his captors.
• Gadgeteer Genius: As the team engineer, this is his job, but he seems unusually skilled at it, possibly because of his age and experience. Carly expresses surprise he's already built communications devices for the whole team in the day between the first four's initial arrival and first meeting.
• Jerk Jock: In spades. Much to the dismay of the Traveler Trevor, who has to keep up appearances, despite the fact that he's practically the polar opposite of his host. He does try to make amends and change the teenagers around him though, leading to Took a Level in Kindness.
• Let Them Die Happy: When talking to a webcam strip show, waiting the arrival of a Traveler team, he asks the performer to describe her happiest memory. We don't hear the answer but she is smiling when she dies.
• I Like Those Odds: He states that of the first wave of travelers, only 60% survived the journey. When the rest of the team tells him they weren't aware of such figures, he asks them if they still would have volunteered had they known. The implication is that he chose to travel being much more aware of the risks.
• May–December Romance: Trevor's discomfort with sex and romance is partly because his true age means any relationship with another human would be this for him. It does turn out that his original wife was somewhat older than he — though three lifetimes together was more than enough to make the original age gap insignificant. This was the reason he assumed that when her mind succumbed to final death he still had a good few years of lifespan remaining to serve the Director as a Traveler.
• The Mourning After: Season 3 reveals why Trevor has so little interest in sex and romance — despite a Raging Stiffie being his teenage body's "default setting". He and his wife were taken as a married couple to be the first experimental subjects for long-term consciousness transfer, and as a result have lived three whole lifetimes together. He only became a Traveler because after her final death he had nothing to live for but furthering the Director's mission. As Grace realizes, there's no new love interest that could compete with a One True Love that spanned more than two centuries.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He saves Grace against protocol by sticking her in a remote forest, but he can't carry her unconscious body back to the car if he gives her Laser-Guided Amnesia so he lets her walk with him, which she uses as an opportunity to escape. She nearly does, but her calling 911 gives her Traveler the TELL coordinates to jump into her, preventing this trope, although he does get reprimanded for risking it.
• Not Afraid to Die: Trevor volunteers without hesitation for risky missions - even, in one case, a mission that is guaranteed suicide - since having lived for so long he sees himself as having little to lose. He's definitely not an actual Death Seeker, though, and seems to determined to take as much joy in his newly youthful body as he can.
  • It turns out that he was coming up on the maximum lifespan of a human mind anyway and expecting his Fictional Disability to finish him off, and thus always considered himself more expendable than the rest of the team. When the team goes to great lengths to build a device to keep the disability under control, he gets outright angry at them for putting the mission in danger over sentiment rather than letting himself be replaced with a healthy Traveler.
• Not So Above It All: Trevor cultivates a high degree of detachment from his host identity's concerns compared to Mac's attachment to his wife or Carly's to her son — but when he finds out his beloved guidance counselor is marked for death he takes it very hard.
• Old Soldier: Despite his host's age, he's established to be not only the oldest of the team, but also, that he's been part of the time travelling conspiracy for far longer. It is implied that, in the future timeline, the history changing project has been going on for quite some time, and he has been a member of it possibly from the beginning.
• Old Master: His body is 17, but Trevor is established as the oldest of the group by a very large margin. He certainly has the attitude, being quite spiritual and trying to implicitly and indirectly improve everyone's lives. See Let Them Die Happy.
• Older Than They Look: Most of the Travelers will tend to be this when placed into younger hosts, but Trevor has been through the process before and is actually well over a hundred years old.
• Outliving One's Offspring: He's survived long enough to see two of his own sons die of old age. This may be why he's less than helpful when Grant struggles with his wife's miscarriage — the sharp, a immediate fear that comes with being a new parent is now decades behind him.
• Parental Neglect: The original Trevor's father seems very little interested in him personally beyond his future in football, and his mother is too much of a doormat to be different. To their credit, they do make an honest effort to try and change.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: The Traveler Trevor is less than impressed with his host father's parenting methods (and noticing he treats his mom the same way) so he start calling him Gary instead of Dad, to underscore how little he thinks of him as a father and a man. This leads to a Heel Realization later on.
• Time Abyss: The second season establishes that he is the oldest human to ever live.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Much to the confusion of pretty much everyone around him. The Traveler Trevor's first dialogue with his parents ends with a sincere "Thanks, Mom" that makes his family stare him blankly in disbelief. After that, he spends a lot of time trying to talk the original Trevor's friends out of whatever stupid or criminal activity they're engaged in.

Philip Pearson

Traveler 3326 ("Philip Pearson")

Played by: Reilly Dolman

The team's Historian.

• Blessed with Suck: Being crammed full of history is definitely this for him. Knowing about countless deaths that he could prevent but isn't allowed to does no favors for his sanity in Season 1, and it gets even worse in Season 2 after "Update": because now he also knows the altered future, the one that includes himself and his teammates, meaning he knows every horrible thing that's scheduled to happen to them. And no, he's not allowed to try to change any of that without being instructed to, either.
• Cassandra Truth: When he first arrives in the 21st century and Ray wants to know his system for predicting winning horse races, Philip calmly tells him the truth - that he's from the future and memorized the results. Ray, naturally, thinks he's just trolling him and laughs it off.
• Child Soldiers: As with all Historians, Philip was identified in his infancy as someone with the potential for superior memory and "recruited" into the Travelers to be conditioned into a living database. It's never stated, but this is probably why his Traveler number is 100 digits lower than his teammates' (except Trevor): they all joined as adults.
• The Cracker: He's the one to call when you want something hacked remotely. He also sets up the deep web network that the traveler teams and the Director use as a way of communication.
• Deadpan Snarker:

  Marcy: You're sweating, are you ok?.
  Philip: Well, I wish there wasn't a bomb in my house, but other than that, I'm fine, thanks.

• Functional Addict: Invoked: quitting a long time heroin addiction is a time-consuming, physically and mentally challenging task, so he voluntarily keeps using the minimum dose required for his body and mind to function properly. As soon as thing settle down somewhat, he gets more proactive in quitting.
  • Relapses briefly in "Protocol 5", when he is directionless and purposeless.
  • His progress takes another major setback when Jenny, a fellow Traveler, sets him up with an alternative drug in the form of eyedrops that leave him more functional than heroin but are just as addictive. Turns it this is because she's a Faction member manipulating him.
  • No sooner does he seem to finally be off drugs in general in Season 2 than he receives an "update" of future historical knowledge that makes him dependent on still more drugs to manage the debilitating psychological side effects.
• Hacker Cave: The hideout he sets up as a base of operations.
• The Heart: Not oficially, but he hits the right notes: he's always pushing to do the right thing even against protocols, he dislikes letting people die (despite being trained to accept it). He even states that he loves his Marcy and doesn't want to reboot her.
  • In the first Season Finale, even when the team is on the run, caught in the middle of a civil war and basically knee-deep in shit, what is his concern?
    Philip: Oh, no.
    Marcy: What is it?
    Philip: I left Poppy behind.
    Marcy: Who's Poppy?
    Philip: My [pet] turtle.
    ...
    Philip: Yeah. That was a lot of gunfire. What if she got shot? You think she's gonna be alright?
    Marcy: I do.
• Loners Are Freaks: Subverted. He definitely invokes the image (lampshaded by his lawyer who thinks he's just an drug addict living alone in his warehouse) despite not being a loner nor a freak.
• Morality Pet: He appears to be the most moral of the team, visibly shaken when he sees people dying whether they were meant to die or not, even if they're being taken over by a traveler, and is visibly conflicted about leaving people to die.
• Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: While he isn't a loner per se (because he has a team), there's no doubt he has a very strong moral compass under all those protocols, transhuman knowledge and mission objectives.
• Room Full of Crazy: During a drug-induced breakdown Philip writes the name, date and location of every host candidate (i.e., preventable death) in his memory of this time period and location. It stays there for a while, as part of Philip torturing himself with the moral implications of his mission.
• The Smart Guy: He shares the role with Trevor. While no slouch in combat, his specialty is the intelligence and counter-intelligence of the team's operations, acquiring data, cleaning down paper trails, and tying up loose ends (the non-lethal kind).
• Playful Hacker: He displays a shit-eating grin when he reminds MacLaren that he can hack a system remotely. He also takes a great deal of pride in his work station set up.
• Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: The nature of his ability and function means Philip spends much of his time struggling with this.
• Tyke Bomb: The season 2 finale reveals that potential Historians are chosen from infancy by the Director and more or less brainwashed in order to give them the comprehensive memory they use to do their jobs.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Philip generally plays this role in missions that don't require all hands on site. Carly even uses him as a DJ, playing music over the comm system during the day.

Core team hosts' friends, family and work colleagues

Kat MacLaren

Grant's wife.

Played by: Leah Cairns

• Death by Childbirth: This was going to be her fate but the Director sent Rick Hall to save her, at the cost of the child.
• Wet Blanket Wife: Kat is unfortunately 100% this trope, although you perhaps can't blame her for reacting poorly to the constant Gas Lighting Traveler! Grant puts her through. It reaches its nadir when Grant comes home with a bloodsoaked shirt, having just helped defuse a nuclear bomb and save the city, to hear her ask for a divorce.
• You Monster!: At the end of Season 2, after having learned the truth about "Grant" and the Travelers, she tells him to get away her, calling him the murderer of her husband.

David Mailer

Played by: Patrick Gilmore

Marcy's social worker.

• All-Loving Hero: He gets a $30,000 windfall in the lottery by stealing Marcy's numbers, and ends up giving away all of it to people he knows could use it more than he could.
• Audience Surrogate: David acts more and more like this as time goes on, commenting on the insanity of Marcy's life from a regular 21st-century person's perspective. In his Dying Dream in Season 3 he directly confronts the team about the moral problems with what they're doing, openly stating the theme of the show - nothing they do will work unless present day humans take responsibility for their own world.
• Bomb Disposal: He wakes up from a Near-Death Experience having been shot and left for dead by the Faction, to find himself forced to improvise his way through dismantling a nuclear bomb with only three minutes on the clock before detonation — pretty much a classic scenario from an anxiety dream. And once he succeeds, against all odds — keeping in mind a highly trained Traveler team in Shanghai died attempting the same thing — his only reward is a painful death from radiation sickness.
• Break the Cutie: His experiences through the whole show are a Trauma Conga Line, escalating to being violently assaulted and almost killed in Season 2. It gets significantly worse in Season 3, and eventually taken to its logical conclusion.
• Cowardly Lion: By his own admission, he is very much a Non-Action Guy terrified by the sight of blood, but doesn't hesitate to offer Marcy all the support she needs even as his growing awareness of how dangerous her life is - and how dangerous she is to him by extension - takes a serious toll on his mental health.
• Dark and Troubled Past: We eventually learn David pursued a path as a social worker with a special interest in homeless people because he himself very narrowly escaped life on the street as a kid after his father died in a car accident and his mother had a breakdown and lost their house. He credits his staying off the street to a homeless man who took him under his wing and pushed him to seek help from social services and "not end up like me." His whole life since then has been to pay this gift forward.
• Gut Punch: His death is by far the biggest one on the show.
• I Can't Dance: By his own admission, he doesn't so much dance as "wigglingly stand."
• Muggle Best Friend: Of all the non-Traveler characters he fits this trope most, actively supporting Marcy's missions despite being Locked Out of the Loop.
• Nice Guy: The most friendly, adorkable, kind person on the show.
• Non-Action Guy: He's a mellow and peaceful person, with no experience in or interest in fighting. This makes him painfully unprepared for the sort of risks he faces from being close to a Traveler, and Season 3 sees him trying to Take A Level In Badass.
• Plucky Comic Relief: David is always cracking jokes to relieve the tension, even — indeed, especially — in life-threatening situations.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Lacking the training or the fatalistic outlook of the Travelers, one brutal assault and close brush with death at the hands of a hostage taker leaves him racked with post-traumatic anxiety (and Marcy racked with guilt).
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Directly invoked by Marcy when she watches him die of radiation sickness having saved the city from a nuclear bomb — despite "having no training, having taken no oath" — and turns against the Director for doing nothing to save him.

Walt Forbes / Traveler 4112

Played by: Arnold Pinnock

MacLaren's FBI partner in season 1 and 2.

• And Then John Was a Zombie: Becomes a Traveler in Season 2.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: After he gets overwritten for the second time, he simply stops appearing in any episodes, with no explanation given for his absence.

Jeff Conniker

Played by: J. Alex Brinson

Carly's abusive ex-boyfriend.

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• The Alcoholic: Him showing up to Carly's house drunk was the cause of Original Carly's death, he is shown multiple times to be drinking or drunk while on the job, and a major part of Carly moving back with him was a demand that he stop drinking completely.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Midway through Season 3, he gets into a standoff with Carly, but before the two can kill each other, he gets overwritten.
• Asshole Victim: After repeatedly getting in the way of the main casts actions and threatening them while on a mission, Carly tells him simply to get out of their way or he would die. Because he refused, Carly would have shot him, leading to his death, providing the Director the opportunity to overwrite him.
• Dirty Cop: Uses his resources as a cop during Season 1 to keep tabs on Carly's Traveller team, thinking that she has become Grant's lover (and/or a prostitute).
• Disability Immunity: His many experiences with having been blackout drunk give him a certain familiarity with and therefore resistance to the effect of the Traveler's Laser-Guided Amnesia drug, which works on similar principles.
• Domestic Abuse: Decks Original Carly, giving her the head injury that causes her death in the original timeline. Traveler Carly, naturally, does not allow this to continue.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: His only real redeeming feature is that he does genuinely love his son, and is happy when he gets to spend time with him.
• Hope Spot: After saving Carly from a Faction traveler at the end of Season 1, Season 2 has him trying to be a better husband and dad, as well as promising not go drink... only to fall Off the Wagon at the end of the season and try to rape Carly in the process.
• Jerkass: Jeff is an abusive, petty, vindictive alcoholic that was the direct cause of Original Carly's death, makes Traveler Carly's life as much of a living hell as he can by forcing her to fight to keep custody of their child and whose only redeeming quality seems to be him caring for Jeff Jr. However even that only lasts a couple months before he falls off the wagon, comes home drunk, and tries to violently rape Carly.
• Jerkass Has a Point: He's an abusive drunk and not above using police resources to push Carly around to try to get his way. However, he's still a dad who deserves to see his son, and through much of season 1 his behaviour outwardly seems more reasonable than Carly's.
• Off the Wagon: Finally gets drunk again at the end of season 2 and tries to rape Carly, causing her to nearly beat him to death. It was heavily implied that Philip suddenly started singing over the comm because he knew she was going to kill Jeff if he didn't do something.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Jeff has a few moments where he genuinely seems noble, like when he reflexively tries to defend Kat from Ingram's goons after Ingram captures the team's loved ones.
  • He shoots a teenager (actually a Faction Traveler) attempting to kill Carly and checks to see if she's okay.
• Shmuck Bait: Refuses to take it, when Carly gives him "The Reason You Suck" Speech in an attempt to provoke him into assaulting her in front of a CCTV camera. Firmly takes hold of it in the third season while threatening Carly and the rest of the team at gunpoint, while having a good idea of what Travelers are and how they take over a body. Carly warns him to back off or he would die. His refusal means MacLaren's team would have shot him, giving the Director a way to overwrite him.
• Villain with Good Publicity: He's a violent drunk, but he's apparently been able to hide it well enough that he looks like a more stable parent than Carly and his colleagues accept his version that he's just "got some trouble at home" when the real truth is that his wife is justifiably terrified of him. Once he gets caught drunk-driving with his son in the car, though, that goodwill disappears in a hurry.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Surprisingly enough, it's never indicated he's hit Jeff (but with these types, never say never...). On the other hand, he drunk-drives with Jeff in the car.
  • He shoots a teenage girl (from the Faction) trying to kill Carly, which is probably one of the only decent things he's done. However, it looks bad and he's understandably worried he might get charged for murder if Carly (who fled the scene due to Traveler context) doesn't come back to cover for him.

Gary Holden

Played by: William MacDonald

• Abusive Parents: Hits Trevor in "Protocol 5" for speaking back. Trevor is unimpressed.
• Parents as People: For all his flaws, he does genuinely care about his son. He tries to be reassuring when it's thought Trevor might not fully recover from getting shot, and when it's revealed that his son's football coach has been sexually abusing the boys on his team.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Is shown to be prejudiced against gay people.

Patricia Holden

Played by: Teryl Rothery

• Extreme Doormat: Does pretty much nothing in response to Gary's nasty behavior to her or to their son. (Or, for that matter, Original!Trevor's mistreatment of her.)

Ray Green

Ray Green

Played by: Ian Tracey

A public defender who works as Philip's lawyer.

• Amoral Attorney: He's decidedly sleazy and self-serving.
• Cassandra Truth - After he finds out the truth about the Travelers, he acknowledges that Philip told him the truth from the start.
• The Gambling Addict: His main vice, which Philip makes use of to gain his assistance. "001" reveals that he's got substantial gambling debts to some pretty scary people.
• Only Friend - When he is kidnapped by Traveler 001 along with the family and lovers of the other main Traveler team, he finds it sad that Philip is a drug addict whose only 'friend' is a gambling addict that uses him.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: At the beginning of Season 3, Philip gets rid of Ray after memory wiping fairly easily with a big cash payoff, in direct contrast to the problems Grant and Marcy have repairing their relationships with Kat and David. After this, Ray is never seen again (and fellow comic relief character David becomes much less clownish).

Joanne Yates

Joanne Yates

Played by: Kimberly Sustad

MacLaren's new FBI partner as of season 3.

• Face Death with Dignity: After the Faction essentially brings forth a nuclear apocalypse, Yates goes to look at the sky. That said, as the timeline is completely rewritten after MacLaren goes back in time and warns the Director not to send Traveler 001 Yates is still alive.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: She is assigned to work with the Traveler program, and expects the Travelers to adhere to a long list of restrictions and protocols that the FBI has created for their cooperation. The Travelers, for their part, do their best to circumvent her at every turn.
• Pet the Dog: Despite being very reluctant to aid the Traveler team, and has a particular dislike for Mack especially, Yates shows a little empathy towards him and the problems with his wife, replying: "Same here."
• Straight Gay: Yates is married to another woman, although her wife is neither seen nor named. The only thing known about Yates' wife is that she and Yates are having marital problems.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Because of the restrictions she expects the Travelers to adhere to and also the Protocols that restrict Travelers from revealing too much of their mission, Yates and Mack tend to butt heads a lot during Season Three.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers a particularly scathing one to MacLaren and to the Travelers as a whole, accusing them that they did not come to stop the end of the world but instead to speed up the process. Considering that at that point the world was about to burn up in nuclear fire, she's not entirely wrong.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Her main function throughout Season 3 is to point out the questionable morals of the Travelers' operations, reminding the audience of just how messed up it all looks from a regular person's perspective.

Grace Day / Traveler 0027

Played by: Jennifer Spence

A guidance councilor based at Trevor's school

• Abhorrent Admirer: Trevor seems badly squicked by Grace's open sexual interest in him starting in Season 3. It's then revealed in a later episode that after sharing three lifetimes with his original wife, nobody else could really compare for him.
• Ambiguous Disorder: The Traveler Grace comes off this way thanks to apparently having No Social Skills, No Indoor Voice, and no impulse control, and freely admits at her trial that she and the other original Programmers may have qualified as "sociopaths." Much of this might be attributed to growing up in a Bad Future where most niceties of civilization have become obsolete, in which she was part of a tiny, relatively pampered elite — and the fact that she went rogue when she came back to the past and got none of the standard cultural training for Travelers.
• Break the Haughty: Whatever 001 put her through in the S2 finale, it seems to have destroyed the last of the arrogance she took with her into the past.
• Hypocrite: After her trial, complains that the Director had humiliated and used her for his goals in almost EXACTLY the same way she had used others like Marcy.
• I Did What I Had to Do: The Traveler Grace is totally unapologetic about rebooting Marcy without her permission, rebooting the Director, and as a direct consequence of that action, causing the deaths of hundreds of people that missions she interrupted were supposed to save as she claimed it was the only way to stop The Faction.
• Insufferable Genius: Other programmers grudgingly admit she is the best programmer there is in the future, but she never even considers that she might be wrong about something - and her ego causes her to make several HUGE blunders. At the end of her trial for treason, this falls all the way into Suicidal Overconfidence, where she not only refuses to admit she might have been wrong, she demands that they THANK her for her actions.
  • Gets worse in S2 when her attempt to convince her fellow hostages that time travel is impossible only succeeds in thoroughly blowing her cover, thanks to her inability to resist revealing her in-depth technical knowledge of exactly why it's impossible.
• Jerkass: 0027 shows absolutely no empathy for anybody or anything except the Director and the Grand Plan.
• Kidnapped by an Ally: Poor Ms. Day has the scare of her life when she's kidnapped by Trevor, who wants to save her life. It doesn't work.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: It's eventually revealed that Grace's cavalier attitude toward the Traveler chain of command and the Protocols is because she was the leader of the team that created the Director and helped write the Protocols.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: The Traveler Grace is quite different from the original, and doesn't make much effort to fake it. To other people, it seems the school counselor Took a Level in Jerkass.
  Girl: ... And then Rene said that all my pictures should have #BoobJobWon'tFixThis on them.
  Grace: So ... you didn't retaliate?
  Girl: What?
  Grace: This is your problem exactly. You let people walk all over you. You need to establish dominance.
  Next time Rene says something to you, disparage her home life. Her mother's had a DUI.
  Alternatively, you can just accept the fact that you're less attractive and uninteresting. That option may even be more realistic.
  Girl: [Beat] Uh, I'm gonna go.
  Grace: Good talk.
• The Sociopath: Receives this accusation from her colleague, 0029, during her trial in S2. She throws this back in his face, arguing it was a necessary trait for high-ranking members of the program. Since he turns out to be a traitor, she has a point.

Other Travelers and associated characters

The Director

The Director

Played by: N/A

The overall supervisor of the Grand Plan.

• Artificial Intelligence: We find out at the end of the first season that the Director we've been hearing about all along isn't a person but one of these.
• Broken Pedestal: While it should seem obvious that working with incomplete records and experimental technology will produce a certain number of unexpected and unwanted results, it always seem to come as a horrible shock to Travelers just arrived from the future that the Director is capable of making mistakes. Some react better to this revelation than others.
• The Chessmaster: The Grand Plan is one great world-spanning chessgame played by the Director from hundreds of years in the future, with individual Travelers nothing more than pawns who are never allowed to see more of the overall strategy than is strictly necessary.
• Deus est Machina: While the Director does not explicitly claim to be a god, the Travelers' relationship to it greatly resembles religious devotion, complete with the occasional crisis of faith and Rage Against the Heavens.
• Omniscient Morality Licence: The Travelers try very hard to believe that everything the Director does is the best possible thing it could have done under the circumstances, but whether it actually has one of these is very much a grey area.

Victoria Boyd

Played by: Kristine Cofsky

• All There in the Manual: Boyd's first name is never spoken aloud in any of the episodes she appears in but it is written on her business card.
• Friend on the Force: Boyd has a long-established identity as a local cop. Though he's posing as an FBI agent himself, MacLaren sometimes gets help from her since he can't explain what he's doing to his partner and coworkers.
• The Medic: Boyd has had to fill in that role as well as team leader due to casualties within her own Traveler cell. She often helps support the main team in that capacity as well, lending aid to Marcy.
• You Are in Command Now: She was originally supposed to be the Medic in her Traveler cell, but because her cell's original leader died somebody, in her words, "had to step up."

The Engineer

The Engineer / Traveler 0117 ("Mrs. Bloom")

Played by: Karin Konoval

• Cigarette of Anxiety: In a way. Mrs. Bloom is dying of cancer, and smokes marijuana to relieve the pain; the Engineer continues to smoke freely, reasoning she only has to live a couple more hours and perform a very simple task, and refuses to do it in pain.
• Cool Old Lady: Exhibits snark born of experience, much like Trevor. Unlike Trevor, her host shows her age (to some extent). She's over a hundred years old in her original life.
• Stern Teacher: Not a teacher as such, but a high-ranking Traveler authority figure; after she grills MacLaren, Trevor privately tells him that she goes hardest on those she thinks have the most potential.

Vincent Ingram

Traveler 001 ("Vincent Ingram") and later Traveler 5692

Played by: Enrico Colantoni

The first experimental Traveler, only meant to send a message and die. He has turned violently against the Director after the death of his wife.

• Ambiguous Disorder: Of course, we know Vincent's fear of the Director and Travelers is Properly Paranoid, but he still exhibits many symptoms mental illness similar to OCD and anxiety from his lifetime of hiding. His desire to seek treatment from Dr. Perrow seems to be genuine, at least at first.
• Big Bad: Of Season 2, and possibly the series as a whole.
• Body Surf: The Faction offers its resources to 001 when the Travelers discover Dr. Perrow's secret, including letting him use them as a supply of new bodies. From that point forward, he could be anybody.
• Brain Uploading: He makes a major project out of reinventing this technology in the past to enable his Body Surf strategy of immortality. It then evolves into a plan to send his consciousness into a machine permanently, to become the seed of a new Director.
• Broken Pedestal: Part of the reason he rebels. He realizes the Director is fallible when his initial mission puts him in the wrong body, causing the mission itself to be a pointless failure. It goes further when the Director breaks his understanding of its ethical programming, overwriting his wife when she had done nothing wrong and wasn't already slated to die - an act he, reasonably, sees as murder. After this point, he goes simply from fearing the Director to being its enemy.
• Create Your Own Villain: The Director really should have picked someone more loyal to be the first test subject. Failing that, it should have left him alone instead of killing his wife right before his eyes.
• Exact Words: In his promise to Dr. Perrow, he says, "Ava will see her mother shortly." Not "Ava will see you shortly."
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Claims to be doing all of this to protect the son he had with his wife as Vincent Ingram, whom he no longer believes to be safe after the Director showed its willingness to kill to get to him.
• Gender Bender: As far as we know, 001 is the first Traveler to enter a body with a different gender from his original one, abandoning the body of Vincent Ingram for Katrina Perrow. (Note that his conversation with the Faction appears to confirm he was originally male.)
• Godhood Seeker: His goal evolves from simply wanting protection from the Director's power to replacing the Director outright, which he refers to as this.
• Grand Theft Me: Above and beyond the normal case of any Traveler. He transferred into the body of his psychiatrist, Dr. Perrow, to escape being overwritten by the Director.
• Hypocrite: He constantly cites the death of his wife as murder (as she died by Messenger), but he has zero hang-ups about overwriting other Travelers or innocent bystanders.
• I Have Your Wife: A method 001 employs very effectively, by kidnapping all the loved ones of the team to force them to publicly confess and break their Masquerade.
• Morality Pet: His wife seemed to be this for him before she died - he cites her influence as the original reason he became a benefactor at the hospital, before discovering Simon.
• Pet the Dog: Minutes before fleeing the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, he is compelled to shout out a warning to everyone around him, which is of course ignored. This is the last purely altruistic act he will ever commit.
• Properly Paranoid: Despite what his therapist thinks, there really is a vast secret conspiracy of body-snatchers from the future who's out to get him.
• Psycho Prototype: 001 is essentially this for the Traveler program. Their first attempt at sending someone back to the past goes horribly wrong in every way it can go wrong, in a way that ends up driving him insane and turning him into the greatest possible threat to his fellow Travelers and the Grand Plan.
• The Sociopath: Whether he was always like this or it's the result of a lifetime of fear and isolation, 001 seems to have zero concern for the well-being of any human beings but his wife, his business partner and his son - two out of three of whom are already dead. As for the Grand Plan to save the world from its future collapse, he's actively hostile to it.
• Suicide Mission: Moreso than the typical Traveler. He volunteered to be the first Traveler because he was already almost dead from a "disease that doesn't exist yet" in the future, and his mission was designed for him to simply leave a message behind in the few minutes before he died in 9/11.
• Torture Technician: 001 rarely if ever personally gets his hands dirty, but seems to have a keenly developed sense of the physical and psychological techniques of breaking a person.
• Villain Team-Up: The Greater-Scope Villain of Season 2 is the Faction's nebulous leadership from the future that works to sabotage the Director's plans in the past. Season 2 ends with 001 giving a Rage Against the Heavens rant against the Director's manipulations that sounds a lot like the Faction's ideology. Turns out they're led by 001's Alternate Self, who was never sent back in the new timeline the Travelers created.
• Would Not Hurt A Child: To his credit, he not only acts as a Papa Wolf to his own son but keeps his promise to Dr. Perrow to care similarly for her daughter after he kills her and takes her identity.

Simon

Traveler 0004 ("Simon")

Played by: Chad Krowchuk

A Traveler tasked with engineering the communication infrastructure that future Travelers rely on.

Ellis

Traveler 0014 ("Ellis")

Played by: Tom McBeath

A Traveler who worked as a programmer and a compatriot of Grace/Traveler 0027 in the future

Rick Hall

Traveler number unknown:Rick Hall

Played by: Louis Ferreira

A Traveler who has been running missions for a long time with his cell who occasionally aids and butts heads with the core cell.

• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a complete asshole with zero morals, but his loyalty to the Director is beyond question.
• Shadow Archetype: He's got the same background and goals as the protagonists, but he's abandoned both their professional discipline and their basic human decency in favor of getting the job done with whatever brute-force solutions are most convenient. He claims that after enough time in the present, every Traveler turns out like him.

Andrew Graeme

Traveler 7189 ("Andrew Graeme")

Played by: Christopher Heyerdahl

A mathematician sent back to explain the perils of a new technology to its inventor. The host he's assigned turns out to be a serial killer who was never caught in the original timeline.

• Abusive Mom: Original!Andrew was abused by his mother and targeted other abusive mothers in his killings.
• Creepy Good: He has a decidedly unsettling appearance and mannerism, inherited from his host, but as 7189 he's gentle, friendly and here to save the world.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The original Andrew Graeme liked to eat parts of his victims. Poor 7189 starts his time in the 21st century by puking up an eyeball.
• The Only One: He's the only Traveler who's got the right education to conclusively prove to the inventor that her technology is unstable.
• Serial Killer: The original Andrew Graeme.
• The Woobie: He starts out by being set on fire, and no sooner has he been put out than he vomits up a human eyeball and realises that the body he's in is a cannibalistic serial killer (welcome to the 21st, indeed!). He's promptly arrested for his host's crimes, has to dodge the police to carry out his mission, and in the end seems set to be incarcerated for life (if not executed). At no point during all of this does he display any aggression or resentment, only fear that he won't get to save the world. He does, at least, get to do that.

Others

Major Gleason

Played by: David Lewis

Dr Delaney

Played by: Kyra Zagorsky

• Badass Normal: Can match wits with Trevor as an engineer despite him coming from 400 years in the future and having 200 years of experience over her.
• Insufferable Genius: Inventing a means to synthesize antimatter puts her way ahead of anyone else in her field in 2017, and she makes sure everyone around her knows it.
• Scientist vs. Soldier: Her conflict with Gleason is the routine version of this trope.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: An interesting variation. Grace Day was on the show from the beginning, but after Dr. Delaney leaves the show, Grace is overwritten by Traveler 0027, who is very similar in personality to Delaney, if rougher around the edges due to coming directly from a Bad Future without training. It helps that Kyra Zagorsky and Jennifer Spence look vaguely similar.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The Helios arc ends with MacLaren's team surviving specifically to protect Delaney's life because "the future needs her". She is never seen again.

Private Wilson

Played by: Giacomo Baessato

Mom

Played by: Eileen Pedde

Jenny

Traveler 4514 ("Jenny") and later an unnamed/unnumbered Traveler

Played by: Stephanie Bennett

A Traveler who has come to "help" Phillip with his addiction problem.

• Femme Fatale Spy: Used sex and drugs to steal a virus formula from Phillip for The Faction.

Aleksander Andrieko

Played by: David Raynolds

A young boy whom the team rescues from kidnappers — under false pretenses, it turns out, as a death Philip was compelled by his conscience to prevent even though it conflicts with the Director's plans.

• Bad People Abuse Animals: Played with. Alex has a hideout filled with skins and trophies from animals he's killed, and everyone who knows about it already assumes he's a budding serial killer. Subverted in the end. It may well be that this is what he evolves into in the future, but he only started hunting as a way to feed himself because his foster parents were starving him. MacLaren's example is enough to turn him off the path of cruelty.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Just spending the day with McLaren and having someone who seems to actually give a damn about him changes the probabilities involved in calculating his future, enough to make the Director relent and expend the necessary resources to get him to a loving home.
• The Bus Came Back: No one was expecting the kid from the Season 1 episode "Aleksander" to come back in Season 3's "Protocol 3". Hearing his name again as a "mission" and realizing what it implies is a major Gut Punch.
• Creepy Child: He's not an easy kid to like, though there are very understandable reasons for it.
• Department of Child Disservices: Where Aleksander ends up after his rescue — a bureaucracy that finds his PTSD from his experiences and the culture barrier from being the child of impoverished immigrants makes him a "problem child", and relegates him to an abusive group home not much better than an Orphanage of Fear. Sadly, all too much Truth in Television.
• Evil Orphan: Young Aleksander is already getting this reputation from his classmates and fellow foster kids.
• Freudian Excuse: From what we see, Future Aleksander will have one hell of one if anyone confronts him about it. Unfortunately, that won't make a difference to his victims, who have become the Director's priority.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: We don't know exactly what Aleksander's destiny was going to be, but it's apparently bad enough that the Director set a mission for him to be killed as soon as possible just to make sure. It's bad enough that Philip, who saved him in the first place, doesn't question its necessity, and unqualifiedly describes Future Aleksander as a "monster".
• Full-Name Basis: Before we get to meet him, Philip consistently calls him by his full name, Aleksander Andrieko, because he knows him from his memory of news stories about his death. After the team saves his life, Philip still calls him this, because he now recognizes him from the new historical records he's downloaded... which are far worse.
• Happy Ending Override: When we left Aleksander in his namesake S1 episode, it seemed like he was going back to his mom and everything was fine. Then she dies.
• My Greatest Failure: Philip sees tricking the team into breaking the Protocols to save Aleksander as this, which is why he bears the burden of knowing the future consequences alone and refuses to share it.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Alex only appears in two episodes but his existence reverberates through the whole show as a symbol of the moral burden of the butterfly effect power time travelers have. We learn that in the current version of the timeline, Philip's decision to save Aleksander is taught as an example of the gravity of Protocol Three — and people who disagree that Philip did anything wrong are prime fodder for recruitment by the Faction.
• Thank Your Prey: We get a major adjustment to our assumption Aleksander is some kind of psycho killer when he prays over the corpse of a coyote accidentally caught in one of his traps.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Time travel variant. We only meet him as the sweet kid he currently is, and have to imagine what kind of man he is in the future.
• Walking Spoiler: It's hard to talk about the fact that he comes back at all without spoiling the episode in which he does so.
• Wham Shot: Seeing Philip passed out in his chair from a heroin bender (after having been clean for a long time) with photos of Aleksander all over his desktop, and realizing what the "new mission" he was meant to pass on must entail.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Grant's mission to kill a child in cold blood plays out very much like the binding of Isaac in Genesis.
• The Woobie: One of the biggest woobies on a show full of woobies. Made worse by the knowledge he's destined to become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.