Timeless continues to mix history, intrigue, and moral quandaries as our trio is unwillingly made to travel back in time.

After last week’s episode changing the historical events surrounding the Hindenburg disaster, this week’s episode decided to go for bigger stakes: the assassination of President Lincoln.

What we know

Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic) and his minions, for reasons not fully clear, want to disrupt the very core of American civilization. Their end game is unknown, but they are driven by a book/diary that Lucy (Abigail Spencer) supposedly wrote at a not yet disclosed date in the future.

Saving Mr. Lincoln and more

Flynn isn’t out to save Lincoln. He’s actually out to decimate history. This time he maneuvers to have the two presidents who historically followed Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as Secretary of State Seward assassinated too.

Fortunately, history more or less pans out as it is supposed to due to the quick actions of Lucy, Wyatt (Matt Lanter), and Rufus (Malcolm Barrett).

How did history change?

In the big picture, Lincoln is still assassinated, only this time it was by an unknown assailant, A.K.A. Flynn. John Wilkes Booth is still eventually blamed as the ringleader of the plot. He is then tried, sentenced, and put to death for treason.

There are also now a variety of people who have seen a semiautomatic weapon a hundred years before such an item should exists. How many will believe the excuse of Prussian manufacturing?

An actress named Rebekah Shakesman, A.K.A. Lucy, gets credited with thwarting Grant’s assassination. Rebekah also makes the acquaintance of Lincoln’s son, Robert, who is clearly smitten with her.

Rufus, A.K.A Denzel Washington, saves President Johnson, but a white man gets the credit in the history books. Perhaps more importantly, though, Rufus interacts with a group of young, Black soldiers and gives them life advice. Did this advice change their path? Who are their descendants? Did Rufus change history by doing this?

Wyatt manages to save Seward, but gets shot in the process. He’s lucky that he got to return to a time with penicillin, or things might not have worked out so well.

Moral dilemmas

Wyatt points out that it’s tough to see who has the moral high ground. If you could save someone, shouldn’t you? How is Lucy wanting to bring her sister back different than Wyatt wanting his wife, or saving gold old Honest Abe?

From Rufus’ point of view, how can they not save Lincoln and save the South from the Jim Crow Laws, and the discrimination that sees minimal improvement until the time of Dr. King in the 1960’s a hundred years later.

For now Lucy is sticking to her mantra of not changing history, though she is tempted to cave in.

Rufus is also feeling less and less sure about recording Wyatt and Lucy for his boss, Connor Mason (Paterson Joseph). Why do the lives of Wyatt and Lucy fascinate him? How does this all relate to the mysterious Rittenhouse?

Present day ripples

Who knows how Rufus and Wyatt’s lives may now be affected? Lucy, on the other hand, has had some help piecing together what went wrong in her own timeline.

Thanks to the help of Rufus’ coworker, Jiya, Lucy knows that her mother and father never met because her father actually married a Hindenburg survivor’s descendant.

Since Lucy’s mom and dad never met, her dad never managed to influence her mom to take up smoking; ergo, her mom isn’t dying of lung cancer. Additionally, this is why Lucy’s sister Amy isn’t around, since her mom and dad never met.

But how is Lucy then still existing? Dun, dun, dun! The other shoe drops, and Lucy realizes that the man she has always assumed is her father, isn’t her biological father.

This all leads us to more questions. Who is Lucy’s father? Who is her fiance? Is Lucy’s mother somehow in on the Rittenhouse connection? How is Garcia Flynn connected to Lucy?

Timeless will return Monday on NBC at 10:00/9:00.

Which ‘Timeless’ mystery do you most want the answer to?