Travelers: The TV series that anticipated the future

Travelers was a science fiction television series that aired from 2016 to 2018, spanning three seasons. The disturbing story managed to anticipate the future thanks to its original plot and ideas.

Travelers centers on five individuals whose consciousnesses are replaced by those of five travelers from the future just before they die according to historical records. It quickly becomes clear that this replacement of consciousness is equivalent to the death of the original human being, who is the owner of the body that receives the time traveler's consciousness. The moral justification presented is that the host was going to die anyway; the travelers simply use that opportunity to continue the host's existence and try to avoid the terrifying future they come from, even though this could mean that they never existed in the first place.

The basis of the series is captivating, especially since the time travelers in our era are not just the five main characters; there are thousands of them, and our five protagonists form just one group that acts like a terrorist cell. All the work of the various cells is organized by a mysterious director, who near the end of the first season is revealed to be an artificial intelligence operating on a quantum supercomputer in the future. People can tell it's a machine because it's relentless; the travelers carry out many morally questionable actions and allow calamities they know about from historical records to happen, all under the assumption that the Director has a plan and that his Grand Strategy will prevent the future they come from from materializing.

Both the consequences of their new identities and the difficulties in their unfamiliar lives will be the context in which these travelers from the future will have to prevent a disaster that will significantly impact the future, even if it forever alters their lives and even compromises their own existence, because they have a mission and will not stop until they complete it.

As the series progresses, viewers begin to understand that choices are more essential than strictly following the Director's plan. Strictly adhering to it causes an unexpected butterfly effect, putting our heroes in danger from an evil force they had never known before and which now appears, traveling back in time to influence their lives and humanity in general.

Final explained

As could be anticipated, Travelers concluded in a confusing way, which attracts some and displeases other viewers.

The end of Travelers is a surprising reboot of the Netflix series that even the most dedicated to it might need to clarify. Grant MacLaren returns to a more remote past than that of the original Travelers program to try again his goal of preventing the annihilation of humanity. Netflix could decide to end Travelers, as it has not commented on whether there will be a new season.

David has passed away, Marcy has died, Grant's wife has left him, Trevor is on the verge of death, nuclear bombs have been detonated in four cities and everything has collapsed. Under these circumstances, Phillip creates a plan to send Grant to his own body years before the start of the Traveler program, and from the past, Grant sends a message to the Director in the distant future, telling him that the Travelers program is ineffective and that he should cancel it. The Director accepts, implying that nothing that happened in the initial three seasons happened. The timeline has been completely removed, although glimpses of the new timeline are clearly seen in Phillip's visions showing alternate realities.

Despite this, the Director decides to reboot the Travelers Show, which means that if the series returns for a fourth season, he can do it with the same group of characters, with an entirely new cast, or a mixture of both.

It's a total reboot: the Director does pretty much what Ted Danson does in The Good Place when things don't go as expected: he just starts over. In a sense, this gives the series the freedom to explore whatever it wants in the fourth season. On the other hand, this also detracts from the coherence of the story, since for the Director, everything is essentially a computer simulation and he can keep trying until he finally gets the desired result. However, this would be much more disheartening if the series wasn't as effective at portraying the characters.