How the ‘Timeless’ Christmas Special Wrapped up the Series

After months of anticipation, NBC‘s beloved series, Timeless, wrapped up its run with a two-hour Christmas finale special tying the show up with fantastic full circle moments.

The finale took most of its first hour with the team working to figure out how to save Rufus (Malcolm Barrett) from his shocking death in San Francisco during the Season 2 finale. While Denise (Sakina Jaffrey) sends the team to the 1840s to stop Rittenhouse’s latest plan to alter the timeline, the team reels from the appearance of the future versions of Lucy (Abigail Spencer) and Wyatt (Matt Lanter) and the reveal that the answers to helping Rufus come from fixing a change in the timeline they had caused themselves — keeping Jessica (Tonya Glanz) from dying in 2012.

After Wyatt realizes that saving Jessica — his wife who turned out to be a secret Rittenhouse ally — was a mistake, he decides to take her out of the timeline. Knowing its dangerous, however, Lucy hesitates to let Wyatt do it and Flynn (Goran Višnjić) volunteers to go back to 2012 and kill her.

The mission leads to Rufus being brought back from the dead, with Flynn sacrificing himself in the process. After that, the team toasts to the memory of their former adversary-turned-friend. At the same time, Emma (Annie Wersching) realizes the change in the timeline when Jessica disappears and enacts her revenge by creating a crisis in 1950’s North Korea, hoping to lure the team to their deaths.

After a failed helicopter crash leaves them injured but still alive, Lucy, Wyatt, Rufus and Jiya (Claudia Doumit) fight to escape communist North Korea, while also helping a pregnant woman reunite with her family. In the present, Denise gets some surprise help from Lucy’s father Benjamin Cahill (John Getz) and he forces Emma to help the team.

When all hope seems lost, Jiya and Rufus have a heart-to-heart about their feelings and how things have changed since she spent three years alone in 1880s San Francisco and he came back from the dead. Lucy and Wyatt realize that their complicated history doesn’t matter and they kiss.

Just before the communists arrive to kill them the Mothership arrives with Emma and Denise coming to rescue the team. In a last minute attempt from Emma to get Lucy to spare her, Emma gets shot and killed by the communists and the team manages to escape North Korea just in time.

Back in 2018, the team returns just in time to celebrate Christmas. As the team celebrates defeating Rittenhouse Jiya and Rufus agree to move in together. Denise and Connor (Paterson Joseph) announce they have destroyed the Mothership but will keep the Life Boat, in case a new threat to the timeline comes in the future.

The series then flashes forward to 2023 and reveals Lucy to be a college professor and a mother of two girls — Flynn and Amy — that she shares with Wyatt. Jiya and Rufus are now the minds behind a big corporation, with a department that focuses on bringing science education to underprivileged youth.

The team reunites all of those years later as Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus must head back in time for one last time. The show heads to Sao Paolo in 2014, to the moment where Lucy first contacts Flynn to die him the journal and inspire him to steal the Mothership, setting up the events of the entire series.

Lucy tells Flynn that people, including the past version of herself will see him as a villain, but that he is a hero and ultimately saves history.

After a sequence of highlights from the series, the writers give one last twist to fans of the show during the final seconds of the episode when the show jumps to a teenage girls’ room and she is working on homework. After she gets up to head to dinner with her family, her notebook is filled with pictures and calculations for another time machine.

What did you think of the Timeless series finale? The series is available to stream on Hulu.