Stitchers ends its third season with one crazy cliffhanger, and it would be a mistake if we don’t get to see what comes next. It begins with what’s a pretty good morning for the team — Kirsten and Cameron couldn’t be happier that they have an oxytocin filter, she’s closer than ever to saving her mother, and Camille and Amanda decide to move in together — but then it’s one hit after another.
And a stitch that could lead them to all the answers they’ve been looking for regarding the program is just the beginning. By the end of the season 3 finale, titled “Maternis,” Kirsten does stitch into her mother again to save her, but that’s even more complicated than they thought — and there’s more going on than most of them know by the time they’re done.
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This isn’t a Normal Case
Admiral Decker and a military escort bring in Denise Nichols, a NASA mathematician who died of natural causes in her home. So why the need for a stitch? She picked their cases, and they need to know how she did it. The answer is in her spare room, which is impregnable with no visible lock or keypad, and scans indicate that the walls are made of metal a foot thick on all six sides.
There’s one problem: Linus’ oxytocin filter doesn’t quite work because of Denise’s age, so everything Kirsten sees is through a fog. She knows how Denise opened the room (voice command), but she can’t see who sent her an e-mail with the “relative location of asset” and a series of numbers. When she reads “Decision to Terminate JAS/613,” she bounces, but Maggie insists that her mother won’t be terminated.
Kirsten refuses to just sit around and wait until she can stitch into Denise again, so she heads to her house with Fisher. Fortunately, Denise programmed the system to recognize Kirsten’s voice, so when she says the phrase that Denise did in the stitch, the door to her secret room opens.
Once inside, Kirsten brings in the rest of the team and has Linus look at the papers with the algorithms for stitching she finds. It looks like Denise was tracking Kirsten during stitches or their progress mapping the brain, which could be how she chose the cases. They would need something more powerful than a quantum computer to narrow down potential cases to the exact case Kirsten’s mind needed next, Linus explains.
While Cameron and Kirsten work on making sense of the numbers from the stitch, Linus takes a break to see Ivy, who tries to convince him that what she feels isn’t a lie and he’ll understand what’s happening soon. But once she tells him that she used his NSA account to hack into Maggie’s e-mails and told her father that they’re planning to terminate Jacqueline and now he’s trying to find her, Linus has enough and leaves.
It’s when they remember Denise’s past at NASA, where she calculated trajectories, that they figure out that the numbers could track where Jacqueline was moved, Point A to Point B.
Though Cameron comes up with a plan to get past the guard at Point B (involving Kirsten going into labor), Denise told him that Kirsten would be coming. Once inside the building, they find Jacqueline, but they’re not the only ones there. Stinger is as well, for a nice family reunion. Yes, the entire family, including Ivy.
But what Stinger doesn’t know is Ivy didn’t come alone. Maggie and Fisher join them. Jacqueline’s “termination” was just a story to bring him out of hiding. Yes, Ivy set Stinger up.
But Stinger won’t go quietly, and while he, Maggie and Fisher shoot at each other, a bullet hits Jacqueline’s pod, and Stinger surrenders. Kirsten refuses to lose her mother now, and that means stitching into her in hopes that what broke her will fix her, no matter the risks. They only have one shot to get this right, Cameron warns her. One wrong move and Kirsten’s brain activity could be shut down forever.
It’s Time to Do Something Different
Cameron has never stitched into a living person before, but Stinger has. They need his help but in a strictly advisory role, Kirsten makes clear. And while Stinger wants to be on the controls, he ultimately wants to save Jacqueline, right? “Prince Charmless,” as Camille calls Stinger (to Jacqueline’s “sleeping beauty”), joins them in the lab, with Fisher behind him in case he tries anything.
When it comes time to stitch, however, they spot something on Jacqueline’s brain stem. It’s fine, Stinger insists. But when they proceed, Kirsten can’t see much, Linus can’t get a lock on the neurosync, and Jacqueline’s mind rejects it. They have to bounce.
That’s because they’re doing this backwards, Stinger realizes. They need to switch the host and the client and put Jacqueline in the tank and Kirsten in the corpse cassette. They don’t know what that’ll do to Kirsten, Cameron argues, calling Stinger out on Jacqueline being his first priority. He ends up punching Stinger (which is pretty satisfying to see). But when Stinger hits him back and after asks how it felt to channel his emotional energy into him and then for him to redirect it back, Cameron realizes he’s right. The stitch isn’t about the tech; it’s about the emotional energy because both Kirsten and Jacqueline are alive.
They’ll stitch Jacqueline into Kirsten and fire whatever residual emotional energy she has left into Kirsten’s brain and then redirect it back to her. One emotional burst of energy could wake her. But it’s very risky.
“I love you,” Cameron tells Kirsten before sealing her into the corpse cassette with a comm on an open channel so she won’t be alone. Just like Kirsten’s love will save her mother, Cameron’s love for her will save her, Stinger tells him before they stitch.
But then they run into another problem: Kirsten’s in pain, and her head feels like it’s exploding. The cassette’s rejecting her because her temperature is too high. They need to lower the temperature in there as if she’s a corpse. That works. But then Linus sees something similar on Kirsten’s brain stem as Jacqueline’s, and Stinger admits it’s a cluster of nanobots he infused into her brain when he tried to stitch her into her mother as a child. It was how the tech worked back then.
It’s all connected, they soon realize. Kirsten. Jacqueline. Denise. The algorithm that Denise’s computer used to pick cases is tuned to Kirsten’s brain and the mapping they accomplished. The computer would get homicide reports and then narrow those crimes down to a few candidates for stitching. Denise didn’t pick the cases. Kirsten did.
The data arrays that Kirsten found at Denise’s show an exchange of data, in both ways, to and from the nanobots in Kirsten’s brain. Without knowing it, Kirsten selected the exact right case based on the potential benefit to her mind mapping. They said crunching the data would require more power than a quantum computer; the human brain is the most powerful computer of all.
Since Jacqueline has a similar structure in her brain, they should be able to communicate on a quantum level. “You can’t help me if you’re stuck in here” was Jacqueline talking to Kirsten. When they stitch again, they just need to reopen that channel.
Once Kirsten focuses on all the love she has for her mother, her friends and Cameron, and channels that into Jacqueline, she sees her. It’s time for her to come home, and Cameron forces the bounce.
He hurries to Kirsten’s side, while Stinger immediately checks on Jacqueline and tells her he’ll never leave her, confirming that she is, in fact, his priority over his daughters.
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Cue Heartbreak in 3, 2, 1…
But it’s not time for happily ever after. Whatever happened to Kirsten while in the corpse cassette affected the latter part of her long-term memory, and her memories from the last few years have been compromised. She doesn’t remember anything about the program or Cameron. They don’t know if it’s permanent.
Camille, Linus and Fisher try to tell Cameron that it’ll be okay and she’ll get her memory back, but he’s blaming himself and just wants to be alone.
After they do, Kirsten joins him and remarks that he seems upset at the people who were with him. His friends? Yes. She’s not sure if they’ve met, but she introduces herself. He does the same, shaking her hand. Something happened to her memory, she says, but didn’t they meet when they were kids and he had heart surgery? She remembers he was really nice to her. (But how could she remember that?) How’s his heart? “It hurts a little,” he admits. She reaches out and puts her hand over it and tells him it’ll be okay one day.
But after he leaves her, someone else joins her and she tells that person, “I will never forgive you for what you’re making me do to him.”
How much do you need a season 4 after that Stitchers finale?! What did you think of the finale twist? Do you think it’s too soon for Camille and Amanda to move in together, especially since they just got back together? And do you think there’s a future for Linus and Ivy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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(Image courtesy of Freeform)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
If it’s on TV — especially if it’s a procedural or superhero show — chances are Meredith watches it. She has a love for all things fiction, starting from a young age with ER and The X-Files on the small screen and the Nancy Drew books. Arrow kicked off the Arrowverse and her true passion for all things heroes. She’s enjoyed getting into the minds of serial killers since Criminal Minds, so it should be no surprise that her latest obsession is Prodigal Son.
