Stitchers season 3 gets off to an entertaining start with the premiere, in which the team is facing a couple of problems: Kirsten is still trapped in her memory, and once they get her out, they’re all facing reassignment (except for Kirsten, of course).
But a stitch in “Out of the Shadows” allows for Kirsten to not only try to get what she wants (her team staying where they are) but also for someone to send her a message.
The 10 Sexiest Female TV Characters of Summer 2017 >>>
Kirsten’s Team Helps Her…
It’s been 74 hours, and even without the mission clock, we can tell that’s the case by how Cameron looks. They decide to reboot the entire lab in hopes that it will bounce Kirsten, but it doesn’t work.
Blair refuses to let Linus call out to see how his father’s doing after his surgery, but he knows something’s not right. It’s the bond between parent and child, Maggie (whose son is recovering in Germany at an Army Medical Center) explains. It’s like entanglement.
And that gets Linus thinking. They just have to figure out how to disentangle their quantum computer from Stinger’s and find out what the trigger is that Stinger used to entangle Kirsten. It’s possible that Ivy could help, so they need Fisher, who’s under guard in an interrogation room, to tell them what the NSA asked her.
When he’s brought in, he’s cuffed and a bit bruised. “I wasn’t being cooperative,” Fisher explains before assuring the others, “You should see the other guy.” (And he’s right. The other guy is brought out of the lab on a stretcher.) It’s only after he promises Blair he won’t “break any more of [his] guards” that he’s uncuffed.
Since the NSA didn’t ask Ivy the right questions, it’s up to Linus to do just that. Yes, Ivy knows how entanglement triggers work, but first she wants to know what it’s about. Kirsten, Linus tells her. But he gets something more important from her (at least to him): her smart watch to call to find out about his father. Sadly, he finds out he died two days ago and the funeral was the day before.
The new plan is to hijack the hijacked signal; Cameron hijacks Kirsten’s mother and manipulates it to force a disentanglement and get Kirsten to bounce. That means making Kirsten think that it’s her mother yelling at her to leave, that she doesn’t want her there, that Kirsten ruined her life, until Kirsten makes the bounce.
Once she’s out, she turns to Cameron for comfort, but once he admits what he did, she slaps him before passing out.
…And Then Kirsten Helps Her Team
After sleeping for nearly 18 hours, Kirsten wakes up to find Ivy (who’s now in the know about their father’s tech) in her house. The rest of her team has been arrested by “the one who looks like a sci-fi villain” (aka Blair), her sister tells her.
Kirsten confronts Blair, but he’s already thinking about an upcoming meeting with his boss, Admiral Decker, and the future — a future that will see Kirsten working with a new team and her old team reassigned. Yes, he knows where Kirsten’s mother is, and he promises her that she’s safe. The NSA needs her that way. See, Project Grasshopper, the goal of which was to accelerate the evolution of the human brain (which, ultimately, could mean the end of conflict, war, poverty and all that bad stuff if world leaders knew what other leaders were thinking), wasn’t a complete failure.
The lab accident involving her mother when Kirsten was 8 accelerated Jacqueline’s brain, and it evolved in ways that were more complex than they understand. After they’ve perfected the stitching tech, they can stitch into her living, evolved brain, map it completely and understand her completely. The cases are training missions. If Kirsten stays with the program, she can save her mother.
Kirsten then brings Ivy with her back to the lab, and they find Tim still there, 3D printing spare parts for the new team before his relocation. Thanks to Linus still having Ivy’s smart watch, they track the others to an NSA facility, and all Kirsten has to do is use 3D-printed fingerprints and a badge saying she’s another agent, Nora Dublin (currently in Cairo), to get in and get them out with a fake prison transfer. There’s a minor hiccup when the fingerprints don’t seem to be working, but once Kirsten cleans the scanner, she’s good.
To her surprise, however, the team’s just hanging out in a room. Cameron’s even cooking. They are, after all, just being relocated. Or, at least, that’s the old plan. Kirsten’s new plan is to get them out of there, find her mother and use that knowledge as leverage to force Blair to let them continue working together. It almost works too, until another guard finds the guard they left tied up (and with Cameron’s crepe) in the detention room.
Cameron does get a chance to apologize for what he did, and while Kirsten is grateful that he got her out, she’s now stuck remembering her mother that way. “She was [real] to me,” she explains.
Quiz: Who is Your TV Boss? >>>
This Stitch is — and Gets — Personal
The team is only briefly detained again before Blair summons them back to the lab. His son was killed in a hit-and-run, and he wants Kirsten to stitch. Though Maggie agrees, Kirsten refuses, as does Linus. After all, Blair didn’t care when it was Linus’ family who died and when he missed his father’s funeral. That’s why they’re better than he is, Maggie explains.
Kirsten does stitch into Blair’s son, and after seeing Blair reading to him at age 8 and then arguing about a girl (the last time he saw him), she sees the death memory. Her father hit him, to send her a message: “Blair wants to kill your mother. Do not trust him.” When she bounces, she claims she didn’t see anything, but Blair doesn’t buy it and threatens to shoot Camille. And so Kirsten tells him what she saw and what her father said, leading to Blair declaring that he’s going to find Daniel Stinger and kill him.
“Touch me again and I’ll rip out your rib cage and wear it like a vest,” Camille warns Blair, but he’s already planning to ship them all off (again). And when Kirsten protests, he reminds her that he can still take Ivy away.
But what Blair doesn’t know is that stitching into Nathan’s brain gave her something on his father: a photo that showed him with his boss and her father. She once again poses as Nora Dublin to meet with the Admiral and threatens to go public with her knowledge of the Stitchers program. What does she want? Her team back, with Maggie in charge, and to never see Blair again. Oh, and she’s looking for someone — her mother — and she knows that he knows where she is.
Everything Makes Sense When — Wait, What?!
Kirsten finds out that Nina left Cameron a note saying goodbye after she waited three days for him. But he’s okay because he realized he wasn’t in love with her. “How long would you have waited for me when I was trapped in my memory?” Kirsten asks. “Forever,” he tells her. “Everything makes sense when I’m with you,” she says before kissing him.
But wait! She pulls back to ask what he meant when he said “You can’t help me if you’re stuck in here” when he hijacked her mother, and he tells her he never said that. So who did? she wonders.
Are you happy that Cameron and Kirsten are finally together on Stitchers? Should Kirsten be worried about Blair since her father killed his son? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Stitchers season 3 airs Mondays at 9/8c on Freeform. Want more news? Like BuddyTV’s Facebook page.
(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.
