Stitchers – All In

By starrymag | May 27, 2016

By: Lyndsey Nadeau

 

In the “Stitchers” Season Two finale episode All In, Kirsten (Emma Ishta) finds many of the answers she’s been looking for, but ultimately is left with even more questions. In the midst of this, the rest of the Stitchers are faced with daunting challenges in their own personal lives.

 

Answers Leading to Questions

Kirsten’s at her crazy research wall again and Cameron (Kyle Harris) is concerned, per usual. He wants to make sure Kirsten is okay after her ex-boyfriend/stalker was killed. She says she’s fine with the fact he’s dead, but isn’t too keen on losing the last chance she had of finding her father. After what happened to Liam (Jack Turner), Kirsten is hesitant to bring Ivy (Sarah Davenport) into the mess. Cameron hopes she’ll figure it out soon so she can take a break from her crazy research wall and be a normal person, but that probably won’t happen.

 

The Stitchers team enters Liam’s memory and Kirsten discovers that Daniel Stinger (C. Thomas Howell) hired him to learn everything there is to know about her. He even faked the British accent in order to charm her and told Stinger his plans of trying to marry her. He’d planned to stay in the Los Angeles area to keep tabs on her if she rejected his proposal. Throughout this discussion, Kirsten can hear an audible buzzing sound.

 

Back to the crazy research wall, Kirsten is having a mental breakdown and tearing everything off it. In the midst of this, she finds a new equation that she didn’t write. Camille (Allison Scagliotti) denies that it was her doing, leading Kirsten to believe it was probably Ivy. It’s an equation for power lost during the transmission of electricity, which reminds her of the buzzing sound in the stitch. Ivy had given her clues to find their father because she couldn’t say it out loud.

 

Meanwhile, Cameron and Nina (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are together again and she accidentally discovers he’s in the NSA. He explains that his job is to keep Kirsten safe and that’s why they’re so close. She buys this and doesn’t seem to mind.

 

Kirsten heads to the suspected location and finds Ivy instead of her father. Stinger fled when he found out she was coming with the NSA. This can only mean that Stinger must be connected with someone inside the NSA. Needless to say, the heartwarming long-lost-sister bonding is over and Ivy leaves after she divulges that Ed Clark wasn’t exactly a good guy. He withheld important information from Kirsten, like the small fact her mother is still alive.

 

Kirsten barges into Maggie’s (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) office to ask if her mother is dead, assuming that everyone knows except her. She wants to talk to Ivy, but (unsurprisingly) her sister does not want to talk to her. Maggie thinks that Ivy was being groomed for the “family business” a/k/a/ stitching, but she doesn’t think he’ll contact her again after what happened. Maggie truly doesn’t know if Kirsten’s mother is alive and insists that she doesn’t call Fisher and ask him to reach out to the district attorney’s office, meaning she actually wants her to do this.

 

Fisher (Damon Dayoub) quickly receives an exhumation order for Jacqueline Stinger. Fisher, Kirsten and Cameron visit the crypt where her mother’s body is supposed to be and find an empty casket. Kirsten meets up with Mitchell Blair (John Billingsley) and threatens to leave the Stitchers program if she doesn’t get an answer about her mother, but he reminds her that she has no power. She is his possession.

 

Of course, Kirsten chooses Cameron’s apartment as the location to unleash her next mental breakdown, leading to the ideal opportunity for a touching “Camsten” moment. He comforts her and she says she’s never had a sense of “home,” except for when she’s with him. This leads to a long kiss, which ends with her apologizing and rushing out the door to go home. So close to perfect…

 

Kirsten goes home and finds Camille, who is probably a more appropriate person to vent to since they likely won’t end up making out. Camille doesn’t want to listen to Kirsten whine; she wants to solve the problem. They realize that Ed Clark did, in fact, give Kirsten the answers she needed when they find a binary code on his urn, which is decoded to 10816 Eastern Blvd #2319. At this address, they find a trail of old dried-up blood leading to some type of high-tech chamber with the code JAS6/13. Instead of finding Kirsten’s mother, they find what appears to be a dead body. He jumps awake for a few seconds though before actually dying.

 

The man turns out to be Dr. Jean-Simone Khouri (Scotch Ellis Loring). He helped develop deep space sleep technology, what Kirsten assumes has kept her mother alive all these years. Before stitching into his memories, Kirsten apologizes to Cameron for accidentally kissing him and they try to pretend it never happened. Sigh…

 

Mitchell Blair barges into the lab and demands they stop the stitch, but they defy his wishes and do it anyway. In the stitch, Dr. Khouri is talking to Jacqueline who is in the hibernation chamber (or pretending to talk to her). Jacqueline has been in the chamber since the accident. She’s pulled to another memory where the NSA arrives to retrieve the “asset.” The team realizes Jacqueline was the asset that Stinger and Turner fought over all along. When Dr. Khouri refuses to give her to the NSA because she hasn’t been prepared for extraction, they try to kill him and take her anyway. He crawls into the chamber to survive.

 

Little Cameron appears again and this time she’s not hiding it. Kirsten is clearly done with all of this nonsense and she responds to him out loud so everyone can hear her. They realize he’s appearing via a quantum computer hack by Daniel Stinger, meaning Kirsten’s father has been talking to her this whole time. Kirsten’s father, in the image form of Little Cameron, takes her into her own memories, causing her to go off the map.

 

At this moment, the NSA shows up to get them to shut down while she’s in the middle of the stitch. If they succeed, Kirsten will be lost within her own memory. The Stitchers team successfully restrains them and keeps them in the interrogation room.

 

Kirsten’s father brings her to a memory where she’s having a sweet moment with her mother. There’s no time limit because she’s no longer in the stitch. Cameron hijacks the hijacker’s signal so he can convince Kirsten to make the bounce. She doesn’t want to leave the memory though. She wants to give up in her search and stay where she is, where she can be with her mother forever and have the childhood she never had.

 

In arguably the best Camsten moment of the series, Cameron leans over the tank, takes Kirsten’s hand and gently tries to convince her to come back to the family who loves her—her friends. “Maybe you’re right,” he says. “Maybe most people leave sooner or later, but you and I are not most people. No matter what you think, no matter how long it takes, I will never leave you.” While it feels like it’s just the two of them in the room, the entire team is watching this touching moment.

Meanwhile…

While Kirsten is desperately searching for answers, the rest of the team is faced with problems of their own. Linus (Ritesh Rajan) is still coping with his father’s illness. He wants to be there his father, but knows he cannot control the situation. His parents finally confess that they’ve always known what he does for work. His father wants him to stitch into his memories if anything happens to him, so that he will know how proud he’s always been of him. Linus says he doesn’t need to stitch to know that.

 

Maggie is on edge for reasons she won’t reveal to her colleagues. She first receives a text from “Family Readiness Group Iraq” in the beginning of the episode and later receives a call from a hospital in Baghdad. She’s seen staring at a photo of men in the military when Kirsten barges into her office.

 

It seems as if Camille is confused about her feelings towards Fisher. While these two have undeniable chemistry, it’s difficult to tell if there’s something more to it other than best friends. Fisher helps Camille work through her guilt regarding Liam’s death and promises that she is strong enough for this line of work. Later, she invites Fisher to her place for a glass or two of wine, but he already has plans with his estranged wife.

Season Three?

“Stitchers” has yet to be renewed for a Season Three, but Freeform would be making a mistake if the network decides to pass on an intriguing story and a great cast that only continue to improve. And besides, Kirsten can’t remain stuck in her own memories when Cameron and the rest of her friends are waiting for her to return to the real world. There are too many questions left unanswered to end the show now!