Diksha Sundriyal
Based on Stephen King’s book of the same name, ‘11.22.63’ follows the story of an English teacher named Jake Epping, who embarks on a quest to change the world by stopping JFK’s assassination in 1963. This journey leads him on a path that shows him the possibility of a different life in the 60s. The more time he spends there, the more comfortable he gets with his new life. But as the past starts to push back, resisting the changes brought upon by his mere existence, Jake is forced to face some harsh realities. The ending episode delivers a sucker punch that brings Jake’s story to a fitting end. SPOILERS AHEAD.
11.22.63 Plot Synopsis
Jake Epping is an English teacher in Lisbon, Maine. He is divorced and doesn’t have much going on in his life. He frequents a diner owned by a man named Al, who, one day, reveals a shocking secret to him. It turns out that there is a closet inside the diner that leads a person to October 21, 1960. Every time a person travels through it, the past is reset, which means that the time traveller has the opportunity to rewrite things as many times as they want. Al, particularly, has become obsessed with saving JFK, believing that if he didn’t die, things like the Vietnam War wouldn’t have happened, and the world would be a better place.
The problem is that when a person tries to change the past, it pushes back, especially when these changes could completely change a timeline. One of these pushbacks has appeared in the form of cancer, which means Al cannot save the President anymore. So, he transfers this responsibility to Jake, who is initially unwilling, but then decides to do it, believing that the mission might give a purpose to his life. With Jake landing in 1960, he has about three years to figure out how to save JFK. Due to his own journey on the same path, Al already had a battle plan laid out. To save the President, they’d have to find and possibly kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Al shares everything he found out about the assassin’s movements and how to stop him.
While Jake starts out alone, he is joined by others in this journey. A young man named Bill becomes his partner and right-hand man in surveilling Oswald. At the same time, Jake creates a cover for himself by moving to a Texan town called Jodie, where he secures a job as an English teacher. He also meets a woman named Sadie, with whom he falls in love. As their relationship progresses, dark things about her past come to light, while he tries to keep his true purpose a secret from her. At the same time, the past keeps reminding him that he doesn’t belong there, and Jake feels it pushing back at him at critical times.
What Happened to the Diner? What Happened to Harry’s Family?
After going through a long and trying journey, Jake finally succeeds in his task. In the eighth and final episode of the show, the day of the assassination arrives. By this time, it has been confirmed that the shooter is Oswald himself, and knowing exactly where he is going to shoot from, Jake decides to confront and stop him. He is joined in this endeavor by Sadie, who is also dedicated to seeing the plan through. As expected, they find Oswald at the book depository where he used to work. Their presence distracts him long enough for Kennedy’s motorcade to pass without anyone getting killed. A scuffle ensues between Jake and Oswald, which ends with Jake shooting Oswald in the chest and killing him on the spot.
At the same time, he discovers that a stray bullet caught Sadie, and she dies. The cops arrive on the scene and arrest Jake. They try to pin the shooting on him, but eventually, the truth comes to light, and he is let go. With nothing left for him in the past, Jake goes back to 2016. He expects to return to Al’s Diner since only two minutes should have passed since he entered the closet and travelled to the past. However, what he finds is the remains of the diner. It turns out to have been blown up by a bomb, and Jake can see the rest of the city has also suffered the same fate. While trying to understand what has happened, he crosses paths with Harry, the janitor from his high school, whose past Jake had changed by tampering with events in 1960.
In the original timeline, Harry’s violent father had killed his mother and siblings. He shared this story with the class taught by Jake. So, when Jake travelled to the past, he thought about doing Harry a favor. He killed Harry’s father and saved his family. It turns out that after JFK survived, he was re-elected for a second term as the President. But then, George Wallace came into power, and things escalated so quickly with the Soviets that bombs were dropped on major American cities, and a lot of people, including Harry and his family, were forced to stay in the refugee camps established by Kennedy. Harry’s sister went missing, and his mother died of the flu in the camp. His brother joined a militia and was never seen again. It seems that despite Jake’s efforts, they couldn’t be saved in the long run.
Why Does Jake Reset the Past? Does He Save JFK and Sadie?
After talking with Harry, Jake discovers that by saving JFK, he actually made everything worse. The world is in a much worse place than it was before. Moreover, in the past, Sadie and Bill, too, died because of him, so nothing but pain and suffering came of his endeavor. With this, one thing becomes clear to Jake: there is no point in changing things, especially when it comes to saving and/or killing people. So, he decides to travel back in time again. By doing this, he resets the timeline completely, erasing every single thing he’d done the last time around. This means that if he doesn’t tamper with the events now, JFK will die, and when he goes back to 2016, it will be exactly how he’d left it the first time around.
In the same vein, he also decides not to save Harry’s family. By doing this, he won’t just spare Harry more pain, but he’d also prevent himself from crossing paths with Bill, who killed himself the last time because of Jake’s actions. While he applies this logic to the others, he doesn’t stop to think that the same holds true for Sadie. In his mind, her death is the only thing that needs to be stopped, but at the same time, he also believes that he is supposed to end up with her. When he enters the reset timeline, he remembers that Sadie had told him about being in Lisbon around the same time. Sure enough, he finds her driving around town with her cousins. Even though he knows she won’t remember anything, he approaches her with the idea of introducing himself.
Even though Jake is not in good shape at the time, he captures Sadie’s attention. But then, the Yellow Card Man shows up. The man was the first one to notice Jake when he was sent on trial runs to the past by Al. At the time, Jake didn’t understand who he was and why he kept telling Jake to go back. But then, on the night before Kennedy’s assassination, the man appears to Jake and tells him his story. It turns out that the man is also a time traveller who came to the past in an effort to save his daughter from dying. But no matter how many times he returned and no matter what he did, she always ended up drowning to death. The grief of losing his daughter and the trauma of witnessing her death again and again broke him down completely. And yet, he couldn’t stop himself from trying one more time.
Do Jake and Sadie End Up Together?
The Yellow Card Man has been through the cycle of time travel long enough to know how it can trap a person in itself. It’s a loop that will keep repeating, and no matter what a person does, the past never really changes. He knows that he can never save his daughter; he has tried enough times. He also knows that he will never stop trying and thus will stay stuck in the loop, losing his mind a little bit more each time. For now, he is self-aware enough to warn Jake that this could be his future, too. The Man can see that Jake has become fixated on saving Sadie, and while he might think he will save the woman he loves and spend the rest of her life with him, it will never really happen. The hope will keep bringing him back, and he will become another victim of the loop.
At first, Jake denies his claims. He knows what the Man is talking about, but because he has already saved JFK, he has proven that things can be changed in the past. While the Man may not have succeeded in saving his daughter, Jake will save Sadie, no matter what. As the Man leaves and Sadie walks up to him, Jake seems intent on his initial mission. But the moment he talks to her and looks at her face, he realises that the Yellow Card Man is right. He knows how the past has a tendency to push back, and it will continue doing so as long as there is an anomaly around. In Sadie’s case, Jake is that anomaly, and as long as he is out of his own time, Sadie will never be safe. So, he makes a hard decision and lets her go. When Jake returns this time, nothing has changed.
He goes back to his life, but he is still heartbroken about not being able to have a life with Sadie. Still, curiosity gets the best of him, and he googles her name. He is pleased to discover that not only is she alive, but she is also being honored and celebrated for her work as a librarian in Jodie. This means that she escaped Johnny and came to Jodie, and had a good life without Jake’s intervention. To see her one last time, he travels to Jodie and attends the ceremony. Later, he asks her for a dance, and though she doesn’t recognise him, she feels she knows him somehow. Instead of telling her the truth, he tells her that he is someone she knew in a different life. They dance for a while, and then Jake goes back to his life, realising that the present is the only place he can and should be.
