So, how does it end?

[NumberLord]

What do you think? Does Travis let them through?

[David]

Well he's got plenty of time to do it (view spoiler)[ I mean obviously somehow technology that extends life is invented, theres an older version of himself on the other side who is hundreds of years old (hide spoiler)] maybe we will get another book...please lets have another book

[Simon]

Great book eh? The author's descriptive writing had me reading my Kindle during my lunch breaks - loved it!

[NumberLord]

Actually, David, there are several older versions of himself floating around. Besides the one on the other side of the whatsit, there's one in the future from Ghost Country, and there's the (original?) one that apparently died in order to send the whisper back.

As much as I loved the series, I can't decide if there should be another book. It's a nice open ending as is.

[Talia]

Please, just this one spoiler...............Is the breach man-made? I don't care about the HOW of it, I'll find that out when I'm able to read it (having some problems with mobility and funds at the moment, lol), but this one question is bugging me!

[Talia]

David wrote: "Well he's got plenty of time to do it [spoilers removed] maybe we will get another book...please lets have another book"

The "Poker Chips" mentioned in "Ghost Country" are life extenders.

[NumberLord]

Talia wrote: "Please, just this one spoiler...............Is the breach man-made?"

I don't know if that was ever answered.

[Talia]

NumberLord wrote: "Talia wrote: "Please, just this one spoiler...............Is the breach man-made?"

I don't know if that was ever answered."

Oh. But the "them" were aliens or future humans?

[C. J.]

NumberLord wrote: "What do you think? Does Travis let them through?"

I think that the ending is left up to the reader. In my opinion I think if Lee came up with any kind of conclusion (whichever way he would go) somebody would have been strongly against his decision.

[C. J.]

To continue from my last comment, the ending is clever because the reader would naturally come up with their own conclusion leaving them satisfied.

This would not be good though if and when they make the movie version of the series. I bet they will have to make a huge risk in coming up with a full conclusion since suggesting two choices and having no obvious choice would not work in a movie form (yes there is supposed to be a movie version starting with The Breach in the works!).

[Herb]

My review was basically about this question, so I post it here.

I read all three books. I recommend the books and hope a little of what I write here will make them more satisfying as I try to highlight and tie together some loose pieces or at least ruminate on them. This review contains spoilers after this paragraph. I examine the challenge Travis Chase and readers are left with in the last pages of the third book. I think Lee is a talented writer with a vast imagination. I was frustrated at the end however, because I felt he left too many things unresolved and expected me to be brighter than I am. I would say I’m an average reader so this may be a problem for others as well.

At the end of the book we find out that Travis must decide whether to invoke a mechanism that will cull 20 million people from the planet to remove all the bad seeds in the human race. Advanced alien and human science have demonstrated a way to predict who will be responsible directly or indirectly through a cumulation of events and progeny for the discord and eventual self-destruction of humans thousands of years hence.
The mechanism works in a troubling manner. First, it culls or “filters” the obvious bad actors. Then, because those bad actors are gone, other people who might never turned bad, do turn bad because of circumstances and some innate characteristics which are activated by circumstances. There is a phrase in the book something like “anyone can turn bad in the wrong situation,” a phrase which seems logically inconsistent with the idea that you can 100% guarantee the safety of humans by applying the mechanism. (BTW does anyone think that bad actors/situations are represented by the ratio of 20 million/7billion? I suspect it is closer to 20/80 these days. I suspect bad actors can have an exponential growth when the norms of society are eroded with the proliferation of Orwellian autocratic, deceitful, and corrupt behavior at the highest levels of society.)
Travis must decide if he trusts the assumptions and science behind the mechanism. Here is a man who himself was a bad actor once but through the love of two women is shown to put aside his own self and pursue a greater “good”… which in practice often means killing bad actors. I’ll ignore that pursuing good through killing baddies is also driven at two critical points of his life with revenge, a motivation which is all about his own self-gratification (when he killed his criminal parents and tried to kill the usurping president.)
The book stops at the point he is presented with this conundrum and does not explore his thoughts on it or what he might do considering who he is. We don’t know: if the current love of his life is one that would be culled; whether he will be culled; if his current love in the future disagrees with the culling and from the future wants to kill him to stop him from taking an action like that; why he was told about the location of his first love’s body by an entity that then buried that knowledge in his brain; why was he told to kill his current love by the legit president’s dead wife in a note at the start of the first book; and upon reflection we don’t know why he had the whole interesting adventure of the second book.
I would have liked some of these questions to be asked and somewhat answered by the author. I’m not asking him to do all my thinking. A good book leaves much for the reader to ponder after the last page, but, for me, this book was more confusing than intriguing. I had to do a lot of thinking and imputation to try and get to the point where it seemed to come together, and I could begin to explore the challenging ideas animating the story. I could be lazy and stupid but I would have been more satisfied with just a little more character dev and with a few more pages at the end about the love story and the role of love in his thinking and perhaps love’s influence on the ultimate decision he might make. Oh well, I must give obvious chops to the author… his approach did get me to write this review.

[Hazel]

The tunnels that are breached (e.g., the breach) are three billion years old, so neither they nor the technology they deliver are man made. The ending seems pretty straightforward to me. (view spoiler)[ It seemed pretty clear to me that Travis decides to implement the filter even though he is fully aware that he himself would be among those filtered. Consider his rather blase attitude toward killing throughout the trilogy, and it's clear he would be filtered. All of his iterations would need be killed. This is why Paige objects. She is trying to save some of Travis's iterations by killing only one of him. (hide spoiler)]

[C. J.]

C. J. wrote: "...there is supposed to be a movie version starting with The Breach in the works!."

What a bummer! I stopped hearing about this film version not long after I made that post. Looks like it might not happen after all (though we may have dodged a bullet as the update originally said David Goyer would have directed. Is this THE David S. Goyer who did Blade: Trinity? I am glad if this version fell thru then lol!).

[Grigory]

Hazel wrote: "even though he is fully aware that he himself would be among those filtered

Err, I strongly disagree... Travis didn't get filtered. In the original timeline, he sets off the filter, kills 20 million people, and that's why Paige sacrifices herself to send a "kill him now" warning back in time. She thinks he's a monster for having done that. If he'd told her "honey, I plan to kill 20 million people tomorrow" then she could've killed him right on the spot.