Season 1
Pilot
- Rufus gives an absolutely epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech to an ignorant white cop in the 1930s.Rufus: Actually, I do [realise where I am]. I'm in a damn Stone Age, but man, I hope you live a long, long life. Long enough to see Michael Jordan dunk, Michael Jackson dance, Mike Tyson punch - really, just any black guy named Michael! OJ? Yeah, he gets off. Oh, he did it, but we don't care! And Obama, he's the president. 2008. That's gonna suck for you! I hope you see it all, because the future is not on your side, boy.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
- Wyatt saving Secretary of State Seward by fighting the assassin sent after him, and ultimately shooting him in the struggle.
- Likewise, Rufus tackling the assassin sent after Vice President Johnson, saving his life.
- Lucy saving General Grant by fighting off Flynn.
Party at Castle Varlar
- The team are able to stop Flynn from kidnapping Wernher von Braun by blowing up a V2 rocket outside a palace.
- Their ally in all this? None other than Ian Fleming.
- Rufus wants to talk to Von Braun, who's writing in a notebook and naturally ignores this black man. Rufus grabs the notebook and scribbles down an equation. He shows it to Von Braun who's completely stunned this "inferior" just came up with something he couldn't think of (at least, not yet).Rufus: I have a question.
Von Braun: [ignores him]
Rufus: [grabs his notebook, scribbles something in it, hands it back] I have a question.
Von Braun: [looks at notebook, then patiently waits for the question] - When the team return to the present, they discover that Fleming used the adventure as the basis of a "new" Bond novel that was turned into a 1964 Sean Connery movie.
The Watergate Tapes
- Rufus and Lucy trick both Rittenhouse and Flynn by having them both show up at the Black Liberation Army safehouse at the same time, then escaping in the chaos of the ensuing gunfight.
Space Race
- Lucy, fed up with the treatment she's been getting from a boneheadedly sexist NASA scientist, rips him a new one in front of several other harried women staffers who have no doubt been getting the same "coffee, honey" treatment from him for quite some time.
- Rufus and Lucy enlist Katherine Johnson's help to successfully erase the rogue files Anthony placed on the NASA mainframes. It gets even better when the NASA team bring Johnson into mission control next to the flight director himself to oversee the restoration of communications; as soon as the first communication comes back from the moon, the entire room of white men applauds the previously-unseen black woman heroine who got the computers back up and running.
- Better, when the team return to the present, Rufus reads how the front pages of newspapers credit Johnson with "single-handedly" saving the astronauts from a "Communist attack". It goes on to note she was honored and made the first female flight director of NASA, a major step for the Civil Rights and women's lib movements.
The World's Columbian Exposition
- Flynn shanghais Harry Houdini into helping him break into a Rittenhouse meeting room. After doing the job by leaping into the ceiling vents like it's nothing, Houdini shows what he's really made of by swiping Flynn's gun and handcuffing him to a table without him noticing.
- Wyatt coolly executing H.H. Holmes, rather than let him follow his historical path of being arrested and profiting from his infamy.Wyatt: (just before he begins hunting down Holmes) "This isn't over!"
- Houdini's other Big Damn Heroes moment, aiding Lucy in rescuing Wyatt and Rufus from Holmes.
The Lost Generation
- Ernest Hemingway's Dare to Be Badass speech to Rufus, riling him up enough to discover his inner strength. This later allows him to threaten to kill Emma so convincingly that she just stands back and lets them escape.
The Red Scare
- Lucy finds a way to take down Rittenhouse without any unnecessary violence: she convinces her grandfather, who hated being part of the organization, to keep immaculate notes of all its members. Upon returning to the present, Lucy and Wyatt hand that information over to Agent Christopher, who uses it to arrest them all, starting with Benjamin Cahill and his NSA crony.
- Mason deserves credit for his own Long Game: all the sucking up he did to Rittenhouse was to gain access to their Sinister Surveillance network, which he uses to back up the information Lucy's grandfather gathered.
- Wyatt gives a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Joseph McCarthy, calling him a coward and a bully, followed by effortlessly taking out his two goons and advancing on the terrified asshole. On the way out of the building, he only says the senator will be found in an hour...maybe two.
Season 2
The King of the Delta Blues
- Wyatt's one man raid on Rittenhouse's headquarters, forcing them to escape on the Mothership while blowing the place up.
Mrs. Sherlock Holmes
- The way Grace Humiston figures out who the real killer is and removes the bullets from her gun.
- Also Grace's impassioned speech to President Wilson, all the more awesome given her own reactionist attitude towards women's suffrage earlier in the episode.
The General
- Harriet Tubman leading a mission to free hundreds of slaves from several South Carolina plantations, despite the Union Army's retreat. No wonder people are campaigning to put her on the $20 bill.
Chinatown
- Jiya proves to be a very capable badass — she strangles a Rittenhouse mook to make her escape from where they're holding her. Then, when damage to the Lifeboat leaves her stranded in the 1880s, she survives three years there on her own, hiding the Lifeboat and managing to leave a message for the others to find. And when we first see her there when the team tracks her down, she's shown subduing a violent customer at a bar.
