This week, Dan is on the trail of a decades-old news mystery — Dylan McCleen, the pseudonym of a hijacker who parachuted from a plane in 1975, got away with $100K, and was never found …

As with the earthquake episode, all the jumps this week are back to the same year. Over several of them, Dan discovers that “Dylan McCleen” was actually an army ranger named Captain John Ritchie who stole the $100K as a means to help a Cambodian family who helped him survive during the Vietnam War. Dan helps him fulfill this mission, while also protecting Ritchie’s identity, and in return, he ends up with $50K in “old currency” — something he’s been needing for a while now, since, you know, today’s money has a lot of really big heads on it.

Meanwhile, Dan’s jumping continues to cause problems for him in 2007. He inadvertently leaves his son Zach stranded at a crowded street market, and he has to cancel plans to see a big 49ers game with him because he can’t trust himself not to disappear. He’s under suspicion for an armed robbery that happened on the night of his wife’s big fundraiser — the victim of which is currently in a coma. And he doesn’t even realize yet that management rumblings at the newspaper he works at could put him out of a job any day now.

Also in 2007, Dan finally gets a chance to swap ideas with Elliott Langley, the scientist who somehow called him on his cellphone back in 1998 in the last episode. Dan asks about this, and asks a lot of other questions about time travel under the premise of writing a science fiction book. Langley offers very little helpful information, but we get the impression that he knows a lot more than he’s letting on. Which is especially intriguing because we know that he was friends with Dan’s father — who Dan also gets to interact with this episode, back in 1975.

His father is played by the same actor who is Tom on “The 4400″ (who is, by the way, William Shatner’s son-in-law) … and … well … he’s kind of a douchebag. But he does end up playing a critical role in Dan’s mission, while at the same time reminding Dan of just how important it is for him to maintain his relationship with his own son Zack, in spite of all the obstacles posed by his jumping. This goal becomes much easier to attain when, at the end of the episode, Zack reveals that he witnessed Dan’s most recent jump first-hand. Now I guess the hard part is just making sure Zack doesn’t tell all his friends that his father can do “magic”?

I’m really enjoying how the writers raise the stakes just a little bit more every week. The episodes are largely self-contained, but there are always bread crumbs of a larger plot arc there. For instance, I’m curious to see if Dan eventually gets to fix his own life by jumping back to the night of the armed robbery. And I’m very intrigued to see what role Langley is going to play. Something about that guy just rubs me the wrong way — especially that crack about somebody using Dan’s power for their own gain, which almost sounded like a taunt to me.