In 2014, 17-year-old high school senior and aspiring inventor David Raskin (Jonny Weston) is admitted into Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is unable to afford its tuition fees. Upon learning his mother, Kathy Raskin (Amy Landecker), is planning to sell the house to help pay for his college, David enlists his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner) and his friends Adam Le (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner) to sift through the belongings of his father Ben Raskin (Gary Weeks), an inventor who died in a car crash on David's seventh birthday, in the hope of finding something that David can use to get a scholarship instead. David finds an old camera with a video recording of his seventh birthday party, in which he briefly spots his 17-year-old self in a reflection. Noticing how he appears to be reaching for a basement light switch in the reflection, David and his friends go to the basement, which was forbidden by his father. Underneath a trapdoor activated by the basement switch, the group find the blueprints of a time travel device that Ben was developing named "Project Almanac", and use the available resources to build a functional time machine. David, Christina, Adam, and Quinn later use the battery from the car of David's longtime crush, Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black D'Elia), to charge up the machine, and successfully send a toy car back in time, but blow out the power for the entire neighborhood. They end up being caught by Jessie and recruit her to their experiment.