No, I didn't either. I expect that if it had gone to 9 Seasons we would have learned much more. What I gathered was that he was the person who first time travelled and changed everything by making "a mistake" and that he was trying to get back but was stuck. The "tethering" of the timelines allowed him to do this and so everything changed back to its original course. The freelancers were his followers who had been attempting to make this happen for many years. Where he came from, where he went back to, where he had been, what the mistake was, or how he managed to have followers who knew about his predicament; I don't know.