The mysterious woman who informed Demetri of his upcoming murder at the end of last episode gives him a few more details: He’s going to be shot three times in the chest. She tells him she’s warning him so he can prevent it from it happening, then hangs up.In Quale Prison in Munich, a guard asks an elderly prisoner named Rudolph Geyer what he saw in his flash forward. Geyer replies, “Something that will ensure my release from this hateful place.”
Charlie and Mark watch cartoons and eat breakfast. Olivia leaves messages for their babysitter Nicole, who has been increasingly flaky since the day of the blackouts. Mark covertly meets with Aaron to discuss Charlie’s apparent knowledge of the sinister figure known as D. Gibbons (in this scene, for the first time, it’s clear the Irish actor who plays Aaron -- Brian F. O’Byrne -- is faking an American accent. He’s doing a very good one, and his pronunciations are right on, but there are moments when it’s just not… right.)
In Seattle, Demetri’s criminal defense lawyer fiancée Zoe, who is played by the gorgeous and awesome Gabrielle Union, flies back to Los Angeles on a near-empty plane. As the nervous airline executive sitting across the aisle tells her, people are still terrified to fly after all the crashes during the blackouts. Demetri meets Zoe at the airport with flowers. They kiss, and wow, that’s one attractive couple. Later, as they roll around in bed together, Zoe tells Demetri what she saw in her flash forward: They were getting married on a beach in Hawaii. Interesting… Demetri lies and tells her he saw the same thing.
Mark and Janis sift through a glut of tips and intelligence reports about possible causes of the flash forwards. Mark discovers that an incarcerated Nazi, Rudolph Geyer, has been trying to locate him concerning information about the “137 Sekunden” -- the two minutes and seventeen seconds everyone was unconscious. Mark recognizes Geyer’s photo from his evidence wall in his flash forward.
Olivia lunches with Stan’s wife Felicia, who is played by Gina Torres. In her flash forward, Felicia saw herself in her college-aged son’s bedroom, tucking a small, unknown boy named Attaf into bed.
Mark and Janis arrive at the prison in Munich and meet with creepy Rudolph Geyer. Before he was arrested, Geyer lived for a time in America. If he shares what he knows about the flash forwards, he wants all charges dropped against him. He also wants to return to the United States. Janis is strongly against the deal, but Mark wants to go for it. Geyer asks Janis why she wears a ring on her left thumb -- in some Eastern European countries, it’s a code for homosexuality. He rambles on about how everything in the Kabbalah has a hidden meaning. When the word Kabbalah is spelled out in Hebrew, in which each letter also has a numerical value, the total sum of the letters equals 137. Mark is not impressed by this. Nor am I. Kabbalah? Seriously? That’s where we’re going with this?
In Geyer’s flash forward, he saw himself being repatriated to the United States: He was going through Customs at an unidentified airport, chatting with a officer named Jerome Murphy about how he was disappointed Mark wasn’t there to meet him and how he has a murder to thank for his return home. As he tells Mark, if Mark can track down Jerome Murphy and ask him for details about his flash forward, he can confirm Geyer’s story.
In Los Angeles, Demetri tells Stan that no one named Jerome Murphy works in Customs. Stan tells him to check current applicants -- six months from now, the situation might be different. Sure enough, Demetri tracks down a (naked and dancing) recent applicant named Jerome Murphy. Demetri tries to corroborate Geyer’s flash forward with Jerome’s This is difficult at first, as Jerome doesn’t know what “corroborate” means, but he eventually catches on and confirms he saw Geyer in his flash forward, down to the enigmatic "murder" comment. His flash forward inspired him so much he applied for the Customs job the day after the blackout, thus suggesting, strongly, that the events seen in the flash forwards are dictating everyone’s present-day actions. As Demetri gets ready to leave, he knocks over a bong. Jerome begs him not to bust him -- if he does, he won't be hired by Customs, which means the future he saw won't happen. It’s left up in the air what Demetri does, but Demetri sure does have a vested interest in seeing if the future can be changed.
Still in Munich, Mark meets with Janis, who is drunk and upset about the bargain they struck with Geyer. Janis, who is a sharp cookie, thinks Geyer is stringing them along. Stan calls Mark to let him know Geyer’s flash forward panned out. Thus, they can go ahead and arrange for Geyer’s release. Now that his freedom has been guaranteed, Geyer spills everything he knows. Which turns out to be… not much. After the blackout, he had a vision: He looked out his cell window and saw the city burning and dead crows -- a murder of crows -- on the ground. He gives Mark a book on birds and tells him he might need it.
(Another commercial for V. Yep, it’s still looking damn good.)
A dispirited Mark returns home to Olivia. Olivia, who is a good egg, cheers him up with sex.
Aaron talks with a bartender, Kate, who is the mother of Aaron’s dead daughter Tracy. Aaron tells her about seeing Tracy alive in his flash forward and tries to get her to sign an affidavit to exhume her corpse. Kate tells Aaron that his flash forward was wishful thinking and refuses to sign. With Demetri’s help, Aaron goes over Kate’s head and exhumes Tracy without her permission. Later, Aaron returns to Kate’s bar and tells her about the exhumation: The body in the grave was indeed Tracy. Aaron, who seems emotionally demolished, apologizes for going behind her back; Kate hugs him.
In downtown L.A., Stan delivers a eulogy during a memorial for eight FBI agents killed during the blackouts.
At Mark’s urging, Janis looks up figures on the worldwide crow population and discovers that on the day of the blackout crows died in massive numbers worldwide. The only other time that happened was in 1991, though it was limited to the Ganwar region of Somalia. Mark finds a CDC report on the incident, which noted that there were claims of mass unconsciousness in Somali villages at the same time. Mark realizes a smaller-scale version of the blackout happened once before.
1991: In the Ganwar region, crows swarm around, cawing wildly, then fall to the earth. A young goatherd runs over to investigate, and discovers what looks like an abandoned city and a single very tall, very active smokestack.
Comments
DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, did not exist in 1991. It was created in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks of 2001...
I had the same reaction as you did to the Kabbalah angle. Really? Seriously? Though what cracked me up was that the agents had the same reaction – “what the hell does this have to do with anything?” But I did like the argument it brought up between Mark and Janis about the morality involved in knowingly letting a mass murderer out of prison because of what he might be able to tell them about what’s happening.
I could see where Mark was coming from in terms of “the flashes are the future, so it makes sense to go this route and take a leap of faith” but ultimately I found myself siding with Janis. If the flashes are the future than whether you let this jackass out now or later shouldn’t be a deciding factor…and if you can change the future and you want to avoid this potentially disturbing one, then why not start now and make this guy serve the rest of his useless life behind bars?
Watching John Cho and Gabrielle Union make out I was also struck by the insane attractiveness of the pairing. That is simply unfair. Just to point out that I was amused when Demetri accidentally kicked over the bong and was all “I know what a bong is?”. Cho delivering that line (*wink* at “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle”) with a straight face was awesome.
I can be easily amused.
This episode certainly didn't disappoint. The diabolical old nazi plot was pretty good, especially when it went from promising lead to dead end to unexpected promising lead again.
Good to see a return to the Aaron subplot. Despite the fact that he reconfirmed his daughter's DNA I can think of two ways she could still be alive. The first possibility is that those are in fact parts of her body that are buried, just not ones required for survival. In the first episode Aaron said that only 37 pounds of her body were returned home and she was only recognizable via her dna. I'm guessing a good portion of both her legs could easily account for 37 pounds. The other less morbid possibility is that it was a complete coverup by the government and the DNA on record does belong to the body and it's not hers. He should have checked the remains against her mother's (I'd say his own, but that doesn't help in the event that she was not actually his biological daughter) in case the government sample was tampered with. Either way I'm glad his daughter's mother (ex-wife?) was kinder to him the second time when he went back and admitted going behind her back.
Now that we've finally met Demetri's fiance and seen them together it seems unlikely that he would end up as Janis' baby's father. He's done quite well for himself, now hopefully he'll be able to avoid his as yet uncorroborated March 15th demise and make it to the beach wedding.
It's kind of a shame, but I have standards, and exploiting this story for the sake of cheap thrills is not okay. Bad research, bad writing.
Ah, thanks, Jason. Duly amended in the recap.
DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, did not exist in 1991
Excellent catch, Anonymous. I thought the whole business with tracking the crow deaths was a little far-fetched overall (that was some amazing website Janis was looking at), but that hadn't even occurred to me. But of course you're right -- DHS is a more recent thing.
I was definitely more on Janis's side too, Levitatethis, and it irked me that Mark was so eager to assume that just because Geyer's flash forward was confirmed by the Customs agent, it automatically meant Geyer had valuable information. Mind you, I thought it seemed pretty plausible that Mark would agree to the deal under the circumstance -- it just didn't seem like his smartest move ever.
Cho's delivery of "I know what a bong is" cracked me up. It was the first time this show has ever made me laugh out loud.
The ridiculous dialogue about the White Rose and Sophie Scholl convinced me to drop FlashForward from my watchlist.
Anna, I caught the reference, and I know who Sophie Scholl was and how she died, but I sort of missed whatever point the scene was trying to make by bringing her up. If you can shed any light on it, I'd be grateful.
What struck me was how out of touch the dialogue was with the reality of how the White Rose - or this entire portion of German history - is dealt with in Germany. I wrote a rant about it in my Livejournal. I mean, I live in Munich and go to the university where the White Rose operated, and the script writers clearly have no clue, and don't care either.
I'm not sure what "Quale" is supposed to mean. Maybe it's meant to be the plural of "Qual", the German word for "torment". The correct plural would be "Qualen", though. The Nazi's name, Geier, means "vulture". We're constantly reminded of how he is a Nazi, and therefore evil.
They claim that their made-up prison (possibly named "TORMENT") was the place where Sophie Scholl was executed, which means the show exploits a real-life heroine in order to give their fictional prison a scary context. That's just cheap and quite disrespectful towards the White Rose... and kind of comic-bookish.
You can't exactly see the Alps from Munich either.
I may be a little too pissed off today, but after the Heroes debacle, I am much less willing to give a TV show a free pass on how it chooses to use different cultures, ethnicities, countries, anything that differs from the "white American male" norm. Maybe this anger will pass eventually.
That's totally fair. Since FlashForward has taken such great care with other aspects of the script -- I think they're doing a marvelous job of doling out information in tiny, intriguing bits -- it's disappointing to see them dropping the ball in this area.
(Unrelated: Anna, are you on Twitter now? I think I just found you via my usual morning sweep for Sendhil news.)
I know I've expressed my own issues with the way different shows have chosen to present various groups as if they were all the same backward entity versus the "wonderful norm of the white American male".
It's unfortunate to see this show make this kind of choice. But thank you for bringing my attention to it.
And it might not be unrealistic to portray Americans as being mouthy and arrogant toward their host while on foreign soil. Still, meeting Kretschmann's reply about slavery and the treatment of Native Americans in the US with a quip about Britney Spears was unfortunate. Since liberties were being taken with the historical location, and since the reference to Sophie Scholl didn't have any relevance to the scene, it would have been best to just excise it.
It's interesting now how they're establishing that events revealed in the flash forwards would not have happened (if they do ultimately happen) without prior knowledge of the flash forwards (the Customs agent applying for the job in the first place, Geyer getting released from prison). This has the potential to get pleasantly convoluted down the road. Are the events in the flash forwards at all fluid (and that's why Demetri and Zoe are seeing two separate possible futures)?
("Geier" -- "vulture", as Anna pointed out -- seems like a vastly more appropriate spelling, but they're using "Geyer" in ABC's promo materials, so I'm going to stick with that for the sake of consistency.)
I was reading Dan's blog and he made some interesting points - such as the fact that everything Mark does is influenced by the fact that he did it in his FF (or had it done in the FF). So there is very little detective work going on. A German contacts him and he goes to see him because he has the German's picture on the wall. By the way - I can't remember anything in Geyer's FF to explain how he knew Mark's name...
Last week Mark went to the warehouse only because he had seen the pictures of the toys on his board in the future.
I'd prefer if we saw Mark doing some proper detective work and not just doing things because he knows he's done them. No wonder he starts drinking again.
Is Janis homosexual? That seemed to be the suggestion this week with the discussion of her ring and Mark's reaction to Geyer's line. There has been speculation about this from episode one and the way she said that she didn't even have a boyfriend. certainly doesn't look like Demitri is the father after this episode.
Somalia and the crows is another great plot addition. It just feels that not a lot happens each episode - just a lot of dialogue, not all of it good - and then in the last five minutes we get something juicy like the guy walking around during the blackout, or the crows.
He told whoever was taking him through Customs that he expected "Agent Benford" to meet him. So he only knew that name because he'd met Mark six months earlier, because he'd asked to meet Mark because he remembered making a reference to Mark in his flash forward... Yeah, this is the whole problem with having everyone's actions be strictly dictated by what they saw in their glimpses of the future.
I'd prefer if we saw Mark doing some proper detective work and not just doing things because he knows he's done them. No wonder he starts drinking again.
Heh. Yes. It does make the investigative process a lot easier when you're just gathering up the breadcrumbs leading you to a known destination.
Is Janis homosexual? That seemed to be the suggestion this week with the discussion of her ring and Mark's reaction to Geyer's line.
That was my interpretation of the scene. Yeah, sort of reduces the odds of that future wild affair with Demetri I theorized about last episode ever taking place, huh? 'Sokay. Demetri seems to be doing quite well for himself, girlfriend-wise.
Somalia and the crows is another great plot addition.
Best thing about the episode. I think they're smart to keep ending on a really great bit of information. (Hey, Patrick, since you were discussing my Heroes script earlier in the week: the bit where the boy in Somalia stumbles across the smokestack and looks at it with complete incomprehension? That's exactly what I was going for with Hiro stumbling across the strange power plant. I had deja vu during the scene.)
I like the mystery of the crows and the mystery of whether Demetri will be alive in April given Zoe's flash. I think his lack of a vision will be key to the storyline at some point.
Given the DNA evidence Aaron found about Tracy, I wonder if he was asleep at the time of the flash and what he saw was merely a dream? I'd be disappointed if that was the case, it would just be lazy writing. (The letdown of recent Heroes seems to be coloring my expectations for other shows. Sad really.) I much prefer Jason's theories.
As this was an uncharacteristically serious post from me, on an unrelated note and for the sake of levity I leave you with... Mookies! Ahhh the halcyon days.
I'm going to venture forth the theory that it's damn hard to pull off a Nazi-related plot on a big-budget action-oriented American television show.
Jason's totally morbid legs-blown-off theory about Tracy's remains is the best I've heard, though I'd also be okay with his less grotesque DNA-records-got-switched theory. Either would be much much less of a cop-out than "Aaron was just dreaming!"
I didn't know why he was bothering with the DNA tests. If I was convinced my vision was true I would just start searching for her. I wouldn't need some additional proof that she was alive.
But they need to stretch it out so that he has something to do each week. He'll find something out next week to make him realise that there's still hope - maybe a fellow solider who visits him.
Excellent point. I suppose it would lessen the drama if he found her next episode, then six months from now, in the events of his flash forward, he was just visiting her in Afghanistan to drop off clean socks.
I had some kind of theory that maybe the event that caused the flash forward hasn't happened yet.
I like that idea a lot, actually. For its flaws, I will say the show has developed a nice central mystery, and I have no real clue what will ultimately be the solution.
I'm going to venture forth the theory that it's damn hard to pull off a Nazi-related plot on a big-budget action-oriented American television show.
And it gets harder and harder. At least if you desperately want an imprisoned war criminal who was a high-ranking Nazi soldier or a ruthless scientist... the war ended 64 years ago, so your war criminal has to be pretty damn old. ;) It's time to think of a new trope.
(And yeah, I'm... on Twitter. Not sure what will become of the account, though. XD But it's me.)
It's funny how all the main characters have more severe flashforwards than Mark. This is not to say it's not a terrible thing to have your marriage fail, or to fall off the wagon and start drinking again, but it seems to me like the prospect of a violent death is more severe, and shouldn't be treated like it's of secondary interest... Especially since I can see how Mark's marriage would fail. He should have told her all about her FF. And get his daughter therapy...
It's funny how all the main characters have more severe flashforwards than Mark.
Reminds me of last week's episode when poor little Charlie was traumatized by about whatever she saw in her flash forward, and Mark and Olivia were all, "Oh no! Maybe she sees that our marriage will be in trouble!" Not to understate the effect of parental tension on a small child, but it seemed so weirdly self-involved to have that be the absolute worst thing they could imagine Charlie seeing.
When Charlie said "D. Gibbons is a bad man", I got child rape vibes and I believe any parent should be completely creeped out by that kind of confession coming from their obviously traumatized kid... I would have liked had they followed up on this, but as far as I recall, Mark simply repeats Charlie's words and doesn't follow up on it. Which is especially weird when you consider that he was all over finding D. Gibbons in the last episode.
Yeah, the only sort of follow-through we got this episode was Mark having a secret conference about it with... Aaron. Not sure what Mark thought Aaron could do about it, apart from counseling him not to start drinking again. But yeah, if I were a parent, I'd be going crazy trying to find out why a "bad man" traumatized my kid.
Of course, it probably wasn't abandoned because it was ridiculous, but in all likeliness because it didn't involve the Petrellis, Claire or Sylar.
Gracious. I can't imagine Heroes favoring some characters over others. That just doesn't sound right!
I just wanted to preface my comments with this so that I am not seen as a negative person who ALWAYS has to find faults with a show. I can think a show is pretty flawless, honest. For example, the new Doctor Who series.
Flash Foward has a great concept but I am worried about the execution. The problems with the Nazi storyline have been discussed already here. It also made me wonder how old Geyer was - say 85? That makes him 15 when WW2 started and 21 when it ended. How high up can he have been? What exactly did he do that resulted in him still being locked up in 2009?
And all we got from him was a lead about dead crows - which he only knew from looking out his window. Eh, isn't this something that Mosaic should have picked up on, or any other person in the world who also saw dead crows. It just doesn't seem like no other agency heard about dead crows - and that no one on the planet reported it.
Is that what qualifies as detective work on this show? Going to Germany to find out what a pretty junior Nazi saw when he looked out the window.
I fear the writers had a great point A starting the story, and have a great point B they want to be at in 6 months time. But they have no idea how to get there, except through clunky dialogue where everyone talks about how they plan to get to point B, and relying on people's visions to make them do certain things.
Because otherwise Mark would need a pretty good reason to be stuck alone in his office drinking when he knows that masked gunmen are coming to kill him.
No worries, Patrick. I think the new Doctor Who is pretty close to perfection, and yet I can still nitpick it ("No more farting aliens! Bring back Martha!"). Human nature. But yeah, FlashFoward is no Doctor Who. The detective work, the way Mark et al are navigating their way through the information, could stand some neatening. The dead crows are a marvelous bit of information, but the path leading up to the revelation was pretty shaky.
It seems like we're still missing the back half of the Geyer story. I suspect his entire story was self-contained in that episode, but if so, if his entire purpose in the greater scheme of things was just to point out the dead crows... that's a little weak.
I also hope they find a way of explaining why people in six months time aren't acting like they know what is happening because they saw it in their FF
Good point. It's where things are going to get very confusing, if they're not careful with how they handle it. Since they made it clear the flash forwards weren't like a vision (i.e. Mark wasn't passively observing what his future self was doing without knowing what was going on inside his future head), shouldn't everyone have been thinking during their flash forwards something along the lines of, "Holy crap, this is it"? Or, despite what they were suggesting in this episode, have the various futures seen in the flash forwards already changed just by knowing about the flash forwards?
...it's sort of late here, and the part of my brain that's good at explaining things seems to be asleep right now.
But then, how did Mark have a FF of investigating the flashes? Something's very amiss here and I really hope the writers have this all worked out with a cool explanation.
Because I sure don't have one just yet (worldwide amnesia doesn't cut it, I'm afraid, especially since Mark would have to be an exception)
Yeah. Possibly a multitude of alternate futures, if the idea that Demetri and his fiancee are having conflicting flash forwards is any indication. Very confusing and, if not handled carefully, has the potential to go very wrong.
I hope they pull it off and explain everything in a tidy and intriguing manner. Because I like the show a lot -- I don't want the big reveal to be a huge letdown.
Me too. Surely they will. Because if they haven't seen this issue yet and planned for it, they're going to get to the end of the season, suddenly spot it and we could have a train wreck on our hands.
It can't be a multitude of alternative futures because everything seems to come together on Mosaic. The visions all join together. There is some red herring with Demetri and her fiancee as we don't see her seeing Demetri. She could easily be marrying someone else, or lying about what she saw.
And even if Demetri was alive - why the hell is he getting married on the beach at the very time that Mark needs back up!
I'm still convinced the FF are of the real future. The episode on 29 April will show things happening pretty much as we saw them. Because if it turns out to be an alternate future then it ruins the dramatic tension for season 2. If we see everyone having a second FF of bad things happening - say at the very end of season 1 - we won't be emotionally engaged because we now know the future can be averted.
I think Lloyd Simcoe is a bad guy. I didn't like him taking that phone call six months into the future - it just didn't seem right. And I wouldn't be surprised if he is mixed up in things.
Only 11:30pm in my nape of the neck of the woods, Patrick. But, aye, I'll be off to bed soon.
And you're right. There's something really weird going on here. It pretty much has to be the one and only future for Mark, given he's investigating it. But I see no reason why he would be seeing a different future to everybody else. Or be the only one seeing a self-consistent future.
OTOH, if it is the one and only future, why, as you say. does nobody seem to expect it? Does it come early... somehow? (I know they've got a date locked down, but what if whatever they're investigating somehow brings the event forward, including, uh, clocks, I suppose). That doesn't quite work, but there's gotta be something...
Dan's up late. I'm up very very early, so early as to beg the question of why I even bothered going to bed at all. Insomnia, so I'm working straight through the night. I can nap during Heroes tonight. It doesn't take much in the way of brain waves to follow it these days.
Lloyd seems like a shady character, but that may be just because he's played by Jack Davenport. Which automatically makes him highly suspicious.
No idea how it's going to play out. I just want it to be: a) somewhat plausible, and b) extremely cool.
Mookies are the eternal constant. They will never fail us.
The kid in Somalia sees something brilliant in the sky, almost like a Second Coming precursor. Will be interesting to see where that goes.
Great plot twists, though, and fun to see them cycle through as many of those in one episode as they can.
As a time-travel junkie, I'm officially hooked on this one!