FlashForward: Future Shock

We’re here at last. The final episode. Let’s deal with the sweet, pretty, dull people first. Keiko, Bryce, Nicole, I’m looking at you.

Bryce rushes down to the immigration facility to find Keiko. The grumpy clerk tells him she was released an hour ago. She refuses to give him any further information, so Bryce pours his heart out about how he flew to Tokyo just to try to meet Keiko, and how he really loves her even though he’s never met her. The clerk replies, “In my flash forward, I had $100 in my pocket, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it got there.” Bryce fishes around in his wallet. In exchange, she gives him the phone number for the sushi restaurant where he saw Keiko in his flash forward.

Outside the facility, Nicole apologizes to Bryce for not telling him about Keiko. Bryce apologizes for stringing her along when he knew he was in love with Keiko the whole time. Brokenhearted, Nicole speeds away and, in her distress, somehow manages to drive straight into a pond. She starts to drown, but a nice random guy named Ed rescues her. So all ends well-ish for Nicole.

Meanwhile, Keiko and her mom, under the supervision of Immigration agents, stand in the security line at LAX for their flight back to Tokyo. Impulsively, her mother poses a distraction by pitching a loud fit to give Keiko a chance to slip away and find Bryce. Oh, lordy. Making a ruckus in a security line and/or sneaking out of a security line is exactly the sort of thing that results in a terminal evacuation. No worries. I’m sure all the thousands of other travelers in the terminal don’t want their pressing travel plans to stand in the way of Keiko finding true love.

Bryce and Keiko finally meet at the sushi restaurant and, presumably, live happily ever after. Even if they don’t, it doesn’t matter -- we’ll never, ever hear anything more about them, and hey, I’m okay with that.

Mark sits in a holding cell, charged with being drunk and disorderly and stupid beyond all rational comprehension. Stan bails him out and drives him back to their office. For some damn reason, Stan apologizes to Mark. For not fully understanding the depth and breadth of his idiocy? It’s unclear. Anyway, Stan calls Aaron and passes the phone to Mark, so Mark can receive a pep talk from his friend/AA sponsor.

You’d think Aaron would have more pressing matters at the moment, seeing as: a) he’s on the run and hiding from gunmen in a remote part of Afghanistan, and b) his daughter Tracy died in his arms last episode. But wait! Ace physician Khamir takes another peek at Tracy and decides she’s somewhat less dead than he previously thought. So, sure, Aaron’s got plenty of time to give Mark a metaphorical shoulder-punch and to sternly tell him to stay off the sauce. Do Aaron and Tracy ever make it out of Afghanistan? We’ll never know, and I don’t think anyone will lose sleep about that.

So some miscreant has rigged the Federal Building with bombs. Lots of bombs. Five or more, located on multiple floors. Didn’t we find out last episode that the FBI was on super-duper extra-high alert for Flash Forward Day? And yet someone managed to sneak in there and plant a whole slew of bombs? Yep, that sounds about right. The FBI could bring a pretty good lawsuit against this show for slander, what with the way the Feds are portrayed as a pack of bunglers. Stan evacuates the entire building. Megalomaniac Mark decides the bad guys must have planted the bombs for the express purpose of destroying his evidence wall, so he rushes into the building.

Heavily-armed men attack and massacre the bomb squad members (all of whom were wearing body armor, BTW), then swarm the building after Mark. For no particular reason, Stan and Vreede go in as well.

Olivia and Charlie snuggle on a blanket on the beach and watch fireworks. Lloyd arrives, Dylan in tow, and tells Olivia he absolutely needs to recreate the conditions in their flash forwards in order to have his breakthrough about the equation. Olivia agrees, even though she was adamantly opposed to this idea at the end of last episode, so they all head back to the Benford house.

Charlie shows Dylan around. She’s downright chipper for someone who had a vision that her dad was going to be killed later that night. A vision which apparently traumatized her for months, traumatized her so much she was unable to talk to her parents about it, even though it could possibly provide the key to solving the world’s biggest mystery. Yet here she is, on the night in question, chirping away to Dylan about cookies. Anyway, it turns out it’s Dylan, not Lloyd, who writes the equation in lipstick on the bedroom mirror. Lloyd frets about not being able to solve it, then he makes out with Olivia.

Simon, Janis and Demetri arrive at the National Linear Accelerator Project building in Palo Alto. Janis, who’s been having some severe pregnancy-related cramping, approaches the security guard at the gate and asks him to call an ambulance. While the guard scrambles to help her, Demetri and Simon sneak inside the facility.

Janis gets carted off to the hospital, where an ultrasound shows there’s nothing wrong with her baby. She also discovers that, contrary to her flash forward, she’s having a boy, not a girl.

Demetri and Simon drink beer and squabble with each other, while Simon tries to hunt down the file he’d uploaded into the mainframe which brought about the first global blackout. Remembering he sent Lloyd some kind of text message in Lloyd’s flash forward, Simon texts Lloyd with Lloyd’s old electronic signature -- the formula for a damped wave, to signify a tearful goodbye. Physics humor. Gotta love it.

Lloyd receives the text and realizes the formula is the missing part of his equation. He smooches Olivia and calls Mark to tell him there will be another global blackout sometime in the next two days.

Mark examines his evidence wall and realizes Baltar moved stuff around to send him a message that the next blackout will happen at 10:14 -- which is in just a few minutes. He’s suddenly swarmed by a whole bunch of men with assault rifles. He’s outnumbered and outgunned. Which is exactly what he saw in his flash forward all those months ago, and yet he still didn’t bother to prepare for it. Oh, Mark Benford. I think I’ll miss you the least of all.

So there’s a lot of chaos in the Federal Building, as Stan, Vogel and Mark each shoot it out with the bad guys from their various locations. Mark calls Stan and tells him about the upcoming blackout. Stan gets out of the building and spreads the news.

At the lab in Palo Alto, Simon discovers someone is accessing the mainframe from outside the building. The particle accelerator fires up.

With just a few seconds left before the bombs detonate, Mark runs for the exit… but the second global blackout strikes before he makes it out.

Worldwide, everyone collapses. We see a kangaroo hopping down a deserted street, which is a callback to the pilot, back when this show was fresh and shiny and new and interesting. It makes me kind of wistful and sad.

While Janis lies unconscious in the hospital, Lita -- the only person still awake, thanks to the QED ring she’s wearing -- wheels her out of there in a wheelchair.

This time, the flash forwards take place at some point further in the future. The only vision we really see is young Charlie’s. Now a teenager, she tells someone excitedly, “They found him!”

Back in the present, the Federal Building explodes, presumably (hopefully?) taking Mark with it.

Messy and unsatisfying, but you know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s over. Farewell, FlashForward. You started out so well, but your time had come.

Fringe: Over There, Part 2

Apparently not many people watched the second part of the Fringe season finale, because the ratings were low. That's a shame -- it was a pretty darn good ending to a pretty darn good season.

My recap is up at TVgasm.

FlashForward: Countdown

We’re finally up to April 29th, the day everyone experienced during the global blackouts. Let’s get the Afghanistan plotline over with first, as only two things of note happen: 1) Aaron discovers Jericho was conducting experiments with flash forwards in advance of the blackouts (what Tracy thought were slaughtered villagers were really just unconscious test subjects), and 2) Tracy dies from her injuries.

Bryce plans a big picnic with Nicole to celebrate Flash Forward Day. Nicole finally ‘fesses up about Keiko being detained by Immigration. Bryce rushes off to the detention center to free Keiko, but her mom has already posted bond and is ready to whisk her daughter back to Tokyo.

Lloyd calls Olivia to tentatively inquire about the possibility that they’ll be lolling around in bed together later that day, as per the events seen in their respective flash forwards. Olivia, who has her hands full with a wigged-out Charlie, hangs up on him.

Mark presents Demetri with a special mix CD of fifteen different covers of Islands in the Stream and urges him to run off to Hawaii with Zoey to get married. This marks the first and only genuinely cute and sweet thing Mark has done over the course of the season. Demetri meets Zoey at the airport and tells her about getting Janis pregnant in Somalia. A strictly rote I-did-everything-for-you scene ensues, which ends with Zoey storming off to Hawaii by herself. Fair enough.

Hellinger, who was captured by the FBI at the end of last episode, will only speak to Mark. Mark tries to grill him about future blackouts, but Hellinger won’t cooperate. Hellinger claims to have witnessed himself being grilled by Mark in dozens of different flash forwards. He picks up a notepad and scrawls out the different paths the day could take, per his vision: They all end with Mark dead.

One of Hellinger’s scribbled pathways includes notation for a tachyon, followed by the word “wipe.” Mark consults with Lloyd about tachyons. Lloyd gives him a quick physics lessons: Tachyons are particles, so the idea of a “wipe” makes no sense.

Mark finds that Hellinger operates a data warehouse called Tachyon Offsite Information Systems. He tells Stan and Vogel that he’s going to investigate it, per the reference on Hellinger’s chart. Stan and Vogel decide they’ve had enough with Mark rushing headlong into things that are destined to kill him and refuse to let him go. Vogel sends a strike team in instead. Naturally enough, it’s a trap, and the strike team is ambushed.

Olivia brings Charlie over to Mark’s office. Charlie is worried the events in her flash forward -- overhearing Vogel talking about Mark being dead -- will come true. Mark reassures her that he loves her.

Lloyd has some kind of breakthrough on the formula he saw himself working on (in between lolling in bed with Olivia) in his flash forward. He bustles Dylan over to the Benford house, but finds Olivia and Charlie gone -- Olivia is trying to avoid the events in her flash forward by taking a spontaneous road trip with Charlie.

Mark interrogates Hellinger some more. Naturally enough, he’s a total dick about it. I don’t think I’d mind Mark being a dick so much if he was, say, a grimly competent dick. Instead, he flies off the handle and throws tantrums and, in general, looks toolish and ineffectual. I don’t like seeing adults throw ineffectual tantrums in public. I lose respect for anyone who does crap like that. Anyway, after Hellinger refers to Mark’s evidence wall as a monument to Mark’s failures (got it in one, Hellinger), Mark beats the snot out of him. He then somehow seems surprised and offended when Stan angrily sends him home for the day.

When the Flash Forward writers and producers go on to different projects next season, I do hope they take away some hard-earned knowledge from this experience about the importance of having a sympathetic protagonist. We don’t necessarily have to find Mark cuddly and likeable, but it’d help if viewers felt something for him other than exasperated contempt.

Anyway, Mark wanders through the streets teeming with revelers. Some random guy hands him a flask. Mark thinks, hey, free booze, neat!, and breaks his long-held sobriety. He gets stinking drunk, gets into an unnecessary bar fight, and gets tossed in a holding cell.

Simon holds Janis at gunpoint in her apartment and tells her he needs her help to destroy the people responsible for the blackouts. At the request of the bad guys, Simon had uploaded a piece of software into the mainframe at the lab in Palo Alto prior to the October 6th blackouts. Janis assures him the FBI has examined the mainframe multiple times already, but Simon wants her to take him to the lab so he can look at it himself.

Demetri drops by while they’re arguing about this. He and Simon pull guns on each other. Janis tries to persuade Demetri to leave quietly and forget he saw anything. Demetri takes Simon into custody, but eventually agrees to help Janis and Simon break into the lab. They hit the road to Palo Alto.

Well, okay. It’s messy (really messy) and ungainly, but at least most of the events seen in the flash forwards were addressed, some more effectively than other. In next week’s finale, Bryce and Keiko will probably finally meet. It’s hard to imagine anyone trying to deliberately drown Nicole, but right now she’s feeling like a terrible person who deserves to die, much like she felt in her flash forward. Tracy died prior to the events shown in Aaron’s flash forward, and it’s not clear what specifically changed in his future to bring about her death, but I’m not too hung up on that. Olivia and Charlie will probably return home, seeing as Lloyd and Dylan are optimistically camped out in their driveway right now; while it’s difficult to see how Olivia and Lloyd will end up in bed together, at least the part about the breakthrough on Lloyd’s equation has a chance of coming true. And Mark is precisely stupid enough to drunkenly head on over to his office to get ambushed by masked gunmen as soon as he gets released from his holding cell, because that's just the way Mark rolls.

Janis? Janis will not be having a sonogram, as seen in her flash forward, because she’ll be running amuck in Palo Alto with Simon (who did not have a flash forward due to being awake during the blackouts) and Demetri (who did not have a flash forward due to being dead -- hey, does anyone really think Demetri’s going to live through the next episode?). And Zoey will be in Hawaii, where she can drop a solitary flower on the beach while thinking sad thoughts of Demetri. Gah. I don’t know. It’s messy and rushed and sort of awful (just like this recap!), but at least it’s coming to an end, and right now, that’s all that matters.

Fringe: Over There

Visit TVgasm for my recap of the first part of the pretty damn awesome Fringe season finale. All kinds of good stuff happened in the parallel universe. Plus: More zeppelins!

Life Beyond Thunderdome: The Last Starfighter

My May column at Forces of Geek, "Life Beyond Thunderdome" is now up. This month? 1984's The Last Starfighter, which is a perfectly okayish kind of film.

Heroes Postmortem

It's official: NBC canceled Heroes. I'm fuzzy on the details. Something to do with the show hemorrhaging two-thirds of its viewers over the last couple of seasons? Not sure.

I was briefly tempted to start this off with, "I come to bury Heroes, not to praise it," but I'm not a huge fan of public gloating. Granted, the severe dip in the show's quality made me lose all enthusiasm for it by early fall last year, and I never did get around to watching the back half of the final season, but for a good run there, this site devoted significant time and energy to covering and analyzing the show. Thus, it seems only right to have one final wrap-up post.

Here's a handy master list of the Heroes-themed posts on this site:

Volume One recaps
Volume Two recaps
Volume Three recaps
Volume Four recaps
Volume Five recaps

Ten Common-Sense Ways to Fix Heroes

My pre-Volume Five Heroes spoof press release

My Volume Five speculative script

My account of meeting all those talented and charming cast members during the WGA strike.

Post-Volume Two character analyses

...and, for good measure, all those Volume Five recaps where I Photoshopped the inexplicably-absent Mohinder into the publicity stills, just out of spite. Ah, good times.

In all those words above, I've probably already said far more than needs to be said on the subject. Thank you for one damn good season, Heroes, and here's hoping all the cast members soon find their respective ways onto better projects.

Edited to add: the great Dan Liebke's awesome visual representation of the ideal end for the series:



Total missed opportunity there, Dan.

Fringe: Northwest Passage

My terribly late recap of last week's Fringe is up at TVgasm. Peter mucked about in the Pacific Northwest, hanging out with Stef from The Goonies and eating pie and thwarting a brain-slicing serial killer. Good stuff.

FlashForward: The Negotiation

Repeat as necessary:

Just two more episodes. Just two more episodes. Just two more episodes.

Dead show walking, folks: Per unofficial reports, FlashForward has been canceled, to the surprise of precisely no one. Considering the joyless and charmless muddle into which this once-promising show devolved, the news is a relief.

It’s April 28th, the day before the events revealed in the flash forwards are supposed to take place. New footage of Suspect Zero -- Simon -- wandering around awake and aware during the blackouts at the Detroit Oxide Stadium is leaked to a local news channel, which has Stan and the rest of the FBI gang spitting tacks. Figuratively, of course. The footage was anonymously delivered to the station via messenger; Demetri tries to track down the source, but he’s distracted by Zoey, who wants him to drop everything and take off with her to Hawaii so he’ll be safely out of the city on April 29th.

In other Demetri news, he’s decided he wants to be a part of Janis’s baby’s life. Janis thinks this is a perfectly awful idea.

In Afghanistan, Aaron and Khamir spy on the Jericho base. Aaron sends photographs to Stan, who warns him not to try to rescue Tracy without help. Aaron ignores Stan. He and Khamir ambush the base and rescue a badly-injured Tracy. Aaron, by the way, shoots a whole bunch of people with an assault rifle in the process. Remember the early days when Aaron was just a mild-mannered electrician/recovering alcoholic? And then he sort of magically transformed into a ruthless one-man Black Ops squad? There’s an interesting and evocative idea about a father who’d venture into hell to save his damaged daughter buried somewhere in Aaron’s quagmire of a plotline, but, like pretty much every other story on this show, it’s been botched and diluted. Aaron’s adventure in Afghanistan to save her, which should be a stirring climax, seems slipshod and improbable.

Stan looks over Aaron’s photos of Jericho, then gives President Peter Coyote a call. They have a conversation laden with menace and double meaning. When President Coyote hangs up on him, Stan calls his arch-nemesis, Vice President Clemente. Stan and his shady Washington ties is another interesting plotline that sputtered out early.

While pretending to be an American, an incognito Simon is approached in a bar by Lita, the woman who recruited Janis to the dark side. Here, Dominic Monaghan gets to test-drive an American accent, and all I can say is, join the club: Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, Brian F. O’Byrne and James Callis are all charter members of FlashForward’s Fake American Accent group.

Anyway, Simon and Lita go back to a seamy motel and roll around in bed together. They’re interrupted by the arrival of the main bad guy… who turns out to be that random blond guy, Hellinger, who made sporadic and non-vital appearances in a couple of earlier episodes. Really? Him? Anyway, Hellinger wants Simon to work for him again, as Simon is the only person who can properly calibrate the particle accelerator and thus plunge the world into chaos once more. I’m sad to report that the nice actress from Mystic Pizza and Shag is forced to spend this scene parading around in Simon’s fedora, a leather jacket, and no pants. Sorry, Annabeth Gish.

At the FBI office, Baltar rearranges Mark’s stupid evidence wall to fit the visions in his own flash forwards. Baltar claims he’s been in Mark’s office before, with Dyson Frost, examining the wall. Baltar shows Mark and Olivia a sketch he made of Hellinger, whom he identifies as the big boss. It also turns out that both Nhadra, the mysterious woman in Hong Kong, and the homeless man Dyson Frost murdered at the shelter were test subjects at Raven River. When Demetri walks in, Baltar freaks out, because in all the thousands of possible futures he’s seen, Demetri is supposed to be dead.

Janis meets with Vogel in a bar and tells him the bad guys have ordered her to kill Mark. Vogel advises her to play along with them. Vogel doesn’t seem overly concerned whether Mark lives or dies. Vogel and I share this in common. I wish this show had been all about Vogel instead of about Mark. So Janis meets her contact, Carline, in a Laundromat and tells her she’ll kill Mark in good time. She also tells her that Baltar is in the clutches of the FBI. He’s being moved to a safe house; Janis promises she’ll tip off the bad guys to the location.

And there’s some long, glum scene where Demetri frets to Mark that the universe is trying to kill him and Mark displays his customary monstrous indifference. Do these two even like each other?

Sidebar: I’m always far more likely to assign credit or blame to writers instead of actors, because gauging the quality of acting is a far, far more subjective process than gauging the quality of writing. It still boils down to a matter of opinion, of course, but there’s plenty of specific criteria separating good writing from bad: Are the characters consistent? Does the plot proceed in a logical fashion? Do the characters have clear, identifiable goals and do they move toward those goals? It’s much more difficult to pinpoint whether an actor is effective in his or her role, and opinions are much more likely to vary. For my own purposes, I use two separate and highly subjective criteria: Is the actor believable as his or her character, and does his or her performance evoke an appropriate emotional response in me? Joseph Fiennes -- who has done plenty of good work in other projects -- is believable enough as a straight-laced FBI agent, but he’s less successful at the second half of my criteria. From the start, I’ve found Mark relentlessly unsympathetic and unlikable. I’m not convinced that’s the reaction I’m supposed to have.

(If the scripts consistently portrayed Mark as flat and dour, is there anything Fiennes could have done to give the character more layers? Damned if I know. This is why I'm not an actor, and this is why, even in a case like this, I'm far more likely to point fingers at the writing staff.)

As Vreede and Demetri drive Baltar to the safehouse, their van is ambushed by armed men, who’ve been tipped off by Janis. There’s a huge gunfight. The armed men raid the van… and discover that Baltar is actually Mark in disguise. Mark forces the gunmen to take him to Hellinger’s lair, which turns out to be a big, roomy building with white walls and lots of empty space. Upon the arrival of the FBI, Hellinger runs through the building shouting at everyone, “Burn it all!” All his accomplices start deleting files on their computers. As is always the case, the phrase “DELETING FILES” shows up across the monitors in huge red letters, and the computers start emitting sparks and short-circuiting. This is exactly why I haven’t cleaned up the old files on my computer in months. The resulting electrical fire always sets off my smoke alarm.

Mark confronts Janis in the parking lot and demands to know who she’s working for. Points to Mark for figuring out she’s been up to some shady business, at least. She tells him she’s been working for Vogel and the CIA for the past three years. Janis warns Mark about her orders to kill him. This is kind of what I’m talking about with Fiennes: In this scene, Mark has every reason to be justly pissed off -- he’s just discovered someone he’s been working with for several years has been deceiving him the whole time -- and yet Janis seems a whole lot more sympathetic. Mark just kind of seems like a self-righteous dick.

There’s an interesting undercurrent to this scene, with Janis explaining how she’s been forced to lead a double life for too long and how she hasn’t been able to make friends or form any permanent bonds. It gives her sudden baby wish more resonance -- she doesn’t want to have a baby just because she saw herself pregnant in her flash forward and thought gee, that’d be neat, but because she thinks it might end her self-imposed isolation and loneliness. It would have been nice if they’d introduced this idea much earlier in her character arc. For the entire first half of the season, Janis was defined strictly in terms of the status of her womb; it did her character a disservice not to give viewers a concrete reason why having a baby would be important to her.

Janis returns to her apartment and finds Simon holding a gun and asking for her help.

FlashForward: Course Correction

Two days before the blackouts: At their laboratory in Palo Alto, Simon and Lloyd share a toast and prepare for their latest experiment, in which they’re going to attempt to simulate the Big Bang. Their giddy mood is dampened when Simon gets a call from his mom informing him of his father’s death.

The day of the blackouts: With a great deal of fanfare, Lloyd, minus Simon, activates a big, shiny blue particle accelerator. As soon as he does this, the blackouts take place across the world.

Present day: It’s now only a week from the date seen in the flash forwards, which means this season must be coming to an end. Hallelujah! As the world gears up for this event, Lloyd is interviewed on television, along with Celia, the woman who was saved from her flash forward-ordained death by cute Al’s suicide. Lloyd claims that people like Celia who have managed to avoid their fate are anomalies. He believes the universe will keep pushing toward the futures shown in the flash forwards. The universe is spiteful and vindictive like that. Lloyd also claims there’s no chance of another blackout occurring. Lloyd is a big old liar.

Simon meets with his kidnapped sister Annabelle on a bridge, while unseen assailants in a nearby parked van hold her in their rifle sights. Annabelle tells Simon her kidnappers want him to give them the QED ring, or they’ll kill her in twelve hours.

Back at FBI headquarters, Simon tries to bribe a random FBI agent into tracking down the license number of Annabelle’s kidnappers; van. Instead, the agent rats him out to Mark.

MI-6 Inspector Fiona Banks (remember her? Alex Kingston? Last seen back in, oh, Episode Seven and never referred to since?) meets up with Demetri at a crime scene. A man named Andrew Weeks, who had managed to avoid his flash forward-predicted death from a drug allergy, was murdered: Someone put rat poison in his coffee. Fiona explains to Demetri that there’s been a rash of murders of people who, like Demetri and Celia, had otherwise managed to escape their fates. Fiona has traipsed over from Merrie Olde England to investigate these murders, all of which have taken place in the Los Angeles area. I’m sure this raises all kinds of jurisdictional issues, but hey -- as far as I can tell, the Los Angeles branch of the FBI is currently being headed up by CIA agent Vogel, so clearly nobody’s being much of a stickler on jurisdiction these days.

Vogel, by the way, is not in this episode. This is a disappointment. The joys I get from this show are few and far between, but Vogel’s smarm can usually make me smile.

Among Andrew’s papers is a flyer for a Blue Hand gathering. Oh. Those guys again, huh? Much like Fiona, we haven’t seen them since Episode Seven. They haven’t been missed.

Mark calls Simon into his office, wondering why he wanted the information on the license plate. Simon ‘fesses up about Annabelle’s kidnapping, though he claims to have no idea what her kidnappers want with him. Mark gets shirty with Simon about how this puts the Mosaic investigation in jeopardy. You know, more than the investigation has already been jeopardized by all the various moles in Mark’s department. Simon steals the QED ring from the FBI, bids farewell to Lloyd, and takes off.

Demetri and Fiona interview the weird, creepy leader of the Blue Hand group, who is once again played by Callum Keith Rennie. His character name, apparently, is Slingerland. I feel reasonably certain I did not know that before this episode. Huh. Anyway, Slingerland claims to know nothing about Andrew’s death. He, like Lloyd, believes the universe will try to balance itself, and thus all the people who tried to dodge their deaths in their flash forwards are doomed.

Of course, it turns out Slingerland is doing his best to help the universe along. Demetri and Fiona discover Slingerland poisoned Andrew. They try to stop him before he can run over Celia; Demetri manages to kill Slingerland, but in the chaos, Fiona accidentally hits Celia, gravely injuring her. So Fiona and Demetri start to think that maybe there really is something to this whole “universe balancing itself” talk.

Olivia fusses over Baltar in the hospital. When Lloyd drops by, Baltar is delighted at the prospect of Olivia and Lloyd hooking up, as he’s seen in his multiple flash forwards. Vreede questions Baltar about a drawing of Mark’s evidence wall found among Baltar’s possessions. Baltar claims he saw the wall during one of his flash forwards

Meanwhile, Nicole is assigned the task of giving flu shots to people in the custody of Immigration. She looks through their medical records and sees one of the files is on Keiko. Nicole goes to tell Bryce she’s finally tracked down his mystery dream girl, but before she can, Bryce trumps her good news with his own: His cancer has gone into remission. He kisses Nicole exuberantly.

Mark tracks down the van Simon saw on the bridge. He finds Annabelle tied up in the back, safe and alive.

In Lloyd’s apartment, Olivia and Lloyd look over Baltar’s brain scans, then make out a bit. Brain scans make them randy. This gets a little awkward when Mark unexpectedly stops by to talk to Lloyd about Simon’s disappearance.

Now thoroughly suspicious of Simon, since he stole the ring and ran away and lied about his sister’s kidnapping, Mark and Stan analyze the security tape from the Detroit stadium during the blackout and prove conclusively that Simon is Suspect Zero. Since we the audience found out about this five episodes ago, the revelation lacks a certain dramatic punch. When Mark questions Annabelle about her ordeal, she tells him she overheard one of the kidnappers say Simon would cause another blackout.

Just a few more episodes, folks, and we can all put this show behind us for good.

Fringe: Brown Betty

So Fringe was thoroughly bonkers last week, what with all the singing and the jazz hands and the fedoras, to say nothing of Olivia's Damon Runyonesque accent. My belated recap is up at the new, improved TVgasm site. Fair warning for formatting errors beyond my control; the new site is, shall we say, not entirely bug-free.