FlashForward: Better Angels

It’s kind of depressing to think how, just two weeks ago, I was optimistic about FlashForward’s return and remarking how the show finally seemed to be back on the right path. I’m not optimistic anymore. In fact, between this episode and the last, I’m now resigned to just watching the sand run out of the hourglass.

In Nicole and Bryce news: Nicole decides to go to medical school, and Bryce finally tells her about his cancer. That’s really all that happens with them. Nothing about Nicole’s flash forward of being murdered, nothing further on Bryce’s mystery dream girl from his own future vision. Really, they’re both just in this episode to remind viewers they’re still part of the show, however tangentially. I shall consider myself duly reminded. I shall also offer up my best wishes that, upon the inevitable news of cancellation, Peyton List and Zachary Knighton manage to get themselves cast in projects that give them a better chance to flourish. They’re both likeable and attractive actors, but they haven’t been used to the best of their abilities.

In Mark and Olivia news: Olivia decides they should move out of Los Angeles to escape the dire events of their flash forwards. Being Olivia, she’s already picked out a nice three-bedroom Colonial house for them in Denver. Mark, on the trail of D. Gibbons/Dyson Frost, decides to (finally, finally) grill their daughter Charlie on her “D. Gibbons is a bad man” statement, which is something he should have done about ten episodes ago. I vented about my frustrations with this plot development plenty last week, so now I’m just going to set it aside and move on. With relatively little prodding, Charlie finally describes her flash forward: She saw Lloyd on the couch talking on the phone (to Mark, as we now know) about how D. Gibbons lied to them. Liars are bad; ergo, “D. Gibbons is a bad man.” Charlie also overheard two unidentified men in suits standing at the back door. One of them tells the other, “Mark Benford is dead.” Hence, Charlie’s trauma about this.

…I don’t know. It’s a little weak. I totally get that Charlie would be shell-shocked after hearing news about her dad’s death. No problem there. But we haven’t seen any indication that Charlie’s been worried her dad’s going to die, and the whole “D. Gibbons is a bad man” clue now seems like a giant fake-out. It seems like the idea for Charlie’s flash forward got changed pretty drastically somewhere along the line.

Disguised as a Red Panda humanitarian aid mission, Demetri, Janis, Simon and Vogel (hi, Vogel!) arrive in the Ganwar region of Somalia to investigate the mysterious tower. Gunmen promptly open fire on them from rooftops. Chaos erupts, and it’s all too Black Hawk Down for words. They get captured by a Somali warlord named Adbikalif (Owiso Odera), who murders their translator, their pilot, and their private security guards. Just to prove he’s bad stuff, he also murders a couple of his own henchmen for being insufficiently competent after Demetri et al make a botched escape attempt. He’s bad. Bad, bad, bad.

Abdikalif explains about the five towers: They were built by an unnamed humanitarian group to provide electricity to the region. Abdikalif was away from the village on the day of the 1991 blackouts; he returned to find his mother and everyone else unconscious in the streets. He thought they were dead (he saw a black camel, which is a bad omen), so he ran away. When he returned years later, four of the towers were gone, and the village was empty.

In his own flash forward during the more recent blackouts, Abdikalif saw himself as a great leader, making a speech to a huge crowd about “better angels.” Janis recognizes this as Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. She goes online to the Mosaic site and, by searching for “better angels,” finds a number of accounts from people who saw themselves attending Abdikalif’s speech in their own flash forwards: He was addressing the Assembly of the African Union, and he was talking about stopping war in Somalia.

This is enough to convince Janis, Demetri, Vogel and Simon that Abdikalif is a good guy, even though he just murdered their translator and their pilot in front of them for no particular reason.

The whole group investigates the sole remaining tower. We’re reminded that it was inexplicably built in 1991 from Simon’s 1992 design. Weirder still, the technology for the towers still doesn’t exist. So that’s all very curious. They find a chess board in the tower (earlier, Mark discovered that Dyson Frost is a chess fiend) and a VHS tape. They pop it into a handy-dandy VCR and watch Frost interview the villagers, including Abdikalif’s mother, about what they saw during the 1991 blackouts, in which they all witnessed events from two weeks in the future.

Vogel finds a huge room filled with the bullet-riddled skeletons of the villages, who were evidently massacred en masse by Dyson Frost after the experiments were completed. Recognizing Simon from his televised press conference where he and Lloyd took responsibility for the blackouts, Abdikalif decides to kill him in vengeance… but Vogel shoots and kills Abdikalif instead. Ergo, his “better angels” vision will never happen.

Huh. Yes, they’ve established that the flash forwards can be changed. But in regard to Abdikalif’s death, there’s no reason it should have changed. Al Gough deliberately altered his fate to avoid the events he saw in his future by jumping off a building. Fair enough. With this, though, Abdikalif’s future vision of himself as a great leader would have only come to pass if he’d had his encounter with Janis and had seen the skeletons inside the tower (he finds his mother’s beaded necklace, which he’s wearing in the flash forward). So his flash forward was on track at least to that point, and no one in this scene was working actively to prevent it from taking place… so why shouldn’t the rest of his vision play out just as he saw it? There might be an explanation -- maybe we’ll find that Simon was never supposed to be in Somalia, and thus Vogel was never supposed to kill Abdikalif -- but with the way things are getting increasingly sloppier and more ragged, I sort of doubt it. Time will tell.

Later, Janis complains to Demetri that her window for getting pregnant to match up with the timeline in her flash forward is closing. Demetri helpfully offers to impregnate her (which is a theory I floated back in episode two, before learning that Janis is a lesbian). It says something about these two characters that the offer actually seems pretty goofy and casual and sincere, and not skeezy in any way.

Demetri watches some more of the VHS tape from 1991, in which Dyson Frost addresses him directly.

And we get a little bit of Vogel’s flash forward: He saw himself standing at the back patio door at the Benford house, saying “Mark Benford is dead” to someone while little Charlie watches him through the door.

Frustrating. Unsatisfying. Not much fun to watch.