FlashForward: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Well, what do you know? After a string of stinkers, FlashForward goes and pulls off a pretty decent episode. It’s far too late in the game for it to count towards longevity -- this show is still doomed -- but it raises my hopes they’ll be able to wrap up this season gracefully.

Olivia finds Baltar in her kitchen, doing his finest Howling Mad Murdoch impression. He babbles about how he’s seen her at various events all throughout her life: a Pixies concert, a wedding… He informs her that she made a mistake by marrying Mark instead of Lloyd (yeesh, no kidding. Mark is a dud). For good measure, he howls, “Don’t buy coffee today from the man who looks like Mr. Clean!”

A little freaked out, Olivia drives to work. There’s been a terrible car accident in front of the hospital, and the coffee cart vendor -- who has a bald pate like Mr. Clean -- is lying in a bloody heap. So that’s weird. You know what’s also weird? Nobody on the scene, including trained surgeon Olivia, is doing a damn thing to help the man, who appears to be gravely wounded but still alive. If I were to make a list of all the things wrong with FlashForward, this would rank pretty high: It does not want the viewers to value lives apart from those of our main cluster of characters. Ergo, Marcie can open fire in a conference room full of FBI agents and murder six of them, and we’re never given any indication that Mark and Demetri et al. are disturbed by the slaughter of their friends and coworkers. Ergo, Olivia sees a man dying on the sidewalk, and clearly we’re not meant to think anything deeper about this scene than, “Wow, it’s weird Baltar knew that would happen.”

You know what? Instead of harping any further on all the basic structural errors in FlashForward, I’m just going to post a link to my essay, “Ten Common-Sense Ways to Fix Heroes.” Just substitute “FlashForward” for “Heroes” throughout, and it more or less fits. Both shows make the same fundamental script mistakes, and both shows are dead in the water as a result.

Back at home, Olivia flips through a photo album and notices that, yep, Baltar has indeed been present at key events in her life: There he is in the background of the wedding photos, and there he is hovering behind Olivia at a Pixies concert. Does Olivia seem like the type to have ever gone to a Pixies concert in her life? Really?

(Baltar’s character name is actually Gabriel McDow, but he’s going to be Baltar from here on out. Here’s the thing: I thought James Callis was great on Battlestar Galactica. He deftly pulled off a character who was: a) brilliant, b) insane, c) despicable, and d) sleazy… and he made him pretty darn likeable and even a bit sympathetic. But I’m not feeling him here. Gabriel is composed of a bunch of highly mannered tics and repetitive speech patterns, and thus I’m experiencing the detached sensation of watching an actor play someone who is mentally ill, instead of feeling like I’m genuinely observing someone with mental problems.)

Olivia compares notes with Vreede about Baltar and this Raven River business he keeps yammering about. Vreede, who has been following up on the Raven River lead for Mark, has discovered it was a psychiatric hospital specializing in treating autistics, savants and schizophrenics. It’s been closed since the late 1980s.

Vreede and Olivia explore the abandoned hospital. Once again, it seems odd that Olivia would be involved in Vreede’s investigation this closely, but at least it gets her more closely involved in the plot. Inside the hospital, Baltar pops up and accosts Olivia again. He shows her a room where he claims Dyson Frost did experiments with flash forwards on him and the other patients. They’d put him to sleep, and he’d wake up… elsewhere. Olivia muses that Frost probably used savants in his experiments for their eidetic (photographic) memories. After the experiments were concluded, Baltar claims, the patients were supposed to be killed so they wouldn’t tell anyone what was going on.

Baltar again insists Olivia’s life is going the wrong way: She was supposed to go to Harvard, not UCLA, and she was supposed to be with Lloyd, not stinky old Mark.

In Kandahar, Afghanistan, Aaron drinks tea in a café and tries (poorly) to blend with the locals. He’s approached by a man named Malik, who has been sent by Stan to help him. Hey, it’s Ravi Kapoor, who played Young Chandra Suresh on a couple of fairly execrable episodes of Heroes! Ah, memories. Aaron and Malik head off to look for Khamir Dejan, the man who helped Aaron find Tracy in his flash forward. As they head south into the mountains, their vehicle is surrounded by gunmen, who open fire. Malik gets shot, another group of gunmen move in and start attacking the first group, stuff blows up, and Aaron gets captured by an armed group led by… Khamir Dejan.

Two years ago: Recent Quantico graduate Janis chats with a flirty lady named Lita (Annabeth Gish) in a bar. Lita, who turns out to be a headhunter, makes a shady-sounding offer for Janis to supplement her income while still keeping her FBI gig. Following Lita’s tip, Janis goes to an aquarium and meets her new secret spy contact, Carline, who asks her to pass along super-secret FBI information to her on a regular basis. Janis says okay to this.

Present day: During an FBI briefing, Mark brings up Dyson Frost’s words about how Mark will be saved by the lady he sees every day. He thinks the blueprints and photos they found on Frost might turn out to be important. Smarmy Vogel, who is sulky that Frost got killed by Alda before he could turn himself in to the FBI, puts forth the convincing argument that Frost was crazy and not to be trusted. Saith Mark, “He was always true to his word.” Was he? I mean, Mark knows Frost slaughtered all those Somali villagers after conducting experiments with flash forwards on them. He knows Frost faked his own death and stayed in deep hiding for years. This all kinda points to a long-standing pattern of deceit and betrayal, so I’m not sure why Mark is assuming everything Frost told him is the truth.

Mark is a terrible FBI agent. I’ve probably pointed that out before, but it bears repeating.

Janis gives Mark the scoop on Frost’s photos -- they’re old, taken early in the prior century. Lab analysis discovered traces of soil exclusively found in the Kunar region in Afghanistan on them. That’s mighty specific and convenient.

Janis takes Frost’s blueprints to a professor to analyze. He thinks they show plans for a variation of the Antikythera mechanism: a sophisticated bronze artifact found in Greece and dating from the second century BC, used to calculate solar eclipses.

Janis also brings a copy of the blueprints to Carline. Carline orders her to give her the originals and all existing copies. So Janis breaks into the professor’s office and steals back the copy she left with him. She also sneaks into the FBI building after hours and steals the copy pinned to Mark’s evidence wall. Mark catches her in the act, but she bluffs her way through it well enough.

In pregnancy news, Janis has an ultrasound that shows that her fetus might be endangered by her stressful life and vigorous workload. Perhaps her bullet-scarred uterus might have something to do with that, too. Mark calls mid-ultrasound to order her to come over to his office right away.

The professor who was analyzing the blueprints is in Mark’s office. He’d managed to take photos of the blueprints before Janis swiped them from him; from his photos, he’s concluded that the device shown on them is a mechanical clock designed to calculate dates. The first date is October 6, 2009 -- the day of the blackouts.

On the day of the blackouts: Janis passes out while retrieving information for Mark and Demetri, who are hot on the trail of Alda Herzog. She has her flash forward of being pregnant. When she wakes up, she heads to the ladies’ room to have herself a good puking/sobbing session. Knowing the information she’s been providing to the shadowy organization was somehow responsible for the blackouts, she confronts Carline at the aquarium and insists she wants out of their arrangement. They have the obligatory I-want-out/you’re-in-too-deep scene, and Janis flounces out in a huff.

Present day: Mark asks Janis what her deal is -- she’s been distracted and sort of incompetent lately. She tells him about her pregnancy. All this sort of clumsily leads into a discussion of Dyson Frost and the whole “saved by the lady you see every day” business, whereupon Mark smashes open the chess Queen on his evidence board that he found during the raid on Frost’s hideout in Pigeon, Utah, and finds one of the blackout-shielding rings hidden inside it.

Mark shows the ring to Stan, Lloyd and Simon. Neglecting to divulge his own close and personal experience with the effects of such a ring, Simon identifies it as a Quantum Entangling Device (QED) and explains that it can anchor the wearer’s consciousness to the present during a flash forward. Mark thinks the armed men in his flash forward might’ve been coming to steal the ring, not to kill him.

Two years before the blackout: Quantico graduate Janis meets with Vogel in a coffee shop. He tells her the CIA has pegged her as a likely candidate for recruitment by hostile forces. He reassures her, rather nicely, that he knows she’ll remain loyal to the FBI. Nonetheless, he wants her to allow herself to be recruited and to act as a double agent.

Once again: I’m glad they’re making Vogel a more important part of things. He’s a good character, and he adds a refreshing dose of smarm to this show. But: The CIA and the FBI are still two separate and unrelated organizations, and it’s still unclear why a Company man has so much pull over FBI employees. I do like this business of Janis turning out to be a double agent (triple agent, really: she’s a Fed who’s secretly working for a shadowy evil organization and secretly working for the CIA); it seems much more in character for her than just having her turn out to be working for the bad guys.

Janis tells Carline about the discovery of the ring. Carline, naturally, orders Janis to steal it from Mark and give it to her. She also orders Janis to kill Mark.

Okay. Better. This show still has huge problems, and it’s still doomed, but there were actually some interesting ideas floated in this episode. Here’s hoping it all manages to build to a decently satisfying conclusion.