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.