FlashForward 1-22 “Future Shock”
Demetri, Janis, and Dom arrive at NLAP. One of them has to get a device close to the security guard so it can clone his access card. Janis is in pain – the baby’s doing something weird. Well, in her Flash she’s being reassured that the baby is OK. So there’s not much tension here.
Stanford shows up to bail Mark out of jail, and he’s not happy about it. It seems to me like keeping Mark in lockup past 10 is the safest course of action. Why is nobody thinking about any of this?
It’s 9:02 PM. Stanford tells Mark that he’s partly to blame – he’s been so focused on the Blackouts that he hasn’t seen that Mark is losing it. Then there’s a call – they found two bombs with timers in the FBI building, and they think there may be more. Stanford and Mark head for the office.
Janis pulls up to NLAP, and the security guard orders her out of the car – she talks about needing a hospital and collapses, which gets her close enough to the access card.
Charlie talks about how it’s almost 10 and they’re not home. She’s happy because it means that things can change. Then stupid Lloyd shows up with Dylan and cocks everything up. He’s sure that he was on the verge of a breakthrough in his Flash, and they have to re-create the exact conditions of his Flash to get him there.
Bryce leaves the detention center and finds Nicole waiting for him. She apologizes, but Bryce is sorry for “ignoring the truth”. Yep, he loves this person he has never met more than the person who he knows and cares about him. This pisses me off. Stupid Bryce.
Keiko and her mother go through security at the airport, and if Up in the Air taught us nothing else, it’s that George Clooney is right in line behind them. Finally her mom says that Keiko should go and find the man, and she creates a diversion by hitting a security guard with her bag. Couldn’t they just, you know, get out of line?
Mark and Stan talk about the bombs, and Stan tells him to stay in the car. He also gives mark a phone to connect to Aaron. Yeah, Aaron’s really in the mood for Benford drama right now. To Aaron’s credit, he doesn’t tell Mark to shut the hell up because he’s in the middle of a damn war zone at this very moment. Mark gets out of the car when he sees Hellinger, and Hellinger nods to a couple of Bomb Squad guys, who return his signal.
9:32 PM – Olivia and Lloyd bring the kids back to the Benford house. Oh, for Christ’s sake. This storyline pisses me off to begin with. And if Olivia buys Lloyd’s logic that they have to recreate the scene exactly, doesn’t that include Charlie hearing Vogel say that “Mark Benford is dead”? If the point was to maybe change the future so that doesn’t happen, then why change up the plan. “No, seriously. Put on your lingerie and get into bed. I will totally have a breakthrough.”
Dom and Demetri get into the NLAP mainframe, and Demetri is suspicious that Dom is pulling a double-cross. Dom gives Demetri the blackout ring to prove his sincerity.
Vogel gets a call that at least five bombs have been uncovered in the FBI building with 36 minutes one the time. Then stupid effing Mark decides that he’s going to go into the building and that Vogel should go and secure the Benford home. If you don’t want to ensure that the future you saw plays out, then don’t force everybody into that position! I don’t know if I’m pissed at the writers for this contrivance or the characters for being a-holes. I think it’s the characters, actually, The more I think about it, Mark and Lloyd are self-important douches who would do exactly what they’re doing right now. It doesn’t mean that I like it, though.
In the Benford house, Dylan scrawls the equation on Olivia’s mirror with lipstick. Well, that does explain that – I never got why Lloyd would write on a mirror instead of, you know, paper. Everybody is just acting like a helpless slave to fate, which to me feels like a giant “Screw You” toward the rest of the season. I don’t know. This is making me disproportionately angry.
Dumbass Mark heads up to his office, and then a group of gunmen kill the bomb squad in the parking garage and put on those masks. Janis is in the hospital and she sees the doctor who performed her ultrasound. Back at the FBI building, Stanford is pissed that Mark went back in, and Vreede is irritated that he left his car keys in there. Ha! Vreede, we shall miss you most of all.
Lloyd stares at the lipstick equation to try to crack the tachyon constant. Olivia tells him that he’ll figure it out because he did. This idea that things have to happen the way they did is undermining everything I like about the series – this season, the Lost motto was “What happened, happened”. FlashForward’s is “Screw it, it’s gonna happen.” I think it would have been more interesting to have people fighting the future until the very last moment, rather than giving up like this. And to make things worse, Olivia is extrapolating this into proof that she should be with Lloyd because a crazy guy told her that was her future.
Stanford and Vreede are in the stairwell when they hear shots fired. Then Mark stands in front of the Big Board and says “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be”.
Bryce gets into the Japanese restaurant, where they recognize him as “Keiko’s man”. Then we see Keiko in a cab – traffic is blocked, so she climbs out and hoofs it. Nicole is driving, and swerves to miss an oncoming car – her car goes off the road and into the water. OK, here’s another thing that’s chafing me. Bryce thought from his Flash that he already knew Keiko and there was an established relationship as of April 29. There isn’t. He now knows that he is pinning his hopes on somebody about whom he knows nothing, except that he saw himself meet her. And what he felt in his Flash came from all the buildup he’s given her in the intervening time. He feels absolutely nothing for the actual Keiko, because they don’t know one another. And this doesn’t freaking bother him at all.
9:55 PM. People party in the streets. Dom can’t find the file he needs, and he offers Demetri a beer from the cooler. He reminds Demetri that Janis will be fine because she saw it in her Flash. He also has to send Lloyd a text. Demetri loves this crap about people being slaves to the future as much as I do. He notes the clock on the wall, which gives them about 20 seconds.
10:00 comes. Keisko’s running to the restaurant, Bryce is waiting, Nicole is drowning. Tracy’s waking up, Janis is getting her results. Lloyd is being an asshole. Mark gets a call from Lloyd. Lloyd talks about his findings, and that the next blackout will be in April, 2010. You know, the month of which there are 26 hours left.
Keiko finds Bryce in the restaurant, which should be a sweet moment, but it’s pissing me off. It looks like the guy is trying to pull Nicole out of the water, and she’s resisting. Janis’ baby is fine, but it’s a boy. Not a girl at all, as in the Flash.
Vreede chases a guy through the stairwell, firing away. Hey, notice how Stanford and Vreede are not trying to recreate their Flashes? Stanford should be taking a dump right now. Instead, they are taking control and trying to fix things. So basically, I made good choices when I picked my favorite characters.
Aw, dammit. Stanford goes to hide in the bathroom stall. But he’s not reading the paper with his pants down, so that’s a positive. Mark notices that the strings on the Big Board are different, so he tries to recreate what Baltar drew. Baltar’s strings run between circled letters that spell out “Blackout Ten Fourteen PM April 29th.” Uh oh.
The gunmen find Mark. Dom realizes that he’s looking at a fake mainframe, designed to keep him out. He looks for a back door, and then downloads what he needs. Charlie looks out the back door to see Vogel, and we hear him say “Mark Benford is dead…. He ran into the building. Doesn’t have a chance.” Wait, she only heard part of the line? Did they seriously pull a Three’s Company on us, this close to the finish line?
In the FBI, the gunment start shooting into Mark’s office, blowing the hell out of everything.
Nicole wakes up on dry ground – the guy who she saw drowning her pulled her out of the water. He says that he saw himself saving her in his Flash, and he’s been wondering for months if he would succeed. He introduces himself as Ed, and Nicole’s pretty shaken up.
An alarm goes off at NLAP – somebody’s accessing the mainframe from outside and taking away Dom’s control. They’re activating the collider again.
The gunmen search Mark’s office, and we see that Mark hid in a cabinet. He overpowers one and takes his gun. In a pretty awesome shootout, Mark kills a couple more shooters while everything explodes around him.
At NLAP, Demetri pulls his gun on Dom – he thinks Dom’s causing this, but Dom says he’s trying to stop it. He won’t let them make him the villain all over again. He tells Demetri to either shoot him or let him do his job.
Stanford’s on the toilet with his feet up and his gun pointed at the door. A gunman comes into the bathroom, and Stanford kicks the door open and shoots the gunman dead. We see one of the bombs, with just over eight minutes on the timer.
Mark hits the elevator button and hides. When the elevator comes up, two gunmen unload into it, and Mark kills both of them from behind. He then calls Stanford, who’s mad as hell that Mark is still in the building. Mark tells him about the upcoming Blackout and asks Stanford to call the White House. There are more gunmen looking for Mark, which has me thinking that maybe these bombs aren’t real. You’d think they’d just let the explosion do its job.
We hear bulletins going out all over the world, announcing the upcoming global Blackout. Mark calls Olivia and tells her to get Charlie somewhere safe. Dom tells Demetri to put the ring on, but Demetri says he didn’t get to see his future before, so now’s his chance. Mark kills another shooter and runs for the exit. Hey, did Vreede get out? Mark runs toward a window with a helicopter outside, presumably waiting for him, and then mid-stride, the Blackout hits. There’s a montage of passed-out people, though we see a little dog walking around. That’s as close as you’re going to get to an explanation for the kangaroo. We see a montage of images without context, including a sign that says “Happy New Year 2015”. We see Janis in a wheelchair (in the present), and Lita, wearing a Blackout ring, rolls her away. And there’s the kangaroo, in a final screw-you to the viewers. (Probably not how it was intended – I’m sure they went into this thinking it was a season finale and not a series finale.)
The last shot of the montage is an adult Charlie, telling somebody offscreen “They found him”. And then the FBI building explodes.
Yeah, that’s totally how they end the series. I don’t even know what to say. It’s ridiculously frustrating, Dammit. Look, I really cared about this series, and now I feel like it was all a waste. I can’t blame the creators, even though some of the storytelling choices in this episode really pissed me off. We walk away with nothing, and the finale pretty much ruined it for even being a one-season wonder. Damn.
Next week, I’m going to look at what went wrong. Honestly, this show should have been a success. Everybody treated it like it would be a hit, and they never tried to course-correct. One of the best new shows of the season ended up as a cautionary tale, and that’s a real shame.
