FlashForward 1-4: “The Black Swan”
It turns out, his name is Edward Ned, but his friends call him “Ned Ned”. He’s been experiencing pain, but he’s weirdly outgoing and makes a lot of stupid jokes. This is a weird dude. Bryce asks him about his Flash. Ned saw himself “rocking leather pants” at a cool bar that he’s always been afraid to go to. Also, he was Black. Sure enough, we get a glimpse of him and he’s much darker-skinned than in the present. Olivia’s barely holding it together in this scene, which is pretty great. I can’t tell if the character is supposed to be amused of if Sonya Walger herself is amused. Either way, it’s pretty funny. I love that he further explains it by saying “Black. Like Oprah.”
At Zurika Coffee, Zoe and Demetri are talking about the wedding. Apparently, his parents are not thrilled about the wedding, what with her not being Korean. She finally notices that he’s being weird. She asks him about the arrest he made on the day of the Blackout – she wonders if Demetri is violating due process by keeping that woman in custody for 14 days without charging her. Oh – she’s a lawyer. Have I not mentioned that? I’m sure that’s been established, but I don’t know if I brought it up.
At the Benford home, Mark is making an egg talk to Charlie. It’s cute and funny. Olivia tells Charlie that Nicole is coming back to be her babysitter, which makes everybody happy because they don’t watch Mad Men, so they don’t know her as Jane. Speaking of, we see her sitting outside, having breakfast with Aaron. And hey, we find out that his daughter Tracy used to babysit Nicole. It’s the Circle of Life!
In the hospital, Bryce and Olivia talk about Ned. Bryce is fascinated by Ned’s Flash, while Olivia doesn’t think it has diagnostic value. She’s also mad at Bryce for not seeing his psychiatrist. Lloyd then stumbles out of Dylan’s room – Dylan is freaking out and throwing food, mostly to remind us of Olivia’s Flash.
At the FBI, Stanford is not excited about sending Mark to Somalia. He points out that Mark’s hunches haven’t really born fruit, including releasing a Nazi to find out that crows died. Hee. Al tries to sell Mark’s point, but Stanford ain’t buying it. I think the sheer paradox of using Mark’s Flash to generate leads is starting to wear on him.
Al and Mark slink off, and immediately start comparing notes on a hacker they busted who might be able to commandeer a satellite to get a better look at the region. Mark does not care about rules! Also, Al mentions that Demetri is interrogating the “hot blonde terrorist”. Well, who wouldn’t? And that takes us to Demetri, interrogating “Alda Hertzog”, which is the most suspicious name ever. He’s also got Agent Vreede backing him up, and he used to be Matt’s partner on Heroes. Alda seems aware that they can’t hold her indefinitely, but they kind of don’t care. I like how Demetri calls her associates “super-dead”. She finally drops the name “Customer Choice Restaurant Group”. Sounds threatening, right? However, Vreede looks it up and says that they’ve wiretapped them in the past, but never found any significance. She then taunts Demetri about his upcoming death. Wait, hot terrorist knows, and he still hasn’t told his fiancée? Demetri’s a weird dude.
Meanwhile, Mark is irritated that Stanford won’t let them investigate Somalia, but Demetri wants to reopen this weapons charge. Stanford takes Demetri’s side and tells them to follow up on Hot Terrorist.
At the hospital, Lloyd apologizes to Olivia for pestering her, and then mentions that she’s clearly uncomfortable. She suggests that he leave the hospital for a bit, maybe go to the house where Dylan lived with his mother and find something out about the kid. Once he’s gone, Olivia tells Bryce to transfer Dylan to Physical Therapy.
Mark and Demetri are at a fast-food restaurant, apparently the only one owned by Customer Choice Restaurant Group. The manager is a bit of a dumbass, who excitedly tells them that they’re adding yogurt to the menu, per his flash. They ask for a list of employees, and he heads back to get it for them, shouting out an order for burgers “for these FBI guys”. This makes a swarthy employee nervous, and he runs for it. They give chase, and they run over fences, across streets, under fences, and then into a trailer park where a heavy Black man is playing jazz trumpet. Hee. Our heroes split up, and Demetri’s the first one to spot Swarthy Guy. Unfortunately, a trashy blonde opens her door at the wrong moment and Demetri smacks into it at full speed. Ha! This episode is becoming a Tom and Jerry cartoon!
Mark can’t find the guy, but he spots a broken gold chain on the ground, which means he’s close. Swarthy Guy bursts out and knocks Mark over. Mark catches up and tackles him into a kiddie pool. In his backpack, Demetri finds a metal case labeled “Yellow Cake” and talks about how awesome he is for catching a guy transporting yellow cake uranium. Because you’d totally label it. Mark isn’t a dumbass, so he opens the case, which is full of baggies of weed – “Yellow Cake” is the strain he’s selling. In his Flash, he saw himself in a fancy car, so he takes that to mean that he’s going to be a big success in the weed game. He says you can’t fight fate, which is Demetri’s cue to kick the living hell out of him. Mark chews him out for being unprofessional, and Demetri decks him. Way to make sure nobody misses you, dude!
After the cops take away Swarthy Guy, Demetri tells Mark about the call, the one where he found out the day of his death. Mark is sure that the guys trying to kill him in the future are the ones who kill Demetri, which seems like a reach. Still, he thinks they can “Use what we saw to stop what we saw”. He says that’s why he’s obsessed with Mosaic – he wants to save them from their futures.
At the hospital, Lloyd returns Bryce a sketchbook that he left in Dylan’s room – he sketched an Asian woman who Bryce says he hasn’t met yet. There’s a news story in the background about a post office worker who used Mosaic to track down the police officer who’s going to save his life. Bryce asks Lloyd what he saw, and Lloyd says he saw a strange house, and he got an urgent call from somebody he didn’t know. He heard a woman’s voice and turned toward it, and then the Flash ended. Olivia walks past, trying to be unnoticed, but Bryce chases her down. He has Ned’s X-rays, and apparently he has blood pooling around his liver. Olivia says it’s lucky he came in, but Bryce says it isn’t luck, since he had a vision of the future, so he’d clearly survive. Olivia is still not impressed with temporal anomalies as diagnostic tools. Because of the cheating, mostly.
Bryce tells Ned about the risks of his surgery, but Ned isn’t worried at all. In six months, he’s going to be “this invincible, fearless Black guy. Like Shaft or Bryant Gumbel.” Holy crap, did I ever laugh at that line.
Nicole is in a priest’s office – the priest enters, chatting on his cell phone. In a series of strange details, he keeps crickets in his office, and mistakes Nicole for her sister, Paige. Anyway, she wants to start doing volunteer work. The priest tells her that they’re fully staffed, since everybody’s volunteering now. We get another shot of her Flash, where a man is drowning her. She asks “How do I atone for something I haven’t done yet?” which certainly sounds like we’re missing some details. That throws the priest. She thinks that she was being punished in her Flash, which again, either means that there’s more to it than we’ve seen, or Nicole is a crazy lady. The priest gives her the number of volunteer coordinator Audrey Ridgeway, and a Jesus t-shirt. From the way he hustles out of there, I think he’s got something going on.
Bryce Googles “Pigment Change”, and then goes looking for Ned. He finds out that Ned’s in the OR, which means “We’re about to kill our patient”.
Damn, there are a lot of ads for V during old episodes of FlashForward. Sure would be nice to see new episodes of either series at this point, right?
Bryce rushes into the OR and tells Olivia she can’t operate – Ned has Addison’s Disease. Apparently, and I have no idea if this is a real thing, his body is making melanin instead of adrenalin. That’s why he’s so calm, and that’s why he’s Black in the future. If he can’t manufacture stress hormones, surgery will kill him. Olivia is really pissed now, that Bryce is citing “some freaky dream” as medical evidence, and she scrubs in.
Lloyd returns to his late wife’s empty house. He looks around at all the pictures and mementoes, one of which is a stuffed kangaroo. We’ve established how much I love the kangaroo. This scene is more effective than it would seem by a description – nothing really happens, but it’s good at conveying a sense of loss. Oh, Lloyd seems interested in a “Magician’s Handbook”.
In the OR, the surgeons who are not Olivia are talking about their theories on the Flashes, when they suddenly start to lose the patient. Defib doesn’t work, and it’s looking bad for Ned Ned. They can’t resuscitate him, until Olivia catches sight of Bryce’s pleading eyes. She finally orders a shot of hydrocortisone, which is what Bryce suggested, and I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about medicine. The point is, it works.
Mark interrogates Hot Terrorist. He asks her about Demetri’s upcoming murder. She just knew he didn’t have a Flash, not that he would be murdered. Apparently, there’s a lot of office gossip about him, and she picked up on it. Awesomely, she flat out tells Mark that she’s going to lie, so he might as well not bother asking question. Mark persists. He asks if she’s been to Somalia, Detroit, or Utah. She says that he’s wasting his time trying to figure out what caused the Blackouts, when he should be asking “Why”.
She goes on to tell him about a Black Swan – a metaphor for a high-impact event. Something so rare, it’s beyond the boundaries of human expectation. Except for the country club owner on that episode of Curb. Essentially, we assumed that all swans were white, until we saw a black one. She then brings up an old parable about a boy blowing out a candle. I can’t tell if she’s supposed to be deep or crazy. I’m going to err on the side of “crazy”. Finally, she says that she can tell when somebody’s willing to sacrifice anything, and she can tell that Mark isn’t.
Al logs onto the Mosaic website and looks up the name “Celia”. He sees many names pop up, and he looks absolutely gutted. Mark walks past, and asks Al to call up his hacker buddy. Mark’s going to get into this whole Somali thing if it kills him!
Back at the hospital, Bryce tells a now-conscious Ned about his surgery and his Addison’s Disease. He gives Olivia all the credit for the save, which is pretty generous of him. Ned is happy, and says he doesn’t need to be afraid – the future saved him. Bryce then checks in with Olivia, and they both apologize. Olivia tells him that she’s available to talk if he needs to deal with his suicide attempt, but Bryce says he’s OK now, and echoes Ned’s words: “The future saved me”. A nurse asks Oliva about Dylan Simcoe’s treatment, and to Olivia’s surprise, Dylan has been transferred back to her care.
Mark returns home to find Nicole. He asks her how she’s holding up. She apologizes for flaking out, and then sort of breaks down and tells Mark about her Flash, where somebody was drowning her. She also says that she felt like she deserved it. We get a quick look at the guy’s face, but it’s nobody we’ve seen. Mark tells her that he’s going to get her in touch with the police, and they would protect her. He says that she’s not the person in the vision, and she needs to believe that. Charlie comes running in and Mark announces that he’s making breakfast for dinner.
In another domestic scene, Lloyd’s doing magic tricks for Dylan. Lloyd’s phone rings, and it’s none other than Dominic Monaghan (Charlie from Lost!). Lloyd’s not happy to hear from him, but Dom says that Lloyd will have to get used to it, now that they’re “responsible for the single greatest disaster in human history”. Oh yeah, we’re getting into it now!
Next time: Mark testifies before Congress, Janis goes on a date, and asses are kicked. See you there!
