FlashForward – Episode 1-1 “No More Good Days”
We then pull a JJ Abrams, as it shifts to “Four Hours Earlier”. It’s 7 AM in Los Angeles, and it’s a lovely day. Mark opens his safe to get his gun, and there’s a note that says “You’re a crappy husband. I hate you.” He chuckles, so this is clearly their thing. He goes over to the bed and tells his wife “I hate you too.” His wife, Olivia, is played by the lovely Sonya Walger. You know her as Penny on Lost. I’m having a hard time getting past that, because all of her scenes make me think she’s cheating on Desmond.
Their adorable daughter, Charlie, is watching a weird-ass cartoon. We seem this same show a bunch of times in future episodes, and I can’t tell if it’s important or if it’s just a running joke. He leaves the house and passes Nicole, the babysitter. Since she is also Jane on Mad Men, I am inclined to dislike her immediately. Meanwhile, Olivia calls a Bryce and leaves a scolding message about “missing rounds”. We then see Bryce, out on a pier. He watches a surfer out on the water, and then takes a handgun out of his backpack.
In what appears to be a church, Aaron Stark talks about receiving his daughter’s remains back from Afghanistan. Mark is in the circle of chairs, listening to him speak – it’s an AA meeting. Outside, Mark hassles Aaron about going out on a date with one of Olivia’s co-workers, and Aaron mentions that he’s Mark’s sponsor.
Back at the Benford house, Nicole is making out with her boyfriend, who proves to be an instant d-bag. (I think Liz Lemon would confirm that if you take a break from making out with a guy and he tells you to “get back to work”, that’s a dealbreaker.) While on a stakeout, Mark and his partner, Demetri (John Cho), are talking about Demetri’s upcoming wedding. He’s embarrassed by her choice of a wedding song, “Islands in the Stream”. By the way, in this scene there is a billboard for Oceanic Airlines. I declare that to be awesome. (And I hasten to point out that this scene is set in October of 2009. The present-day scenes on Lost are only up to early 2008, so technically, they could exist in the same universe.)
Aaron’s at work now – he works for a utility company, and he’s getting set to climb one of those poles. Sorry to get all technical on you. Olivia’s scrubbing up for surgery. Then, Mark and Demetri spot their target, and they begin pursuit. They call into FBI headquarters, which is just an excuse for us to meet Agent Janis Hawk, and their boss, Stanford Wedeck. Make and Demetri begin their pursuit in earnest, and it’s a flat-out car chase. We cut to Bryce, who’s putting the gun to his head. Then Aaron starts to climb the pole. Nicole keeps making out. Olivia heads into surgery. And just as Mark and Demetri are about to slam into a fuel truck, the world goes crazy.
We zoom in on Mark’s eye, and then we see a rapid flood of images. Since a lot of them will be revealed in the next few episodes, I’m not going to Zapruder the footage just yet. Finally, it congeals into a hazy image of Mark standing in front of a huge, cluttered bulletin board. We see a note card reading “The Blue Hand”, a British passport, a sign for “Red Panda”, a photo of an old man, the name “D. Gibbons”, and the repeated word “Mosaic”. Mark takes a hit off of a flask, and writes “Who else knows?” on a calendar sheet for April 29, 2010. We see he’s wearing a friendship bracelet. Then, he spots the beams from laser scopes – three masked gunmen are outside his office. We see more rapid-fire images, including the word “Baltimore”. And then, we’re back at the beginning of the episode and all the chaos.
Bryce wakes up on the pier, and we see him surrounded by other people, all lying on the ground. In the operating room, everybody keeled over and the patient’s monitor is making worrisome sounds. Olivia says she lost consciousness. Nicole and the d-bag start to wake up, too. Aaron finds himself dangling from a utility pole, surrounded by wires.
Back on the street, the burning guy gets to close to a ruptured gas tank and a car explodes. Smoke pours out of nearby buildings. It looks really bad, guys. We hear explosions in the distance. Mark and Demetri spot each other and start pulling people out of burning cars. In the background, a helicopter flies into a skyscraper and explodes, and if you think that imagery is ever going to stop being shocking, I will beg to differ.
On the pier, Bryce sees bodies floating in the ocean and rushes down to help. Nicole panics and runs up to check on Charlie. Poor little Charlie simply says “I had a bad dream. I dreamt there were no more good days.” That is a killer line right there.
Mark and Demetri spot the SUV they were chasing – the driver and front seat passenger are dead, their brains smeared across the windshield. But the blond woman in the back is OK. Demetri pulls her out and demands to know what happened. “We know about the suitcase! Did you set it off?” The blond woman responds that she blacked out and went “somewhere else”. “There was a storm. The horses were scared.” People start asking the agents if it was a nuclear attack, and Mark tries to calm everybody down and focus on helping the people who are injured. Awww, he’s pulling a Jack Shepherd. It’s like they’re sucking up to me, right off the bat.
One guy says he heard on the radio that the same thing happened in San Diego. Demetri tells Mark to go check on his family, and Mark makes a run for the hospital. He sees people drowned in a puddle, looters, and, awesomely, a kangaroo. In the middle of the street. The kangaroo just bounds off. Inappropriately placed animals? Like, say, a polar bear on a tropical island? They are desperate for my love! (By the way, I love that kangaroo and hope he makes more appearances. I love the idea that there’s a kangaroo loose in LA.)
Mark spots a crowd gathered in front of an electronics store window, where the TV’s on display bring the news that everybody in the world blacked out. ABC heads into an ad reminding us “Don’t forget the kangaroo”. Oh, there is little to no chance of that happening. By the way, I’m mostly going to recap for now and save hard-core theorizing for when we’re all caught up. Still, I’m obsessed with that kangaroo.
Mark finally gets a call through to Olivia. Olivia confirms that Charlie is fine, and that her patient died during the blackout. She’s loaded down with work, what with all the injured people. Bryce finally shows up for work, and when an 8-year-old boy is wheeled in, she tells him that he’s going to be fine, and the boy responds “I know, Olivia”.
At FBI headquarters, it’s a blur of activity. Stanford confirms that everybody lost consciousness for two minutes and seventeen seconds. (Seriously guys, I like the show. You do not need to give me seemingly random numbers to get me hooked.) For no good reason, Seth McFarlane (of Family Guy) is walking with Mark and Stanford, confirming that they don’t have any information. Wow, that was super-distracting. Meanwhile, the little boy on the operating table is not doing well. Olivia gets all heroic and manages to save the kid, though.
In a meeting, Stanford is explaining the scope of the blackout, trying to figure out the death toll. More than eight hundred aircraft crashed, including Air Force Two, with the Vice-President on board. As Stanford talks, Mark keeps flashing to the images he saw, and finally speaks up. He says that he didn’t black out, but rather that he experienced a vivid dream. Janis and others confirm that the same thing happened to them. Mark describes it as “having a memory… of the future”. He explains what he saw. When he gives the date, other agents confirm that they also saw April 29.
Demetri brings the blond woman into custody. He tells Mark that he managed to get in touch with Zoe, his fiancée. Then, agent Al Gough approaches them, and says he has a way to corroborate the “Flash Forwards”. And that’s the first use of the term, right there. He says that he saw April 30, at 6 AM, but he was in London, so the timing still works out. Demetri has no idea what he’s talking about. In Al’s flash, he was having a meeting with their Scotland Yard liaison, probably about the Whitechapel murders, and they were interrupted by a bird flying into the window. Al’s point is that he had a vision of Fiona Banks, so they should see if she had a vision of him. They call Fiona, and indeed, she had the same vision that Al did. It was early, they were working on “the Rutherford case”, and a bird flew into the window.
On the news, a pundit explains that there were people in MRI’s at the moment of the blackout, and their brain activity was consistent with a waking experience. That seems important. They also mention that the accounts of the future are consistent. People were watching the news in their flashes – they mention that “Senator Glenway is facing ethics charges”, the Dow will be on an upswing, and there are food riots in Ghana. Olivia texts Mark “Hope I never see you again”, which is less harsh when you think back to the note she left him. One of the pundits calls it a “Mosaic”, and Mark remembers that word on his bulletin board. He says that was the name of the investigation he was working on, and he was working to determine what caused the blackouts. He remembers some of the leads, but they don’t mean anything yet. As they talk, Demetri reveals that he didn’t see anything at all. Janis says she was getting a prenatal sonogram, and she was 17 weeks pregnant with a girl. She mentions that she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. Stanford says he was in a meeting, but we see him sitting on the toilet, reading the paper. Ha! I love Stanford.
They start brainstorming, and Janis says they could set up a website where people could catalog their visions. They can then look for patterns and clues. That seems familiar to Mark, because that was in his vision. Stanford puts the three of them in charge of the project, and yes, the investigation comes from the clues that Mark saw from his investigation in the future. He’s providing his own leads, which makes this a potential time loop. Stanford says they have to find out what caused it, and whether it will happen again.
Mark and Demetri start setting up the bulletin board based on what Mark remembers. He remembers the name “D. Gibbons”, and producers confirmed they took the name from Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. How desperate for my love can they be? He remembers a picture of a burnt doll head next to a bullet casing. He remembers Baltimore and “Blue Hand”. Next, he says that he was wearing a friendship bracelet. Demetri asks about his “state of mind”, and Mark reveals that masked people were coming for him, and one had a tattoo of three stars on his arm. Demetri wonders why he didn’t see anything, and they both know damn well what that seems to mean. He comes right out and says he didn’t see anything because he’ll be dead by then.
Back at the Benford home, Mark checks in with Nicole. She’s pretty shook up, and she doesn’t believe him when he says it’s going to be OK. Nicole thinks “God did this. To punish us.” Olivia and Bryce talk about the kid they saved – his name is Dylan Simcoe, his mother died during the blackouts, and his father is a scientist named Lloyd. Bryce then explains that he’s been “going through some heavy stuff”, and he had planned to kill himself, but the glimpse of his future refreshed him. He considers his vision a gift.
Olivia is less convinced, and says only that she saw the end of her marriage. At Aaron’s house, Mark tells him that he was drinking in his flash forward. Aaron tells him that maybe he can change his future, and this was all just fantasy. He then says that in his flash forward, he was reunited with his daughter, Tracy. You know, the one whose remains came back from Afghanistan. He’s confused and desperately wants it to be true, but he knows it’s impossible.
Olivia comes home, and she and Mark just look at each other so sadly that it breaks my heart. In bed later, Olivia asks him what he saw. He only says he was working on his case, and he was in danger. Olivia says she can’t talk about what she saw – it was too upsetting. Finally, she says she was with another man, a man she’s never seen before. We do see a piece of her flash forward, and she’s in their house. She gets out of bed and looks over the railing to see a guy relaxing on the couch. She calls out to him, “Hey, honey”, and the vision ends as he starts to turn around. In the present, Olivia is devastated. Mark assures her that these things don’t have to happen.
Later, at the hospital, Lloyd Simcoe comes to check on his son. Lloyd? Is the guy in Olivia’s vision. Oh, snap! Meanwhile, Charlie gets out of bed to give her father a friendship bracelet that she made. The exact one he wore in his flash forward. We cut back to the FBI office, where Demetri is working late.
Janis calls him over to look at some video footage. She looked at hundreds of surveillance cameras to see what they recorded. And yep, it’s mostly people falling over. But at Tiger Stadium (Detroit! Represent!) there is one man in the stands, dressed all in black and blurry as all get out, who stands up and leaves the stadium during the blackout. Oh, yeah. Consider me sold!
