Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT This Is Why Beer Wenching Is a Bad Idea
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 11 | Aired on 03.18.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Welcome back, everyone! Remember how there was this blackout that swept the entire planet, and nearly everyone saw their futures, and there was mayhem and foolishness? You do? Good. You can then skip the first few minutes of the episode.
Let's start off with the most superfluous narrative arc of the night. Naturally, it stars Bryce and Nicole. Their "no, really, we're friends" relationship is continuing apace, and Nicole becomes enamored of the "Sanctuary" movement -- helmed by a former window-washer who escaped death-by-flashforward only through the most improbable of coincidences -- in an effort to find meaning in her own flashforward. Bryce is skeptical but supportive, and honestly, the two of them just need to stop brooding over their flashforwards, exercise a little free will and get horizontal already.
More relevant: Mark is suspended for his Hong Kong hijinks, and he's under orders to go see an FBI-mandated psychiatrist until she declares him fully functional for duty. So... permanent unemployment, then? ANYWAY, Mark meets up with the doctor, who shrewdly notes that he's missing an awful lot of his flashforward and she's got a shot that can help amplify and clarify the missing details. Mark takes it and we get the extended remix of his flashforward, which I promise to recount in excruciating detail in the recap. What you need to know now is that it ends with a really hostile telephone conversation with his collaborator Lloyd that ends with Mark saying, "Unless we stop this, there's going to be another blackout!" Thus the ties between Mark and Lloyd continue to tighten...
As for Lloyd, he begins the episode being held in the requisite dank basement with David Fincher-style lighting. And because he's not suffering enough, eventually Simon joins him. Ricky Jay comes down and says, quite forthrightly, "I'm a villain." Why, yes -- because he stole all the scenes he was in. (Ba-da-bump!) Ricky Jay tells Simon and Lloyd that they didn't cause the blackout, but their experiment in plasma wake field acceleration amplified it. Then, correctly banking on Simon's craven nature and Lloyd's innate altruism, Ricky Jay cuts off a piece of Simon's finger to convince Lloyd to talk.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!"I want to tell you a story about a man I know," the episode begins. It's the parable of the window-washer. What, you haven't heard this one before? Okay, heathen, let me bring you up to speed: And yea verily, it did come to pass that a window-washer was preparing to get all tied up in his rig and go wash windows on October 6. But then the blackout hit before his safety harness was rigged up, his unconscious body hurtled toward the unforgiving pavement, and it was only through the most contrived of narrative coincidences that the end of the rope happened to catch a hook and thereby keep the window washer suspended like this show from Thanksgiving through St. Patrick's Day. Naturally, the window washer took this as a sign that everything happens for a reason -- not the show hiatus, the happenstance that kept him twirling at the end of a lifesaving rope -- and now he delivers the good news to anyone who wants desperately to believe that there's a reason for the whole I-saw-my-future thing. No, wait, let me amend that: Anyone who wants desperately to believe there's a good reason for the whole I-saw-my-future thing, a sparkly reason with unicorns, as opposed to a shadowy-cabal-of-evildoers-with-no-regard-for-humanity reason.
We cut to Wedeck elegantly carving Mark a new posterior orifice. As he pauses the freeze-framed footage of Mark losing his cool in Hong Kong, Wedeck says with cheery malice, "Take me through something here. You're in a foreign country, against my expressed wishes, and you decide to pull a gun in a public place. Just out of curiosity? What were you thinking?" Mark doesn't have a good answer, so he tries to pull the I-need-to-go-comfort-Olivia card. Wedeck won't have it, though. And this is why he's my favorite character on the show.
Meanwhile, Olivia is telling Janis and Vreede her version of the Lloyd-napping events, only when she gets to the part of the story where Lloyd heroically offers to take a bullet for her, she slips and calls him "Mark." This does not go unnoticed by Janis. Olivia concludes her recollection with "[Lloyd] saved my life."
Back to Mark and Wedeck. Mark self-righteously says, "Some stranger tells me I'm going to put three bullets in my friend, I'm not going to invite her to a tea party." Wedeck is immune to this sort of bull, and reads Mark the riot act for implying that Wedeck is not working diligently enough on the blackout. He orders Mark to therapy three times weekly, and when the doctor says it's OK for Mark to return, then maybe he'll consider it.