Episode Report Card Sobell: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT What a Feeling
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.24.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So! Welcome to a brand-new series that is in no way like Lost despite the catastrophic opening scene, the home network and the threat of a hobbit on the cast. Because this is a pilot, we get a lot of introductions, so let's meet our cast of characters:
Mark Benford is our protagonist. We know he's an agent with the FBI, he had a drinking problem, and he currently has a wife, kid and spotless McMansion in what looks like Castaic (making for a commute to L.A. that might actually drive one back to the bottle). His flashforward shows him investigating the flashforward (using a wall montage hauntingly like the one on Prison Break -- and the second he gets a full-body tattoo, I am out of here), hitting a sleek silver flask and eluding people with high-powered rifles. Office work will apparently be much more exciting by April 29, 2010.
Olivia Benford is married to Mark. She appears to have it all: high-powered doctorin' gig, adorable kid at home, nary a childcare problem (that she knows about…) and soon -- if her flash forward is to be believed -- an adulterous affair. Forget opting out -- in this day and age, you can have it all!
Aaron Stark is Mark's AA sponsor, and a recently-bereaved father. (His daughter's remains, when shipped back from Afghanistan, weighed all of 37 pounds; she was identified via DNA samples.) He was shimmying up a power pole when his flashforward hit. He is the only one who even suggests that you can actively work to prevent your future. Even more disturbingly, his flash-forward suggests his daughter's alive.
Bryce Varley is a colleague of Olivia's, and he was just about to commit suicide when he passes out. But now that he's seen a glimpse of his future, he's totally zen: "These visions were a gift."
Demetri Noh is Mark's little FBI buddy. Prior to the flash forward, his biggest problem was trying to talk his fiancée out of using "Islands in the Stream" for their first dance. Afterward, it was realizing that since he didn't flash to anything, he's probably going to die some time in the next six months.
And here is what they do:
First, everyone wakes up to total apocalyptic chaos, because while all these people blacked out, things like cars and helicopters did not. Mark runs through the streets so we can drink in the horror, because the one thing Americans love to watch every September is footage of smoking skyscrapers and dust-filled city streets filled with panicky citizens. (Well played, ABC.) Then Mark heads back to FBI headquarters to meet up with Boss Agent Courtney B. Vance (the "B" stands for "Boy, he's in everything") and Agent Quagmire, so named because Seth McFarlane is playing him, and it is disconcerting as hell to watch him on screen because you keep waiting for him to bust out the baby Stewie voice.
Anyway, Mark gets things moving during an FBI meeting by admitting that he had the flashforward to 10 p.m., April 29, and soon, the folks in the room are admitting they also flashed ahead to the exact same moment in the future. Agent Al Gault says he had a vision involving Dr. Elizabeth Corday (here, having renounced medicine for life in Scotland Yard as "Inspector Banks"), so they call her and she confirms having the same flashforward, so they establish that people can flash on each other, and that all the flashforwards are definitely linked to the same time. Agent Courtney B. Vance then creates a special task force consisting of Mark, Demetri and a woman agent named Janis (who flashes forward to getting a sonogram at 10 p.m. at night -- so, apparently 24-hour, universal health care will pass in the next six months).
After a long day, Mark and Olivia have a really awkward discussion about her flashforward and how it involves her mouthing sweet nothings at another man. She's distraught over this, and Mark reminds her that just because they saw something doesn't mean they don't have to mindlessly tread along toward their futures.
The third-to-last scene introduces Lloyd Simcoe -- the shirtless man in Olivia's flashforward. Here, he is not shirtless; he is staggering under the realization that he's about to meet-cute with Dr. O over his crippled son's hospital bed. The second-to-last scene has Mark's daughter giving him the friendship bracelet he'll be wearing in his flash forward. (Score one for predestination.) And the last scene has Janis and Demetri discovering security camera footage of one person who was awake during the flash-forward. And honestly, it's the most creepy and unsettling image of the entire night.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The episode opens on a truly striking composition: glass that appears to have fallen up, a few oranges rolling out of an opaque blue haze and along the asphalt ceiling. Then we hear a few faint screams, see a man lying on his side with a baffled expression, and we realize we're sharing his disoriented perspective.
The guy crawls out of his overturned car, discovering the hard way that hot mufflers do not make the best leverage points for pulling oneself out, and once he's out in the open, he sees what can only be described as complete pandemonium: thousands of cars that have plowed into one another, a truck crushing some poor guy in a convertible, lots of bleeding and stunned people, someone running by whilst on fire. Or, as those of us who used to take the 405 in Los Angeles like to call it, "The morning commute."
We then hurtle back in time four hours to seven a.m. Dawn's rosy fingers are just creeping over the mountains outside of what looks like Castaic (i.e. a far-flung burb on the very edge of what might technically be called the greater Los Angeles area) but is probably meant to be a much closer Valley-based shire. We see a neighborhood of Aughties-style McMansions, then zoom in to where the guy in question from the last scene is opening up his gun safe to find a note reading, "You're a crappy husband. I hate you." I'm not sure I'd leave that kind of note near a firearm, but I have an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation. Anyway, we learn that our man (AKA Joseph Fiennes, who has mercifully matured out of the stunned Bambi-in-tights look he was sporting through Shakespeare in Love) is an FBI agent and this insult to his spousal appropriateness is an inside joke. Also, we learn that the garage door is acting up.
He then heads downstairs to make breakfast for his small, blonde daughter, then to do combat with the garage door. The babysitter, Nicole, pulls in and we establish that Joseph Fiennes is married to Olivia (who works at the hospital) and is father to Charlie. Then we quick-cut to a nightie-clad Olivia calling someone named Bryce to ask why he wasn't at rounds the prior day. "You better have a damn good reason why," she adds.
We cut to Bryce, whose damn good reason is, "I'm on a pier overlooking the Pacific and about to harsh a lot of surfers' mellows by committing suicide before breakfast." Before he even tries (he's planning to shoot himself), we get another stunning visual composition: the pier stretching to the horizon, as white-capped waves roll into shore and cirrus clouds soften the blue sky.
Then it's another beautifully-lit scene -- this one inside what looks like a lovely municipal building erected during the WPA era and not the eye-searing reign of modernism -- and someone explaining, "My daughter Tracy was five-five, a hundred and eighteen pounds. But when the Marines shipped her body back from Afghanistan, her remains, they weighed thirty-seven. Only reason I knew it was her was 'cause they DNA'd what was left. So ... yeah. I took a drink that night." We cut to Joseph Fiennes looking utterly stricken.
Then it's post-AA meeting and Joseph's talking with this man (Aaron), who is apparently his sponsor, about his dating life (or lack thereof). Aaron says that his would-be date is a nurse, and "Nurses freak me out, man." Joseph Fiennes (whom I wish the show would introduce already, so I don't have to keep calling him "Joseph Fiennes") replies, "It's a date, she's not giving you an enema." Aaron replies, "How do you know that's not my thing?" Heh. I like Aaron.
We cut back to the house, where Nicole has Charlie down for a nap, and where she herself is getting down with her boyfriend on the couch. Nicole frets over Charlie waking up with, "This is so wrong?" and her boyfriend smirks, "Which is why you love it." Nicole then tells him, "Which is why, once we're done, you have to get your ass out of here." To which the boyfriend gallantly replies, "Then stop talking and get to work." He is one silver-tongued lothario, isn't he?
Several miles away in downtown L.A., John Cho is carrying on about the inappropriateness of using "Islands in the Stream" as one's first dance during a wedding reception; it's giving his mouth something to do while the rest of him sits in the car with Joseph Fiennes (and snaps photos of a finely-drawn blonde lady and her thick-set male companion casually "meeting" before going into some building. John Cho protests, "I cannot dance to 'Islands in the Stream!' I will never live it down." He's right -- any movement set to that song is guaranteed to be an instant YouTube classic. Agent John Cho asks what Joseph Fiennes and Olivia danced to, and Joseph Fiennes replies, "I can't even remember." See, this is why YouTube is saving civilization. Where else would we be if we couldn't use the Web as a repository for all our recollections? (See how I just foreshadowed there? No? OH, YOU WILL.)
Then it's a brief series of intercut scenes: Nicole, who has stopped talking and gotten to work (truly, her work ethic is an inspiration to us all); Aaron, who is saying hello to a photo of his daughter (tacked to his car's visor), before preparing to shimmy up a utility pole; Olivia preparing to scrub into surgery and comparing parenting notes by bemoaning of her daughter, "You only have to worry about one penis. I have to worry about all of them." (Not if your daughter is a lesbian, you don't. Don't rule anything out, Dr. O.)
We cut to things getting interesting at the stakeout -- Khalid and Omar, who are known to Agent Joseph Fiennes and Agent John Cho, plus the blonde, getting into an SUV -- and Matt radios to a surveillance van. He then patches in to the office where Janis Hawke has been standing by for his call, and says, "This is Benford. Suspects are on the move." AT LAST! A name for Joseph Fiennes' character. Well, part of one -- he's Mark Benford (which we find out once Courtney B. Vance hops on the call and demands a recap of the last few minutes). We establish that the blonde is unknown, and then the black Escalade notices that several cars are following it and commences a seriously flashy car chase.
Agent John Cho is screaming, "Car! Car! Car!" -- understandable, as they all seem to be flying in his and Mark's general direction -- and the chase is in full swing. Then we get a montage indicating that lots of people are in the middle of things that demand their attention, the music get more ominous and urgent, we get more of the chaotic car chase, Nicole getting busy, Bryce preparing to blow his head off, Olivia gowning for surgery, and right as Mark swerves to avoid a fuel tanker (that is, naturally, zipping along in rush hour traffic) ...
We get a kaleidescope effect and he sees himself, looking considerably more harried, in front of a big bulletin board covered in fragments of writing, photos and string connecting one item to another. As we see fragmentary clues ("Diogenes" is written on one yellow fragment, for example), we also check out the office, which is dark. We see Mark drinking from a stylish silver flask, then writing on a calendar page dated April 29, 2010, "WHO ELSE KNOWS?" He's wearing a faded friendship bracelet. Mark's then distracted by the pencil-thin red beams of two laser scopes; he's being hunted by a couple of mask-wearing guys. There are some more fragmentary images -- a tattoo of three stars, for example -- and then, WHAM! We're back where we started the episode.