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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 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 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.
Mark gets out of the car (again), we revisit the carnage (again), and then we flash to Bryce, who's flat on his back and watching a balloon vendor's wares silently drift skyward. Bryce is like, "Why does the afterlife look so much like the beforedeath?" Then we zip over to the operating theatre, where the entire surgical team has just come to in time to learn that their patient died on the table. Boy, that's going to make for an awkward morbidity and mortality review.
Nicole comes to on the floor and asks Toolio Iglesias what happened. He does not take the opportunity to smirk, "I'm just that good, buttercup" -- surprising, really -- but helpfully restates the obvious: they blacked out. Still in a state of deshabille, Nicole runs upstairs to check on Charlie, who is so distraught by her dream/blackout fugue/whatever that she forgives her babysitter her taste in lingerie and says, "I dreamt there were no more good days."
Meanwhile, Aaron is hanging sideways from the utility pole. Oh, that can't feel good.
We zoom back to Mark looking for Agent John Cho, who is apparently named "Demetri." Because I read the book shortly before watching the series, I let out an excited Oooh! because I now know what Demetri's plot will be, and I love being lulled into the false sense of omniscience that book-readers get right before the show takes a sharp right turn away from the source material. And I love the righteous snits that go along with the "THAT WASN'T IN THE BOOK" complaints, because who doesn't love the chance to play the "And I read! BOOKS, even!" card in conversation? How embarrassing would the converse complaint be, all, "This novelization of One Tree Hill does not respect the source material"? And we have drifted far afield from the chaos at hand. Let's get back to Mark wandering o'er the highway, taking in the assorted dead, maimed and panicky people. We see the VW driver who somehow managed to set himself ablaze, but he is only the wee fiery appetizer whetting the palate for the giant conflagration that is the fuel truck blowing up. There is some more random automotive chaos (here, my closed captioning helpfully notes, "Screaming continues") and Mark looks up from watching a car fall off a highway overpass. He runs to the middle of said overpass and checks out what appears to be 101 right past Hollywood. The long curve of road is packed with cars that have all run into one another, and plumes of smoke are drifting out of the nearby skyscrapers. Mark looks at it all with a "Judas priest, what just happened?" expression.
Fortunately, Demetri swings by just then and he and Mark help a few people out of a car. That mission done, they're distracted by an airplane flying into a building, and Mark's like, "Perhaps we should call the FBI, seeing as how we work there and someone might have some intelligence for us?" As soon as they stop gaping over the carnage from a helicopter plummeting to the ground, I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Bryce has recovered enough to notice that many of the surfers are now catching waves on another plane; this is the natural side effect of blacking out in a large body of water. He hastens down to help anyone he can.
We zip back to Mark and Demetri, who have just noticed that the SUV in which they were in such hot pursuit is now standing stock-still. Hey-o, time to apprehend some shady people! Mark and Demetri whip out the guns and approach the Escalade. The windshield is decorated with big, juicy red splotches where the driver and passenger's heads whacked into it (what, no airbags on those things?), but there's still the mystery blonde to apprehend. As Demetri manhandles her into handcuffs with "Get out! We know you were planning an attack!" the woman mumbles, "I blacked out. I was somewhere else. There was a storm. The horses were scared. " Demitri demands, "What are you talking about? What are you talking about?" but we won't find out today. The less-dead extras notice they've got some law-and-order types in their midst and start asking what's going on. Mark tries in vain to quell the more panicky elements by telling everyone, "Until emergency services arrive, we need to stay calm and help whomever we can." Mark, did you notice those helicopters spiraling out of the sky? I believe those might have been the emergency services. According to the pilot episode of Trauma, those things are always crashing in mid-air. Anyway, some handy extra exposits that this total apocalyptic chaos is not in fact Los Angeles' idea of a really bad morning commute, but a statewide phenom, possibly bigger.
Demetri keeps his gun trained on the blonde and tells Mark that since the cellphone networks are down (and/or overloaded), it makes total sense for Mark to traverse two miles on foot through the explosion- and chaos-strewn streets so that he can go check up on Olivia at the hospital. I realize that the U.S. federal government is a vast and unwieldy creature, but sheesh, did nobody in the FBI hear about Ready.gov and the family preparedness plan? Or did the writers not have a better excuse to send Mark on a special-effects-strewn tour of downtown L.A.?
Mark goes running through the streets, practically knocking over some homeless dude, wading through the puddle created by a knocked-over fire hydrant, observing some looters, noticing some big helicopters zipping overhead, then seeing a kangaroo go hopping on down the street. So the kangaroo's like his spirit animal? With a handy pouch for his gun and flask? I'm just throwing that hypothesis out there.
And then we get that handy cinematic convention, a wall of TVs all tuned to the news, and that's how we learn that when the whole world blacks out at the same time, lots of things go boom. And we're also introduced to the central mystery of the blackout: Who caused it and why did it happen?
Then Mark's phone rings. Hooray! It's Olivia -- now Mark won't have to run another mile to the hospital. Lord only knows what other animals he might have run into along the way. They establish that their kid's all right (aside from whatever permanent psychological trauma she's endured) and Olivia shares the story of how the OR blacked out. Mark tells her that this is likely a global phenomenon and Olivia replies, "Global? That's impossible. Babe, I love you, but I gotta go." And off she rushes to tend to the results of what the paramedic phrases as "Eight-year-old boy, pede vs. car -- a car plowed straight into an elementary school. Head injury on the right, abdominal bruising on the left." Bryce pops up just then, and Olivia has only a little time to berate him before she heads into trauma with the kid. "You're going to be okay, honey," she assures the boy. "I know, Olivia," he replies. Aaaaaand we're now two-for-two on preternaturally creepy kids.
A nicely cleaned-up Mark is back at FBI headquarters, which is bustling but not at Oh-God-it's-the-end-of-the-world levels. FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance picks up the thematic ball and carries it with "Nobody knows anything." He and Mark confirm with one another that indeed, this was a worldwide phenomena and everyone passed out for two minutes and seventeen seconds.
Also, we get many shots of the eight-year-old kid in medical distress, but he's not in any real peril and we all know it. So, let's move on to less blatantly manipulative plotlines.
As FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance strides down a hall, he tells Mark and Agent Seth McFarlane that they've eliminated nukes, EMPs and chemical agents as the cause of the blackout. Mark asks if this might have been a natural phenomenon, and Agent Seth McFarlane says, "NASA's checking into more exotic explanations -- solar flares, gamma bursts, that kind of thing." I think I'd like Agent Seth McFarlane's character better if he delivered all his lines in a Stewie Griffith voice. Or introduced himself as Agent Quagmire (giggity!). However, we move on; FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance asks, "How about the Vatican. Has the Pope chimed in yet?" And what do you expect His Holiness to say? "Look, did you scientists do this because it took us 329 years to apologize for that little misunderstanding with Galileo? Would it help if we sent an Edible Arrangement to CERN?"
We zip to a meeting room, where FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance inspires his agents with, "We need to wrap our heads around the scope of this thing, people. It's now been four hours since the blackout. You shut off the consciousness of the entire human race for two minutes. What would the death toll be? How many cars collide? We have planes down at LAX. How many more across the country? Around the world? The FAA's reporting 877 aircraft down. Airforce Two was one of them; the [vice president] was on board." (Fill in the "Oh, if only this had taken place back in 2002!"/"At last, a way to shut up Joe Biden!" joke of your choice here.) As FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance continues to ask things like, "What about hospitals? Operations? Births that were in progress? People probably died walking up a flight of stairs. Global projections are pretty staggering."
Mark snaps out of his reverie (he's revisiting his flash forward) and asks about the blackouts themselves. FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance is all, "What about them?" and Mark says, "We've been saying people have been blacking out, but it wasn't my experience. For me, it was more like a dream, only more vivid than that. One second, I was in a car, the , I was somewhere else." Relieved, Janis blurts out that the same thing happened to her. Agent Seth MacFarlane says, "During the blackout, people seem to have experienced some kind of ... hallucination." Did his involve a non-sequitur set-up starring a 1980s pop-culture icon in a completely improbable situation? Did he snap out of it all, "That was more numbing than watching Andrew McCarthy eat an ice cream cone after getting Novocaine?" Mark sets everyone straight: he didn't have a hallucination -- he had a memory, only it was set in the future. Before anyone can make the twirling cuckoo motion to their heads, Benford drops the magic date: April 29, 2010. Hey, everyone else also flashed to the same date and time? FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance breaks it down for us: "Are you saying everyone's consciousness jumped forward to April 29?" Why, yes, he is.
Demetri brings in the blonde conspirator and she protests, "We didn't do this." Demetri's had a bad day already, and he is in no mood for this: "Even if you didn't do this, you were still planning on killing thousands of people, so sit still and shut up already." I believe we've all witnessed a flash-forward to what will happen if Harold and Kumar trade in the kind bud for a crystal meth habit. Anyway, the point to this scene is to introduce the term "flash forward," which the dapper young Agent Al Gault does, and to verify the idea that the flash forwards show likely future incidents (as opposed to just being freaky vivid dreams). Al Gault had a vision of meeting with a Scotland Yard investigator, Fiona Banks, so, he concludes, "Let's see if she had a vision of me." And ... yes. Both of them had a vision of meeting at 6 a.m. in London, working on the Rutherford case, and getting startled by a bird flying into the window.
We then get another perspective on the flash-forwards via a very helpful TV-show voiceover while Olivia's looking over her charts: "When the blackouts took place around the world, people were getting brain scans at that exact moment ... and in each of these cases, the hippocampus -- that's the memory center of the brain -- was actively engaged for the entire two minutes and seventeen seconds. These thought patterns are consistent with a waking experience. People were not asleep. They were not dreaming ... [they were experiencing] memories of events that haven't occurred yet." We cut to Nicole having a weeping fit on the couch, then cut back to Olivia, who is also looking alarmed. The talking heads go on to confirm that so many of the details in so many of the flash forwards are so consistent, it makes sense to assume that everyone on the planet's seen the future. The newscaster enthusiastically rattles off a list of events to come -- the Dow's up, a senator's being investigated on ethics charges -- and brightly finishes off, "There will be food riots in Ghana!" Oh, well, hooray for that pending insight. Olivia whips out her smartphone and types "Hope I never see you again" to Mark. These two appear to have a very complex set of signifiers.
As the talking head enthuses, "It's like a very grand mosaic is coming together," Mark recalls his flash forward and says, "Mosaic. That was the name of the inv
estigation I was working on in my vision. It had to do with what caused all this." FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance asks if Mark can maybe skip months of investigation and just recall all the evidence that he saw in his flash-forward. Alas, that is easier said than done. Then, FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance asks Demetri what he saw, and Demetri's all, " ... Nothing?" He then quickly changes the topic, and everyone's off and running as to what their visions were (Janice saw her pending prenatal sonogram, which is news to her as she is not exactly in a situation where pregnancy is a likely outcome; FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance was taking a "meeting" in the men's room). We focus on Demetri, who has just this moment figured out what the lack of visions probably means.
But he rallies nicely and suggests that it would be a good idea to write all these stories and stick them in some sort of central repository. It would corroborate the visions and help people get an idea of what's coming. Oh, please, use Twitter as the medium! With a #flashforward tag. Imagine the fun you could cram into 140 characters: "As a matter of fact, I will win the lawsuit, Mother! & Lucielle Two & I are very happy! #ex-motherboy #flashforward." Between Mark, Demetri and Janice, it takes but 30 seconds to conclude that the thing to do is to create a website where people can log on, share their flash forwards and cross-reference their visions. "We can piggyback on that and search for patterns," Janice concludes. If the whole site doesn't devolve into commenter wars, sure. Let's hope that whomever devises this site accounts for 4chan. Mark's all, "I think that's what I was already doing ... Mosaic, all those leads I was running down. We should start following up on them now." Demetri brings up one of those brain-bendy things about knowing the future in the past with "Assuming your vision is even accurate, this investigation doesn't exist yet." "But it could! It will. In my flash forward, I seem to investigate what caused all this. I seemed to have an idea of why this all was happening. Those people, the places I saw on the board, they were part of the puzzle. Mosaic. Look, I'm certain of it," Mark replies. FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance demonstrates that the "B" is for "bureaucracy" when he immediately wills an interagency task force into existence and assigns Demetri, Janice and Mark to it. Demetri again brings up the logical loops that Time's Arrow evidently just made by pointing out, "We're running point on this because [Mark] had a vision we're running point on it?" Yes. Yes, you are. Let your coworkers' belief that the future is immutable lull you to sleep at night.
Within seconds, Mark and Demetri are trying to recreate the bulletin board. Demetri lightly asks, "Okay, my psychic friend. What do you got?" Mark has: the name "D. Gibbons"; a photograph of a doll with a melted head, with a bullet casing nearby; "something about Baltimore ... a blue hand" ("What the hell does that mean?" Demetri asks. Don't worry about it; we'll eventually find out during a sweeps episode); a friendship bracelet. Once they've exhausted Mark's memory, Demetri moves on to ask about Mark's state of mind, and Mark sighs, "I was chambering around, I was scared to death ... the office was empty, but someone was coming for me. They were wearing masks. They wanted to kill me because of what I knew. One of them had a tattoo [of three stars, on his forearm]." Mark sighs and admits it's not a lot to go on, and Demetri's like, well at least some of us have an April 29 to look forward to. He admits, "Everybody had some kind of a vision. I didn't see a damn thing, Mark. We're both thinking the same thing, so let's just say it. What if I didn't see anything, because six months from now, I'm going to be dead?" Then I'll cry, because I already dig this character.
By the scene, Mark's home and chewing the fat with Nicole, who is looking for reassurance on whether or not things will be okay. "I think God did this," she concludes, "to punish us." How very Old Testament of her.
Back at the hospital, we find out that our young eight-year-old friend is now motherless (she died on the 405) and his father, Lloyd Simcoe, is currently MIA. After Olivia and Boyce get done talking about that, they start chatting about their flash forwards. Boyce tells her, "You wanna know why I wasn't at work yesterday? I've been going through some really heavy things recently, and I don't want to get into it now, but the point is, this morning I was out on the Venice pier, and I was thinking about committing suicide." Olivia is suitably appalled, so Boyce hastens to add, "I'm okay. I saw a glimpse of my future and I was alive. Everything's changed for me now -- whatever I was thinking about doing wasn't meant to happen. It's like a sign from God or something. These visions were a gift." We get another shot of Boyce gazing upon the pellucid surf, just in case we don't really get how calm and one-with-everything he is now. Olivia would dispute that the visions were a gift, as hers included the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, in stately Benfield Manor, Mark is having an emergency confab with Aaron, because his flash forward shows him drinking again -- "It wasn't just a one-time thing, I was full-fledged drinking again." Aaron injects the first note of pure reason we've had regarding the flash forwards with, "Just because you saw it doesn't mean it'll happen. Even if this future stuff is real, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. Maybe because you saw it, you can change it. Ghost of Christmas Future crap." Aaron, I think you need to meet Demetri. Mark's haunted by the possibility of relapse: "Olivia said she'd leave me if I slip again. She made that clear." "Then don't slip," Aaron replies. He thinks the future's still up in the air. And he'd like it if Mark stopped hosting a pity party, because he's not the only one who had disturbing flash-forwards. In Aaron's flash forward, his daughter Tracy is still alive, and "if she's still out there somewhere, she needs me. For two years, I've been putting her to rest. And now, I don't know what to think. I'm confused, I'm hopeful and I'm angry that I'm hopeful. You're worried your future's going to come true. I'm worried mine won't." Well. If both men make it through the night on nothing stronger than coffee, they've got a lot of internal fortitude, is all I have to say about that.
To distract himself from everything else, Mark repairs the garage door right as Olivia gets home. "It was a slow day," he deadpans. (Hee.) The parents remember they have a kid and bid her goodnight, then repair to their own bed. Mark asks if Olivia remembers the song they danced to at their wedding, and she rattles off, "Etta James, 'At Last.'" Raise your hand, any of you who haven't been to a wedding where that was the first dance. I was at one wedding where the child bride and groom played this and we all stood around wondering, "At last? Was naptime that long and lonely before your heart was wrapped in clover and life was like a song?" Anyway -- Mark's already feeling low about the whole off-the-wagon thing, and this is but one more prick to the conscience. Oh, wait, here's a big one: Olivia asks him what his flash forward was, and Mark omits the whole "And I was drinking" detail from his recitation of his vision.
But then he asks Olivia what she saw, and she's like, "I don't want to talk about it, 'cause it was too upsetting." "I need to hear it, whatever it was," he insists, and Olivia only throws up a few more protests before telling him: "I was with another man ... I don't know [him]. I've never seen him before. He was downstairs, I don't know who he was, and yet in my vision, I had all these intense feelings for him. I don't understand, Mark. I wouldn't ever cheat on you, I wouldn't betray you." She is absolutely gutted to be telling him this. To his credit, Mark comforts her with, "Just because we saw these things doesn't mean they're going to happen."
But! But! But! Lloyd Simcoe has just found his son in the hospital -- and he's the man in Olivia's vision! (He is also played by Jack Davenport, who is finally allowed to use his natural accent on American television. Now please tell me he'll also be allowed to have his wife, Michelle Gomez, guest star, because what this show could use is a little Green Wing-style lunacy in Our Lady of the Mood Lighting Municipal Hospital.) Anyway, Lloyd perks right up when Bryce tells him that Dr. Benford will be in in the morning. He'll wait for her.
Back at stately Benford Manor, Mark's hanging out on the swingset and pondering the bitch goddess of fate when Charlie comes out. She had a bad dream and can't sleep. After Mark mouths a few half-hearted platitudes about how everything's okay, Charlie pushes us to the real point of the scene: she made her father a friendship bracelet and she'd like him to wear it. As Mark ties it on, he looks sick; he's just taken a step toward the future he's terrified of meeting. Aww, who's suddenly a neo-Calvinist? Mark is!
Meanwhile, Demetri's back at the office multitasking: talking to his fiancee on the phone, watching "Islands in the Stream" on YouTube and consenting to make that the first dance at the wedding. Well, it's easy to be gracious when you're not going to be around to endure the consequences. The conversation's cut short when Janice orders, "Dem, come here. You have to see this."
And what's up? Janice pulls up some security footage and tells us: "As far as we know, every single person lost consciousness at the same time, right? So I started cycling through a bunch of surveillance cameras for the last five hours, because I was curious to see what they recorded. I looked at hundreds of them. I checked every major city, even webcams in other countries, and they all show the exact same thing: At 11 a.m. (PDT, one presumes), people start dropping like flies, then two minutes and seventeen seconds later, they all start to come to. And then I saw this."
We see what Janice is showing Demetri: footage of a Tigers game in Detroit. Everyone's passed out -- odd during a division race, but maybe someone just finished reading one of Mitch Albom's "O, whither thou, Detroit?" pieces over the P.A. system and -- oh, wait, I seem to have drifted. Anyway: Comerica Park, crowd out cold, except ... EXCEPT we see one man walking around the lower deck of the park. The camera zooms in to show all these passed-out people and we see the black-clad man pausing in the door, turning deliberately to look around, then disappearing into the darkness of an exit. Janice asks the question that will doubtlessly haunt us for weeks: "Who the hell is that, and why are they awake?" Oooh, I can't wait to find out!