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
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 next, 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 next 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