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
By the next 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!