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At Our Lady of the Mood Lighting Memorial Hospital, Drs. Olivia and Bryce treat a cheery fellow named Ned Ned who complains of vague pains -- yet cheerily recounts how in his flashforward, he is evidently going one better than C. Thomas Howell, all Soul Man-style. ("I'm going to be some invincible black guy, like Shaft, or Bryant Gumbel.") When not nearly killing Ned Ned -- who has Addison's disease, and therefore was not equipped to handle the trauma of surgery -- Olivia counsels Lloyd on how to adjust to his fortnight of primary-parenting duties.
We also get Lloyd's version of his flashforward, in which he claims not to have seen the face of the woman in his flashforward, "but I knew we were together." Also, we in the audience now know that Lloyd's in cahoots with a sinister hobbit, and they're "responsible for the greatest single disaster in human history." O, how amusing that the architect of the flashforward will end up canoodling with the lady whose husband is looking for him! Or is the word I'm looking for… ironic?
Mark wants to fly to Somalia on the taxpayer dime, but Demetri manages to grab the FBI's travel budget for the week and goes to Indio, California, on a follow-up errand for his dirty-bomb investigation. Once at a greasy spoon, Demetri quickly ascertains that it's owned by Customer Choice Restaurant Group ("We're not quite a group yet," the manager says sheepishly) and then they're off and running after a fry guy who also doubles as a terrorist. The entire chase plays like something out of a videogame -- pitbulls! Children's pools! Boozy blondes opening doors right in agents' faces -- but the fry guy is, of course, nabbed with a backpack full of marijuana. ("I am going to be Scarface of pot!" the guy says.) Demetri does not take any of this well. He finally tells Mark -- via a punch to the jaw -- that he's going to be murdered soon. Mark vows to help Demetri solve his murder before it happens.
When Mark's not dealing with Demetri, he's tangling with the blonde terrorist lady from the pilot, who provides this week's theme with the following monologue: "Do you know what a black swan is? It's a metaphor used to describe a high-impact event, something so rare, it's beyond the realm of human expectation. It comes from the 17th century when scientists assumed that all swans were white. They were wrong." Then she alludes to a Sufi parable, snarks on Mark, and generally makes us feel bad for investigators who have to spend their professional lives wading through such tendentious bullshit in search of actual, usable explanations.
Finally, babysitter Nicole re-emerges as a character. She's found religion post-flashforward, but unfortunately, the church she wanders into is sort of a Buddy Christ operation. Also, the priest she consults with may or may not be the guy who tries to drown her in her flashforward. (He sure looks like it right now.)
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The episode begins in a lovely downtown Los Angeles park. As Bjork's cover of "It's Oh So Quiet" begins, we see everyone slump into their flashforward, which makes this, what, the second episode where we get the recreation of the cataclysmic event? From the depths of the couch, Mr. Sobell grumpily asks if this will happen every week. I hope so -- I look forward to the episode where the apocalyptic death cult has a flashforward, then comes to just in time to realize their Dear Leader is wrong about everyone being bodily beamed into Heaven-traveling spaceships on Christmas Eve.
Anyway, the point to witnessing this facet of the blackout is so we can watch a city bus roll into the water with its unconscious cargo, then watch the bus fill with water as its passengers sit unawares. The juxtaposition of the song lyrics ("you cross your heart and hope to die/until it's over") with the bus sinking into the lake and the bodies floating around is pretty striking. One passenger comes to while his head is still just above water; he takes out his Bjork-blasting earbuds and calmly looks around. Another passenger comes up; she's sputtering in a foreign language, and the man swims over to reassure her, "You're going to be fine, okay? What we're going to do is on one, two, three, you're going to take a big breath with me, okay? One, two, three." The two suck in a great lungful of air, then duck under again. The man kicks out a bus window -- it takes long enough to make me really nervous as a viewer, so well done there with the pacing, director -- then escorts the woman out to safety. He then swims toward the light and the surface.
Zip! The man's finishing his story in the hospital, saying brightly that he wishes he could have saved more people. All he could do was a bit of freestyle (AKA "Australian crawl") back to the shore, then walked home. That was two weeks ago, but he's in the hospital today, telling his story to Bryce and Olivia, because "I didn't need a doctor until now." Further discussion reveals that this amiable chap is named Edward Ned -- please call him Ned Ned -- and he doesn't know how he stayed so calm. Also, he's flying on morphine at the moment.
Bryce asks why Ned Ned didn't come in sooner, and he's like, "It didn't hurt so badly before. I thought I had just bruised my spleen." Bryce then asks about Ned Ned's flashforward. "Not where I was going with this," Olivia says tartly, as she's hung up on the abdominal pain and low white cell count, but Ned Ned spins a compelling tale and we must divert our attention from lessening leukocytes to take heed:
"I was rocking leather pants. I've never rocked leather pants. It's always been one of my top three fears, along with clowns and escalators. But there I was, rocking out at this bar that I've always wanted to go to, but I've never gone to, because I thought I'd be too nervous because well, I'd be too nervous. But it wasn't that way. I was happy. I was at peace. Oh! And I was black." We see in Ned Ned's flashforward that he is "black" in the same manner that C. Thomas Howell was black in Soul Man, i.e. in that "So everyone in this movie is legally blind, right?" convention the 1980s films were so fond of employing. But Olivia and Bryce don't see that, so they're imagining Ned transformed into, say, Idris Elba, and their giddy, disbelieving reactions take us right to the credits.
Demetri and Zoey are cramming in a little wedding talk at breakfast, and Zoey's making cracks about Demetri's family not being terribly fond of her. Well, that's two great tastes that just might make someone wish March 15 would hurry up and arrive. Fortunately, Zoey goes from pressuring Demetri to run interference on the earlier wedding date to fishing around for information on the lady Demetri arrested in the pilot; she's worried that the lady terrorist's rights have been violated. Well, she's worried on a professional level; personally, she'd love it if Demetri were "getting all Dick Cheney" on the lady should she prove to be responsible for the flashforward. That sentiment still doesn't erase the fact that Zoey the defense lawyer made a note when Demetri said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of said blonde terrorist lady.
Morning in stately Benford Manor. Charlie is being amused by an egg rising from behind the kitchen island to the following Mark-provided narration: "As Eggbert, I would like to Egg-spress my desire for you to eat oatmeal this morning." The egg leads Mark into view, there is a caper involving a chicken-shaped jar, and Mark drops the egg on the floor right as Olivia comes down. Oatmeal it is! Olivia comments, "You really are a Shakespeare of cheesy dad humor." And it's funny because Joseph Fiennes played Shakespeare, you see. Mark dips her for a good-morning kiss. Awww!
Olivia shares the news that Nicole's coming back, then we transition to Nicole hanging out with ... Aaron? Apparently so. There are only six people in Los Angeles and they all know each other, I guess. Anyway, we establish that: A) Aaron's daughter Tracy used to babysit Nicole, B) Aaron got Nicole the job with the Benfords, and C) Aaron is still on his "Hurrah! Flashforward!" kick, which Nicole is not too keen on.
At Our Lady of the Mood Lighting Memorial Hospital, Olivia and Bryce are catching up on their patients, and Ned Ned's condition pops up. Bryce shares, "I can't stop thinking about that guy. How does somebody possibly go from being Caucasian to African-American?" Ask C. Thomas Howell -- he's got plenty of free time now that the idiots at NBC have cancelled Southland. Bryce noodles on Ned Ned's vision some more, and Olivia is all am-cray on the ision-vay, which Bryce does not pick up on at all. So Olivia changes the subject all, "So how are those weekly sessions with the psychiatrist going? I ran into her ..." and it's Bryce's turn to go on the defensive. He's all, "You know, it's only been two weeks since the entire planet passed out and we discovered that things like planes, trains and automobiles don't operate themselves. I've been busy." Olivia's regained the upper hand, so she snaps, "You want to keep working here, you need to follow up with psych at least twice a week. You got it?" Bryce does.
Any further discussion is interrupted by a boy's shout, a metal tray flying out into the hall, and a flustered Lloyd trying to retrieve said tray whilst spilling coffee down his shirt. Olivia flashes back to her flashforward (drink!) and makes an awkward moment even more so by just staring at Lloyd until he mumbles, "Sorry," and flees back to an agitated Dylan. Olivia begins making noise about getting Dylan off her rounds.
Mark is in FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance's office making the case for a jet-setting adventure to Somalia. It is not going well: FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance points out that Mark got to take a field trip to Germany last week on the strength of an index card. Mark points out, "And it paid off." FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance does not have the same definition for "paid off" as Mark does: "You found out some crows died in Somalia." Agent Al Gough pleads, "If a blackout happened before, that would be major." FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance assumes an air of sweet reason: "I agree. Why haven't we heard about it before? Last I checked, all you've got is a footnote in a CDC funding request." Gough protests that he's trying to track down satellite photos from 1991, but the CIA apparently has better things to do than dredge up 18-year-old photos.
After the meeting, Mark muses, "Remember that hacker we busted, the one who broke into the DOD's network, trying to take our overseas drones for a joyride? Don't you think [Mr. Cheeto Dust] would find Langley's mainframe a delightful challenge?" Gough is all, "Yes, because he gets his yayas off the illegal aspect, not the technical-challenge aspect. Also, please do not make me an accessory to any federal offenses you may be planning." Mark bats his big brown eyes at Gough and goes looking for Demetri.
Our marked man is trying to question the blonde he caught on the day of the blackout. Her name is Alda Hertzog, she looks like Seven of Nine's deborgified little sister, and she's too cool to submit to questioning by anyone. "I've done nothing wrong. It's my associates you want," she says. "Honey, your associates died on the day of the blackout. They were super-dead," Demetri says. Alda spits out, "Customer Choice Restaurant Group. That's all I have for you for today." Demetri leans in and points out, "You are running out of time for this to be a civil conversation." "Really, Agent Noh? Here I thought you were the one running out of time," Alda sneers. Demetri manages to resist the urge to go Dick Cheney on Alda because he's now wigged out by the possibility that Alda's linked to his upcoming murder.
Back in FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance's office, Mark's still pleading for Somalia while his very own partner Demetri is all, "Let's go to Indio! Hello, dirty bomb? Also, that Somalia thing with the dead birds is an urban myth." FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance lets them wear themselves out with bickering, then issues his decree: "Send me a postcard from Indio." The boys are off to gather intel on the terrorism investigation they had been working on before the flashforward.
As the two men leave FBI Boss Dude Courtney B. Vance's office, Mark sensitively inquires of Demetri, "What the hell's the matter with you?" Demetri replies, "I just want to be an FBI agent today, all right? Life is short."
At Our Lady of the Mood Lighting Memorial Hospital canteen, Lloyd waylays Olivia at the checkout line and says, "Thank you for putting up with me. I'm afraid I'm the annoying parent who always wants a thousand details. I'd like to apologize for that. I can tell it makes you uncomfortable." Olivia speaks truthfully when she says that's not making her uncomfortable; she does not feel it necessary to add that her foreknowledge of what Lloyd looks like shirtless is what gives her the screaming heebie-jeebies. Lloyd also apologizes for Dylan's outburst of the morning, quipping about "the unidentified flying meal tray," and if only this show had more of a sense of humor, Lloyd would be the perfect viewer stand-in as the smartassed observer of what apparently passes for normal in this show's world.
Anyway, Lloyd is desperately asking for advice on how to deal with his autistic kid, and Olivia is being less than helpful. Her only useful piece of advice is to swing by Dylan's house: "Being in his room, among his things, might give you a sense of who he is." Then she scurries off, presumably so she's not tempted to fling her marriage to the winds and ride Lloyd like a Vespa. To further place obstacles between the present and the (presumed) future, she orders Bryce to transfer Dylan to the physical therapy department.
Out in Indio, California, Mark is sitting in a plastic booth at a fast-food restaurant, while Demetri tells the eager, amiable manager that the restaurant came up in an FBI query, so he'll need the names and addresses of every employee. The manager already has it printed up. He hands it over with "Burgers and waffle fries -- that's all we do." And bless you for doing it: the world needs more waffle-fry venues. Except! The manager excitedly alludes to the frozen yogurt expansion his flashforward showed him. Demetri cuts off the creamy treat exposition by asking if the restaurant is owned by Customer Choice Restaurant Group, and we learn that Demetri and Mark are standing in the birthplace of Customer Choice Restaurant Group. Demetri's got a You have GOT to be kidding me look. Mark brightly and maliciously asks for a moment alone with Demetri. The manager shouts, "Somebody get some burgers for these FBI guys, please!" and that is all a bearded fry cook needs to hear. He makes a run for it, and in the time it takes you to read to the end of this sentence, Mark and Demetri are right on Beardo's tail.
The good news is, both Mark and Demetri are in remarkably good shape, what with all the sprinting they have to do and the scaling of tall fences. They eventually end up in a trailer park that embodies every cliché in the genre: pit bulls snarling at the agents, a dumb blonde opening her trailer door right into Demetri's face and knocking him flat on his back, and the chase ending up with Mark tackling Beardo in a kiddie pool.
As a wet Mark cuffs Beardo -- good news! Indio is hotter than two rodents getting friendly in a wool sock so you'll dry off in no time -- Demetri checks the backpack Beardo had on him.
Beardo shouts in a Russian accent, "I heard what you're being! FBI can be biting my ass!" as Demetri pulls out a metal lockbox with a taped-on label reading "Yellow Cake." The agent shouts, "Yellowcake uranium, Mark! Black market nuclear material. Do you th
ink we should leave it here, go back to your office and stare at your bulletin board?" I realize Demetri's being a tool here, but man, I snickered when I first heard that line. Mark opens the box and we find out that no, terrorists are not dumb enough to A) label their contraband and B) entrust it to fry guys in the ass-end of nowhere, USA. Instead, it's pot. Mark does not take the news of this well. (And he's not exactly the kind of guy who's going to mellow out by playing fast-and-loose with what gets handed to the evidence locker.) On the ground, Beardo says, "It's sickest strain around, yo. In my flashforward, I'm driving pimping ride. Nineteen-inch rims, yo. I must be going to be Scarface of pot." In terms of drug dealers, I'm not sure Scarface is who you want to be. Try for someone a little less perforated by machine guns.
After Beardo concludes, "You can't be fighting fate, yo," Demetri lands a few good punches in his kidneys. When Mark pulls him off, Demetri shouts about how at least he's not sitting on his ass mooning over a flashforward, then slugs Mark across the jaw. It is really satisfying to watch. Disturbingly so. As Mark stands up, checking to make sure his teeth are all still intact, Demetri admits, "March 15. Three shots to the chest. I'm not just going to die, I'm going to be murdered." Mark looks thoughtful.
The self-styled Scarface of pot is cuffed and tossed into a black-and-white, but that's just a background detail to the real point of the scene: Demetri telling Mark he found out about his upcoming murder via an anonymous call. "Mark, I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but I thought maybe I could find who's going to kill me, or get a lead on them -- I don't know ..." Demetri trails off. Mark is like, "Really? You really think INDIO will hold the keys to your mortality?" and Demetri shamefacedly admits, "Alda said I was running out of time." They both recognize that Alda pulled one over on Demetri, but he whispers, "All I can hear is the clock ticking, every day. What am I supposed to do?" Mark tells him that Demetri just needs to figure out a way to work through the fear. He flashes back to his own flashforward (drink!) and talks about the men coming in to kill him. (This weekend, my friend Jason and I were talking about this show, and Jason was like, "I hope Mark has the brains to tell his boss, 'Hey, you know that night when I'm in the office and you're in the john? We're going to get gun-wielding maniacs in the building. Let's arrange for backup, so it's waiting right around the corner.'" Smart man, Jason.) Anyway, Mark concludes that he and Demetri are clearly targets for murder -- insights like this are why he's a lead investigator -- and Demetri heads off any sort of proactive discussion with "It's the future, Mark! Why do you think we can stop it?" "Because we saw it," Mark counters. Sure, but the thing that has yet to come up on this show is a character who's seen their future and is taking radical steps to prevent it from coming to pass. We've got a few people who are mildly disturbed about their likely futures but aren't exactly restructuring their lives to make sure they reduce the odds of their flashforwards coming true (OLIVIA). Mark points out, "We can use what we saw to stop what we saw. Demetri, we can solve your murder before it happens. That's why I want to put everything we have on Mosaic. For you. For me. For everyone." Demetri's still on the verge of tears, but Mark's GET ME OUT OF INDIO NOW! Conclusion stops the self-pity party.
Back at our Lady of the Mood Lighting Memorial Hospital, Lloyd's going to stretch his legs, maybe check out the ex's homestead, but first he has to drop Bryce's sketchpad back to the good doctor. We find out that the woman Bryce has been drawing is someone he expects to meet, as she's featured in his flashforward. Lloyd and Bryce's awkward small talk is interrupted by some dreadful newscast concerning a human-interest story ("a postal worker uses the Mosaic site to meet the police officer he belives is going to save his life in the coming months!") and Bryce gushes, "It's incredible, isn't it?" "A temporal anomaly in global consciousness? Yeah, I think that qualifies," Lloyd replies absently. I think I love him a little for both the contents and delivery of that line.
Bryce asks Lloyd what he saw, and after Simcoe dryly comments, "I guess that's the new 'How's the weather,' isn't it?" he finally spills his version of his flashforward: "I was in a house. Not my own house. I got a call from someone. I don't know who it was, but it was urgent. Dylan was nearby, maybe in another room. I heard a woman's voice, I turned toward it -- and it was over. I never saw her face, but I knew we were together, she was important to me somehow." So! Assuming Lloyd's telling the truth, he doesn't realize Olivia's the woman in his flashforward.
And speaking of ... Bryce runs off when he catches sight of Olivia so he delivers Ned Ned's CAT scans. After she goggles a bit at the giant hematoma that's right by Ned Ned's liver, Olivia comments, "Ned's lucky he showed up here in time." Bryce moonily says, "Well, no, it's not luck. He was alive in his vision, so clearly --" "Enough about visions!" Olivia snaps. The two squabble briefly. Olivia's take is that flashforwards have no place in medicine, while Bryce thinks they're a handy predictor of likely medical outcome. She then pushes Bryce in Ned's direction with orders to get Ned to consent to surgery, then get his own moony ass to the OR.
Cut to Bryce giving Ned the direst of warnings regarding all the things that could possibly go wrong with the surgery. Ned serenely takes it all in: "You're telling me I need some sort of drug-allergy-death-surgery. I'm totally cool with it." Then Ned goes flying off across the pockmarked plains of pseudomysticism: "Some of change is happening. I don't feel nervous or afraid of anything. All that worrying all the time, it's just kept me from being the me I'm supposed to be." (While Ned Ned is laying the Oprah-speak on us all, we see him dreamily swimming out of that submerged bus again.) Snapping back to the here-and-now, Ned Ned concludes, "Six months from now, I see myself and I'm, like, this invincible, fearless black guy. Like Shaft or Bryant Gumbel." Somewhere, Greg Gumbel just threw his remote across the room all, "What the fun?" Anyway, Ned Ned is changed in the now because of what will happen in the future.
We zip to the outside of a church, then to an interior office, where Nicole is looking at a shirt of a high-fiving Christ with the legend "Jesus is my Episco-Pal!" And to think we all dismissed Buddy Christ as a joke when Dogma came out. Anyway, a dynamic youngish priest comes in, indiscreetly talking about how he's presided over 15 funerals in the last two weeks, but he somehow finds the inner strength to turn off the mobile phone and gestures for Nicole to sit down. Nicole goes to unburden her conscience, but is interrupted by the crickets that Father Seabury keeps 'cause he likes the noise they make, and after he makes some small talk about how it's not creepy at all to keep insects tucked in a desk drawer, Father Seabury then confuses Nicole with her more observant sister Paige. Nicole shares that she has the urge to volunteer, but the church is full up. Father Seabury explains, "In a crisis like this, people really want to -- well, people need to help. So, uh, why don't you tell me what this is all about?"
Nicole flashes to a shot of a dark-haired person being pushed underwater before she asks, "How do I atone for something I haven't done yet? In my flashforward, I felt like I was being punished. Do you think God made this happen?" Father Seabury is all, We did NOT cover this at Yale Divinity and he practically fidgets himself out of the scene as he stammers, "Tell you what, this is Audrey Ridgeway's number. She is the volunteer coordinator. I hope she can help." Then he hands over a tee and sprints out the door. Nicole's all, "I may not go to church much, but that is not typical."
Bryce does a little poking around online with the search term "pigment," goes to find Ned Ned, and learns he's been taken to an operating theatre. He sprints down a hall, ordering, "Call the O.R.! We're about to kill our patient."
As Olivia is scrubbing in, Bryce makes one last valiant effort to persuade her not to operate. He explains, "Ned has Addison's Disease. Surgery could kill him. In the bus crash, he was calm in the face of an insane disaster, and again today he spoke about his flashforward, and again he mentioned that he was weirdly calm and black. If he's got Addison's, then his body is making melanin compounds instead of adrenaline. That's why his skin is going to get dark. Without adrenaline, his body can't mount a proper stress response. That's why he's so serene in the face of this surgery." Olivia snaps that any schmuck with an Internet connection can tap WebMD, so Bryce is going to have to do a lot better if he's going to persuade her not to operate, because his flashforward diagnosing isn't going to cut it. Bryce talks over her, flashing forward to approximately six minutes later in the episode by pointing out that without stress hormones, Ned Ned's body won't be able to adapt to surgery, his blood pressure will tank, and he'll die. Olivia tells Bryce she has no plans to administer (possibly) life-saving hydrocortisone "just because one patient had a freaky dream."
She's on a tear, telling Bryce, "I don't know what you saw, and I don't care, but it is affecting your professional judgment and it needs to stop." Bryce calls Olivia's judgment into question and she grounds him from participating in surgery.
Outside the hospital, Lloyd's finally worked up the nerve to go into his dead ex-wife's house. After scooping up the mail that's dropped through the slot -- there is surprisingly little, so I guess some study comes out between now and April proving that junk mail only pisses people off or something -- Lloyd continues on into the dust-free house with its host of live plants. Was his ex some sort of domestic genius who invented a maintenance-free abode? Truly, the world's lost a visionary. As Lloyd wanders from room to room, he stumbles over Dylan's calendar, which is chockablock with therapy appointments. Lloyd then notices that Dylan's drawn a picture of his family that features only the boy and his mother, and when he looks away in pain, he finds "The Magician's Handbook." Lloyd's getting an idea. He sits down to read.
Ned Ned's operation is not going smoothly at all, just as Bryce flashforwarded two minutes ago. It's not until Olivia reluctantly administers hydrocortisone that Ned Ned comes back from the land of the nearly-dead. We see Bryce watching from an observation room; we do not see him mouthing, "I TOLD YOU SO."
Back at FBI headquarters, Mark is attempting to interrogate the supermodel terrorist Alda. (Honestly, I have long contended that if you really wanted to cripple the Western world, you'd brainwash a few of those teen models as undercover bombers. They travel everywhere without much hassle, they get entrée into all sorts of places, and nobody would think that some six-foot-tall teenager with bee-stung lips is a fanatical jihadi. So this casting of a gorgeous blonde makes sense here.) Alda says, "I knew [Agent Noh] didn't have a flashforward. I didn't know he was going to be murdered 'til now." Mark wants to know how Alda "knew he didn't see anything," and she chalks it up to the Mosaic project. I was unaware that people in federal custody had untrammeled access to the World Wide Web.
The conversation does not improve from there. Alda smugs, "You're wasting your energy on what caused the blackout, who's responsible. You're ignoring the most profound question of all: Why? Do you know what a black swan is? It's a metaphor used to describe a high-impact event, something so rare, it's beyond the realm of human expectation. It comes from the 17th century when scientists assumed that all swans were white. They were wrong." Then Alda busts out her fluent Farsi, but ha ha HA!, Mark is fluent too and he says, "So there's a room and a small boy enters with a candle. What is this, a bedtime story?" Sadly, no. It's another one of Alda's esoteric digressions: "It's a Sufi parable. The man in the room with the candle asks, 'Tell me where this light comes from.' And the boy blows out the candle and replies, 'If you tell me where this light went, I'll tell you where it comes from." Does this parable end with Mark reciting the electromagnetic wave equation and schooling Alda on Maxwell's equations? Oh, please, oh, please ...
Alas, no. Alda smugs some more: "Your partner is right about one thing. I commune with some very dangerous people. I'm friends with those willing to don suicide vests in the name of ideology. I know when a man is willing to sacrifice anything for his cause. And you're not that kind of man, Agent Benford." Really? Because Mark sacrificed a hell of a lot of integrity last week liberating that Nazi, and he's just proven himself willing to spend four minutes of his life with you. He'll never get those minutes back! And sadly, neither will we. Alda continues her goading with, "Even if you start asking the right questions, you're not willing to do what it takes to get the answers. You're that little boy, Agent Benford, alone in the dark." Oh, how I weary of the TV convention of smart criminals -- especially since these sinister brainiacs can never answer the question, "If you're so goddamned smart, why didn't you get away?" The lawbreaking underworld is not exactly filled with lots of Dr. Dooms in training. Would that it were -- I myself tire of seeing men in business suits at international gatherings and think someone in a hooded green cloak and a faceplate would be just the thing to liven up photo ops -- but it's not, and so I grow weary of this comic-quality villainess. scene!
We see Agent Gough at his desk, sighing deeply before tapping into the Mosaic project and typing the name "Celia." Surprise, surprise, there are a lot of results for that query. Before Al can spiral into despair or whatever, Mark comes into his office and asks, "Hey, Al, remember that hacker, Mister Cheeto Dust? Give him a call." Oooh, machinations are afoot! Al asks if Somalia's really that important, and Mark says, "Yeah. It's time I got out of the dark."
Ned Ned is just coming to and learning that he's got Addison's Disease. His first question is an entirely reasonable one: "Who's Addison?" "The one vaguely sympathetic character on Grey's Anatomy, since exiled to a ludicrous medical soap opera," Doctor Varley replies. Or perhaps he simply mumbles something about Addison being the cat who described the malady Ned Ned's suffering. Bryce refrains from pointing out that Olivia and her bias against using the future to diagnose in the now nearly killed Ned Ned, but he adds, "We should thank you. Your flashforwards helped us piece it together. If you hadn't told us what you saw, you might have died on the table." Ned Ned, who is still riding that sweet post-anesthesia high, slurs, "I wasn't afraid because I didn't need to be afraid. The future saved me." Bryce, who skipped eating a gun after seeing his flashforward, smiles in understanding. I smile because the show finally, finally elects to trust that we viewers will remember little details like that from week to week.
Olivia's waiting outside Ned Ned's recovery cube and she apologizes, indirectly, by telling Bryce that it was her hangups owing to her own flashforward that prejudiced her against seeing the merit in Bryce's arguments. Bryce admits that his own marvelous, heretofore-unseen flashforward is what biased him toward believing Ned Ned and thereby coming up with the obscure diagnosis in the nick of time. Olivia then gently fishes for a status update on Bryce's mental and emotional health and he glassily repeats, "The future saved me." This makes me wonder: why are we not seeing a wave of suicides from people who saw their futures and decided, "To hell with this all"?
By the way, Dylan Simcoe is back under Olivia's care. She is none too pleased about this.
That night, at stately Benford Manor, Mark greets Nicole very warmly and she gives him the 411 on Charlie's daily activities. None of those activities included recounting in detail what her flashforward was, which is just too bad for Mark, but he does get a chance to talk to Nicole about her flashforward and her subsequent disappearing act. Nicole says sheepishly, "I'm trying to figure out why you guys didn't fire me." Mark tells her she's part of the family, then asks if she'd like to talk about what happened.
"I saw someone drowning me in my flashforward. I saw someone drowning me, and I don't understand, but I felt like I deserved what was happening. Like I'd done something wrong and there was no other way out," Nicole says. We see her in a white dress, being drowned in an impossibly blue and clear body of water. She adds that she saw the man's face while he was doing it. So do we -- and it looks an awful lot like the priest who was so freaked out a few scenes ago. Nicole finishes: "He pushed me back down, and then I was just gone. What did I do to deserve being murdered?" We see her drift to the bottom of the pool, a modern Ophelia. If rosemary's for remembrance, what flower stands for precognition?
Mark's brow is furrowed upon hearing all this, but his brow is furrowed nearly all the time, so it's not like we can gauge how deeply he was affected by Nicole's story. But he consoles her: "I've known you a long time. You didn't do anything wrong, and you won't. Tomorrow, I'm going to have a detective friend of mine from the LAPD come talk to you. We're not going to let anything bad happen. I want to do whatever I have to, to make sure you're safe." But how will he fit it into his busy schedule of getting punched by coworkers and guilting his wife over her flashforward? I worry that the extra responsibility will drive him to the bottle.
Anyway, Mark dispenses some wisdom he should actually heed: "That person you think you saw, that person you worry you'll be? That's not you." Then Charlie comes down and Mark proves he's a hell of a father and employer by cooking all the ladies in the room breakfast-for-dinner. (Scoff all you want: a man who can make pancakes after a bad day is a keeper.)
Back at the hospital, Lloyd's proving that he can scale a steep learning curve with regards to this parenting thing, and he is entertaining Dylan with a story that requires sleight-of-hand tricks. Olivia witnesses this heartwarming vignette on her way home to another heartwarming father-child vignette. Lloyd then says he's off to pick up dinner super-quick, and he's derailed from this errand when his mobile goes off and it's someone named Simon.
We see Simon, who is getting the
menacing edit with the dim lighting and the ominous music and the apparent lack of sympathy for Lloyd's struggles to set up a feasible work/life balance. Lloyd's all, "Can't talk!" and Simon snarls, "Well, I'm truly sorry about that, Lloyd, but talking to me is just one of those little inconveniences you're going to have to put up with, now that we're responsible for the single greatest disaster in human history."
Dun-dun-DUN! The episode ends there, so as to better let the sweet irony of the situation sink in: Olivia's going to go from canoodling with the flashforward's principle investigator to snuggling with its chief instigator. O, THE IRONY! Now someone bring me another glass of chardonnay. This one has a fly in it.
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