Episode Report Card LuluBates: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT A Boozer on a Train Headed to Los Angeles
By LuluBates | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Charlie! Is alive! And using kind of awesome pick up lines, which include quantum mechanics, Schroedinger's Cat and Google searches of him flashing his nads to pick up a hot lady on a train. And, yeah, the line works. Charlie recounts his flash forward to the lucky lady (mid-coitus, natch) and it is a gruesome choking mood killer. Also a mood killer? When freaky Charlie shows up unannounced in the back of your car wanting to talk about your experiment, which killed 20 million people. Yeah, Lloyd, I'm looking at you.
After her gun shot, Janis's life hangs in the balance and in Olivia's skilled hands. But Olivia is distracted by the text message telling her that Mark was a flash forward drinker. Olivia, the button on the left is the delete key. When Mark finally gets to the hospital, Olivia is in a panic, which is not lessened when he tells her that he and his team were assaulted by extras from a John Woo movie. Olivia manages to save Janis's life, but there was so much damage, she may never be able to have a baby.
Demetri angrily throws some files around and generally ignores his boss's direct order as he tries to track down who ordered the hit. In the course of the investigation he stumbles on another clue from Mark's vision board. He and Wedeck (Jett Jackson) know the Blue Hand they found on the shooter's body is related to Baltimore because of Mark's vision and their quest is rewarded when they find a blue hand on Baltimore St. in Los Angeles. Scooby-style they track the clues and find a roomful of bodies with stained blue hands. And the case Jett Jackson was working on in his flash forward finds a starting point during the blue hand investigation.
Then Lloyd (Olivia's future honey) loses his son. The kid is so convincingly dressed like Easy E that a Latin King with a heart of gold helps him find his home, because he's old school, yo. But instead of going to his mom's house, Dylan heads to Mark's and Olivia's home where he completely weirds out the babysitter. Mark and Lloyd both respond to the babysitter's frantic call and completely freak out Olivia when she comes home from the hospital and finds her husband and her future fling all in the house together. Ruh-roh. A lot of awkward staring ensues. And then a fight. They both admit they have trust issues, leaving the future of their marriage in flux.
While trick or treating with his daughter and his sponsor (which is always a good time), Mark spies three men who look suspiciously like the men who will eventually corner him in his office. He gives chase, but only proves that he is the ultimate gun-wielding crotchety fist-shaking old man who really hates those pesky kids.
Also, a kangaroo hops by. Meaningless silliness? I think not.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!In case you have stumbled on this show accidentally or if the bleak 8 pm offerings have you haplessly channel surfing, let's have the opening credits remind you of the plot of this show. On October 6, the planet blacked out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. The whole world saw the future. You know, these title cards would really draw in the appropriate demographic if they just slanted them backwards a bit, had them trail off the screen as they scrolled, and had John Williams's music soaring over them. You know what I am talking about. Or you should or you probably meant to be watching "Historical Reenactments of the Great British Sea Battles From 1560-1720." If so, you are on the wrong channel, because that is on the CW. Right before Melrose Place. In case you blacked out between last week and now, or are just rising from your fifteen-hour World of Warcraft marathon, let's recap what happened last week. Everybody went to Congress to try and get funding and all they got was a lousy hit squad trying to take out the whole team. The only FBI agent who actually took a bullet was the lady FBI agent who was wearing heels and deserved it. Then Mark, the lead investigator, overacted in a karaoke bar and yelled at his boss about how in the future he is, like, drunk all the time, which would be awesome (and something to which I frequently aspire), but this time it is NOT AWESOME because the FBI is basing their entire investigation on his DTs. Man, Congress is a hoot! Then someone sends an anonymous text message to Mark's wife because they want her to know that he might be considering getting drunk and she has no sense of humor at all when it comes that shit, so she is T.T.O.'d (totally ticked offed). Also, when the lady FBI agent got shot her hot girlfriend gave her the same alarm clock that I have and now it lives in a drawer while I try to sell it, because watching it run in circles in her blood made me realize that it probably enjoyed it AND WILL KILL AGAIN. Please see my Craig's List ad for purchasing details.
And now onto today's program. OH SHIT. Am I watching Lost? Because this show is simply lousy with Lost cast-offs, like you weren't good enough for the freaking Island but you're good enough for Flash Forward, because I mean Joseph Fiennes is the lead and he was in that one Academy Award-winning film and stood near Gwyneth while she bought, I mean, won, her Oscar and that shit rubs off you know? Like don't wash the toilet seat after Joseph Fiennes uses it, because you will totally catch OSCAR FEVER. I am asking these important questions because there is this train running through the night and CHARLIE is on it. He is alive and in a bar, which is pretty much where I think we would all be if we were almost dead in a plane crash and then almost dead at the hands of some wackadoodle fake Dharma Initiative types and then [SPOILER ALERT] really dead when you wait...did you drown or get gutshot? Same same, but different, right? So Charlie is on a train in a bar making googly eyes at a pretty young thing who totally ignores his come on about knowing what caused the Great Flash Forward of ought-nine. The girl is in a black Marilyn Monroe dress and naughty girl heels and I am not sure what type of train these two are on, because every train I have been on for the West Coast run does not have smokin' hotresses in a bar car but instead has fat people guarding their fanny packs with their lives and saving their seats with their potato chip bags while they try and figure out how to lock the door to the automatic toilet. Charlie tells the lady to look him up on her fancy smart phone by doing an image search for "quantum physicist genius". She does and finds herself facing a picture of near naked Charlie striking a pose in his skivvies. Whoa, not in the first minute there, buddy! That's totally a five-minute picture. That one picture says everything to the girl: A quantum physics genius? Her mother would be so proud. Then the randy physicist ruins the mood by blaming her for the flash forward. In a line worthy of his self-proclaimed genius status, he explains that her overwhelming attractiveness makes the universe go bananas, luckily he knows how to counteract said bananas by blocking her dark energy and if she would just follow him to his sleeper car, all future global blackouts will be prevented. She smirks, but what type of girl does he think she is? She only puts out for real answers to the blackouts. Charlie gives her the sultry piano bar version of Schrodinger's Cat, which is an experiment done on tiny defenseless animals by sociopaths before they graduate to putting humans in bathrooms to see if they would cut off their own leg in order to get a gun and kill this other guy who is chained next to them in a bathroom. Also before Schrodinger changed his name to Jigsaw. Anyway, this proto-sociopath Schrodinger put a cat and some cyanide in a box and decided that before he opened the box and knew whether the kitty had died due to cyanide poisoning (and the letters from PETA started rolling in), in the world of quantum mechanics the kitty was both alive and dead and named Whiskers. It wasn't until the person opened the box and saw the outcome of the experiment was the result confirmed. Aren't you glad you didn't pay $180,000 for a degree in physics? You can learn everything you need if you just watch enough television. While the mad scientist is rambling about life and death, over at the hospital in Los Angeles, Olivia gets an emergent patient. It is Janice, the lady FBI agent who got gut shot. Olivia gets her on the operating table (she may have yelled, "Stat!" just to prove that this is IMPORTANT) and then had to use a defibrillator on Janice (Olivia may have yelled, "Clear!", too.) and we don't know if Janice, like that poor defenseless little kitten, is alive or dead.
Olivia is just completing her last sutures on Janice and we are lucky enough to get a super close up of the stitches just to show how disgusting medicine really is and even though you get to yell cool things like "STAT!" and "CLEAR!" it is really gross and you probably don't want to do it. This is also why they pay surgeons a lot. It's what I call the "ew" factor. Although that would mean that sewage cleaners and fish milkers (think about it) would get paid a LOT, which sadly I do not think is the case at all. Olivia calls Mark because she is worried that with his token lady FBI agent in the hospital something might have happened to him. He doesn't answer and she is reminded of his failures when she sees the text message about his future self drinking. She sighs and goes to bed, which pretty much makes sense. Lloyd, who I cannot help but think of as Steve, and the boy's dead mother is definitely Susan, who we all know was going to leave Steve sooner or later. Anyway, Lloyd is doing card tricks for his autistic son who likes magic and is still in the hospital for no apparent reason. As he shuffles and while he is distracted, Lloyd tells Dylan that, assuming he will some day be discharged from the hospital, they are going to move to Palo Alto and be bored and shop in strip malls and complain about the heat. Dylan is not 100% behind the plan, but further discussion is cut off when the formerly suicidal doctor whose name I am forgetting because he is not really that important, announces that the sad hospital Halloween party will be starting soon. Crap father that he is, Lloyd leaves Dylan by himself in the hospital, because he forgot a Halloween costume and now has to go spend too much on whatever outfit is available in the hospital gift shop thirty minutes before trick-or-treating.
Elsewhere in the hospital, the FBI's finest (well, it depends who you ask) have made it out of Washington alive and are not buried in red tape. They want to know about Janice. They are told that she is out of surgery and is fine. Mark goes to stare at Olivia while she sleeps, which is creepy, but is just the right amount of creepy for this particular character. Olivia wakes up with Mark's face about five inches from