Episode Report Card Sobell: A- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Lloyd Knows When to Hold Them, and When to Fold Them…
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.12.2009
y or wrongly, from their more fun and exciting contemporaries. And the appeal of these characters -- most of the time -- comes from their solitary, slightly forlorn attempts to cling to their dignity amidst circumstances that have been imposed upon them. Except in Swingtown, Jack Davenport played a man who was morally retarded, and thus his character felt like a hypocritical dolt. You can't really think of hypocritical dolts as sexy, and it's not like the show corrected itself to become Grant Show and His Moustache Finally Get the Harem They Deserve!. Hence, the tankage. (Well, that and CBS being deathly afraid that all the network-friendly sex might kill their audience.)Here, however, Davenport's back to playing a man whose principles -- so, by extension, his very self -- are under assault. All is well in the universe again. And Simon is snapping, "You're not the only one who lost someone, Lloyd." He declines to share who he's lost -- or ever loved. When Lloyd calls on his hand, Simon says, "I knew you were bluffing this entire hand. Because there's no such thing as luck, or fate, or 'there but for the grace of God.' This game is pointless. I've already won. The future's already happened. Fighting it is futile." The end of his little spiel is the voice-over for footage of Nicole being drowned in the world's best-lit pool.
Nicole snaps out of her flashforward-induced reverie and -- surprise! -- she's dry and she's at the hospital. She tells the patient Olivia, "I'm guessing Mark told you what I saw?" He did. Because when it comes to keeping confidences, it's only his own flashforward where Mark's not spilling the whole can of beans. Olivia warmly adds that she and Mark worry about Nicole, and Nicole witlessly beams, "You don't have to be. I'm going to be fine. The future can change. It's all over the news." Before Olivia and Nicole can convene the symposium on free will versus predestination, they're distracted by a nurse coming by to announce a floral arrangement for the new mother of quintuplets. She needs Nicole's help with it, presumably because it takes two people to shake out all the desperate TLC programmers hiding in the gladioli. As Nicole walks off, she tells Olivia, "We can change what we saw, just before the blackout. Everything's back to being up to us again." You know, as comforting to some people as the idea of being in charge of one's own future must be, I really wish we would have also seen the converse: people who are absolutely crushed by the idea of their golden future no longer being certain.
At Aaron's house, Tracy's come over to tell her father what happened over in Afghanistan: She's been missing for two years because of the attack on her Humvee -- an attack meant for her personally. A few weeks prior to the attack, she had seen something she shouldn't have. Private-security contracting firm "Jericho PMC" -- mission statement: "Blackwater? Never heard of 'em." -- massacred an Afghani village full of women and children, and Tracy happened to observe it while she was doing long-range recon in the area. Tracy reported it to her superior officer, and a week later, her supervisor sent her on the mission where she was assumed to have met her end. The people who blew her up? Jericho. Tracy reasons that because of Jericho PMC's status as a military contractor, the Army's in collusion to hush this up, so she can't exactly trust the armed forces to have her back. The Tracy-survives-the-blast-and-discovers-her-leg-missing is all very harrowing, but I couldn't really get into it because I kept thinking, "Lady, you spent a lot of time rolling around on the ground and screaming after you came to. Exactly how fearsome and far-reaching can these mercs be if they didn't even have the brains to check out what all the noise downwind from the flambeed Humvee was?" I ask you, doesn't anyone teach murder-happy mercenaries to confirm their kills anymore?
And in the next scene, Aaron totally violates his daughter's confidence and has a curbside chit-chat with Mark. After Aaron shows Mark a time-stamped photo of Tracy taken on his mobile, he answers Mark's gasped "How?" by explaining, "Tracy would kill me if she knew I was talking to you. She was in a Humvee with three other soldiers. It got blown to Hell. A bloody mess, body parts everywhere, including her leg -- the DNA, right?" Mark asks the pertinent question: What's Tracy been doing these past two years? Ah, but that is what Aaron wants to talk to Mark about: "She's been on the run. She saw something she shouldn't have, and got in trouble with Jericho. They were the ones who attacked her. I know this sounds like something out of a Baldacci novel or something, but Tracy was dead, and now she's alive. I really need your help, Mark. Tracy was scared to death of these Jericho guys, and I'm afraid they're going to try and find her."
Cut to Mark undressing for bed, thinking about the new secret he has to keep from Olivia. She knows something's up, but all Mark says is, "I saw something today, and it got me thinking that if this person's future could come true -- and it did, even though it seemed impossible -- then maybe these visions are more set in stone than we thought." Olivia's not having any of that: "Maybe we have to work that much harder [to subvert them]." Speaking of which -- Mark asks how Olivia likes her new lingerie, and she deflects the query. As Olivia says, "We can change things, Mark. We just have to decide how badly we want to, how far we're willing to go to make it happen," the scene shifts to her office, where the janitor is clearing out the ashcan, which is now full of Olivia's new lingerie. As we shift back to the Benford bedroom, Olivia concludes, "I say there's nothing -- nothing -- we shouldn't be willing to do for one another to make it happen."
Speaking of willing to do insane things for noble reasons ... Mark goes to work the next morning and pitches the idea of using Ingrid as bait in a trap to draw out the star-tattooed guy. Wedeck patiently says, "I know a lot's changed, but we still don't use civilians as bait." Wedeck asks everyone to work the Parofsky angle, but Janis and Demetri quickly demonstrate that they have: Parofsky used to be the chief engineer for Micro-Circadian Electronics and was recently let go on suspicion of corporate espionage. Janis brings up Ingrid's recollection of the thugs taking a package off Parofsky before killing him; she wonders if it contained purloined intellectual property. To make a procedural scene a little snappier: Mark argues that these unknown killers are hot to whack Ingrid, so floating the rumor that she's out of protective custody ought to flush out the goons, and then they can be apprehended in a Mark-masterminded sting. Were I Demetri and Wedeck, I'd remind Mark of his last grand plan, which ended in flames at a doll factory. But I'm not, so they don't, and thus the dramatically-convenient plan continues apace. Ah! One more relevant thing in this scene: Wedeck suspects a mole in their department, what with "whoever we're investigating knows what we're doing before we do it," and all the recent attempts to fold, spindle and mutilate the series regulars. Mark is on board with that, arguing that someone has to let the tattooed killers into the well-secured FBI building on April 29, and it makes sense that it's someone on the inside. I suspect Agent Vreede. You heard me call it here first.
Night has fallen. Aaron brings a hot beverage to Tracy as she sits out on the back patio, and she asks if there's any chance that he spiked it with bourbon. Aaron snorts that it's not likely, and asks when Tracy took up the demon rum; she declines to answer. But she's plenty vocal once Aaron reveals that he's looped Mark in on what's going on. "Are you insane? You don't even know these people. I came to this house specifically because I thought I'd be safe, but I see now that was a big mistake. The second that Jericho knows I'm still alive, they'll find me and they'll kill me." Aaron refutes all this with, "Don't you remember your flashforward? The fact that you even had one proves that you're going to be alive." Then Aaron narrates his complete flashforward: "I was with you. I gave you my pocketknife. You were on a cot. You fell asleep. We were in some kind of bunker or cave, surrounded by guards." (With portraits of keffiyeh-wearing men and Islamic script on the walls, by the way.) Aaron continues, "I think somebody was calling my name. Then I stepped outside. There was a man out there. He was very concerned about you. He said something strange, 'The account has been verified,' then I gave him an envelope, but I don't know what was in it." Tracy asks about the man in Aaron's vision and we learn that person is Khamir Dejan, a field medic