Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Beware of Distant Uncles Bearing Gifts
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 12 | Aired on 03.18.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Having just sliced off a bit of Simon's finger, Ricky Jay threatens to stalk Dylan until Lloyd spills details of the experiment. Lloyd semi-talks, and Ricky Jay tasks a few of his less charismatic goons with killing off the now-superfluous physicists, but Lloyd is saved, thanks to Mark's recall of his collage and an intuitive leap as to where the two men are being held.
The narrative arc of the night belongs to Simon: After Mark's dramatic rescue, Simon is loaded into an ambulance where... eeee! Villain Ricky Jay is waiting! (I will freely admit, this made me jump in surprise the first time I saw this.) And it turns out that Simon's working with Ricky Jay, and that whole I-chopped-your-finger-off thing was just a bit of misdirection to fool Lloyd into thinking Simon was as innocent as he. We find out that Simon was the haunting figure in the footage from the Detroit stadium.
We also find out that Simon was a busy boy the day of the blackout: he attended his father's funeral in Toronto at 7-something in the morning, then got abducted to Detroit, where he was ordered to watch baseball, eat popcorn and accessorize with one of those alpha rings. Honestly, except for the abduction part, it sounds like a pretty awesome way to spend an afternoon. Anyway, we learn those rings were engineered to block whatever caused the blackout, and that Simon is lying about his flashforward.
After Simon's treated at the hospital, he fakes a fit of anaphylactic shock to escape from Janis, thereby making her score in successful Simon-wrangling incidents 0-for-2 (it was on her watch that he was taken in the beginning of the episode, during a debate over whether or not she was Simon’s beer wench), and he takes off for Toronto. However, Janis manages to track him down there (1-2), and accedes to his plea for an overnight in the fair city, because she has a hunch he's up to no good. Oh, you think?
Simon takes Janis to the family home, whereupon he promptly eludes her surveillance (1-3) so that he might hang out with his friend Philip -- erstwhile professor and eccentric physics genius -- and beg him for help in preventing another flashforward. Janis tracks him down again (2-3) and marches him back to the homefront.
And then! OH MY GOSH! We find out that Ricky Jay also masquerades as a friend of Simon's family, "Uncle Teddy." There is a dinner with Simon's family, "Uncle Teddy" and Janis, and it is tense, in part because "Uncle Teddy" was responsible for ordering the death of the Campos paterfamilias. (Simon's flashforward, it turns out, is actually the memory of him killing his dad's assassin on October 6.) And, as it turns out, "Uncle Teddy" is also responsible for kidnapping Simon's sister so he can use her as leverage against Simon. This -- combined with "Uncle Teddy's" hostess gift of Philip's body in the trunk of a car -- pushes Simon to the edge and he kills Ricky Jay. Which is too bad, because Ricky Jay was really entertaining and because he probably could have been useful in leading Simon to Annabel's abductors.
The episode ends with Simon vowing revenge against whomever was employing Ricky Jay, as that party is not only responsible for the global carnage, they've also got his sister.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!The episode begins with Bryce following Nicole into the coffee shop where she's going to meet the Reverend Nutbar. He's going to lurk in the background just in case Nicole needs rescuing. Nicole asks if Bryce can get his change in pennies, then heads over to talk to the Reverend Nutbar.
He asks, "Why don't you tell me what upset you earlier?" Nicole recounts her flashforward -- she's being drowned -- and Reverend Nutbar says thoughtfully, "People ask me all the time to interpret what they saw, and I can't. Ultimately, interpretation is your responsibility." Then he reinterprets the flashforward anyway -- to paraphrase, Nicole's not drowning but waving! -- but I'm really more interested in pointing out that the Reverend Nutbar has taken all the creamers on the table and made a little pyramid of them. Then he's reinforced his barrier with an outer wall of salt and pepper shakers, plus the sugar holder. This subconscious arrangement is completely fascinating to me. What could it presage? Anyway, Reverend Nutbar has a moment of self-awareness with "I'm just a super-religious weirdo dude, and you don't have to believe anything I say. But everyday, God puts something good in your life. Embrace it." Nicole looks over at Bryce, who is diligently scooping pennies into his satchel per her request. This show is so subtle.
Then the Reverend Nutbar VO's "the challenge that we face is recognizing that the answers to our most burning questions may be right in front of us." This is so we can see Mark coming out to his car and seeing a flyer for the Crown Cheese Steak. He flashes back to the point on his collage where there's the same flyer with "HELP US" written on it, and promptly heads across the street to talk to the manager. We learn that this shiny new location has just opened up, and that it will soon close again if its manager insists on pushing the tofurkey cheese steak like it's not an abomination against all that processed food stands for. [Why don't you want vegetarians to have cheesesteak? - Zach] Anyhoodle, the point to this scene is for Mark to get the old location of the Crown Cheese Steak.
Night has fallen and Bryce has taken Nicole home. They're having a theological debate, with Bryce firmly on the side of "Most religions are a kind of club to keep some of the people and some of the people out." It's not often one sees institutionalized belief systems being likened to the Star-bellied Sneetches. Nicole rebuts, "If it makes you feel better about your life, what difference does it make?" And it's not often you see an institutionalized belief system being defended with "It's all about me, anyway." Truly, FlashForward is breaking new ground in how we discuss religion through the lens of popular culture.