Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT When Take Your Fiancee to Work Day Goes Off the Rails
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 13 | Aired on 03.25.2010
. Wedeck, however, cuts straight through the bull: "Is this about Mark's gun? Please tell me that's not what's going on here." It is, but Zoey cites public interest, and she's totally willing to drag the entire investigation into the courts and the public record -- thereby rendering all of the Mosaic investigation completely useless -- if it means that Demetri lives and she gets her damn wedding. Wedeck knows when he's up against prenuptial insanity and grits that "Agent Noh will make the files available to you." And he will probably deliver each one with a searing death glare, but hey, Zoey wouldn't be marrying him if she weren't already immune to his glower.And now, the scene that caused me to smack my forehead. We're at the San Pedro docks and Tracy's alleged "friend" Mike spins some yarn at Aaron regarding a silent phone call he got for his birthday. He concludes, "It's Tracy. She's alive, isn't she?" Aaron is unable to conceal his elation, then says, "She's at my house right now. Can you believe that? It's coming true." Oh, Aaron.
Lloyd has refrained from making any comments about how weird it is to be in the Benford house, and he walks upstairs to the bedroom with Mark. As they enter the room, Lloyd asks, "This doesn't bother you?" It so obviously does bother Mark, but he commands, "Start from the beginning." Lloyd uncomfortably begins narrating, and we see him getting up from the bed (he had been shirtless), answering his phone because he had gotten a text message from Simon ("It was a formula, or part of a formula") and we see for the first time that the full-length bedroom mirror is covered in a mathematical formula, written in lipstick. Lloyd says, "I had a sense there was a woman in the room, but I swear, I had no idea it was Olivia."
In the narrated flashback, Lloyd then excuses himself to make a phone call. He dryly notes that Mark did not take well to inquiries about his drinking, and Mark asks about "cracking the Q.E.D." It does not mean "quod erat demonstratum," but might refer to the name of whatever formula Lloyd and Simon would be working on in the field of quantum electrodynamics.
Later that evening, Demetri is still dropping off files -- each with a glare, natch -- and he huffs to Zoey, "I told you to drop this." She absently corrects him, "You told me to trust you." As it turns out, she's found something in Alda Hertzog's deposition that she thinks might be useful. Demetri repeats, "Drop it." Zoey justifies her actions with "What if it were me?" He replies tightly, "Digging is digging. But serving my boss with paper, trying to smear my partner -- that is way over the line." Zoey huffs, "I'm going to do whatever I can to prevent your murder." And possibly drive Demetri into a relationship time-out in the process?
Back at Aaron's place, we see how his big mouth has gotten Tracy in trouble: she's kidnapped and bundled into an appliance box by two thugs. And those guys look like they're not Amazon Prime members, so the postage on the Tracy package is going to be ridiculously expensive. And when Aaron comes in, the pot of pasta water has burned down to flames, the fire alarm is going off, and Tracy's nowhere to be found. He figures out what's happened after only a few minutes of running around the house. And going by the murderous look on Aaron's face, the rest of this episode is not going to go well for Mike-the-pretend-friend.
Still in the middle of recreating Lloyd's flashforward. Remember: It is night now. Those flashforward are approximately 137 seconds long. Therefore, ace investigator Benford has managed a 1:158 ratio in terms of "seconds of actual flashforward: seconds of talking about flashforward." We're back to shirtless Lloyd talking physics equations -- surely the pinup ideal of some left-brainers somewhere -- and Mark telling him to hurry on account of there being another blackout. Then Lloyd pops a beer and chills on the couch. The last thing he remembers is hearing, "Hey, honey," but he didn't see who it was. Mark asks why Lloyd was so adamant about calling D. Gibbons a liar. There's some back-and-forth and we find out that Lloyd actually does know D. Gibbons. Shocker!
It is now the next morning(?) or something -- look, it's light out, and since Aaron discovered Tracy's abduction when it was dark and it's now light and he's over at Mike's place, it's reasonable to assume it's the next day, unless the flashforward has also mucked about with the Earth's orbit and our days are now only 12 hours long, and wow, I just got distracted by trying to set the scene when really, the point is that Aaron has hunted down Mike at his house, Mike is trying to skip down ("My dad got me a job closer to home. It's all about family, right") and Aaron is having none of it. He tells Mike he'd like to buy him a burger before they take off.
The minute they're in the car, the heavens open up and it's pouring. Aaron makes small talk with, "Do you know I went to prison? Two and a half years. Got into a bar fight, hit a guy a little too hard." So we're talking manslaughter? You can practically see the thought bubble over Mike's head and it reads "Shit! This guy knows his shanks and shivs!" Aaron ominously goes on as to how prison makes you a very capable individual. And this is the scene where we find out that Aaron is, in fact, capable of whupping the hide of a man approximately half his age, then breaking his arm in a way that ensures it'll never heal right. He should be giving lessons to Mark and Demetri, given how both men drop like sacks of potatoes when they're in hand-to-hand combat.
Back to Lloyd and Mark, still nightfall, and I can only assume Olivia's working a 36-hour shift or something because she has not come home all, "Hey, honey! Does pizza -- whoa, this is awkward. I will just call Dominoes. And get it for pickup." Anyway, Lloyd says that D. Gibbons is the former Dyson Frost, and I realize the name is probably an homage to quantum-field theoretician Freeman Dyson but I am immediately reminded of the exacting silver fox who's devoted his life to making frighteningly effective vacuum cleaners. ANYWAY. The scoop on Dyson Frost is that he's a big old intellectual property thief (he stole Lloyd's work and passed it off as his own) who appears to have faked his death and assumed the identity of D. Gibbons. Mark asks if perhaps Lloyd is the one who gave young Charlie the idea that "D. Gibbons is a bad man," but no. And since Charlie won't talk about her flashforward, they have no idea where that came from. To deflect away from the talk about his daughter, Mark changes the topic to Lloyd's abduction. He asks, "They torture you for 72 hours" (note: it was 48 in the closed captioning) "cut off your friend's finger, and they never told you why, made any demands, threatened you in any way?" Lloyd said he was never threatened, but Dylan was, so "I gave them everything -- energy levels, equipment settings, monitoring parameters." Mark asks, "Could they use any of it to cause another blackout?" Short answer: Does sweeps happen every May? Mark realizes, "This guy, Dyson Frost, he's the key. We find him, we can stop this thing from happening again." And this is how both men agree to team up and stop the hated D. Frost/D. Gibbons.
The next day, Mark is briefing Wedeck on what happened with Lloyd, and he reveals that Dyson Frost wrote the seminal paper on something called "the mirror test." Wedeck performs his expositional duties by asking, "What the hell is a mirror test?" Vogel, who is sitting by, silent, also looks intrigued. Mark explains, "It's a test that determines recognition of consciousness among species." And the animals that pass it include us, elephants and crows. (Tangent: What about gray parrots? They're really brainy. Or, say, cetaceans? Excuse me while I disappear into the Black Hole of Google for the next hours checking this out ...) Mark connects the dots for Vogel and Wedeck: the Somalia incident back in the 1990s involved a massive die off