By Sobell
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Soooo … that happened.
Zoey goes to get information about Demetri's possible death from Alda -- whom prison has made even more attractive, as it does -- and Alda tells her that unless there's a hearing to determine whether or not Alda's going to be charged with something, Alda will not talk. Zoey does arrange the hearing by lying about Alda's pending appendicitis, then Alda engineers an escape. She throws Zoey a bone by saying that in her flashforward, she heard that they found Demetri's body in "building seven."
Demetri is, of course, imprisoned in a fiendishly complicated chair where, if he moves, he'll be shot by the gun (which will be fired off by … an arrow? Whatever, the whims of mad geniuses are beyond my ken.) and there are laser pointers, and behind him is a massive diagram detailing all the possible futures that Dyson Frost has seen. He calls it "the garden of forking paths." He tells Demetri, "In almost every future, I don't live past today. Seventy-eight percent of the time, you end up killing me … the point is, once we've glimpsed it, the future wants to happen. It gains weight. It's like atmospheric pressure bearing down, and if we want to escape that pressure, we have to do something drastic." Hence the crazy and elaborate schemes to kill Demetri -- or not really kill -- Demetri. It turns out that Dyson wants to fool the future into happening by presenting the possibility to killing Demetri, yet allowing them both to live.
While Demetri gets to sit in his silly chair and contemplate his mortality, his coworkers try to find ways to get him back. They are thwarted by Dyson Frost's clever feints. Only Mark gets special instructions on getting to Demetri. He eventually makes it out to Antelope Valley and meets up with Dyson Frost. Sadly, the meeting is cut short by Alda killing Dyson Frost (it is sad -- poor Frost is not so much evil as he is lonely and mad from what he knows), but Mark hops in Dyson Frost's car and manages to find the location. But he has to call into the office for help, and Janis is the one who points him to building seven. Nice work, mole!
Mark enters into the building and manages to fight a bad case of nerves to recall Dyson Frost's conversation with Charlie about the collected works of Dr. Seuss, then invokes the timeless rule of "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish" to disarm the elaborate gun-firing machine and save Demetri's life. Hurray! Hurray! (However, when Demetri stands up, he triggers a spraying arm that wipes out all the information on the big board depicting the garden of the forked paths. Win some, lose some.)
Now that that plotline is winding down, the show introduces a new complication in the form of a raving savant who appears to be hop-skipping through flashforwards all on his own. This raving savant, Gabriel, was friends with the homeless dude who got shot one episode ago -- both of them are linked to the "Raven river experiments" that Dyson Frost also alluded to, so it looks like we're about to embark on a plot to answer to the question "Who caused the flashforwards and why?"
Want more? The full recap starts right below!When last we tuned into Flashforward, Dyson Frost -- the man, the legend, the supercooled vacuum cleaner with extraordinary sucking action -- had succeeded in abducting Demetri the day before he was due to be murdered. This was largely due to the FBI getting all in a tizzy about Demetri's pending quickie-nuptials and not, say, anticipating Demetri's possible abduction. How fortunate they're not in the crime-prevention business.
And now, this episode begins by reminding us that on October 6, the planet blacked out for two minutes ... blah blah blah. You know, if you're seventeen episodes into the series, it is probably a bad sign if you're still refreshing viewers on the basic premise. Then again, one of the most hilarious things about the late and unlamented Tru Calling was how the episode would, around the halfway mark, recap everything that had just happened. Clearly, the writers on that show had decided, "If you're brain-damaged enough to want to watch this, we're betting you're brain-damaged enough to have no short-term memory left. We're here to help you."
The episode begins with a close-up on Demetri's perspiring face, and we soon zoom out to see what brought on the flop sweat: an elaborate set-up involving red laser beams (aimed at Demetri's forehead), what looks like one of Green Lantern's trick arrows and Mark's gun aimed at his forehead. We zip very quickly to a blackboard behind Demetri that is covered in a diagram that is colorful, complex and apparently related to all the possible timelines Dyson Frost has seen, then we see that Demetri is barefoot and the platform on which his chair is mounted is pressure sensitive.
We revisit the big board o' possibilities again and see that Dyson has laid out the season's arc in white chalk, and recapped it with admirable brevity: Dec 15: Hong Kong à Keep distance àCan't help à Jan à Somalia à Kill Pat. 9 à Queen Sacrifice à Lathe à L.B.C. à Carnival à March 15, 2010 - Demetri dies à Zoom Car à Antelope Valley.
At FBI HQ, everyone's changed out of their tuxes and bent to the task of finding Demetri. Mark is trying to interrogate his daughter regarding her chat with Dyson Frost the evening. It is not going well and Wedeck steps in, calmly saying, "Charlie, sometimes closing our eyes helps us remember more. You want to do that with me?" He makes a show of squeezing his eyes shut, and Charlie follows suit. Wedeck continues to gently question Charlie, and she spills a detailed narrative. The two are sitting on a bench at the carnival...