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Tonight is a Janis-centric episode. Her pregnancy isn't going as well as it needs to -- she's anemic and not gaining enough weight -- and it's due to her stress levels. Gosh, being a double agent is hard! Somewhere amid all of this, we find out that the blueprints Dyson Frost was carrying around provide the schematics for some sort of astrological clock. And the first date is October 6, 2009. We also find out he secreted a QED in the white queen chess piece he left back in Pigeon, Utah.
Those developments are somewhat secondary to the story of how Janis came to be working for the bad guys. We find out she was recruited as a mole two years prior to the flashforward. She's been passing information to her handler (who holds down a job as the harmless middle-aged matron in a pet store), albeit reluctantly since the flashforward. Equally startling: We find out that Vogel's been on to Janis since the day she graduated from Quantico, identifying her as a potential mole. And he's the one who urged her to become a mole, so he could get someone on the inside of whatever shadowy cabal. (Oh, Vogel, you are sort of like the Bruce Wayne of this show, always thinking a billion steps ahead.) So, in actuality, Janis is a double agent. Whew!
Meanwhile: Olivia has a friend in Gabriel. Although his greeting her in the Benford living room freaks her right the hell out (and understandably so) we find out that he's been shadowing her for much of her adult life. Olivia double-checks Gabriel's ravings against her old photos and, surprise, surprise, he's in the background in an awful lot of them. This convinces Olivia that Gabriel's ravings are probably more correct than incorrect, and she enlists Vreede in her personal "What the hell?" quest. We learn that Raven River was a mental hospital that was shut down back in the 1980s after some very sketchy experiments with schizophrenics and autism. Naturally, Vreede and Olivia rush on over. Unsurprisingly, Lloyd is there, and he leads Olivia and Vreede into the ward where, it turns out, Dyson Frost conducted tons of flashforward experiments on these poor mental patients. Gabriel begins raving again and amid his shouted revelations: Llyolivia was foreordained by fate! Mark is a mistake! And apparently, Olivia needs to get her love life in order or else it's the end of the world.
And in Afghanistan: Aaron zzzzzzzz. (All kidding aside, it turns out that it's hard to go anywhere in Afghanistan without someone trying to shoot at you. Aaron finds this out the hard way.
We've seen the future and we're pretty sure that it means the cast needs new jobs. We've got suggestions for their moves.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!The episode begins with a sequence not unlike the opening of The Silence of the Lambs, only instead of Clarice Stark running through the woods of Quantico and setting squirrels on fire with her laserbeam gaze, we have Janis and Demetri running at the back of the pack while Janis VO's about the brutal six-mile obstacle course that is "The Yellow Brick Road." We get a ton of backstory: "I never intended to be an FBI agent. I was a lawyer, and hated my life. Then I had this friend who joined the Bureau. I never thought of myself as particularly patriotic, but it sounded cool. I liked the idea of being part of something, actually trying to make the world a safer place. I loved it. I loved every second of it. Quantico made me strong. It taught me what mattered. And it showed me I'm capable of tackling problems I never thought possible." We get a shot of Janis and Demetri, all wet (it is raining, natch) and muddy and elated over finishing the course. By the way, that is all you see of Agent Noh this week. He's evidently off taking a well-deserved break this week. We shall miss you and your irritated glare, Demetri.
We then cut to Janis looking all date-night pretty at some lounge, telling a soignée older brunette that, "Of course, I've never lived in L.A., so we'll see how I survive this." The other woman discreetly fishes about the status of Janis's love life and Janis feints, then the lady Lita tells Janis's cleavage that she's a sort of corporate headhunter, if you substitute the phrase "massive, secret global cabal" for "corporate." Janis is being headhunted. And, going by the smoldering looks Lita's giving her, cleavage hunted. After Lita makes her "moonlight for us whilst working at the FBI," Janis coyly flutters her eyes in assent.
Zip! Back in the present, and Janis is expositing in re: the photos and blueprints that Dyson Frost (RIP) had on him when he died. Everyone in the conference room oohs appreciatively at being told what pieces of paper are, while Vogel glowers in the doorway. Mark is all, "Let me jump in by reminding you that Dyson Frost died in my arms, and he said something cryptic about 'In the end, you'll be saved by the lady you see every day.'" Have any of the agents thought to check a comprehensive Grateful Dead lyrics database? This sounds right up their alley. Vogel finally pipes up: "I can't speak on behalf of everyone, but I'm still contemplating the unbelievable fact that we had the possible mastermind of a global blackout in our hands, and just before he's able to divulge any real information, he's killed by a terrorist who, mere hours before, was in our custody. Now how the hell does that happen?" Um ... the writers were given an order to wrap up the show in one season, plausibility be damned? Mark huffily responds that it's all worth it because Demetri's alive, and it descends into bickering before Janis is all, "Gentleman, can we please pay attention to the blueprints? Surely they mean something, right?" The boys ignore her and continue bickering, and it takes Wedeck speaking loudly and threatening to hit them with a big stick before they get back to the damn blueprints. Naturally, Vreede will not be allowed anywhere near them or, by extension, the main plot. He is to chase down the Raven River reference. Fortunately for Vreede, Dyson Frost wasn't the only one babbling about Raven River. Mark gives a go-team summary, and Janis looks all uneasy. BECAUSE SHE'S A MOLE.
Back at stately Benford Manor, Olivia's babbling medspeak into her mobile while she gets ready for work, but her hectic morning routine is interrupted as Gabriel shouts to her, "It's important, Olivia!" She drops her glass in fright, as nearly any of us might if some random deranged person were seated in the breakfast nook. Gabriel's assertions that he knows her -- backed up by things like, "The Pixies! You were there, you wore a purple beret, the drink spilled on the lady in front, she got mad, she got so mad!" -- do not set Olivia's mind at ease. Gabriel adds calmly, "I was there, too. With my handler Barry. Barry lost his job for taking me to a Pixies concert." Now I feel sorry for both Barry and Gabriel. [Is somebody not a Pixies fan? - Zach] Olivia's incredulous that Gabriel knows the concert details, and then he references her friend Scott's wedding at Martha's Vineyard: "Your dress was turquoise. You cried -- it was sad. They served mini-corndogs." (Frankly, the catering sounds awesome.) Olivia asks what Gabriel McDow wants from her, and he snaps that he's already told her his name -- "You have to remember things like that, Olivia." Olivia plays the "My husband is FBI" card, but Gabriel tops that hand with, "He's not your husband. You know Lloyd? Lloyd? Lloyd is. You made a mistake, you should be with Lloyd. I tried to stop you." Gabriel carries on in his recursive style while the rest of us absorb the fact that even the universe hates Mark Benford so much, it wants to ruin his marriage. As Olivia flees in a panic, Gabriel shouts adamantly that she is not to buy coffee from a man who looks like Mr. Clean. I'm thinking Olivia is going to skip the coffee and head straight to the bar.
Janis has ducked out of work to go visit her OB/GYN, who is concerned about Janis's pregnancy, as Janis is anemic and hasn't gained enough weight. She writes a reference for Janis to get a high-resolution ultrasound from a perinatologist. Janis is like, "Now? Why now?"
Cut to Olivia freaking out to Mark on the phone, but she has to cut off her panic attack as she enters the hospital parking lot because some teenager just plowed their vehicle into a coffee kiosk, killing Mr. Clean. Olivia is taken aback that Gabriel may actually be spouting useful flashforwards and not pure coincidental gibberish.
We flash back to two years prior to October 6, 2009. Janis is heading into a pet shop; apparently, this is where she will meet her handler Carline regularly. Carline orders Janis to get an aquarium. After all, she'll need a plausible excuse to come into the pet store frequently. Carline also gives Janis her first assignment: "Be the best special agent at the L.A. bureau you can be. Watch, wait, win their trust -- and while you're at it, keep us apprised of what they're up to."
Zip! We're back to the present and Janis is filling Mark in on the photos; they're platinum prints, and likely printed in the 1910s. Chronology aside, the more interesting news is that Alda's fingerprints were all over the prints. Mark speaks for us all with "How would she have gotten her hands on these photos?" I imagine we'll find out later on. The other weird thing: the prints and blueprints had soil from the Kunar province in Afghanistan all over them. (And so it all begins to come together... Not-Blackwater will be working in league with the organization that had, until recently, employed Dyson Frost, and they'll rely on Keiko to build them an army of rock-n-roll war robots, and then... I got nothing after that.) Mark warns us that Aaron will be taking a more prominent role in upcoming episodes by wondering aloud, "What would Frost be doing in Afghanistan?"
Speaking of whom... Aaron stars in this week's in Plotlines That Can Be Summed Up In One Sentence. And here it is: Aaron discovers that when you travel to a war zone, getting to the camp where his daughter is likely to be held is not so simple as hopping in a Jeep and pointing it due east. And now, this subplot has bored me. Let us get back to the real show.
And here we are: Janis has brought the blueprints to a Professor Cory, who enthuses, "If these blueprints can be authenticated, this would be an incredibly cool find. Kind of reminds me of the antikythera mechanism, [which is] one of the great mysteries of modern science. It was a bronze artifact discovered in the Mediterranean in 1901 -- turned out to be this incredibly sophisticated sort of calculator from second century B.C. Greece... the antikythera calculated dates of solar eclipses, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what this calculates." The good professor asks Janis for the blueprints, so he can scan them, do some 3-D imaging based on the schematics and translate the ancient Greek to find out what this thing might be. Janis is cool with that ...
...Until she shows the blueprints to Carline and Carline's like, "Thanks. Now get the extra copies back from the professor and from Mark Benford." Janis asks, "What's so important about this thing?" and Carline says with sweet menace, "I don't recall 'answering questions' being part of our arrangement. The information goes one way, period. Get me these blueprints."
So poor, pregnant Janis -- who should be home dropping a pint of Ben & Jerry's and some iron supplements into a blender, then relaxing with her ferrous Vermonster milkshake in front of Dancing With the Stars -- one imagines it's less enjoyable when you've already flashed to the outcome, which reminds me: Why have we not seen anything about how flashforwards could kneecap serial or reality TV? Why have we not seen how they affected sports gambling, or the insurance industry, or the stock market? I mean, even a casual "Yeah, my premiums quintupled based on some underwriter's flashforward based on my accident report. I haven't even had an accident yet! I want to sue!" would be something. ANYWAY, my point is that Janis is busy pulling a Mission Impossible-style caper in Professor Cory's office, and once that nervewracking blueprint-stealing-and-computer-fritzing errand is done, she's got to head back to work and get into Mark's office.
Back at stately Benford Manor, Charlie is behaving in the time-honored fashion of TV children everywhere -- which is to say that she told her mom she requires no parental attention whatsoever -- so Olivia's got time to flip through her old photo albums and see whether it is true that she wore a turquoise dress to a wedding or a purple hat to the Pixies. Answer: Yes, and yes. More importantly: Gabriel is somehow in each of her pictures, looking disoriented and anxious as he plays waiter (the wedding shots) rocks out to "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (the Pixies concert).
Janis is now at the FBI building, still dressed like a very well-accessorized ninja and moving around Mark's office all stealthy-like. Unfortunately, Mark has out-stealthed her, and he startles Janis by materializing in the doorway and asking, "What are you doing?" After she recovers, she spins a story: "I totally screwed up, Mark. I'm an idiot. Professor Cory called me and he misplaced the blueprints that I gave him. [Since] I gave him the originals, he's got the only copy." Mark is not buying the story and Janis falters as he asks why she didn't check the originals into Evidence ("I had a doctor's appointment?") and how she managed to get in after-hours ("You gave me your passcode? That time you were in Washington. With Wedeck?") But Mark seems to let it pass and chides her for making rookie mistakes. She can have the copies tomorrow.
The day, Olivia's freaking out to Vreede about Gabriel's appearance and the fact he's been shadowing her throughout her adulthood. This segues into an opportunity for the two of them to chit-chat about Raven River -- the topic of the conversation being "What in the heck is it?" and Vreede says, "There's a few Raven Rivers. There's one in Wisconsin, one in Illinois, there's a tennis club in Ohio, and a Raven River hospital in Arizona." This last one seems to make the most sense to Olivia, and Vreede tells her it's a now-closed psychiatric hospital. The facility was shut down in the late 1980s amid allegation of abuses. The patients were primarily schizophrenics, and Raven River had been the first hospital in the country to deal with autism. From there, Olivia makes the short leap to savants, and from there, we may reasonably infer, it will be a short plane ride to Arizona.
But before that, Janis is getting her ultrasound at the neonatologist's office. As per usual with these things, it looks less like a fetus up there and more like a Rorschach blot, but the doctor seems satisfied, so who am I to quibble with the fictitious medical specialist? The doctor tells Janis to take better care of herself and reduce her aggravation: "The health of your baby depends on your ability to stay off your feet and lower your stress. I'm serious. Otherwise, you could lose your baby." As if to underscore the point, Mark calls right at that moment, totally pissed off because Professor Cory's in his office with a very interesting story.
Janis rushes in, and Cory's all, "So, the darndest thing happened! Not only did my entire building lose power, wiping out whatever was on my computer, I lost those blueprints you gave me." Janis deadpans, "Really," but Cory's BS detector is unusually well-honed -- it has to be for him to survive in the vicious, bloodthirsty arena of a university's humanities department -- and he barely manages to keep the Gotcha! smirk out of his voice when he says, "So it's a good thing I took pictures of them with my phone. I wanted to get a head start." "Great," Janis lies, no doubt feeling her cortisol levels rising in real time. We get a whizzy 3D CAD rendering of a clock with gears and levers designed to calculate a series of dates. The first one? October 6, 2009.
We then flash back to Janis's version of what happened the day of the blackout. Guess what? Janis blacks out like everyone else and has her vision of being Great With Child. The flashforward is much more detailed -- in it, a doctor says, "You've had a partial abruption, Ms. Hawk. The good news is, you've stopped bleeding. You're going to have to really watch your physical activity from here on out." So now we know Janis wasn't getting an ultrasound at 10 p.m. because she's got the most awesome OB/GYN practice ever -- there was a legitimate medical concern and likely emergency call. Then Janis comes back to the present and wanders, dazed, over to a window. She drinks in the mind-boggling carnage taking place. Then we cut to her throwing up in the bathroom, and once she finishes, she breaks down sobbing.
, Janis storms into the pet store. She's dressed for business -- hair scraped back into a bun and everything -- and she bellows, "I want out!" Carline looks up and deadpans, "It's normal to be upset," but Janis is not interested in normal. She's interested in self-flagellation: "Millions of people died yesterday, Carline! I lost friends -- people I know and work with. Nobody told me this was the plan when I was recruited. You said there was going to be an event, but you never said it would be like this. Did you know it would be like this?" Carline drawls that she doesn't answer questions, and she doesn't plan on letting Janis quit. "I didn't hear you complaining when you were pocketing all that money. You didn't think there was a price?" she ask coolly. Janis snarls that Carline's despicable. Carline scoffs, "Man up, sweetheart. This is what we do. And even if we wanted to cut you loose, that's not my call to make." As for the person whose call it is to make: "That's not going to happen. Ever." So Janis's employers are effectively the Hotel California -- she can check out any time she likes, but she can never leave. (On the plus side: pink champagne in everyone's Christmas stocking!)
Sure enough, Vreede and Olivia are now at the old hospital in Arizona. I suppose Nicole is busy watching Charlie back in California? And Olivia had no surgeries scheduled for the few days? TV people have it so easy when it comes to dropping everything for narrative expediency. Olivia made a self-referential nod to the setting by saying it looks like it ought to host a slasher flick. Vreede says, "I'm more of a Clint Eastwood-type guy myself." Don't rule out Mr. Eastwood's potential to take on the abandoned-mental-hospital narrative trope, Vreede -- that cat's gotten eclectic in his dotage. Olivia frets, "I hope you told someone where we were going," and Vreede says airily, "So they'll know where to find our bodies?" He's growing on me. In fact, nearly everyone not named "Mark Benford" has only gotten more appealing lately.
The two let themselves in courtesy of a flimsy piece of plywood nobody else has ever thought to lift up, then walk through the remarkably dust- and animal-detritus-free facility. Naturally, Vreede and Olivia split up. Why? Is it because Olivia's lack of training will slow Vreede down? Or is it so she can freak out harder when Gabriel pops up saying, "You're not going to find what you're looking for. I knew you'd be here. You're always here." I'm sorry, but he's just too goofy to be menacing. In fact, I sort of hope that when this all winds down, he moves in with Olivia, Lloyd and their kids as a sort of goofy uncle figure to everyone. "Oh, Uncle Gabe! Of course you expected us to have pancakes this morning!" everyone will carol as Gabriel comes in wearing a floppy chef's hat and shouting about chocolate chip pancakes. Cue the laugh track. Come on, ABC, it can be the lead-in to Wedeck and Vogel Travel the Country And Tell You What's What and Demetri Kills People With His Stares Of Withering Future. It's not like you've got a whole lot else going on for fall 2010, especially if V's Visitor Anna fails to eat stupid Agent Erica like a guinea pig during May sweeps.
Back at FBI headquarters, Mark is tearing Janis a new one for her recent sloppy work and asks, "What's up with you?" so Janis pulls the "I'm pregnant" card. Mark transforms into a giant, FBI agent-shaped marshmallow and tells Janis how he never doubted he could trust her (good to know those agent-ly instincts are sharp as ever...), then gets back to babbling about Dyson Frost, whom he would have surely left Olivia for had that witch Alda not shot the genius. Anyway, Mark is puzzling over Dyson's last words when it hits him: the lady Mark sees every day is the white queen chess piece that he found at the Pigeon, Utah, blast scene. He breaks open the piece and we see that Dyson Frost had secreted a QED ring away inside it. Janis looks stunned by the discovery -- whether because she's genuinely surprised or because she's taken aback at what Mark figured out.
Gabriel is trying to stammer out backstory to Olivia when Vreede comes up, looking understandably alarmed at his colleague's wife just smiling and nodding at this surprise madman in the hall. Gradually, Olivia and Vreede tease the story out of Gabriel: He was part of a mass experiment where "Every other day for two years, we came in here. They put us to sleep. I never knew where I'd end. Sometimes it was a short trip -- I was eating a tuna sandwich, cat jumped on the table, kitty likes tuna -- sometimes it was long trip. He watches from [the corner], the doctor Frost. He told us we were special, 'cause we could remember things, everything. And when we came back, we had to write it down, every little detail." Vreede realizes that Dyson Frost inflicted these savants with hundreds of flashforwards. Gabriel says, "When they finished with us, when they used us all up, he told them to kill us so we wouldn't tell." Vreede leans in and says emphatically, "He's dead now. You don't have to be afraid of him anymore." Gabriel smiles with relief and says, "The early worm catches the bird. I've been waiting. I've been waiting --" "Gabriel, why have you been following me," Olivia says, treading all over Gabriel's long-overdue emotional catharsis. He tells her it's because she's going the wrong way and he has to turn her around: "In the futures I saw, I always saw you, Olivia. And you're always with Lloyd! In Harvard, by the pipe shop -- I tried to smoke that day, but I threw up. And we were friends. We were friends because I was the janitor in --" "No! Gabriel, I didn't go to Harvard!" Olivia says. I must admit: nice writing here, because it calls back to the Olivia/Lloyd scene where Lloyd explains the multiverse theory and Olivia admits she turned down Harvard Medical School for a life with Mark in California. Anyway, Gabriel is very, very adamant that Olivia is supposed to be with Lloyd, so she needs to fix her future stat, and the petty part of me is very, very glad that the universe is all, "Oh, Mark's a mistake." But there's another part of me that's all "Really? The fate of the universe depends on whom Olivia's wed to? Isn't that a little beyond believing?"
Mark is dropping the QED ring on Simon and Lloyd to ask them what in the Sam Hill the bling is. Janis helpfully points out that Suspect Zero (whom we all know to be Simon) was wearing one, too, so Simon seizes the chance to be perceived as a useful genius by just telling everyone it's the quantum entanglement device. Lloyd looks like he's beheld the holy grail; kudos to Jack Davenport for conveying the pure excitement mixed with scientific curiosity that Lloyd would surely have. Lloyd turns to Mark and says, "This is what we were discussing in our flashforwards." Wedeck demands some exposition and Simon lays it out: "Theoretically, Frost and his pals ramped up our linear accelerator to such extreme energies that it send shock waves through the consciousness field, and jolted all of humanity's awareness to a different place in space-time -- the flashforward. Our Suspect Zero and Frost were awake during this. They were in some way protected." And this ring is how. Lloyd says dreamily, "It's a device which anchored their minds to their current location in space-time." Wedeck is incredulous about the powers of the ring, but that's only because he's never seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies and doubts the power of finger bling. Mark figures the people he saw in his flashforward were not coming for him, but for the QED. Wedeck says, "Well, now that we know that, we can figure out a way to stop them." Yeah, good luck with that -- you've got Janis sitting right to you and, let me remind you, SHE'S A MOLE. As if to underscore my point, we go to Vogel looking all skeptical and Janis looking appropriately evil.
Then we flash to two years before the blackout, and Janis is heading into a brasserie for yet another meeting with someone. But -- surprise, surprise! -- this someone turns out to be Vogel, and Janis was told to meet with him by "Assistant Director Bramwell." She sits on his invitation, and Vogel congratulates her on surviving Quantico. Janis says, "I'm told this is about a special assignment, but I'm actually starting in the L.A. office month." Vogel then makes his sales pitch: "I'll get right to the point. I'm not with the Bureau. As I'm sure you're aware, historically, the Bureau and the Agency haven't always operated as closely as they might have. I'm trying to change that. As part of a still-classified operation, we've assessed your graduating class and found half a dozen candidates potentially vulnerable to hostile recruitment." Janis confirms that she's among them. Vogel nods, "Your financial situation, your sexual orientation, your unconventional upbringing -- they all make you a potential target." Janis vehemently refutes the notion, and Vogel says, "We know. We know. We've done our homework. Your reputation among your classmates and your instructors is impeccable, and Bramwell says you're one of the finest students he's seen in years." Janis is slightly mollified, but still taken aback that the CIA's fingered her as Miss Most Likely To Flip 2007. Vogel says, "We need a dangle. We know something big is going down, something that will make 9/11 look like a fender bender. We need someone on the inside. We have reason to believe an organization may approach you soon and ask you to be a mole in the L.A. office. We want you to say yes." Janis spells it out for the slow viewers: "You want me to be a double agent?" Yes, Vogel does. Are you happy now, viewers? Are we all relieved she's secretly working on the side of the angels? Can Janis now return to her rightful place as the ass-kickingest chick on this show? Vogel wastes a few more minutes giving the world's worst sales pitch about how hard it will suck to be a double agent, what with constantly betraying people's confidence in her and being a handmaiden to evil and not being able to tell anyone, ever. Yet Janis apparently took the job. At least, we don't see her saying no, so we're allowed to hope she's secretly working for the good.
Cut to Janis telling Carline about the QED, and Carline's like, "Get the ring back. And by the way, you need to kill Mark Benford. You've got two strikes. You need to hit a solid here." Dun-dun-DUN! Here's hoping that Vogel's flashforward fleshes out some elaborate ruse that's meant to flush out this group based on Janis's say-so, and that he's not a secret double agent, too. Or MAYBE, here's hoping Janis inadvertently sets the universe on the right track by killing Benford and freeing Olivia to hook up with Lloyd. Oh, it's so hard to know what to root for in the remaining four episodes!
Find out what this show's chances are for getting a second season.
Watch Gabriel's testimony here, discuss it in our forums, then see what we think the cast should do if FlashForward gets cancelled.
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