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There's a lot going on in this episode, so let's break it down subplot by subplot: Bryce bribes the intake guard at the detention center for Keiko's contact information. He then meets up with Nicole, tells her that he looooooves Keiko because "it's meant to be," and runs off to find her at the restaurant. Keiko, who has escaped the clutches of INS thanks to her mom assaulting several federal officials (no, really), runs right into her flashforward.
Nicole, meanwhile, drives right into hers. But she doesn't drown -- she gets rescued by a clean-cut good samaritan who explains that in his flashforward, he saw himself rescuing a drowning woman, and it's a relief that he didn't fail or let down the future. Ed introduces himself and Nicole gives him a look like, "Hello, lover!" Good for her!
Tracy has miraculously come back from the dead. If you're Aaron or Tracy, this is good news. If you're any of the viewers who was perhaps hoping to tie up some of the show's loose ends, not so much.
Wedeck bails out Mark and hands over his badge and his gun. They end up back at the FBI building on account of someone planting bombs in the building (of course! Run toward the danger!). Since Wedeck doesn't trust Mark to stay in the car, he connects him to Aaron and they have a little heart-to-heart where Aaron more or less encourages Mark to commit suicide. Mark hops out of Wedeck's car and heads into the FBI building. The masked men are preparing to sweep in -- as are Wedeck and Vreede, who are honestly more frightening-looking in their steely resolve. Give these men a spinoff!
Janis and Demetri help Simon break into NLAP -- Janis by swooning thanks to her placental abruption -- and Simon and Demetri go looking for the piece of software. There's a nice moment when the two men -- neither of whom had a flashforward -- welcome each other to the future as they know it, when things are unknown. But then Simon discovers someone else accessing the mainframe via the backdoor code, and it kickstarts the particle accelerator. (Oh, BTW: We also find out that Janis is actually carrying a boy, which suggests the future is slightly malleable.)
Dylan and Lloyd end up meeting Charlie and Olivia at the beach -- courtesy of their FBI guards kibbitzing -- and Lloyd gives an impassioned speech about needing to recreate the conditions under which he'll solve the equation that will... prove cold fusion is feasible? Provide an alternative to our petroleum-dependent infrastructure? The power of his words magically teleports everyone back to Stately Benford Manor. As Olivia and Lloyd dicker over keeping their clothing on, Dylan creeps upstairs, grabs one of Olivia's lipsticks and writes the magic formula on the mirror in the bedroom. Turns out the formula is "the greatest mystery in all of quantum physics." And Lloyd has to solve it right now. Naturally, Olivia picks that moment to put the moves on Lloyd. This woman is determined to destroy the universe! I bet if we had Season Two, we'd discover she's got a sleeper personality that controls the flashforward cabal. ANYWAY, the two of them manage to keep their clothing on, and Lloyd solves the equation with a little help from Simon. And guess what? He's just figured out that there will be a flashforward sometime in the two days.
Mark takes this and runs with it, comparing his big Mosaic board against Gabriel's and realizes that the flashforward will be... in ten minutes, as in April 29, at 10:14 p.m. He spends the ten minutes ducking a positive hailstorm of ammo from the masked thugs (they're great with costumes, bad at shooting), then kills some of them. Wedeck gets one in the bathroom. He also gets Mark on the phone; Mark tells Stan to alert everyone to the time of the flashforward, then decides to hang out in the building that's about to blow up. Which it does.
We then get a montage of the world passed out again, including a ring-wearing Lyta wheeling the unconscious Janis out of a hospital. We also see someone's flashforward, in which a teenaged Charlie is saying happily, "They found him!"
And that's it. Decent season finale, terrible series finale.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We begin at 8:42 p.m. Mark is sitting in a holding cell -- surprisingly empty, leading one to conclude that perhaps everyone who flashed forward to being in jail took steps to prevent that future from coming true -- and sniveling as he scratches his friendship bracelet and stares at his wedding ring. If he's trying to make us feel sorry for him, it's not really working.
Meanwhile, Olivia and Charlie are on a beach in Malibu. Nicole is sitting at Bryce's place, marinating in self-loathing. Keiko is slouching into LAX with her mom, trying to convince her that really, what she needs is to be with the man she saw in her flashforward.
Speaking of which, guess who's just bribed a security guard at the detention center for information on Keiko? Bryce may be a fickle SOB, but he really does commit to his lady of the minute.
And this show throws us the biggest bone EVER by getting rid of its Plot-we-can-dispense-of-in-a-paragraph before the five-minute mark. Here it is: We zip to Afghanistan, where the sheer power of Aaron's belief in his flashforward brings Tracy back from the dead. Yes! Just like in Pet Sematary, only without the unholy ghouls possessing the reanimated corpse! Merely Tracy's completely unwinning personality! Aaron is so relieved that his future came true just as he foresaw, he willingly babbles to Mark on the phone later about how "we'll wind up where we're supposed to be." And then we never see him again, so the First Unanswered Question of the show is: How ever will Aaron and Tracy get out of Afghanistan? (Corollary to the first question: Do you care?)
Back in the states, Demetri, Simon and Janis pull up at one of NLAP's many access points. Simon matter-of-factly outlines his plans to get inside, find the software he had planted, and use it to destroy the shadowy cabal. Demetri merely shrugs; he's worked with Mark long enough to know what grandiose nonsense people are capable of spouting. And Janis looks peeved, since "identify these people to the government" and "destroy them on my own" are not really synonymous and Simon had already agreed to the former. Simon could care less about Janis's moods. He whips out a doodad and says someone's got to get it close to the security guard, so that the device can then transmit relevant security codes to Simon's phone, and he can thus break into NLAP with a minimum of A-Team-style mayhem. Demetri pooh-poohs this latest scheme, but Janis figures she can multitask: A. Get close to the guard by gabbling about her possible miscarriage, and B. Get the code transmitted to Simon while she waits for an ambulance to whisk her off to Palo Alto's finest medical institution.
Meanwhile, Wedeck springs Mark from the pokey with a disgruntled, "Don't tell me I won't regret doing this." So Mark wisely shuts up and takes back his suit jacket, badge and gun.
Once they're in the car, Wedeck cops to being a bad manager, saying he let Mark's squishy beatdown of Hellinger happen, ergo he's responsible for it. "We've been so focused on trying to stop the blackout, I haven't seen what's been going on with you." Mark wryly quips, "I've been meaning to talk to you about your priorities lately." And I've been meaning to raise Unanswered Question Number Two: Did Mrs. Wedeck bring home that little boy, per her flashforward? Because we heard about that once and there has never been any follow-up. Mark and Wedeck's little moment is interrupted when some random guy calls Wedeck and says they've found two bombs in the L.A. FBI office, the bombs are on timers, and there may be more. So Wedeck takes the unstable Mark and drives toward the danger.
And now, Janis does her convincing impersonation of a desperate and panicky pregnant woman. As she swoons into the security guard's arms, she manages to plant the doodad, thereby letting Demetri and Simon onto the campus. Demetri frets over Janis, but Simon's all, "Dude, she's headed to a hospital. FOCUS!"
Back on the Malibu beach, Charlie is whinging about wanting to go home, and Olivia is trying to shut down that conversation but then -- oh, look, it's Lloyd and Dylan! Olivia conveniently sends the kids off-screen and asks Lloyd how he found her. He sheepishly answers, "My people called your people," and we see two FBI agents in the parking lot, probably rolling their eyes as they realize that indeed, in terms of flashforwards, "Babysitting these two" is not nearly so cool as some of the other things people have seen. Lloyd explains that he must recreate the conditions he saw in his flashforward, or else he may not be able to solve whatever it was he was on the verge of solving. Olivia has had quite enough of the future-is-predestined-so-go-along-with-it talk and tells Lloyd he's welcome to let himself in and replicate as many of the conditions as he can. Lloyd's all, "I would, except that you're part of this. Gabriel said so!" This isn't good enough for Olivia, who gripes that Mark pushed her away to save the world, and she's not about to go blithely tripping down a foreordained path just because the world's in danger. Lloyd, however, says the magic words: "I can't push you away. I can't do this alone." Olivia folds like a stack of tees at the Gap.
Bryce and Nicole meet awkwardly outside the detention center, and Bryce details his latest Keiko-stalking efforts. Nicole makes a very sincere apology for trying to keep Bryce and Keiko apart, and Bryce apologizes for his prior "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" ethos and simpers, "This whole thing with her was meant to be." They part, with Bryce not saying anything like "Good luck not drowning!" Team Brycole is dead to me, thanks to Bryce's ridiculous vacillation. Boo. BOOOOOO.
Meanwhile, at LAX, Keiko's mom decides to create a massive security disturbance in line -- we're talking assaulting federal agents here -- so her daughter can make a run for it and get to the sushi restaurant in time to meet Bryce. I'd cheer for maternal devotion, but you're telling me not one of these agent foresaw writing an incident report about the crazed Nipponese matron who gave them a black eye? And you're telling me nobody thought to draw a weapon once a non-English-speaking person flipped out in an airport? I call shenanigans.
At the FBI building, Mark is trying to persuade Wedeck that he can be let in on the big Who Put Bombs in My Building? Investigation of 2010, and Wedeck snarls, "So help me, Mark, all the glorious choirs of heaven, if you step out of this car, I will have your head on a plate." Mark rolls his eyes at this but elects to keep silent because he isn't slated to be killed for another few minutes. Wedeck then whips out a phone and says, "You need a friend, so I tracked him down for you. Someone to keep you company while you wait." Yes, but it's Aaron with his "You choose what's , and you'll wind up right where you're supposed to be" twaddle, so that's hardly going to convince Benford to stay out of the building.
Mark then jumps out of the car, has a fruitless conversation with Hellinger -- who apparently has already placed his agents within the SWAT team, if his not-at-all-discreet-nod to a bunch of goons in black is to be believed -- and then saunters into the bomb-filled building. And it hit me as I watched that scene: I am far, far more interested in what happens to Hellinger than I am with what happens with Mark.
Meanwhile, at stately Benford Manor, the writers contrive yet again to get the children off-screen in a mercifully quick fashion, thereby giving Lloyd and Olivia time to stand around awkwardly and count down the minutes to their future. They more or less agree there will be no horizontal warm-up to the future, which is sort of a shame, what with that being one of the main points to their flashforwards and Lloyd's ceaseless nattering about replicating conditions of the flashforwards. Then again, with Charlie and Dylan rampaging through the house unchecked, it's probably for the best.
At NLAP, there's a brief security glitch with a sliding door, and while Simon seems genuinely confused about it, Demetri goes from zero to "I WILL SHOOT YOU, YOU CANADIAN TRAITOR TO HUMANITY" in approximately 12 seconds. Once Simon manages to open the door, he reminds Demetri, "Your friend wanted you to trust me." Demetri corrects him: "Janis wanted me to help you. I do not trust you." Simon sighs and pulls out his QED. He hands it to Demetri with "This is the last piece of leverage I have left. And now you have it. Let's get to work, shall we?" Then he whirls around, clearly broadcasting, "I don't have time for this." I do have to admit, Simon's peremptory pissiness has really grown on me.
Back at the FBI building, Vogel's sprinting out when he crashes into Mark, who's sprinting in. Mark asks, "What's the update?" and Vogel does not even bother to hide his eye-roll when he answers, "Bombs, Mark." HA! If you had told me back in December that Vogel would become one of the season's/series' highlights, I'd have thought you had flashed to a delusional, absinthe-filled future. And yet here we are. Just goes to show you, the universe is unpredictable. The point to this conversation: Mark is going to go save Mosaic -- since that's what's obviously being attacked here -- and Vogel promises Mark that he'll "secure Simcoe." Vogel then admits his flashforward to Mark: "You should know I saw myself telling someone you were dead." Mark pauses for only a moment before saying, "Lloyd Simcoe's key. We need him alive." Vogel points out that the same can be said of Mark. Mark dismissively says, "I'll keep that in mind."
Speaking of Simcoes who should be kept alive, we learn that Dylan, not Lloyd is the one who writes the intricate physics formula on Olivia's bedroom mirror. "I always assumed I'd written it. I guess Dylan must have memorized it this afternoon, " Lloyd muses. Olivia sends the children out of the scene yet again -- possibly because they're being paid by the minute and their rates are eating into the show's special-effects budget? -- and asks Lloyd what the meaning of her new bedroom graffiti is. Lloyd explains: "This equation somehow links the QED, the blueprints and the flashforward all together." Olivia asks, "But it's a math problem -- how could it possibly tie all these things together?" Lloyd is lost in reverie as he replies, "It's the tachyon constant. It's the greatest mystery in all of quantum physics. And I have to solve it right now." The two of them sit on the bed, looking as if they'd rather be anywhere else.
And now, Hellinger's team has slaughtered the rest of the SWAT team, put on their goofy Halloween masks, and headed into the building toward Mark's vision of the future.
Meanwhile, Janis is being wheeled in to see the neonatologist on duty at the local hospital. The doctor's totally chill -- "Everything's going to be okay. That's what we saw, right?" Janis, however, is not at all chill: "I haven't felt her move in three hours!" Note to all TV writers who are plotting character's fictitious pregnancies: Go to babycenter.com and read the dang timeline of fetal milestones. Janis is only 14-15 weeks along, and she's a first-time mother; the odds of her being able to do kick counts this early in the game are really, really low. Human biology does not plot along the lines of conception à tiny Tito Puente impersonations in the womb within seconds.
Cut to Wedeck absorbing the news that his idiot underling is in the building with the bomb. "Where I left my car keys," Vreede dolefully adds. Wedeck calculates that there's 23 minutes until the building blows, so they'll fetch both Mark and the car keys.
Olivia may not be a math genius, but she's sure that at 10 p.m., this will all make sense. She then natters on something about living in the moment, but every time I try to transcribe it, my consciousness steadfastly refuses to live in the moment, so we'll all have to settle for knowing that apparently, all it takes to get Olivia into the sack is your kid vandalizing her room with some cosmetics.
And now, the most bad-ass 30 seconds of the episode: Vreede and Wedeck pull their guns and decide to clear a stairwell. I would not want to meet either one of them. And Mark is standing in his office, breathing, "I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."
So is Bryce, but the officious maitre'd at the sushi restaurant is not about to let him crash the private party currently booked for the venue. Bryce is saved by the waitress, who concludes he's Keiko's man and ushers him right in. Then Keiko -- whose cab gets stuck in traffic -- replicates her flashforward by sprinting through the streets of Los Angeles, guitar in hand.
And what of the jilted Nicole? She's driving and crying, which is hell on her road alertness, and as she swerves through a hairpin curve, she nearly hits another car, swerves away, and ends up going into a pond and right into her watery future.
At NLAP, Simon still hasn't found the bit of software he needs. He declares it Miller time ("Beer helps me cogitate") and soothes Demetri's extracurricular worries with "Janis is going to be okay. She saw it in her flashfoward." Having dispensed with Demetri's pesky human emotions, Simon settles at his terminal and gets to work. First, he sends Lloyd a text -- "an equation for a damped one-dimensional wave" -- telling Demetri that it was Lloyd's email signature for years, adding, "He used to call it his tearful goodbye." Demetri asks, "Is that physics humor?" Simon explains that he's merely sending the text because Lloyd saw it -- "an inside joke for an inside joke." Then he and Demetri both look up at a clock, which shows fewer than 30 seconds left to the moment when the present catches up with the future.
Cut to a raucous party scene. Whee! The future's here! That's good news if you're not Nicole! Everyone else seems to be okay.
It turns out that Simon's text sparks some sort of inspiration on Lloyd's behalf and he calls notable non-physicist Mark to tell him, "The constant I've been looking for isn't a number. It's a wave. If I plug the wave into the blueprint equation, I get an interval which, if added to the blackout, tells us ... the blackout is some time in April 2010, which means it's in the two days."
We take a break to let that sink in. During the break, Keiko and Bryce have their flashforward meet-cute, and Nicole continues toward her watery final resting place. (I cannot believe Bryce has conveniently forgotten all about her flashforward. What. A. Tool.) And then, we find out that the mysterious man from Nicole's flashforward was not drowning her, he was trying to save her. And he succeeds.
Speaking of "he," guess what Janis just found out? Her baby's a boy. So much for that immutable, inevitable future, eh? Or does this presage another "the universe is out of whack" timeline? We'll never know, so that makes this the series' Unanswered Question Number Three.
At the FBI building, Wedeck is hunkering down in the bathroom, ready to blow away any sap with murderous intent and poor bladder control. It's a clever twist on his original flashforward.
At NLAP, Demetri says with no small amount of relief, "We're almost through this thing. We can finally go back to the way things used to be, where the only stuff we see is what's right in front of us." Where we don't throw away a stable relationship with a woman who will do anything for us in order to fulfill our best friend's fertility-fueled flashforward, he does not add. Simon sighs, "Welcome to the future."
In a part of the FBI that is not yet pocked with bullets, Mark figures out that Gabriel encoded the date and time of the flashforward onto the current Mosaic mural. Oh, the insane! So quirky and obfuscating! So convenient to the plot! So ... telling us the blackout is going to happen in like, 12 minutes.
Mark would tell people, but first he has to survive being hunted by what look like the unholy offspring of mimes and ninjas.
And Simon is only now figuring it out -- whomever he gave access to via his little software package has created a clone of the mainframe. Ergo, Simon's working on a fake "designed to keep me from getting in. They knew I'd be back." Ah, but Simon has an archived account somewhere else, and he'll use that to get in and nuke the replica account, then disable the software he originally installed. Within seconds, Simon's finished his computer-fu and he's handed Demetri a flash drive. Simon flashes a grin and says, "This has everything you need to nail the bastards."
At sulky Benford Manor, Olivia ushers Charlie away from the patio door just in time to see Vogel arrive and tell her security detail, "Mark Benford is dead. He ran into the building. He doesn't have a chance."
Oh, yes he does, because we still have a third of the episode to go. Even after the ninja mime assassins unleash an NRA convention's worth of ammo on Mark's office, they fail to hit him.
And since it would be no fun to see what happens , we go to the side of the road somewhere, where Nicole is getting the kind of post-drowning treatment that the Red Cross vaguely recommends. Her rescuer, Ed, explains, "In my flashforward, I saw myself saving you. All these months, I thought I failed. I'm really glad I didn't." Nicole stares at him, dewy-eyed with adoration. This raises Yet Another Unanswered Question: Will Nicole be flaunting her boyfriend Aqua-Ed around Bryce at the hospital all, "Guess who saw me in his flashforward?"
Ruh-roh! Over at NLAP, Simon has just discovered that another, external mystery person has taken control of the mainframe. And -- oh, snap! -- the particle accelerator is kicking off to precipitate another flashforward event. Demetri gets a tad shooty with Simon, who defends himself by yelling about his enormous grudge against the shadowy cabal that is all into flashforwards for ... who knows why? (Another Unanswered Question, that. It can't be solely about buying Amazon the day it had its IPO.) Simon screams, "I won't let them turn me into a monster, to use my machine, my mind. Millions of people, Demetri -- millions of people don't deserve to die. If you want to stop me from trying to shut down this machine, you're going to have to shoot me." Which we all know Demetri won't do. Nobody who's in the credits is seriously in danger of getting shot. To wit ...
When we get back to the FBI office, which is basically reduced to a smoldering ruin, Mark is running through with a big old shotgun, and knocking off assassins left, right and center. (And when one of the assassins makes the mistake of checking out the loo, he runs into Wedeck.) Mark sees a bomb tucked into the ceiling -- eight minutes to go -- then manages to take out a few more guys courtesy of an elevator. (I kid you not. And here you thought escalators were the killers.)
After dispatching those guys, Mark calls Wedeck to tell him about the pending blackouts, since he knows Wedeck Knows People, then hangs out in the office. Because ... he enjoys being shot at? No, it's so he can call Olivia and tell her to listen up: There will be another flashforward in two minutes, so try not to pass out over any open flames, etc. Also, he loves both Charlie and Olivia. "Please be safe," Olivia uselessly says.
We get the montage of the governments of the world making the announcement that we're all about to go through this nonsense again. I feel really bad for the folks in central and eastern Europe, because this is going to really bung up their morning commutes. Inside NLAP, Simon tells Demetri, "You might want to put that ring on." Demetri says, "I missed my future last time." He decides he wants to see what happens. Simon also declines the QED, saying with heroic bravado, "I've seen my future happen. This is it, right now."
The last surviving ninja-mime is about to lose that designation, as Mark has snuck up on him, cocked his rifle, and asked pissily, "What did you see?" Then Mark sees that he has 39 seconds before the building goes.
Simon and Demtri sit down together and watch the accelerator do its thing, Mark runs toward his office window, where there's a helicopter hovering (one hopes it's piloted by people wearing QEDs) --
Then the global flashforward hits.
We see: a little anglo-looking baby, then a little African-American one being baptized; a boy on a swing, swooping up toward sun-dappled tree branches; a "Happy New Year 2015" sign; a boy in red plaid pajamas opening up a present; a doctor looking at a radiograph film; someone signing something reading "As executor of this will ..."; a pair of gloved hands loading a pistol.
In the present, we see that Janis is passed out in a wheelchair in the hall of the hospital. Wearing a set of scrubs and a QED, along comes the seductive Lita. She wheels Janis off to her uncertain fate. (Another Unanswered Question, that.) A kangaroo goes hopping past the FBI building and we get another flashforward sequence.
We see: a hand dropping a pair of dice on a chain into the outstretched hand of an African-American man; a lanky girl staring out a window; a letter dated March 14, 2011; the gun going off; the girl again; a man sliding a wedding band onto a woman's finger; the boy, swinging higher into the trees ... then a quick repeat of all those impressions before we go back to the girl. An American voice asks off-screen, "Charlie, what is it? You gotta tell me?" And the grown-up Charlie turns around and says, "They found him."
The present-day Charlie comes to, gobsmacked by whatever she saw. And the episode closes with the FBI building blowing to hell and back, so for her sake and Mark's, I hope the "him" in question is Mark and he's pulled out of the building by Hellinger's people right before it blows. But whether that happens? Is an Unanswered Question. There are so many, and unless there's some featurette to tell us what was supposed to happen , I guess we'll have to be content with making up answers for ourselves.
So, hands up all of you who watched the first episode and flashed to this being a one-and-done show? You all have the gift of foresight. We could learn a lot from you.
Lisa Schmeiser would like to thank her editors at TWOP, of course, for the continuing opportunity to recap. And to thank you readers for hanging in there. Join her on Twitter at lschmeiser.
Watch this episode here, discuss it in our forums, then see what we think the cast should do now that FlashForward has been cancelled.
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