FlashForward Recap: A561984

Cold weather and a lack of preventative measures have landed me with a head cold, so I am full of cough suppressants and antihistimines, which equals out to the perfect cocktail for viewing FlashForward with something resembling casual enjoyment. And my DVR wasn't working, making my second detail-spot viewing a no-go. So if I forget a few things, please forgive me. To combat this, I'll use broad strokes.

This week's episode wasn't the "before and after a hiatus" bore-fest I envisioned. Series co-creator David Goyer has promised more action and plot for the rest of the season, and while this certainly wasn't a flagship hour, it set up further story points that should all be quite fun when everything comes to a head. I lambaste this show quite a bit, but honestly think the last episodes may make up for the clunkier of the first dozen or so. A persisting issue the show has is never being able to convincingly co-mingle its two or three main plotlines. It's isn't the largest of problems, but the episodes stutter when jumping from one differing scene to the next.

As promised, Lloyd Simcoe confesses his role in the cause of the blackout, in a televised press conference. The cause comes under the guise of Plasma Wakefield Acceleration, a small scale Big Bang recreation, as performed by the National Linear Accelerator Project, of which Lloyd and naysaying Simon are a part. I know this comes from a sci-fi novel, but it's still goofy hearing some of this spoken aloud in the same two minute period. The press bombard Lloyd and Simon with questions, and a wide-eyed woman even manages to swipe a gun from a docile guard standing near. Shots are fired at the stage, but no one is hurt. Agent Wedeck wants to talk to both men, sending Janis to the hospital where Lloyd's son Dylan is staying.

Wedeck is already a ball of angry magma because Agents Mark and Demetri took an ill-advised trip to Hong Kong, seeking the woman with information about Demetri's foreseen death. An "F.B.I." agent named Vogel immediately alerts them that their movements are being tracked, and they don't care much. They play on a hunch and end up at a Persian restaurant, where Mark presses a man for information, eventually getting the name Nhara Udaya. When we see Nhara (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in her gorgeous apartment, we see she has a Mark-like collage of information taped to the outer windows. (On it: a picture of Demetri with the ep. title captioned beneath it.)

Simon drops into Wedeck's office, asking to view Mosaic information, offering a strong amount of help. When shown the satellite photos of the tower in Somalia, Simon cockily namedrops the region based on topography alone, and then claims to be the designer of the small grouping of mysterious towers (lasers for a plasma afterburner), though he says that the technology to develop them doesn't quite exist yet. How does he know? Well he theorized and discovered it in 1992, which makes him all the more surprised to find out the towers are real, and were built in 1991. Wedeck tips off Simon to D. Gibbons, which intrigues him all the more. Expect more Simon/F.B.I. tag-teaming soon.

Meanwhile, Lloyd's TV time has made him the white elephant in the room that everyone hates and points at. He heads to the hospital, dodges Janis, and has a heck of a time trying to find someone to help him move Dylan to a secure location. Why he thought people would come after his son and not him eluded me. Olivia, however, lends a helping hand, impressed with Lloyd's bravery for his admission. (Seriously? Yes.) She agrees to set up a transfer for Dylan to a children's hospital. And here we have a really improbable conversation between these two. Olivia is supposed to want nothing to do with this man, yet she suddenly fawns over him, and asks about his past. It turns out he went to Harvard at the same time she was supposed to, and she probably would have lived next door to him had it not been for hubby Mark's F.B.I. gig. This only makes Olivia all the more interested. Then Lloyd talks about multiple universes, one of those surface sci-fi concepts that this show likes to casually flaunt. Maybe all this was just to make what happened next all the more exciting. When transferring Dylan out of the hospital, the two thuggish E.M.T.s brandish guns and kill a few hospital workers, grabbing Lloyd and throwing him into the back of the ambulance before riding away.

Meanwhile, Demetri's lady Zoey gets a bit of story time as she tries multiple times to contact Demetri's mom, thinking that her inclusion into the wedding of her flash forward would mean that it had to be true. But while at a funeral for a coworker, Zoey has the horrifying realization that the beautiful beach setting of her vision was not of her wedding at all, but for Demetri's funeral. She meets the mother, who confirms the story, and Zoey insists that things could change.

Demetri's death is really taking on a lot of plot time in this show, so there better be a shitload of reason for it. Anyway, back in Hong Kong, the boys stake out a restaurant, eventually confronting Nhara Udaya at her bodyguard-surrounded table. Information is then parceled out that tells us Mark is going to be the one that puts three bullets into Demetri, at close range, killing him intentionally. How does she know? The serial number on Mark's gun, which also happens to be the episode title. It was kind of a goofy confirmation process, and I don't know that I buy the serial number being the crux of things. But if I thought that was goofy....

Mark whips said gun out and takes Nhara as a temporary hostage, for whatever reason. Local authorities quickly diffuse things. Agent Vogel, (who is actually C.I.A., not F.B.I., and speaks of Mosaic as being larger than it seems) shows up, and Nhara gets her cop guys to lay down their arms. Mark and Demetri are arrested and taken back into the States, where Wedeck demands Mark step down from his position, as his fumbling hostage attempt was caught on camera. And at the very end, we see that Nhara is aiding and/or abetting none other than D. Gibbons himself.

I know I didn't have quite the "tadaaaa" effect the show did, but sometimes the reveals on the show are kinda kooky. And now we have to wait something like three months for the next installment. I'm not going to offer any guesses as to where things will go, because of Goyer's promise for more. I'll wait patiently, but I'm sure there will be something else I'll get into in the meantime. Until next year, FlashForward.....Until next year.