The show opens on Agent Al Gough reading a note to a mother of two named Celia, whom Al previously looked up on Mosaic. It's voiced over shots of her having a nice day with the boys, until she finds a note on her windshield, one of a blue hand and a website, "www.alreadyghosts.com" that leads only to the ABC website in real life. On the back, someone has written, "I know you are one of us." Not really spooky, but interesting, and I'd completely forgotten it happened by the time it mattered in the episode, and boy, did it.
The episode is hyper-typical FlashForward, in that it starts kind of strong, gets kooky, veers into dreadfully average territory, and then blows my mind for a few brief seconds. My favorite character, probably because he's under-utilized, is Al, and my least favorite is AA sponsor Aaron. Both major storylines revolve around these two, so that fits into the show's ability to completely polarize me at every given moment.
Aaron is approached by a war vet, Mike, who served active duty with Aaron's daughter Tracy, whereabouts unknown. Mike gives Aaron a pocketknife that he hadn't seen since Tracy went overseas, and didn't think he'd see again until the following year, as per his flash forward. Aaron is so grateful, Mike comes back later in the episode to tell him his hope is pointless, that he watched her die in a Humvee explosion. Aaron gives Mike a job for his troubles. The episode ends on a newly reserved Aaron walking into his house to find his daughter, alive and well. It's the big gasp moment at the end of the episode, but I was waiting for it, so while interesting, it just felt blah.
The implausible comes in the form of the blue hand death club that our bumbling agents stumble upon. The website leads them to one of a large number of get-togethers the club puts on where flash-forward-less folks get together and do all sorts of sado-masochistic behavior. Which seems moronic when you don't have a future, but the club was all Goth and gloom anyway, so I'm sure these people would be there regardless of a worldwide phenomenon. To enter the club, one of them must play a round of Russian Roulette, and Al puts the gun beneath his chin with quickness, pulling the trigger, which stuns the other two agents. (In "on the nose" news, the bullet even says, "Not today," which is repeated later in catchphrase fashion.) Cleverly, the club meets under invitation from a fictional Dr. Raynaud, the actual doctor who discovered the disease in children where restricted blood vessels give them "blue hands." A different person acts as Raynaud for each club, and upon this guy's emergence, the FBI team goes all FBI and takes him in for questioning, where he tells him they use the Mosaic Project to find members. Dum dum dummm!
Here are some smaller bits....Bedford babysitter Nicole volunteers at the hospital, and due to her knowledge of the Japanese language, she ends up helping Dr. Bryce figure out aspects of his own flash forward, which is of an Asian lady he apparently cares for. So much so that he spends a lot of his offtime drawing her. Not creepy....Agent Noh and future-wife Zoey fight because Noh forgot to show up to choose wedding invitations, and after aggressively hemming and hawing through a few drab scenes, he finally confesses to her that he will be dead by the time they were to marry. Zoey is convinced it doesn't mean anything, and that her future will come true. It really only sets up an emotional arm of the strongest plot arc yet this season, centered on Al Gough.
In an early scene, the feebs are in the morgue, looking over the bodies of the blue-handed shooters from last week. One of them is a man named Rutherford, a name Al recognizes from his future self. The group are soon introduced to MI6 agent Fiona Banks, who Al was with in the future. They share a vision which includes a bird flying into an office window, which depresses Fiona, and a phone call taken by Al from his attorney, from which small details drop throughout the show. He confesses to "killing her," a memory of which brings a smile to Al's face in a spooky-at-first moment. Al and Fiona get along, and Al mentions covering the window that will be behind them in the flash-forward, so that maybe the bird won't hit it. Fiona assumes the bird will just hit another window, but Al knows that the power in that is that the future will still be changed in a small way. There are quite a few incidental shots of Al throughout the episode that take on further meaning after watching the show's final ten minutes, which come after a "new information" lacking middle of the episode, but the boredom paid off.
Just before a briefing including another fine piece of script-vomit from Joe Fiennes, Al leaves a note on Noh's desk, addressed to Celia. He avoids the briefing, but tells Noh to read the note. Just as Noh pops the envelope, we're treated to the same voiceover that the episode started with. It turns out Al is the one responsible for Celia's lack of a flash forward. He tearfully confesses to his attorney over the phone that he killed her and left her kids motherless. Well it was either a confession or exposition the attorney didn't need. I never can tell in this show. Regardless, the letter he writes Celia lets her in on this news, and expresses his sorrow over it, but offers hope in the idea of a future that doesn't have to be; one that can be changed with something as easy as a trip up to the roof of the FBI building. Noh stops the briefing and all....three....men make it up to the roof just in time to catch Al standing on the ledge, content with his decision to do the unthinkable. He tells Noh to be optimistic, and then jumps off the ledge. It's a pretty striking two minutes of television, and my heart, I'll admit, was racing. It was a far drop, and the following score-driven moments seal the deal that Al Gough won't be going Lazarus in future episodes.
This was probably the most important event in the show other than the flash forwards themselves, and is exciting, but also terrifying, because now there are conflicting futures, and we all have Heroes to thank for showing us exactly how awful a plot device this can be. But still, this thing has reputable source material in the Robert Sawyer novel, which is seriously one of the only things keeping me optimistic about the show. The end of the show had real emotion going for it, which totally made the middle of the show seem like it was written by different people in different rooms. I'm expecting the finale to be the one where the tone is finally agreed upon. Until then, I'm strapped tight into this children's roller coaster.
