Flashforward episode 06: Reviewed with great snark
Until you observe this entry, this entry is both full of and completely lacking in naked supermodels, giant fighting robots, and directions for how to build a perpetual motion machine. Schrodinger says so!
You know what I haven’t had enough of on this show yet? Pop-physics jargon. I mean, we’re on episode six and already we’ve managed to avoid the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, Superpositioning, String Theory, Schrodinger’s Cat, Special Relativity, M-Theory, Superstring Theory, Quantum Entanglement, and The Secret.
Really, Flashforward. You’ve been slacking off. What we need is an expert on Quantum Mechanics, and since Richard Feynman is dead (or is he? Anything’s possible with bullshit television quantum physics!) we’ll go to the next best thing: Dominic Monaghan.
Yes, good ol’ Dom is finally back in this episode, and it turns out he’s one of them thar Quantum Physicists. You know the kind I mean: the kind that’s suave, smooth, a great talker, and has a face like a month old and decaying jack o’ lantern.
So we start off this episode with Professor Dom on a train to Los Angeles. This is of course science-fiction, because we all know that all forms of mass transit are illegal in Los Angeles.
Dom spots a beautiful woman, and he decides to hit on her by claiming to know what caused the Blackout. She ignores him until he tells her to google him, after which she lets him spew more cheesy pick-up lines at her about heavenly bodies and dark matter. Eventually she asks him what REALLY caused the Blackout.
Rather than give her an answer, Professor Dom explains Schrodinger’s Cat for what will surely be first and last time this series ever mentions that idea. Cause really, what kind of super genius physicist would use a non-testable thought experiment to explain reality? What’s that you say? Every string theorist ever? Well I’ll be a monkey’s descendant (at least, that’s what stupid Darwin says.)
Okay, I’m getting incoherent with my scientist references here. Let’s get back to Dom’s explanation:
“You take a cat and put in your hand, then put some cyanide in your hand too. While trapped in your gigantic hand, the cat has a fifty-fifty chance of eating the cyanide and dying. Therefore the cat is both alive and dead.”
“Wow,” beautiful woman says. “But how can that be?”
“Ah, that’s the miracle of quantum mechanics,” Dom lies. “The observer gets to decide what happens.”
Oh, Dom. Dom Dom Dom Dom Dom. I feel bad for you, I really do. Just think of the downward spiral your career has been going on. Oscar winning film, extremely popular groundbreaking sci-fi show, and now you’re spewing Brannon Braga’s misunderstandings about quantum physics? In a year you’ll be doing community theater in Midland, Texas.
Wait, no, that would be a step up from Brannon Braga. In a year you’ll be still on this show, only your character will have died and been brought back to life somehow no less than six times. There will have been four reset button episodes, two episodes featuring a singing doctor, and three episodes where you kill a bunch of indigenous people because...well who cares why? You just will!
During all of this, we get little snippets of Lady Dolt being operated on by Olivia, since Olivia is the only surgeon in all of Los Angeles and happens to be working the night that Lady Dolt got shot.
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Mac, your nitpicking ways have failed you! How did you miss that Olivia was at home getting ready for bed that very same night at the end of last episode? She wasn’t working that night at all!”
You’re so cute. Don’t you remember that Olivia has the power of bilocation? She’s at home when the script needs her to be at home, and then she’s at the hospital when the script needs her to be at the hospital. Her confusing, wide-eyed stare can be in two places at once!
So thanks to her angelic powers, Olivia is able to save Lady Dolt’s life. Afterwards, she calls Joseph Fiennes, but he’s not answering on account of how he got blown up and shot fifty times last episode.
Meanwhile, Non-American Lloyd is doing endless card tricks for his autistic (and superpowered. I’m telling you. Any day now. Superpowers are coming) son, Dylan. During the fifty or sixtieth iteration, he brings up to Dylan that pretty soon they’re going to leave the hospital and go back to Lloyd’s house. Dylan’s not happy with that, but luckily Bryce shows up to let Lloyd know that today is Halloween and it’s up to Lloyd to make sure his hospitalized son gets out there for some candy.
Lloyd rushes out to go get Dylan a costume, and on his way out he passes by the collective Dolts, fresh from their blowing up in Washington. Everyone’s pretty much fine except for Joe, who has managed to get a little tobasco sauce on his shirt collar.
That’s right folks. This...
...Leads to this.
Joe wakes up Olivia and tells her that the stain on his shirt is nothing to worry about, and that whatever happened to him “isn’t important.” Cause seriously, it was only someone trying to blow him up. That happens like once every two weeks to Joe.
Olivia informs the other Dolts that Lady Dolt is going to be okay. Chief Dolt tells everyone to go home and get some sleep, but Nulu is too upset to do that. He wants to track these people down! He wants to figure out who they are! He wants to...what’s the word? Uh...Investigate them! Yeah, that’s it! Sure it’s crazy, but Agent Nulu of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to Investigate the case of the people who blew him right the fuck up and then shot hundreds of bullets in his general direction.
What a weirdo.
While Nulu goes out to do some investigating, Olivia takes Joe aside and asks him what happened. He spills the beans about the whole getting shot at thing. Olivia does her best to open her eyes as wide as she possibly can, thus countering her husband’s glower. This is why these two are made for each other. He shoves those eyebrows down and she yanks them right up. It’s yin and yang. It’s beautiful.
A perfect negative representation of Joseph Fiennes’ acting style.
While Joe and Olivia practice their eyebrow-based acting styles on each other, Nulu and Young Dolt head down to the morgue to check out the bodies of the guys that Lady Dolt killed. Unfortunately for them, the dead chinese mobster type guys don’t have medical records or identifying features, thus killing the investigation right where it stands. Darn it!
Oh well, at least that frees up some time to head over to Somalia with all that funding money you got last episode, right gang? Gang?
Hello?
Well I guess we can understand why Nulu’s not thinking about Somalia right now. After all, he’s supposed to get shot to death in a few months, so he’s pretty upset about how those guys just shot at him. Normally he’d be all, “Whatever” about guys shooting at him and blowing him up, but this time it’s personal. Young Dolt questions Nulu about maybe being a little on edge, but Nulu tells him to shut his stupid face.
“I don’t listen to suspiciously useless side-characters. Why don’t you go hang out with Little Boy Assistant or something and leave me alone? I have main character stuff to do, like pout and be cute with my girlfriend.”
Young Dolt backs off, and the two go back to examining the bodies. Soon Nulu uses the Medical Examiner’s trust blacklight to find the mark of a blue hand on the dead body of the assassins. This coincides with something on Joe’s board from his vision flashforward. A ha! A lead! Now all they have to do is ask Charlie about D. Gibbons, track down the guy who blew Joe and Nulu up three episodes ago, head to Somalia to check out the smokestacks, and then, once all those much more important leads are dealt with, find out what this blue hand thing means.
I’m guessing it means that the assassins are actually fans of Firefly, and they’re out to murder anyone involved in Flashforward for besmirching the name of F-lettered sci-fi shows.
When they get back to the office, Young Dolt suggests that maybe they check to see if blue hand could mean anything in Cantonese or Mandarin, on account of how all the assassins were Chinese. Nulu tells him to forget it, because it just doesn’t make any sense.
Nulu telling him to forget it doesn’t make any sense, I mean. Seems like a perfectly legitimate lead to me, but then again I still think they should be in Somalia checking out the smokestacks. Clearly I would make a very poor federal agent. I hardly ever use numerology to track down leads, and I’ve only used tea leaves to figure out what witness to trust three times in my entire life. I’m an amateur.
Eventually, Young Dolt and Nulu decide to go check out Baltimore Street, since Baltimore was on Joe’s board and Baltimore, Maryland is like, really far away. If only the FBI had a field office in the Northeast somewhere, darn it!
That night, Joe and Sadbeard take Charlie out trick or treating. While they’re out, they spot a kangaroo hopping down the street, presumably the same kangaroo from the first episode that we flashbacked to when Not-Hot Blonde Terrorist was talking about Black Swan events. I think we’re suppose to find this mysterious, but I can’t say that I do.
What I do find mysterious it Charlie’s line of, “That’s the best costume I have EVER seen.” Charlie is, judging by the age of the actress playing her, eight years old. So she’s clearly not mature enough to be saying that in an ironic way. That means that Charlie, according to the writers of Flashforward, actually believes that there is a person who made a kangaroo costume and is hopping around in front of her. Therefore, Charlie is severely mentally impaired, and anything she’s ever said about “no more good days” or “D. Gibbons is a bad man” can be treated as the ravings of a brain-defective child.
Whew. Glad I don’t have to worry about an infinite lack of good days. That was kind of getting to me.
Back at the hospital, Lloyd has lost Dylan. He asks a nearby security guard if he’s seen Dylan, but the guard just shrugs and says he hasn’t, but suggests that Lloyd check the nurse’s station.
“And while you’re at it,” the guard calls as Lloyd races off to find his missing autistic (superpowered!) son. “Tell my boss that I’m a security guard who doesn’t offer to help find a helpless little boy wandering alone through a hospital! I so deserve to be fired! Thanks, bud!”
Meanwhile, Chief Dolt and Lady Dolt (no relation) are hanging out in her hospital room and talking about how awesome it is to have babies.
“It’s going to be so great when you, the woman who was just shot in the abdomen, has a baby!” Chief Dolt squeals as he braids Lady Dolt’s hair. “You’re going to be such a great mommy!”
“I surely cannot wait,” Lady Dolt replies as she paints her toenails. “There is absolutely nothing that’s going to get in the way of my having a baby. What a joyful future I have waiting for me now that I have survived this bullet wound to my abdomen, the very same general area where I will be growing a baby in just a few months time. There’s nothing in my life to be upset about now that I have accepted and embraced the idea that I’m going to have a baby soon! Hooray! I’m so happy!”
It’s right about then that something starts beeping really fast, which is hospital code for: Wuh-oh. Olivia bilocates in and quickly rushes Lady Dolt back into surgery. Dun dun dun!
Back on the train, Professor Dom is on what seems to be his fifteenth hour of his train ride to Los Angeles, and he’s in bed talking with the woman he was hitting on earlier. And when I mean in bed, I mean in bed. She’s got her knees up awkwardly in the air the whole time they chat, which is a good two or three minutes.
My therapist and I used to talk just like this all the time.
Anyway, now that I’ve burned that horrifying image into your brain, what do they talk about? Well, it seems Professor Dom had a vision flashforward of strangling a man to death. He doesn’t know who or why, because the mechanics of the visions flashforwards are stupid and illogical.
Oh, I mean: dun dun dun! How mysterious!
Then it seems that Hospital Security Guard got a stern talking to from his boss, because he’s at least trying to be marginally helpful now. He’s pulled up some security footage of Dylan just strolling right out of the hospital, because hospitals are really cool about letting unattended children with hospital bracelets on just go wandering out the front door. I sure hope that Lloyd sues the crap out of them for letting his autistic (even if he does have superpowers) son leave on his own.
Dylan makes his way to the local bus stop and gets on. He doesn’t have any money, but his superpowers start to blossom as he uses some sort of mind control aura to get a local gang member with a heart of gold (and a hat concealing the fact that his head is actually a giant muffin) to stand up for him and demand the bus driver take Dylan to the address Dylan keeps reciting or he will “Put you down like a sick dog!”. The bus driver, deciding he’s had a good run as a municipal employee and he could stand a good career-ending lawsuit, does as he’s asked.
Orlando Bloom dresses up as a gang member for Halloween. Isn’t he adorable?
While Dylan goes on his bus adventure, Young Dolt and Nulu are riding around in their car looking for Baltimore Street, which, despite being “five miles from here” has apparently taken them three hours. Los Angeles traffic, people, am I right? Ha ha ha! And what’s the deal with parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway?
Young Dolt checks his cell phone and informs Nulu that Lady Dolt is back in surgery.
“She’ll be all right,” Nulu says confidently.
“Why, cause she had a vision flashforward of being alive? SCOFF!” Young Dolt replies, deciding in this episode that he’s suddenly going to be very skeptical of the visions flashforwards. Now, considering we saw his already and it was pretty benign, I’m going to go ahead and assume that we’re going to forget that at some point and give him a brand new vision flashforward where he accidentally kills a puppy or stabs an old woman with his daughter’s thigh bone or something.
“No,” Nulu says, rolling with Young Dolt’s decision to suddenly have a personality. “Because when we were in FBI school, Lady Dolt drank a lot of liquor and she was fine. Everyone knows if you can drink a lot of liquor and not get sick, you can also survive internal bleeding from a gunshot wound. It’s biology 101.”
Eventually they find Baltimore Street. Even better, they find a blue sticker of a skeleton hand on a stop sign! Success! Finally they’ve blown this case wide open! It all makes sense now!
Just think back, my friends. Do you remember when Joseph Fiennes said “It’s just like when Mommy’s driving and sees a yellow light. It means a stop sign is coming up”? Well I have to apologize to Brannon Braga. I thought that was just some random stupidity on his part, but it was really foreshadowing!
A stop sign was coming up! Don’t you see? It was the stop sign all along! It caused the Blackout! It killed all the crows! It gives Nancy Pelosi her secret orders to Nazify our school systems with the power of communism! Wake up, sheeple! Wake up!
Anyway, there’s no time to deal with the stop sign conspiracy. Instead, we head back to Joe and Olivia’s house. Nicole the sexy babysitter is, for some reason, staying at home all by herself to give out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Is she getting paid for that? Cause that seems like a pretty awesome job perk. Get paid to sit around someone else’s house and steal fun-sized candybars? Yes, please.
Only this time the trick-or-treater is not just some random kid. It’s Dylan, and he brushes right past Nicole and heads inside, announcing that it is his house too. Nicole just stares at him, because nowhere in her job contract did it say “stop people from forcing their way into the house and stealing stuff.”
While this is going on, Joe and Sadbeard are still out with Charlie. Suddenly, Joe spots a red herring! Three guys dressed in black and wearing masks very similar to the ones he saw in his vision flashforward! He chases after them, shouting, “FBI! Freeze!”
Since these obviously couldn’t be a couple of teenagers out to throw eggs and TP houses, the hardened assassins turn tail and run as fast as they can. Oh boy! If Joe catches these guys, then all will finally be revealed! I am one hundred percent confident that these guys are actually the assassins, so this is going to be pretty awesome!
What a great episode this is turning out to be! First the Stop Sign reveal, and now this! I love a show that’s willing to give me straight up answers this early on in a season. I’ve been all wrong about Brannon Braga. He’s really doing something different with this show. Wow!
To prove it, we go right back to Nulu and Young Dolt, who are being very careful by checking the number of digits on the skeleton hand versus the black light hand that was on the dead guy’s corpse. Gotta make sure this is the right random coincidence, of course. Young Dolt soon wonders, “Hey, does it look like it’s pointing to you?”
“You’re right,” Nulu replies. “And seeing as how this is Halloween, I’m sure it couldn’t possibly be pointing in the direction to a local haunted house or other Halloween related event. Let’s chase after it! The FBI is all about following clues that even the Hardy Boys would find insulting, after all! C’mon!”
They head off in the vague direction that the skeleton hand is pointing. Meanwhile, Joe’s chased one of the bemasked assassins into a cemetery. He draws his gun, follows him through a mausoleum, and then tackles him! Yeah! Get him, Joe! Ohboyohboyohboy! Answers, here we come!
Joe rips the assassins mask off and reveals...
What? WHAT!? It’s not actually an assassin after all! It’s just some teenager who was out throwing eggs and TPing houses! B-b-but that can’t be! I was so sure.
I was so sure.
Okay, Mac. Calm down. Get a grip on yourself. So what if the three masked guys were obviously just part of the normal Halloween festivities seen all around the country? You’ve still got the stop sign conspiracy that’s about to blow wide open. It’s all about to be spelled out for you. Just take deep breaths. Okay. Here we go. Just get through this scene of Joe going home after Nicole calls to tell him about Dylan.
When he arrives, we see Dylan’s vision flashforward: it’s him walking around Joe’s house, Charlie showing up to tell him “it’s your house too”, Dylan grabbing a cookie from the jar, and then reading the address of the house on a postcard.
Once that’s done, Charlie and Sadbeard show up, and Charlie cheerily greets Dylan as if they’ve known each other for months.
Questions:
1. Charlie’s vision must certainly be of the other side of what Dylan saw. Why then does she think there will be no more good days? Does she hate Dylan that much? And how does she know who D. Gibbons is if all she did was talk to Charlie? If she indeed saw something that bothered her so much in her vision flashforward, why is she so happy in it?
2. How come some people not only remember what they were doing in their vision flashforward, but also remember everything that happened before that? Professor Dom has no idea who he was strangling in his vision, but Charlie knows exactly who Dylan is, and vice versa. Likewise, Young Dolt knew the woman he was having a meeting with in his vision flashforward.
3. What happened to Orlando Bloom, the gang member with a heart of gold and a muffin for a head?
4. Do you really expect any of this to make any kind of logical sense? What kind of naive fool are you?
Damn it, Brain! Go away! You know I’m not supposed to be using you when I watch a Brannon Braga show, yet you keep insisting on making comments. Just leave me alone!
Fine, fine. I need to go stock up on multi-gigawatt lasers to burn against the back of your corneas anyway.
Man, he just won’t stop running-gagging.
Anyhow, eventually Lloyd shows up and finds himself a little surprised to be in the same house as his vision flashforward. Joe introduces himself, and Lloyd recognizes his last name as being the same as Olivia’s. He does a little patented British Romantic Comedy stammering, and then: surprise! Olivia shows up, wide-eyed and blank-faced to find Lloyd in her house. Lloyd looks at her sheepishly in return.
Joe glowers. It was a nice change of pace.
”Why must my eyebrows be so heavy?”
Lloyd recognizes Olivia as being the woman from his vision flashforward, and Joe gets all huffy as Olivia tries to figure out what’s going on. Joe eventually asks Lloyd to leave and not come back. For some reason, Lloyd has to think about this for a moment instead of just saying, “But if course you’re right, old chum! Terribly rude of me to have stayed for as long as I have. Pip pip and cheerio then, chap! I’m off for a bit of barblin farblin tarryweather fooferaw, wouldn’t you know!”
He’s British, that Lloyd.
After some uncomfortable drawing out of the episode’s runtime, Lloyd thanks Joe and Olivia for their kindness, gets an awkward handshake from Joe, and leaves with Dylan. Joe glowers.
With that over with, we can finally focus on the answer-revealing subplot of Young Dolt and Nulu finally finding an old house with a blue hand sticker on it. They creep their way inside, find a pool of blood, and then find a bunch of dead guys. With blue hands!
So my suspicions are correct. An army of angry Firefly fans have dressed up as the blue hand guys and are going to “two by two with hands of blue” their way through everyone in this show. Only someone else is killing them instead! Who could it be? There’s only one explanation: Angry Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fans!
Yes, the long-feared war to end all wars has finally come to pass. Who will win? Which Summer Glau will defeat which Summer Glau? Will Lena Heady use her bad American accent to ally with the Flashforward cast, thereby ganging up on Firefly? I can’t wait to find out!
But I will have to wait, for we immediately cut to Chief Dolt bringing Lady Dolt (still no relation) some flowers sent by Lady Dolt’s lady love, Ratings. Lady Dolt has survived her latest surgery, but one thing hasn’t survived:
“My uterus!” Lady Dolt wails. “The doctor’s say it somehow got damaged when I was shot by a gun! Now it will be almost impossible for me to ever have a child! Why, I can’t possibly see me ever having a child now! Surely it will never happen! Woe is me! Woe is me!”
Poor Lady Dolt.
Back at Joe’s house, Joe and Olivia are having a big fight about Lloyd. Joe growls and roars in his jealous rage, turning his pointy glower to full explosion-shielding power. Olivia widens her eyes in response, and the two circle each other like they’re in Amok Time (nerd-five if you get the reference.)
“Be HONEST!” Joe screams in the most comical way he can. No doubt he’s attempting to end the fight by sending the two of them into a fit of giggles at his ridiculousness. Alas, it doesn’t work, and Olivia uses her woman-powers to turn things back around on him.
“No, YOU be honest, no backsies!”
“Damn it! Arrrrghhhh! Fine! I was drinking in my vision flashforward. Are you happy, you future-adulterating harpy!?”
“Oh I’m happy! I’m happy that I don’t trust you anymore!”
“But wait,” Joe says. “What about earlier in the hospital when we had a whole big talk about how we weren’t going to let what we saw in our visions flashforwards rule our lives, and how we would just live in the moment? Was all of that just a lie?”
“No, my darling. Not a lie. Just really, really lazy writing.”
Olivia leaves Joe to glower by himself, all alone in the kitchen.
Back in the haunted house house full of corpses, Young Dolt has found a passport from a guy named Rutherford, the very same Rutherford he had a vision flashforward of investigating in the future!
Oh and also he had a vision flashforward of looking really sad while talking on the phone, so I can only assume that he just received a phone call from his daughter, demanding he return the knife he made out of her severed thigh bone, or at least give her back her puppy. Young Dolt, you sick future-bastard who (thanks to Schrodinger’s Cat) has both killed a puppy and stabbed a woman with a knife made out of your non-existent daughter’s thigh bone and NOT killed a puppy and stabbed a woman with a knife made out of your non-existent daughter’s thigh bone! We can’t know until we observe it and decide which one we want to be true.
Being a dog person, I’m hoping he stabbed the woman with the thigh-knife, personally.
Later in the hospital, Lloyd tucks Dylan in for the night, and then prepares to leave him alone in the same hospital that already lost him once. Dylan tries to trick his father into staying by thanking him for finding him today, but it’s no use. Lloyd’s leaving for the night, and there’s nothing this little superpowered brat can do to stop him.
Hey, how about for a change we end the episode with some whiny music? This time it’s a song by some indie band called the “Beatles” whining about some guru or the universe or something. LAME!
While the music plays, we see a bunch of characters. And they’re doing stuff! Joe glowering in the kitchen! Olivia opening her eyes as wide as she can on the stairs! Young Dolt investigating and having a headache! Chief Dolt watching Lady Dolt sleeping! Charlie sleeping! Dylan sleeping! Joe glowering some more! Lloyd walking to his car! Professor Dom hiding in Lloyd’s backseat in a Frankenstein mask!
Good times. Good times.
And hey! Finally Professor Dom is there with Lloyd! Now they can finally talk about what they did to cause the Blackout!
CUT TO BLACK
Okay, now they’re just taunting me.
Until next time, everyone. Until next horrible, horrible time.
You know what I haven’t had enough of on this show yet? Pop-physics jargon. I mean, we’re on episode six and already we’ve managed to avoid the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, Superpositioning, String Theory, Schrodinger’s Cat, Special Relativity, M-Theory, Superstring Theory, Quantum Entanglement, and The Secret.
Really, Flashforward. You’ve been slacking off. What we need is an expert on Quantum Mechanics, and since Richard Feynman is dead (or is he? Anything’s possible with bullshit television quantum physics!) we’ll go to the next best thing: Dominic Monaghan.
Yes, good ol’ Dom is finally back in this episode, and it turns out he’s one of them thar Quantum Physicists. You know the kind I mean: the kind that’s suave, smooth, a great talker, and has a face like a month old and decaying jack o’ lantern.
So we start off this episode with Professor Dom on a train to Los Angeles. This is of course science-fiction, because we all know that all forms of mass transit are illegal in Los Angeles.
Dom spots a beautiful woman, and he decides to hit on her by claiming to know what caused the Blackout. She ignores him until he tells her to google him, after which she lets him spew more cheesy pick-up lines at her about heavenly bodies and dark matter. Eventually she asks him what REALLY caused the Blackout.
Rather than give her an answer, Professor Dom explains Schrodinger’s Cat for what will surely be first and last time this series ever mentions that idea. Cause really, what kind of super genius physicist would use a non-testable thought experiment to explain reality? What’s that you say? Every string theorist ever? Well I’ll be a monkey’s descendant (at least, that’s what stupid Darwin says.)
Okay, I’m getting incoherent with my scientist references here. Let’s get back to Dom’s explanation:
“You take a cat and put in your hand, then put some cyanide in your hand too. While trapped in your gigantic hand, the cat has a fifty-fifty chance of eating the cyanide and dying. Therefore the cat is both alive and dead.”
“Wow,” beautiful woman says. “But how can that be?”
“Ah, that’s the miracle of quantum mechanics,” Dom lies. “The observer gets to decide what happens.”
Oh, Dom. Dom Dom Dom Dom Dom. I feel bad for you, I really do. Just think of the downward spiral your career has been going on. Oscar winning film, extremely popular groundbreaking sci-fi show, and now you’re spewing Brannon Braga’s misunderstandings about quantum physics? In a year you’ll be doing community theater in Midland, Texas.
Wait, no, that would be a step up from Brannon Braga. In a year you’ll be still on this show, only your character will have died and been brought back to life somehow no less than six times. There will have been four reset button episodes, two episodes featuring a singing doctor, and three episodes where you kill a bunch of indigenous people because...well who cares why? You just will!
During all of this, we get little snippets of Lady Dolt being operated on by Olivia, since Olivia is the only surgeon in all of Los Angeles and happens to be working the night that Lady Dolt got shot.
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Mac, your nitpicking ways have failed you! How did you miss that Olivia was at home getting ready for bed that very same night at the end of last episode? She wasn’t working that night at all!”
You’re so cute. Don’t you remember that Olivia has the power of bilocation? She’s at home when the script needs her to be at home, and then she’s at the hospital when the script needs her to be at the hospital. Her confusing, wide-eyed stare can be in two places at once!
So thanks to her angelic powers, Olivia is able to save Lady Dolt’s life. Afterwards, she calls Joseph Fiennes, but he’s not answering on account of how he got blown up and shot fifty times last episode.
Meanwhile, Non-American Lloyd is doing endless card tricks for his autistic (and superpowered. I’m telling you. Any day now. Superpowers are coming) son, Dylan. During the fifty or sixtieth iteration, he brings up to Dylan that pretty soon they’re going to leave the hospital and go back to Lloyd’s house. Dylan’s not happy with that, but luckily Bryce shows up to let Lloyd know that today is Halloween and it’s up to Lloyd to make sure his hospitalized son gets out there for some candy.
Lloyd rushes out to go get Dylan a costume, and on his way out he passes by the collective Dolts, fresh from their blowing up in Washington. Everyone’s pretty much fine except for Joe, who has managed to get a little tobasco sauce on his shirt collar.
That’s right folks. This...
...Leads to this.
Joe wakes up Olivia and tells her that the stain on his shirt is nothing to worry about, and that whatever happened to him “isn’t important.” Cause seriously, it was only someone trying to blow him up. That happens like once every two weeks to Joe.
Olivia informs the other Dolts that Lady Dolt is going to be okay. Chief Dolt tells everyone to go home and get some sleep, but Nulu is too upset to do that. He wants to track these people down! He wants to figure out who they are! He wants to...what’s the word? Uh...Investigate them! Yeah, that’s it! Sure it’s crazy, but Agent Nulu of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to Investigate the case of the people who blew him right the fuck up and then shot hundreds of bullets in his general direction.
What a weirdo.
While Nulu goes out to do some investigating, Olivia takes Joe aside and asks him what happened. He spills the beans about the whole getting shot at thing. Olivia does her best to open her eyes as wide as she possibly can, thus countering her husband’s glower. This is why these two are made for each other. He shoves those eyebrows down and she yanks them right up. It’s yin and yang. It’s beautiful.
A perfect negative representation of Joseph Fiennes’ acting style.
While Joe and Olivia practice their eyebrow-based acting styles on each other, Nulu and Young Dolt head down to the morgue to check out the bodies of the guys that Lady Dolt killed. Unfortunately for them, the dead chinese mobster type guys don’t have medical records or identifying features, thus killing the investigation right where it stands. Darn it!
Oh well, at least that frees up some time to head over to Somalia with all that funding money you got last episode, right gang? Gang?
Hello?
Well I guess we can understand why Nulu’s not thinking about Somalia right now. After all, he’s supposed to get shot to death in a few months, so he’s pretty upset about how those guys just shot at him. Normally he’d be all, “Whatever” about guys shooting at him and blowing him up, but this time it’s personal. Young Dolt questions Nulu about maybe being a little on edge, but Nulu tells him to shut his stupid face.
“I don’t listen to suspiciously useless side-characters. Why don’t you go hang out with Little Boy Assistant or something and leave me alone? I have main character stuff to do, like pout and be cute with my girlfriend.”
Young Dolt backs off, and the two go back to examining the bodies. Soon Nulu uses the Medical Examiner’s trust blacklight to find the mark of a blue hand on the dead body of the assassins. This coincides with something on Joe’s board from his vision flashforward. A ha! A lead! Now all they have to do is ask Charlie about D. Gibbons, track down the guy who blew Joe and Nulu up three episodes ago, head to Somalia to check out the smokestacks, and then, once all those much more important leads are dealt with, find out what this blue hand thing means.
I’m guessing it means that the assassins are actually fans of Firefly, and they’re out to murder anyone involved in Flashforward for besmirching the name of F-lettered sci-fi shows.
When they get back to the office, Young Dolt suggests that maybe they check to see if blue hand could mean anything in Cantonese or Mandarin, on account of how all the assassins were Chinese. Nulu tells him to forget it, because it just doesn’t make any sense.
Nulu telling him to forget it doesn’t make any sense, I mean. Seems like a perfectly legitimate lead to me, but then again I still think they should be in Somalia checking out the smokestacks. Clearly I would make a very poor federal agent. I hardly ever use numerology to track down leads, and I’ve only used tea leaves to figure out what witness to trust three times in my entire life. I’m an amateur.
Eventually, Young Dolt and Nulu decide to go check out Baltimore Street, since Baltimore was on Joe’s board and Baltimore, Maryland is like, really far away. If only the FBI had a field office in the Northeast somewhere, darn it!
That night, Joe and Sadbeard take Charlie out trick or treating. While they’re out, they spot a kangaroo hopping down the street, presumably the same kangaroo from the first episode that we flashbacked to when Not-Hot Blonde Terrorist was talking about Black Swan events. I think we’re suppose to find this mysterious, but I can’t say that I do.
What I do find mysterious it Charlie’s line of, “That’s the best costume I have EVER seen.” Charlie is, judging by the age of the actress playing her, eight years old. So she’s clearly not mature enough to be saying that in an ironic way. That means that Charlie, according to the writers of Flashforward, actually believes that there is a person who made a kangaroo costume and is hopping around in front of her. Therefore, Charlie is severely mentally impaired, and anything she’s ever said about “no more good days” or “D. Gibbons is a bad man” can be treated as the ravings of a brain-defective child.
Whew. Glad I don’t have to worry about an infinite lack of good days. That was kind of getting to me.
Back at the hospital, Lloyd has lost Dylan. He asks a nearby security guard if he’s seen Dylan, but the guard just shrugs and says he hasn’t, but suggests that Lloyd check the nurse’s station.
“And while you’re at it,” the guard calls as Lloyd races off to find his missing autistic (superpowered!) son. “Tell my boss that I’m a security guard who doesn’t offer to help find a helpless little boy wandering alone through a hospital! I so deserve to be fired! Thanks, bud!”
Meanwhile, Chief Dolt and Lady Dolt (no relation) are hanging out in her hospital room and talking about how awesome it is to have babies.
“It’s going to be so great when you, the woman who was just shot in the abdomen, has a baby!” Chief Dolt squeals as he braids Lady Dolt’s hair. “You’re going to be such a great mommy!”
“I surely cannot wait,” Lady Dolt replies as she paints her toenails. “There is absolutely nothing that’s going to get in the way of my having a baby. What a joyful future I have waiting for me now that I have survived this bullet wound to my abdomen, the very same general area where I will be growing a baby in just a few months time. There’s nothing in my life to be upset about now that I have accepted and embraced the idea that I’m going to have a baby soon! Hooray! I’m so happy!”
It’s right about then that something starts beeping really fast, which is hospital code for: Wuh-oh. Olivia bilocates in and quickly rushes Lady Dolt back into surgery. Dun dun dun!
Back on the train, Professor Dom is on what seems to be his fifteenth hour of his train ride to Los Angeles, and he’s in bed talking with the woman he was hitting on earlier. And when I mean in bed, I mean in bed. She’s got her knees up awkwardly in the air the whole time they chat, which is a good two or three minutes.
My therapist and I used to talk just like this all the time.
Anyway, now that I’ve burned that horrifying image into your brain, what do they talk about? Well, it seems Professor Dom had a vision flashforward of strangling a man to death. He doesn’t know who or why, because the mechanics of the visions flashforwards are stupid and illogical.
Oh, I mean: dun dun dun! How mysterious!
Then it seems that Hospital Security Guard got a stern talking to from his boss, because he’s at least trying to be marginally helpful now. He’s pulled up some security footage of Dylan just strolling right out of the hospital, because hospitals are really cool about letting unattended children with hospital bracelets on just go wandering out the front door. I sure hope that Lloyd sues the crap out of them for letting his autistic (even if he does have superpowers) son leave on his own.
Dylan makes his way to the local bus stop and gets on. He doesn’t have any money, but his superpowers start to blossom as he uses some sort of mind control aura to get a local gang member with a heart of gold (and a hat concealing the fact that his head is actually a giant muffin) to stand up for him and demand the bus driver take Dylan to the address Dylan keeps reciting or he will “Put you down like a sick dog!”. The bus driver, deciding he’s had a good run as a municipal employee and he could stand a good career-ending lawsuit, does as he’s asked.
Orlando Bloom dresses up as a gang member for Halloween. Isn’t he adorable?
While Dylan goes on his bus adventure, Young Dolt and Nulu are riding around in their car looking for Baltimore Street, which, despite being “five miles from here” has apparently taken them three hours. Los Angeles traffic, people, am I right? Ha ha ha! And what’s the deal with parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway?
Young Dolt checks his cell phone and informs Nulu that Lady Dolt is back in surgery.
“She’ll be all right,” Nulu says confidently.
“Why, cause she had a vision flashforward of being alive? SCOFF!” Young Dolt replies, deciding in this episode that he’s suddenly going to be very skeptical of the visions flashforwards. Now, considering we saw his already and it was pretty benign, I’m going to go ahead and assume that we’re going to forget that at some point and give him a brand new vision flashforward where he accidentally kills a puppy or stabs an old woman with his daughter’s thigh bone or something.
“No,” Nulu says, rolling with Young Dolt’s decision to suddenly have a personality. “Because when we were in FBI school, Lady Dolt drank a lot of liquor and she was fine. Everyone knows if you can drink a lot of liquor and not get sick, you can also survive internal bleeding from a gunshot wound. It’s biology 101.”
Eventually they find Baltimore Street. Even better, they find a blue sticker of a skeleton hand on a stop sign! Success! Finally they’ve blown this case wide open! It all makes sense now!
Just think back, my friends. Do you remember when Joseph Fiennes said “It’s just like when Mommy’s driving and sees a yellow light. It means a stop sign is coming up”? Well I have to apologize to Brannon Braga. I thought that was just some random stupidity on his part, but it was really foreshadowing!
A stop sign was coming up! Don’t you see? It was the stop sign all along! It caused the Blackout! It killed all the crows! It gives Nancy Pelosi her secret orders to Nazify our school systems with the power of communism! Wake up, sheeple! Wake up!
Anyway, there’s no time to deal with the stop sign conspiracy. Instead, we head back to Joe and Olivia’s house. Nicole the sexy babysitter is, for some reason, staying at home all by herself to give out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Is she getting paid for that? Cause that seems like a pretty awesome job perk. Get paid to sit around someone else’s house and steal fun-sized candybars? Yes, please.
Only this time the trick-or-treater is not just some random kid. It’s Dylan, and he brushes right past Nicole and heads inside, announcing that it is his house too. Nicole just stares at him, because nowhere in her job contract did it say “stop people from forcing their way into the house and stealing stuff.”
While this is going on, Joe and Sadbeard are still out with Charlie. Suddenly, Joe spots a red herring! Three guys dressed in black and wearing masks very similar to the ones he saw in his vision flashforward! He chases after them, shouting, “FBI! Freeze!”
Since these obviously couldn’t be a couple of teenagers out to throw eggs and TP houses, the hardened assassins turn tail and run as fast as they can. Oh boy! If Joe catches these guys, then all will finally be revealed! I am one hundred percent confident that these guys are actually the assassins, so this is going to be pretty awesome!
What a great episode this is turning out to be! First the Stop Sign reveal, and now this! I love a show that’s willing to give me straight up answers this early on in a season. I’ve been all wrong about Brannon Braga. He’s really doing something different with this show. Wow!
To prove it, we go right back to Nulu and Young Dolt, who are being very careful by checking the number of digits on the skeleton hand versus the black light hand that was on the dead guy’s corpse. Gotta make sure this is the right random coincidence, of course. Young Dolt soon wonders, “Hey, does it look like it’s pointing to you?”
“You’re right,” Nulu replies. “And seeing as how this is Halloween, I’m sure it couldn’t possibly be pointing in the direction to a local haunted house or other Halloween related event. Let’s chase after it! The FBI is all about following clues that even the Hardy Boys would find insulting, after all! C’mon!”
They head off in the vague direction that the skeleton hand is pointing. Meanwhile, Joe’s chased one of the bemasked assassins into a cemetery. He draws his gun, follows him through a mausoleum, and then tackles him! Yeah! Get him, Joe! Ohboyohboyohboy! Answers, here we come!
Joe rips the assassins mask off and reveals...
What? WHAT!? It’s not actually an assassin after all! It’s just some teenager who was out throwing eggs and TPing houses! B-b-but that can’t be! I was so sure.
I was so sure.
Okay, Mac. Calm down. Get a grip on yourself. So what if the three masked guys were obviously just part of the normal Halloween festivities seen all around the country? You’ve still got the stop sign conspiracy that’s about to blow wide open. It’s all about to be spelled out for you. Just take deep breaths. Okay. Here we go. Just get through this scene of Joe going home after Nicole calls to tell him about Dylan.
When he arrives, we see Dylan’s vision flashforward: it’s him walking around Joe’s house, Charlie showing up to tell him “it’s your house too”, Dylan grabbing a cookie from the jar, and then reading the address of the house on a postcard.
Once that’s done, Charlie and Sadbeard show up, and Charlie cheerily greets Dylan as if they’ve known each other for months.
Questions:
1. Charlie’s vision must certainly be of the other side of what Dylan saw. Why then does she think there will be no more good days? Does she hate Dylan that much? And how does she know who D. Gibbons is if all she did was talk to Charlie? If she indeed saw something that bothered her so much in her vision flashforward, why is she so happy in it?
2. How come some people not only remember what they were doing in their vision flashforward, but also remember everything that happened before that? Professor Dom has no idea who he was strangling in his vision, but Charlie knows exactly who Dylan is, and vice versa. Likewise, Young Dolt knew the woman he was having a meeting with in his vision flashforward.
3. What happened to Orlando Bloom, the gang member with a heart of gold and a muffin for a head?
4. Do you really expect any of this to make any kind of logical sense? What kind of naive fool are you?
Damn it, Brain! Go away! You know I’m not supposed to be using you when I watch a Brannon Braga show, yet you keep insisting on making comments. Just leave me alone!
Fine, fine. I need to go stock up on multi-gigawatt lasers to burn against the back of your corneas anyway.
Man, he just won’t stop running-gagging.
Anyhow, eventually Lloyd shows up and finds himself a little surprised to be in the same house as his vision flashforward. Joe introduces himself, and Lloyd recognizes his last name as being the same as Olivia’s. He does a little patented British Romantic Comedy stammering, and then: surprise! Olivia shows up, wide-eyed and blank-faced to find Lloyd in her house. Lloyd looks at her sheepishly in return.
Joe glowers. It was a nice change of pace.
”Why must my eyebrows be so heavy?”
Lloyd recognizes Olivia as being the woman from his vision flashforward, and Joe gets all huffy as Olivia tries to figure out what’s going on. Joe eventually asks Lloyd to leave and not come back. For some reason, Lloyd has to think about this for a moment instead of just saying, “But if course you’re right, old chum! Terribly rude of me to have stayed for as long as I have. Pip pip and cheerio then, chap! I’m off for a bit of barblin farblin tarryweather fooferaw, wouldn’t you know!”
He’s British, that Lloyd.
After some uncomfortable drawing out of the episode’s runtime, Lloyd thanks Joe and Olivia for their kindness, gets an awkward handshake from Joe, and leaves with Dylan. Joe glowers.
With that over with, we can finally focus on the answer-revealing subplot of Young Dolt and Nulu finally finding an old house with a blue hand sticker on it. They creep their way inside, find a pool of blood, and then find a bunch of dead guys. With blue hands!
So my suspicions are correct. An army of angry Firefly fans have dressed up as the blue hand guys and are going to “two by two with hands of blue” their way through everyone in this show. Only someone else is killing them instead! Who could it be? There’s only one explanation: Angry Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fans!
Yes, the long-feared war to end all wars has finally come to pass. Who will win? Which Summer Glau will defeat which Summer Glau? Will Lena Heady use her bad American accent to ally with the Flashforward cast, thereby ganging up on Firefly? I can’t wait to find out!
But I will have to wait, for we immediately cut to Chief Dolt bringing Lady Dolt (still no relation) some flowers sent by Lady Dolt’s lady love, Ratings. Lady Dolt has survived her latest surgery, but one thing hasn’t survived:
“My uterus!” Lady Dolt wails. “The doctor’s say it somehow got damaged when I was shot by a gun! Now it will be almost impossible for me to ever have a child! Why, I can’t possibly see me ever having a child now! Surely it will never happen! Woe is me! Woe is me!”
Poor Lady Dolt.
Back at Joe’s house, Joe and Olivia are having a big fight about Lloyd. Joe growls and roars in his jealous rage, turning his pointy glower to full explosion-shielding power. Olivia widens her eyes in response, and the two circle each other like they’re in Amok Time (nerd-five if you get the reference.)
“Be HONEST!” Joe screams in the most comical way he can. No doubt he’s attempting to end the fight by sending the two of them into a fit of giggles at his ridiculousness. Alas, it doesn’t work, and Olivia uses her woman-powers to turn things back around on him.
“No, YOU be honest, no backsies!”
“Damn it! Arrrrghhhh! Fine! I was drinking in my vision flashforward. Are you happy, you future-adulterating harpy!?”
“Oh I’m happy! I’m happy that I don’t trust you anymore!”
“But wait,” Joe says. “What about earlier in the hospital when we had a whole big talk about how we weren’t going to let what we saw in our visions flashforwards rule our lives, and how we would just live in the moment? Was all of that just a lie?”
“No, my darling. Not a lie. Just really, really lazy writing.”
Olivia leaves Joe to glower by himself, all alone in the kitchen.
Back in the haunted house house full of corpses, Young Dolt has found a passport from a guy named Rutherford, the very same Rutherford he had a vision flashforward of investigating in the future!
Oh and also he had a vision flashforward of looking really sad while talking on the phone, so I can only assume that he just received a phone call from his daughter, demanding he return the knife he made out of her severed thigh bone, or at least give her back her puppy. Young Dolt, you sick future-bastard who (thanks to Schrodinger’s Cat) has both killed a puppy and stabbed a woman with a knife made out of your non-existent daughter’s thigh bone and NOT killed a puppy and stabbed a woman with a knife made out of your non-existent daughter’s thigh bone! We can’t know until we observe it and decide which one we want to be true.
Being a dog person, I’m hoping he stabbed the woman with the thigh-knife, personally.
Later in the hospital, Lloyd tucks Dylan in for the night, and then prepares to leave him alone in the same hospital that already lost him once. Dylan tries to trick his father into staying by thanking him for finding him today, but it’s no use. Lloyd’s leaving for the night, and there’s nothing this little superpowered brat can do to stop him.
Hey, how about for a change we end the episode with some whiny music? This time it’s a song by some indie band called the “Beatles” whining about some guru or the universe or something. LAME!
While the music plays, we see a bunch of characters. And they’re doing stuff! Joe glowering in the kitchen! Olivia opening her eyes as wide as she can on the stairs! Young Dolt investigating and having a headache! Chief Dolt watching Lady Dolt sleeping! Charlie sleeping! Dylan sleeping! Joe glowering some more! Lloyd walking to his car! Professor Dom hiding in Lloyd’s backseat in a Frankenstein mask!
Good times. Good times.
And hey! Finally Professor Dom is there with Lloyd! Now they can finally talk about what they did to cause the Blackout!
CUT TO BLACK
Okay, now they’re just taunting me.
Until next time, everyone. Until next horrible, horrible time.