Flashforward Episode 09: Reviewed with great snark
Flashforward! Now with thirty-five percent more flashbacks!
Yes, this episode we go back, not forward, as we finally learn why Bryce is such a bland idiot that I don’t care about. Don’t get me wrong, I usually love characters whose only traits are “formerly suicidal” and “wants to stalk someone he never met,” but for some reason, Bryce just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe that’ll change once I get to know him.
The episode begins by showing us Past-Bryce four weeks before the Blackout. Past-Bryce has inoperable cancer, and though we never hear how long he has onscreen, it’s implied that he’s going to die soon. Past-Bryce, being the little bitch that he is, decides to take out his anger over this diagnosis by repeatedly slamming his car into the shiny red convertible of a guy who, admittedly, looks like he’s probably a real jerk.
Then we flashforward to a slightly more recent flashback on Flashforward, where an adorable Japanese woman (future filer of a restraining order against Past-Bryce) is making faces at herself in a mirror. It’s revealed that she’s in the bathroom at an office building in Japan, and is about to take part in a very important meeting about robotics. I know this because of the very helpful subtitles.
Why is Servo capitalized? Was she a puppeteer on Mystery Science Theater 3000?
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman turns out is not only a genius when it comes to robotics, she’s also a genius when it comes to making quirky admissions about going salsa dancing when she’s supposed to be taking part in a serious interview with very curmudgeonly old Japanese businessmen. How sweet and/or sympathy-inducing!
Back in California (and also the past), Past-Bryce is being a big distracted idiot while working in surgery. He can’t remember the hemoglobin count of his patient nor can he remember her platelet count. Jeez, Past-Bryce! Why don’t you just stamp “DUMMY” on your forehead in big block letters? I don’t leave the house without memorizing both my hemoglobin and my platelet counts, and I make sure to write them in washable ink on the inside band of my underpants just in case I happen to get in a serious accident. You can never be too careful.
Past-Olivia tells Past-Past-Bryce that he better rethink whether or not he really wants to be a surgeon.
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman returns home to find a surprise party waiting for her, and it’s at this point that I give up. There have to be at least fifteen non-American Accented people in this scene alone. Fine, Flashforward, you win! I no longer understand why you hired multiple people who can’t speak in American accents and then forced them to try anyway if you were just going to go and hire dozens more people who can’t speak in American accents and let them speak normally. I thought I understood the plan, but now I’m just hopelessly lost.
“Honey!” Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman’s-Slightly-Less-Adorable-Mother says when she comes home. “We’re so glad you have been working at your new job for two days now, and have no reason whatsoever to doubt that you actually work there. Everything is wonderful for you now! Boy, if you hadn’t gotten that job, your father and I would be ashamed of you forever, but luckily you did and now we provisionally love you!”
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman smiles nervously, and before you can blink we’re back in America! Whoa! Slow down, Flashforward! I’m getting exponentially jet-lagged by all this trans-pacific quick cuts.
We flashforward to another slightly less flashbacked flashback on Flashforward the show about flashforwards that features far too many flashbacks, for fucking alliteration’s sake.
Anyway, Past-Bryce is in his expositionist’s therapist’s office, and boy does he have a lot of backstory he needs to get off his chest. Past-Bryce is understandably depressed about his terminal diagnosis, but he can’t tell his family because his father suffered through lung cancer for three years before he died. He also can’t tell his friends or colleagues because they would pity him, and that would be much worse than the contemptible scorn they heap onto him on a regular basis nowadays. How could Past-Bryce take it if their looks of disgust were suddenly replaced by disgusted concern? It’s too horrible to think about.
So Past-Bryce wakes up that mornin’, gets himself a gun. His momma told him he was the blandest one.
He drives himself to the pier for some reason and then takes out the gun, preparing to shoot himself in the head. Man, if I hadn’t already seen what happened in the first episode and in half the recaps before each episode since then, I would be totally scared that he would kill himself oh my god!
But just as Past-Bryce pulls the trigger, he sees a vision flashforward of his life as Future-Bryce! It goes thusly:
Future-Bryce is in Japan at a restaurant. A waitress takes his order, and then Future-Bryce stares blandly down at the table for a few moments before someone else arrives: Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman! He stares at her chest for a few hours, then looks up to her face and says, “You’re really here.”
Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman does pretty much the only thing she’s done at all in the show so far: she looks cutely nervous, smiles adorably, then looks cutely nervous again.
Just watch this on a loop for 40 minutes, I guarantee you will probably get more enjoyment from that then watching the actual episode, and you won’t have missed anything that Adorable Japanese Woman does anyway, since: that right there? That’s it.
Future-Bryce has her sit down, Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman flashes her smile a few more times, and then Future-Bryce takes her hand and looks at the kanji on her wrist. Shockingly, this causes Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman to flash her smile nervously six or seven hundred times.
Gosh darn it, she’s just so gol-durned cute! Watch out Nulu and Gabrielle Union, a hurricane is coming, and its name is...Well I don’t think she actually has a name yet. But watch out anyway! Oh boy! She’s super cute and aren’t you just going to feel terrible when she’s inevitably killed?
Past-Bryce wakes up in the past and decides that life is worth living, and Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman wakes up on the floor of her bathroom and decides (don’t get ahead of me, people) to flash her smile a few times.
Finally, we return to the present, where Present-Bryce spends his days painting and endless stream of pictures relating to the future-reason-he’s-in-jail-on-harassment-charges. He’s also practicing Japanese, and getting sick from his terminal cancer at the same time. The boy is a multitasker, I give him him that.
Confusingly, none of the paintings or sketches he makes features Adorable Japanese Woman actually giving her already trademarked smile. I guess Bryce is as good an artist as he is a surgeon, which is to say: not very.
We finally leave the saga that is Bryce, and instead turn our attention to Sadbeard. He’s cleaning up his apartment while Tracy sleeps. Joseph Fiennes calls to tell Sadbeard that he’s learned fuck all since last episode. Thanks for the call, Joe. Always a pleasure.
During the call, Sadbeard finds an empty liquor bottle by Tracy’s bed. I assume that Sadbeard left it there after he went on a bender, which would explain why he’s been slurring his words for the last few episodes.
While Joe’s on the phone, Olivia gets a phone call. Since she’s in the shower, she has Joe answer it for her. Joe, actually more of an ape-man than an actual human being, cannot seem to work his fingers properly in order to answer the phone, and instead somehow manages to open up Olivia’s archived text messages and scroll back to find the one that warned her that Joe was drinking in his vision flashforward. All by accident, of course.
He asks Olivia what that’s all about, but she says it didn’t matter since Joe told her about the drinking anyway. The fact that she was getting personal information about her husband from an anonymous person via her phone? Not worth worrying about, says Olivia.
Later, at the hospital, Bryce is stumbling and flailing around, and somehow Olivia catches on that he might be sick. Bryce eventually admits that he has terminal cancer, and Olivia (stop getting ahead of me!) opens her eyes wide and shakes her head a lot.
Bryce assures her he’s just fine and shouldn’t be taken off of rounds for fear he might pass out while operating on someone because he’s a main character and that just wouldn’t be cool. Besides, he has something to look forward to now: being smiled at by Adorable-Japanese-Woman.
Back at Sadbeard’s, Sadbeard is rapidly going through a transformation into MadDadBeard! Tracy cooks dinner for him and has the absolute unmitigated gall to pour herself a glass of wine for dinner.
Where exactly did she get this wine, by the way? I thought she was hiding out in her dad’s house. Did she go out to a liquor store despite being terrified that PMC assassins were going to shoot her in the head at any moment, or does the recovering alcoholic Sadbeard just have a good supply of booze left over from when he was a drinker?
Anyway, MadDadBeard is mad and dad-like.
“Sweetheart,” he says in a compassionate and calm tone of voice. “I understand that you’ve been through a lot; more than I can ever imagine, and I wish I could let you do whatever makes you feel better, but I’m a recovering alcoholic. As long as you’re staying here, I have to ask you not to drink around me. It’s just not good for me. I hope you understand, baby. It’s not that you can’t drink, it’s just that I don’t think I can handle it being in the house.”
WRONG. He said, “Tracy, this isn’t going to work! Gaarrrr! Get that foul witch’s brew out of my house! You evil bitch! How dare you bring alcohol into the sanctity of Sadbeard’s home? I hate you forever!
Two can play at this whole picture captioning thing.
This time I, Mac’s Brain, will wow you with my hilarity.
Ahem:
“I, Sadbeard, am mad at you, daughter!”
Oh yeah, that's the stuff.
“Oh, and good food. It’s yummers.”
How about we just agree to disagree, Brain? I’ll pretend Sadbeard was a compassionate and loving father, and you can live in the reality where he’s a prick who overreacts.
Fine. A truce, then. For now.
For now.
Tracy and MadDadbeard do not reconcile so easily, and so Tracy pouts a little bit before she limps out of the room, taking her whine with her.
Oh, I meant wine. Not sure why I didn’t just go back and fix that typo instead of drawing attention to it. Weird, huh?
At FBI Doltquarters, the gang has gotten the CCTV image of the guy who was awake during the blackout back from the video forensics team, who used the power of pixie dust to enhance a three-pixel image of a ring from roughly three-hundred feet away and determine that it has a quarter-inch symbol for the greek letter Alpha on it.
What did criminal investigators do before we unearthed that kingdom of fairies in 1994 during a routine dig for oil in southern Texas? Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a world where we can’t magically cause grainy, terrible photographs to actually secretly hold terabytes of information that can be extrapolated simply by zooming in and using Photoshop’s sharpen filter a bunch of times? It would be absolutely barbaric.
Despite this godlike miracle from the NSA analyst, Chief Dolt and the others want more. She’s reluctant to tell them anything though, because one of the Dolts has been red-flagged.
Old Dolt darts his eyes back and forth in a sign of total innocence for a moment, and then the analyst continues.
“It was Nulu! He got a phone call from someone in secret,” she cries. “J’accuse!”
“Wait wait, it’s probably just the mysterious international secret agent who called to warn him about his own death,” Joe says. “Totally normal.”
“Wait, does that mean you have access to the phone call?” Nulu asks. “Can I hear it again?”
“Sorry, it’s classified SIGINT,” the NSA analyst replies to a room full of FBI agents. They all look at her blankly, so she adds. “Oh right, Braga-dumb. SIGINT was Donald Anderson, the DARPA chief who was killed by Decoy Octopus in Metal Gear Solid. Oh, and it also means ‘Signals Intelligence.’ I’m sure that as members of the international intelligence community, you boys have never heard of that, which is why I just explained it to you as if you were morons. So no, you can’t have it.”
“C’moooooooooooooooon,” Nulu whines petulantly. “I really need it or I’m gonna die, okay? So just give it to me, you stupid boogerface! Quit bein’ such a dink!”
Joe watches on with his eyebrow furrowed and a weird smile on his face, apparently amused by Nulu begging for his life.
”Nulu’s desperate pleading for his own life both amuses me, and causes my shoulders to become inhumanly large.”
The music rises to a dramatic crescendo, declaring that I’m supposed to feel some sort of tension for this scene. I’m not sure why. Nulu wants to listen to the message he already heard once before. What is that going to change?
Oh wait, I forgot about the magical pixies and their forensics wizardry! If Nulu can get hold of the recording, he just might be able to interpolate the datastream with a cross-generational parabolic axis, thereby re-distributing the gamma particles present in the air at the time of the recording, forming a four-dimensional superimage of the electrostatic aura of the woman he was talking to, thus saving Christmas!
The NSA analyst gives in, and promises to make a call. Way to go, Nulu!
Back in Japan, Adorable-Japanese-Woman is being super adorable, you guys! It turns out that her job at the robotics company is, like any job in Japan (thanks, television!) stifling and uncreative. Her much lauded robot arm that she built is relegated to simply picking out pieces of candy from one bowl and placing them in another. Also, it looks like the kind of thing you can probably buy at Radioshack for a 4000% markup, making me think that Adorable-Japanese-Woman lied about building it from scratch.
Deciding that numbers in columns are boring, Adorable-Japanese-Woman decides to be adorable by watching some Bob Dylan videos while she air guitars...at work! Oh stock Ben Stiller character who always gets into embarrassing situations Adorable-Japanese-Woman, you’re so quirky!
In a shocking twist that nobody saw, she is quickly interrupted by a co-worker who informs her that she is needed by the boss immediately. She minces after the coworker and is brought into a meeting that consists of a mobius strip of curmudgeonly business men sitting around a never-ending table. Adorably, Adorable-Japanese-Woman thinks she’s there to join in the meeting, but really they just want her to serve them tea!
Oh 1950s, will you ever stop being Japan?
Broken and defeated, Adorable-Japanese-Woman pouts adorably, and then serves the tea. Damn it, Adorable-Japanese-Woman! Your heart is too big for this world! You belong in the fairy kingdom, where people who smile adorably, do quirky things, and can magically enhance low resolution photographs can live happily with others of their kind.
Meanwhile, in America, two honest-guys-no-foolin’ Americans, Joseph Fiennes and Sadbeard, have a talk after their recovering alcoholics’ meeting. Joe is totally bummed about someone trying to destroy his marriage by sending Olivia text messages about him, and being an FBI agent he has absolutely no way of tracking down who sent that message. Curses! If only he knew some kind of professional investigator who could investigate this situation for him.
“But the thing is,” Joe says. “I only told two people about my drinking. You, and I guess Chief Dolt. So...”
“Whatta yoo tryin’ to shay?” Sadbeard demands, slowly revving up into Madbeard territory. Its power has already destroyed his accent! Look out, Joe!
“I’m just asking if you’re talking to my wife behind my back,” Joe growls in his Connor MacLeod voice. That, in combination with his glower, is the only known counter to Madbeard’s rage.
Sadbeard walks casually over to a folding chair, picks it up, carefully folds it, and then ANGRILY HURLS IT TO THE GROUND!
”Oh, and Madbeard’s got a steel chair! Why isn’t the ref stopping this fight!? This is an absolutely flagrant disregard for the rules of Professional Wrestling by the contender, Madbeard! I tell you, Mean Gene, this is absolutely despicable!”
Joe watches with an expression of wry amusement, so Madbeard tells him to get himself a new sponsor, then smacks him patronizingly on the side of the face a few times.
So, I’m confused. What exactly has Sadbeard going all Madbeard? His daughter is alive. Remember that? Remember how his dead daughter came back to life? Sure, she’s kind of a bitch and she’s being hunted by group of professional soldiers, but is that any reason to lash out at your friends, Sadbeard? Tsk tsk tsk.
In Japan, Adorable-Japanese-Woman walks by a tattoo shop on her way home from work. She goes inside and asks for a tattoo, but the proprietor, ever the crafty businessman, calls her a weirdo and tells her to leave.
“You want a tattoo? What kind of freak are you?”
“I’m a nervous, shy, yet quirky and independent spirit that test audiences reacted well to,” Adorable-Japanese-Woman seems to say. “I want a tattoo for my future American boyfriend.”
“Well, it’s highly unorthodox for me, a tattoo artist, to give someone a tattoo, but I guess I could make an exception in this circumstance. Sit down.”
Hooray! A victory for Adorable-Japanese-Woman! If I didn’t already love her due to her carefully calculated personality traits that were designed to make everyone love her, I would love her again right now! [kermit]Yaaaay![/kermit]
Meanwhile, Joe has gone to Chief Dolt to ask if he was the one who told Olivia about his drinking.
“You fucking asshole,” Chief Dolt says when he’s accused. “Get the fuck out of here! I don’t want to see you ever again! I hate you, hate you, hate you!”
Seriously, what is with all these people? Just say “No, I didn’t do it” and move the hell on. It’s not like he’s accusing you of being a murderer, a rapist, or in any way involved in writing Flashforward. Just answer the question without going into a fit of righteous anger.
Although it might behoove Joe to recall that while he only told two people about his drinking, he told Chief Dolt by screaming it to him at a crowded bar. A crowded bar where Old Dolt was hanging out. Just saying, is all.
The next day at the hospital, Bryce shows his finished sketch of Adorable-Japanese-Woman to the Japanese patient that you all remember he had, right? That Japanese woman he’s been treating for quite some time now and has been giving him lessons in Japanese? Yeah. Her.
Anyway, he shows her the picture, and she miraculously realizes that the symbol on her shirt or something is that of a small sushi restaurant outside of Tokyo that for some reason sells t-shirts with its logo on it. On his way out (and presumably to Japan), Bryce is stopped by Olivia. She’s done some research and found a fake drug called trifectomab that might be able to cure him. Bryce is reluctant to take it on account of it might kill him, but Olivia tries to convince him to do it by pointing out that maybe taking that drug is what keeps him alive in order to meet Adorable Japanese Woman in the future.
Bryce takes her advice and flies to Japan, because Olivia can go suck a big fat one!
Once he gets there, he goes to the sushi restaurant, and after some absolutely “hilarious” misunderstandings thanks to his poor ability to speak Japanese, someone recognizes his sketches as being of Keiko, the real name of Adorable-Japanese-Woman!
Meanwhile, Adorable-Japanese-Keiko has quit her job and gotten a tattoo. Her mother is all, “Whaaaaaaat?” but Keiko is all, “I’m a big girl now, I can do what I want, Mother. And quit trying to find husbands for me!”
“But Mr. Ito would be a great husband,” her mother replies.
“He has no imagination, as defined by obsessively painting pictures related to me for months! That’s the kind of man I want! Oh, if only I could find him or he could find me!”
“Fine then, screw you,” her mother says, because everyone in this episode is a giant asshole to everyone else. “You can just stop living here! Get out! And make sure it’s just a few minutes before Bryce inevitably shows up!”
Adorable-Japanese-Keiko looks nervous, but determined. Before we can learn her decision, that scene is over.
Nulu’s listening to the recording of the mysterious secret agent who told him of his own death, along with Joe and Old Dolt.
“I used our magical pixie dust to delete everything but the background noise,” Old Dolt says. “Because as we all know, cell phones take each individual sound from the surrounding area and multi-track it, so it’s easy for me to delete the voice of the person speaking while somehow also maintaining the unbroken background noise. Through this, and my prayers to Quetzlcoatl and Thor, we found out that she was in Hong Kong!”
“Great!” Nulu says. “Once we can afford the trip to Somalia, we’ll just hop over to Hong Kong while we’re at it. That should only take six or seven years at our current rate of progress!”
“Wait,” Joe says. “I know it’s crazy, but what if we go to Chief Dolt and ask if we can go to Hong Kong right now?”
“That’s so crazy it just might work!”
They go to Chief Dolt, but he’s reluctant to send them. “First of all guys, it would be asinine of me to send you to China when I still haven’t sent you to the strongest lead you have, Somalia. Second, China totally hates us ever since that one guy said that China caused the Blackout. Third, seriously, I’m not going to be so fucking stupid as to send you guys to China when we’ve spend five episodes avoiding sending you to Somalia. That’s just beyond stupid. Now get out of here before I become even more of an asshole like everyone else in this episode!”
“Don’t worry, Nulu,” Joe says on their way out. “I haven’t been infected by the airborne asshole virus yet, so I have an idea. Let’s just go to China on our own. Surely the Chinese customs officials will gladly allow us, two American Intelligence Agents, into their country without any fuss whatsoever. Let’s go!”
And go they do, making sure to stop only to piss all over a giant map of Somalia, just for symbolic purposes.
Back in Japan, Bryce arrives at Adorable-Japanese-Keiko’s house. He introduces himself to her mother and then pulls out his sketch of Keiko. Her mother looks at the picture, but just as she’s about to tell Bryce where she is, she is infected by the asshole virus.
“Never heard of her,” she says. “Also: fuck you, white devil!”
She slams the door on Bryce and he wanders away, dejected and lonely. The next day, he calls Nicole (and seriously, when is the Bryce/Nicole/Keiko love triangle going to get started already?) who tells him he might as well just come home. If he stays in Japan any longer, he might be hired into a white collar office job and spend the next twenty-five years of his life doing exercises on the roof every morning.
Back at Sadbeard’s, Sadbeard is still kind of Madbeard. Joe comes over and apologizes for asking him if he told Olivia about his drinking.
“I know you’re dealing with the whole Tracy thing,” Joe says.
“You don’t know what I’m dealing with, so just shut the hell up!” Madbeard roars. “My daughter might be alive, but she’s different from how she was before she went to war, was blown up, and had her leg severed! And goddammit, I hate her now! Just like I hate you!”
“Sadbeard, stop! It’s me, Joseph Fiennes! Look into the power of my glare and be cured of this terrible asshole virus! Be healed, Sadbeard! Be healed!”
“Oh god. You’re right. This is all my fault. My daughter is an alcoholic because of me! This makes me...not mad. No, not mad. I feel something different. I feel...
”...Sad.”
And with that, Madbeard reverts back into Sadbeard. Saved by the angelic power of Joe’s glower, the might of the unrelenting asshole virus is destroyed. At last, everyone will return to normal, and stop inexplicably being assholes to each other.
And finally, Adorable-Japanese-Keiko flies to Los Angeles, where -- as her フラッシュフォワード flashforward revealed, she will meet with Bryce in the future.
A future saved from the deadly asshole virus by none other than Joseph Fiennes’ glower. All hail Joe’s eyebrows! We are saved!
So that’s that. I’m finally caught up with the current episodes. Hooray?
Yes, this episode we go back, not forward, as we finally learn why Bryce is such a bland idiot that I don’t care about. Don’t get me wrong, I usually love characters whose only traits are “formerly suicidal” and “wants to stalk someone he never met,” but for some reason, Bryce just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe that’ll change once I get to know him.
The episode begins by showing us Past-Bryce four weeks before the Blackout. Past-Bryce has inoperable cancer, and though we never hear how long he has onscreen, it’s implied that he’s going to die soon. Past-Bryce, being the little bitch that he is, decides to take out his anger over this diagnosis by repeatedly slamming his car into the shiny red convertible of a guy who, admittedly, looks like he’s probably a real jerk.
Then we flashforward to a slightly more recent flashback on Flashforward, where an adorable Japanese woman (future filer of a restraining order against Past-Bryce) is making faces at herself in a mirror. It’s revealed that she’s in the bathroom at an office building in Japan, and is about to take part in a very important meeting about robotics. I know this because of the very helpful subtitles.
Why is Servo capitalized? Was she a puppeteer on Mystery Science Theater 3000?
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman turns out is not only a genius when it comes to robotics, she’s also a genius when it comes to making quirky admissions about going salsa dancing when she’s supposed to be taking part in a serious interview with very curmudgeonly old Japanese businessmen. How sweet and/or sympathy-inducing!
Back in California (and also the past), Past-Bryce is being a big distracted idiot while working in surgery. He can’t remember the hemoglobin count of his patient nor can he remember her platelet count. Jeez, Past-Bryce! Why don’t you just stamp “DUMMY” on your forehead in big block letters? I don’t leave the house without memorizing both my hemoglobin and my platelet counts, and I make sure to write them in washable ink on the inside band of my underpants just in case I happen to get in a serious accident. You can never be too careful.
Past-Olivia tells Past-Past-Bryce that he better rethink whether or not he really wants to be a surgeon.
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman returns home to find a surprise party waiting for her, and it’s at this point that I give up. There have to be at least fifteen non-American Accented people in this scene alone. Fine, Flashforward, you win! I no longer understand why you hired multiple people who can’t speak in American accents and then forced them to try anyway if you were just going to go and hire dozens more people who can’t speak in American accents and let them speak normally. I thought I understood the plan, but now I’m just hopelessly lost.
“Honey!” Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman’s-Slightly-Less-Adorable-Mother says when she comes home. “We’re so glad you have been working at your new job for two days now, and have no reason whatsoever to doubt that you actually work there. Everything is wonderful for you now! Boy, if you hadn’t gotten that job, your father and I would be ashamed of you forever, but luckily you did and now we provisionally love you!”
Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman smiles nervously, and before you can blink we’re back in America! Whoa! Slow down, Flashforward! I’m getting exponentially jet-lagged by all this trans-pacific quick cuts.
We flashforward to another slightly less flashbacked flashback on Flashforward the show about flashforwards that features far too many flashbacks, for fucking alliteration’s sake.
Anyway, Past-Bryce is in his expositionist’s therapist’s office, and boy does he have a lot of backstory he needs to get off his chest. Past-Bryce is understandably depressed about his terminal diagnosis, but he can’t tell his family because his father suffered through lung cancer for three years before he died. He also can’t tell his friends or colleagues because they would pity him, and that would be much worse than the contemptible scorn they heap onto him on a regular basis nowadays. How could Past-Bryce take it if their looks of disgust were suddenly replaced by disgusted concern? It’s too horrible to think about.
So Past-Bryce wakes up that mornin’, gets himself a gun. His momma told him he was the blandest one.
He drives himself to the pier for some reason and then takes out the gun, preparing to shoot himself in the head. Man, if I hadn’t already seen what happened in the first episode and in half the recaps before each episode since then, I would be totally scared that he would kill himself oh my god!
But just as Past-Bryce pulls the trigger, he sees a vision flashforward of his life as Future-Bryce! It goes thusly:
Future-Bryce is in Japan at a restaurant. A waitress takes his order, and then Future-Bryce stares blandly down at the table for a few moments before someone else arrives: Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman! He stares at her chest for a few hours, then looks up to her face and says, “You’re really here.”
Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman does pretty much the only thing she’s done at all in the show so far: she looks cutely nervous, smiles adorably, then looks cutely nervous again.
Just watch this on a loop for 40 minutes, I guarantee you will probably get more enjoyment from that then watching the actual episode, and you won’t have missed anything that Adorable Japanese Woman does anyway, since: that right there? That’s it.
Future-Bryce has her sit down, Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman flashes her smile a few more times, and then Future-Bryce takes her hand and looks at the kanji on her wrist. Shockingly, this causes Future-Adorable-Japanese-Woman to flash her smile nervously six or seven hundred times.
Gosh darn it, she’s just so gol-durned cute! Watch out Nulu and Gabrielle Union, a hurricane is coming, and its name is...Well I don’t think she actually has a name yet. But watch out anyway! Oh boy! She’s super cute and aren’t you just going to feel terrible when she’s inevitably killed?
Past-Bryce wakes up in the past and decides that life is worth living, and Past-Adorable-Japanese-Woman wakes up on the floor of her bathroom and decides (don’t get ahead of me, people) to flash her smile a few times.
Finally, we return to the present, where Present-Bryce spends his days painting and endless stream of pictures relating to the future-reason-he’s-in-jail-on-harassment-charges. He’s also practicing Japanese, and getting sick from his terminal cancer at the same time. The boy is a multitasker, I give him him that.
Confusingly, none of the paintings or sketches he makes features Adorable Japanese Woman actually giving her already trademarked smile. I guess Bryce is as good an artist as he is a surgeon, which is to say: not very.
We finally leave the saga that is Bryce, and instead turn our attention to Sadbeard. He’s cleaning up his apartment while Tracy sleeps. Joseph Fiennes calls to tell Sadbeard that he’s learned fuck all since last episode. Thanks for the call, Joe. Always a pleasure.
During the call, Sadbeard finds an empty liquor bottle by Tracy’s bed. I assume that Sadbeard left it there after he went on a bender, which would explain why he’s been slurring his words for the last few episodes.
While Joe’s on the phone, Olivia gets a phone call. Since she’s in the shower, she has Joe answer it for her. Joe, actually more of an ape-man than an actual human being, cannot seem to work his fingers properly in order to answer the phone, and instead somehow manages to open up Olivia’s archived text messages and scroll back to find the one that warned her that Joe was drinking in his vision flashforward. All by accident, of course.
He asks Olivia what that’s all about, but she says it didn’t matter since Joe told her about the drinking anyway. The fact that she was getting personal information about her husband from an anonymous person via her phone? Not worth worrying about, says Olivia.
Later, at the hospital, Bryce is stumbling and flailing around, and somehow Olivia catches on that he might be sick. Bryce eventually admits that he has terminal cancer, and Olivia (stop getting ahead of me!) opens her eyes wide and shakes her head a lot.
Bryce assures her he’s just fine and shouldn’t be taken off of rounds for fear he might pass out while operating on someone because he’s a main character and that just wouldn’t be cool. Besides, he has something to look forward to now: being smiled at by Adorable-Japanese-Woman.
Back at Sadbeard’s, Sadbeard is rapidly going through a transformation into MadDadBeard! Tracy cooks dinner for him and has the absolute unmitigated gall to pour herself a glass of wine for dinner.
Where exactly did she get this wine, by the way? I thought she was hiding out in her dad’s house. Did she go out to a liquor store despite being terrified that PMC assassins were going to shoot her in the head at any moment, or does the recovering alcoholic Sadbeard just have a good supply of booze left over from when he was a drinker?
Anyway, MadDadBeard is mad and dad-like.
“Sweetheart,” he says in a compassionate and calm tone of voice. “I understand that you’ve been through a lot; more than I can ever imagine, and I wish I could let you do whatever makes you feel better, but I’m a recovering alcoholic. As long as you’re staying here, I have to ask you not to drink around me. It’s just not good for me. I hope you understand, baby. It’s not that you can’t drink, it’s just that I don’t think I can handle it being in the house.”
WRONG. He said, “Tracy, this isn’t going to work! Gaarrrr! Get that foul witch’s brew out of my house! You evil bitch! How dare you bring alcohol into the sanctity of Sadbeard’s home? I hate you forever!
Two can play at this whole picture captioning thing.
This time I, Mac’s Brain, will wow you with my hilarity.
Ahem:
“I, Sadbeard, am mad at you, daughter!”
Oh yeah, that's the stuff.
“Oh, and good food. It’s yummers.”
How about we just agree to disagree, Brain? I’ll pretend Sadbeard was a compassionate and loving father, and you can live in the reality where he’s a prick who overreacts.
Fine. A truce, then. For now.
For now.
Tracy and MadDadbeard do not reconcile so easily, and so Tracy pouts a little bit before she limps out of the room, taking her whine with her.
Oh, I meant wine. Not sure why I didn’t just go back and fix that typo instead of drawing attention to it. Weird, huh?
At FBI Doltquarters, the gang has gotten the CCTV image of the guy who was awake during the blackout back from the video forensics team, who used the power of pixie dust to enhance a three-pixel image of a ring from roughly three-hundred feet away and determine that it has a quarter-inch symbol for the greek letter Alpha on it.
What did criminal investigators do before we unearthed that kingdom of fairies in 1994 during a routine dig for oil in southern Texas? Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a world where we can’t magically cause grainy, terrible photographs to actually secretly hold terabytes of information that can be extrapolated simply by zooming in and using Photoshop’s sharpen filter a bunch of times? It would be absolutely barbaric.
Despite this godlike miracle from the NSA analyst, Chief Dolt and the others want more. She’s reluctant to tell them anything though, because one of the Dolts has been red-flagged.
Old Dolt darts his eyes back and forth in a sign of total innocence for a moment, and then the analyst continues.
“It was Nulu! He got a phone call from someone in secret,” she cries. “J’accuse!”
“Wait wait, it’s probably just the mysterious international secret agent who called to warn him about his own death,” Joe says. “Totally normal.”
“Wait, does that mean you have access to the phone call?” Nulu asks. “Can I hear it again?”
“Sorry, it’s classified SIGINT,” the NSA analyst replies to a room full of FBI agents. They all look at her blankly, so she adds. “Oh right, Braga-dumb. SIGINT was Donald Anderson, the DARPA chief who was killed by Decoy Octopus in Metal Gear Solid. Oh, and it also means ‘Signals Intelligence.’ I’m sure that as members of the international intelligence community, you boys have never heard of that, which is why I just explained it to you as if you were morons. So no, you can’t have it.”
“C’moooooooooooooooon,” Nulu whines petulantly. “I really need it or I’m gonna die, okay? So just give it to me, you stupid boogerface! Quit bein’ such a dink!”
Joe watches on with his eyebrow furrowed and a weird smile on his face, apparently amused by Nulu begging for his life.
”Nulu’s desperate pleading for his own life both amuses me, and causes my shoulders to become inhumanly large.”
The music rises to a dramatic crescendo, declaring that I’m supposed to feel some sort of tension for this scene. I’m not sure why. Nulu wants to listen to the message he already heard once before. What is that going to change?
Oh wait, I forgot about the magical pixies and their forensics wizardry! If Nulu can get hold of the recording, he just might be able to interpolate the datastream with a cross-generational parabolic axis, thereby re-distributing the gamma particles present in the air at the time of the recording, forming a four-dimensional superimage of the electrostatic aura of the woman he was talking to, thus saving Christmas!
The NSA analyst gives in, and promises to make a call. Way to go, Nulu!
Back in Japan, Adorable-Japanese-Woman is being super adorable, you guys! It turns out that her job at the robotics company is, like any job in Japan (thanks, television!) stifling and uncreative. Her much lauded robot arm that she built is relegated to simply picking out pieces of candy from one bowl and placing them in another. Also, it looks like the kind of thing you can probably buy at Radioshack for a 4000% markup, making me think that Adorable-Japanese-Woman lied about building it from scratch.
Deciding that numbers in columns are boring, Adorable-Japanese-Woman decides to be adorable by watching some Bob Dylan videos while she air guitars...at work! Oh stock Ben Stiller character who always gets into embarrassing situations Adorable-Japanese-Woman, you’re so quirky!
In a shocking twist that nobody saw, she is quickly interrupted by a co-worker who informs her that she is needed by the boss immediately. She minces after the coworker and is brought into a meeting that consists of a mobius strip of curmudgeonly business men sitting around a never-ending table. Adorably, Adorable-Japanese-Woman thinks she’s there to join in the meeting, but really they just want her to serve them tea!
Oh 1950s, will you ever stop being Japan?
Broken and defeated, Adorable-Japanese-Woman pouts adorably, and then serves the tea. Damn it, Adorable-Japanese-Woman! Your heart is too big for this world! You belong in the fairy kingdom, where people who smile adorably, do quirky things, and can magically enhance low resolution photographs can live happily with others of their kind.
Meanwhile, in America, two honest-guys-no-foolin’ Americans, Joseph Fiennes and Sadbeard, have a talk after their recovering alcoholics’ meeting. Joe is totally bummed about someone trying to destroy his marriage by sending Olivia text messages about him, and being an FBI agent he has absolutely no way of tracking down who sent that message. Curses! If only he knew some kind of professional investigator who could investigate this situation for him.
“But the thing is,” Joe says. “I only told two people about my drinking. You, and I guess Chief Dolt. So...”
“Whatta yoo tryin’ to shay?” Sadbeard demands, slowly revving up into Madbeard territory. Its power has already destroyed his accent! Look out, Joe!
“I’m just asking if you’re talking to my wife behind my back,” Joe growls in his Connor MacLeod voice. That, in combination with his glower, is the only known counter to Madbeard’s rage.
Sadbeard walks casually over to a folding chair, picks it up, carefully folds it, and then ANGRILY HURLS IT TO THE GROUND!
”Oh, and Madbeard’s got a steel chair! Why isn’t the ref stopping this fight!? This is an absolutely flagrant disregard for the rules of Professional Wrestling by the contender, Madbeard! I tell you, Mean Gene, this is absolutely despicable!”
Joe watches with an expression of wry amusement, so Madbeard tells him to get himself a new sponsor, then smacks him patronizingly on the side of the face a few times.
So, I’m confused. What exactly has Sadbeard going all Madbeard? His daughter is alive. Remember that? Remember how his dead daughter came back to life? Sure, she’s kind of a bitch and she’s being hunted by group of professional soldiers, but is that any reason to lash out at your friends, Sadbeard? Tsk tsk tsk.
In Japan, Adorable-Japanese-Woman walks by a tattoo shop on her way home from work. She goes inside and asks for a tattoo, but the proprietor, ever the crafty businessman, calls her a weirdo and tells her to leave.
“You want a tattoo? What kind of freak are you?”
“I’m a nervous, shy, yet quirky and independent spirit that test audiences reacted well to,” Adorable-Japanese-Woman seems to say. “I want a tattoo for my future American boyfriend.”
“Well, it’s highly unorthodox for me, a tattoo artist, to give someone a tattoo, but I guess I could make an exception in this circumstance. Sit down.”
Hooray! A victory for Adorable-Japanese-Woman! If I didn’t already love her due to her carefully calculated personality traits that were designed to make everyone love her, I would love her again right now! [kermit]Yaaaay![/kermit]
Meanwhile, Joe has gone to Chief Dolt to ask if he was the one who told Olivia about his drinking.
“You fucking asshole,” Chief Dolt says when he’s accused. “Get the fuck out of here! I don’t want to see you ever again! I hate you, hate you, hate you!”
Seriously, what is with all these people? Just say “No, I didn’t do it” and move the hell on. It’s not like he’s accusing you of being a murderer, a rapist, or in any way involved in writing Flashforward. Just answer the question without going into a fit of righteous anger.
Although it might behoove Joe to recall that while he only told two people about his drinking, he told Chief Dolt by screaming it to him at a crowded bar. A crowded bar where Old Dolt was hanging out. Just saying, is all.
The next day at the hospital, Bryce shows his finished sketch of Adorable-Japanese-Woman to the Japanese patient that you all remember he had, right? That Japanese woman he’s been treating for quite some time now and has been giving him lessons in Japanese? Yeah. Her.
Anyway, he shows her the picture, and she miraculously realizes that the symbol on her shirt or something is that of a small sushi restaurant outside of Tokyo that for some reason sells t-shirts with its logo on it. On his way out (and presumably to Japan), Bryce is stopped by Olivia. She’s done some research and found a fake drug called trifectomab that might be able to cure him. Bryce is reluctant to take it on account of it might kill him, but Olivia tries to convince him to do it by pointing out that maybe taking that drug is what keeps him alive in order to meet Adorable Japanese Woman in the future.
Bryce takes her advice and flies to Japan, because Olivia can go suck a big fat one!
Once he gets there, he goes to the sushi restaurant, and after some absolutely “hilarious” misunderstandings thanks to his poor ability to speak Japanese, someone recognizes his sketches as being of Keiko, the real name of Adorable-Japanese-Woman!
Meanwhile, Adorable-Japanese-Keiko has quit her job and gotten a tattoo. Her mother is all, “Whaaaaaaat?” but Keiko is all, “I’m a big girl now, I can do what I want, Mother. And quit trying to find husbands for me!”
“But Mr. Ito would be a great husband,” her mother replies.
“He has no imagination, as defined by obsessively painting pictures related to me for months! That’s the kind of man I want! Oh, if only I could find him or he could find me!”
“Fine then, screw you,” her mother says, because everyone in this episode is a giant asshole to everyone else. “You can just stop living here! Get out! And make sure it’s just a few minutes before Bryce inevitably shows up!”
Adorable-Japanese-Keiko looks nervous, but determined. Before we can learn her decision, that scene is over.
Nulu’s listening to the recording of the mysterious secret agent who told him of his own death, along with Joe and Old Dolt.
“I used our magical pixie dust to delete everything but the background noise,” Old Dolt says. “Because as we all know, cell phones take each individual sound from the surrounding area and multi-track it, so it’s easy for me to delete the voice of the person speaking while somehow also maintaining the unbroken background noise. Through this, and my prayers to Quetzlcoatl and Thor, we found out that she was in Hong Kong!”
“Great!” Nulu says. “Once we can afford the trip to Somalia, we’ll just hop over to Hong Kong while we’re at it. That should only take six or seven years at our current rate of progress!”
“Wait,” Joe says. “I know it’s crazy, but what if we go to Chief Dolt and ask if we can go to Hong Kong right now?”
“That’s so crazy it just might work!”
They go to Chief Dolt, but he’s reluctant to send them. “First of all guys, it would be asinine of me to send you to China when I still haven’t sent you to the strongest lead you have, Somalia. Second, China totally hates us ever since that one guy said that China caused the Blackout. Third, seriously, I’m not going to be so fucking stupid as to send you guys to China when we’ve spend five episodes avoiding sending you to Somalia. That’s just beyond stupid. Now get out of here before I become even more of an asshole like everyone else in this episode!”
“Don’t worry, Nulu,” Joe says on their way out. “I haven’t been infected by the airborne asshole virus yet, so I have an idea. Let’s just go to China on our own. Surely the Chinese customs officials will gladly allow us, two American Intelligence Agents, into their country without any fuss whatsoever. Let’s go!”
And go they do, making sure to stop only to piss all over a giant map of Somalia, just for symbolic purposes.
Back in Japan, Bryce arrives at Adorable-Japanese-Keiko’s house. He introduces himself to her mother and then pulls out his sketch of Keiko. Her mother looks at the picture, but just as she’s about to tell Bryce where she is, she is infected by the asshole virus.
“Never heard of her,” she says. “Also: fuck you, white devil!”
She slams the door on Bryce and he wanders away, dejected and lonely. The next day, he calls Nicole (and seriously, when is the Bryce/Nicole/Keiko love triangle going to get started already?) who tells him he might as well just come home. If he stays in Japan any longer, he might be hired into a white collar office job and spend the next twenty-five years of his life doing exercises on the roof every morning.
Back at Sadbeard’s, Sadbeard is still kind of Madbeard. Joe comes over and apologizes for asking him if he told Olivia about his drinking.
“I know you’re dealing with the whole Tracy thing,” Joe says.
“You don’t know what I’m dealing with, so just shut the hell up!” Madbeard roars. “My daughter might be alive, but she’s different from how she was before she went to war, was blown up, and had her leg severed! And goddammit, I hate her now! Just like I hate you!”
“Sadbeard, stop! It’s me, Joseph Fiennes! Look into the power of my glare and be cured of this terrible asshole virus! Be healed, Sadbeard! Be healed!”
“Oh god. You’re right. This is all my fault. My daughter is an alcoholic because of me! This makes me...not mad. No, not mad. I feel something different. I feel...
”...Sad.”
And with that, Madbeard reverts back into Sadbeard. Saved by the angelic power of Joe’s glower, the might of the unrelenting asshole virus is destroyed. At last, everyone will return to normal, and stop inexplicably being assholes to each other.
And finally, Adorable-Japanese-Keiko flies to Los Angeles, where -- as her フラッシュフォワード flashforward revealed, she will meet with Bryce in the future.
A future saved from the deadly asshole virus by none other than Joseph Fiennes’ glower. All hail Joe’s eyebrows! We are saved!
So that’s that. I’m finally caught up with the current episodes. Hooray?