overnights

FlashForward: F-A-T-E

The Negotiation
Season 1 Episode 19

Last night’s FlashForward whizzed by, with April 29, FlashForward Day, happening tomorrow in the world of the show, and all the actors wandering around in a daze tying up plotlines and wondering if the show will even be picked up for next season. (Hint: According to TV Squad, and early reports from the network upfronts, it won’t be.) Nothing really does get tied up, and Bryce and Nicole are completely offstage, but we do get to spend a few seconds in Afghanistan and enjoy more of Gabriel McDow–Rain Man spelling out what fate means to anyone who cares to listen.

“We are in uncharted territory, people.”
Agent Wedeck opens the show trying to comfort the FBI’s L.A. office about what they’re doing to secure the premises in order to keep Mark’s flash from coming true. Snipers and armed personnel will guard the place 24-7, theoretically capable of keeping out the bad guys in scary masks. Also, isn’t Mark’s board set up in the wrong room, anyway?

“I have a huge hippocampus, FYI.”
Gabriel McDow (James Callis) is brought in to FBI headquarters and shows Benford his book, where he’s sketched out the entire Mosaic investigation board from memory. He immediately begins fucking with it, saying “this isn’t right” and rearranging a few items that are out of place from his well-remembered flashes. Benford wishes he wouldn’t do this.

Gabriel sees Demetri and gets really worked up about how he’s supposed to be dead. Demetri later asks if, in any of his flashes, Gabriel saw Demetri alive. Nope.

Later, Gabriel sees Lloyd and Olivia together, refers to Olivia as Olivia Simcoe, and tells them they are “both part of the equation” and that they both will have to “do the math,” presumably to solve the blackout-QED–quantum theory dilemma.

“Give them something big.”
Janis remains a very reluctant double agent, and tells Vogel she’s done. He tells her she’s not done. She says she can’t kill Mark. He basically tells her to give the Big Evil Cabal someone else. She meets with Carlene in a laundromat, and after telling her the feds have Gabriel, Carlene makes a pass at Janis and tells her she’s “worth every penny.” Gross.

Janis, who now feels completely like a victim of this show’s writing team, seems very put out by everything, and tells Demetri she really doesn’t think he needs to be involved in raising her baby, even though he gave her the hot beef injection necessary to conceive. Demetri, meanwhile, refuses to go to Hawaii on a last-minute cheap fare with Zoey, even though she went to the trouble of going to the airport and buying paper tickets, like this was 1983.

Then Benford gets up in Janis’s grill as she’s just trying to go home to curl up with a bowl of cereal, and confronts her about being a double agent. She tells him she’s been CIA all along, he tells her no one will ever remember anything she ever did except this deception, and she pretty much wants to go swallow some pills with her cereal now. It was all for the greater good, folks.

“They’ve got Tracy.”
We see Aaron in Afghanistan. He’s wearing a turban and taking photos for the feds of this Joshua Base that isn’t supposed to exist, where Jericho takes and tortures people. He uploads a few photos for Wedeck, via satellite-connected laptops that only the fanciest underground agents in Afghanistan have, and proceeds to go rogue to save his daughter. He swoops in just in time, before Tracy’s about to be executed in the desert, and then we cut to him and a badly injured Tracy entering the dimly lit tent where their flashes took place.

Meanwhile, Wedeck sends the photos off to Vice-President Clemente, who’s scheduled to bring down the president with them inside of 24 hours.

“I’m done dealing with lower-level functionaries.”
Simon finds himself a fedora and a passport and is getting ready to fly the coop when he’s drawn in by the feminine wiles of Lita, the very same dark and dangerous lass who recruited Janis to the dark side way back when.

Lita and Simon immediately go to a hotel to have sex, and she does a weird Unbearable Lightness of Being routine with his hat while telling him that Hellinger, a.k.a. the well-dressed Lucas whom we last saw with Alda Hertzog in episode sixteen, is a really nice guy until he’s not. As it happens, Hellinger is the very same “big guy” whom Gabriel has a sketch of in his book, and it’s been Hellinger all along who’s been paying for Simon’s schooling, and employing Flosso, Frost, Carlene, Alda, and everyone. He’s the big evil dude behind the blackout.

The FBI, now one step ahead of Hellinger thanks to Janis, disguises Mark as Gabriel and sticks him in a van. They get ambushed by Hellinger’s men. Mark gets to shoot some bad guys and then press Hellinger’s head to the ground, but with a few simple keystrokes he “erases all data” on the computers in the bad-guy lair

But just to back up a sec, Hellinger and Simon have a relatively undramatic and stupid conversation over a glass of gin about who owes who what that ends with Simon petulantly walking out of the room. Because, naturally, he thinks he’s got nothing to lose now and this Big Evil Cabal can’t kill him because they need him too badly to “calibrate the accelerator” for the next blackout.

So anyway, while he’s off doing that, and while Benford interrogates and roughs up Hellinger and waits for the rest of the cabal to arrive in their masks, we’ll be mourning the impending death of this lame-duck show, despite the excitement we had mere weeks ago about ever more time travel and questioning of fate. We can’t fight destiny, and the cast of this show needs to start gunning for work on V.

FlashForward: F-A-T-E