This week, the agents go to Washington to testify before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee in order to justify the funding for their Mosaic project. You see, just like in the real Senate, FlashForward’s senators will, even in the face of an unprecedented national crisis, just hold contentious hearings and bitch about where all the money’s going, all the while approving trillions in military spending that they barely keep track of. On the upside, our newly introduced Washington Beltway characters all saw a piece of the future, too, so let’s review.
President Dave Segovia (Peter Coyote)
The Flash: The Ken Burns voice-over regular and one corner of a love triangle with Bette Midler and Shelley Long (remember Outrageous Fortune?) gives us his presidential best, playing basketball and politics with former campaign aide (turned L.A. FBI Bureau Chief) Stanford Wedeck. In his flash, he’s awoken from sleep in the East Wing by a Secret Service agent saying, “We have a problem.” Unfortunately, we learn nothing more, and he doesn’t even tell this much to his friend because all world leaders made a pact to keep their flashes a secret (as if).
The Upshot: What he may possess in secret-keeping ability he lacks in faithfulness to his wife — he’s got a major skeleton in the form of a light-skinned black mistress whom Wedeck once paid to get lost during the campaign. Wedeck found her using the Mosaic site; she saw herself in Puerto Rico in six months, along with the young son who may be the president’s bastard.
Senator Joyce Clemente (Barbara Williams, a.k.a. Hillary Clinton/Nancy Pelosi/Dianne Feinstein on a really bad day.)
The Flash: She sees herself as president, even though she apparently lost the last election (nomination?) six years ago to Segovia, thanks to Wedeck’s successful shuffling away of the evidence of Segovia’s affair.
The Upshot: She thinks the Mosaic project is a joke and wants to deny their funding, all because she doesn’t see how it’s possible that she’ll be president in six months, given that she’s nowhere near next in line for the job — as she puts it, “Not everyone’s visions are going to come true.” She grills Wedeck and Benford in the hearing and suggests that the hundreds of thousands spent on their cockamamie web project have amounted to “voodoo” and are a total waste. But after all, she is the guardian of our tax dollars, and she’s got maniacs from the CIA telling her they need to be going after the Chinese instead.
Maya (Navi Rawat, a.k.a. Janis’ secret girlfriend, whom she met in karate class.)
The Flash: The lesbian lover we all knew Janis had from episode one finally appears, and between major tongue-kissing over dinner she manages to tell Janis, whom she’s only just started dating, that she saw a wedding ring on her finger. Janis doesn’t admit that she was getting an ultrasound in her flash, but Maya figures it out anyway by Mosaic-ing her — which is the FlashForward version of Googling (Yahoo, Microsoft — take note).
The Upshot: It turns out that Janis has been totally comfortable with her lesbian identity all along and hasn’t dated a guy since high school, but she’s in the closet at work. She gets freaked out about this weird fast-forward on their relationship, and breaks up with Maya, but only after Maya gives her an alarm clock that rolls around on little tires as a present. (Can you say biological clock? Supposedly the gift is on account of Janis’ frequent lateness to work.) The clock figures prominently in the amusing, John Woo–ish episode finale, in which Agents Benford, Vreede, and Noh are all ambushed in a Washington garage by some Asian gangsters with mini-rocket launchers and semi-automatic weapons, while Janis is simultaneously attacked by an Asian man in L.A. whom she karate-kicks out of her way. He His associate manages to shoot her, and the clock on wheels taunts her as she lies bleeding in the street, imagining her unborn baby.
Agent Benford
The Flash: We all know about his vision of the Mosaic board, but now Senator Clemente and bossman Wedeck want to know why his flash was so fuzzy and vague when everyone else’s was so clear and easily remembered. The answer? He was loaded, which he still hadn’t told anyone, until Wedeck taunts it out of him.
The Upshot: Wedeck put his entire career on the line — he passed up a job as Homeland Security Chief in order to play the mistress card and get Mosaic’s funding — for this asshole’s drunken memory, so he’s understandably stressed. How did President Dave score the funds from bitchy Senator Clemente? He made her vice-president (the orginal VP, you may recall, died in the blackout).
What’s Next?
Back on the homefront, Olivia’s freaked about Mark falling off the wagon, since the last time he got smashed was also during a Senate hearing. Also, she gets an anonymous text message telling her that Mark was drinking in his flash-forward — cue her becoming righteous and angry and running into the arms of her scary future lover Lloyd Simcoe. Also, the agents back in L.A., using the satellite images procured by their hacker friend, now have pictures of bizarre black towers being constructed in the middle of the Somali desert in 1991, before that crow die-off and, presumably, the last blackout. Did the blackout have something to do with cell phones and cell towers? That’s our guess. We’re all gonna die. Cheers!
