Last week, we were left not only bereft that our show isn’t getting a second season, but also anxious as to how our friends in FlashForward land would fulfill their April 29 destinies — the ones they belong in at 10 p.m., 78 minutes from the end of the last episode, so that their flashes can come to pass. The writers have handily made everyone’s flashes come almost true in the final episode, and they’ve even been kind enough to sober Mark up so that he can still be a hero. But how does everyone manage to get where they’ve got to be in such a short time?
How does Bryce get back to L.A. to meet Keiko?
We last saw Bryce arriving at the immigration detention center in Lancaster, California, where Keiko was being held, and here we see him plead with the guard at the desk to tell him where his Japanese future-lover might have gone. Apparently he doesn’t remember the sushi restaurant he and Nicole made out in front of in order to find his own way there. The sassy black woman guard listens to his romantic tale of flashforward woe, and tells him all she remembers from her flash is finding $100 in her pocket and not knowing how it got there. Cute. She gives him a phone number, which turns out to be the restaurant where Keiko hung out briefly. We then see Bryce trying to get in there during a private party, and Keiko’s waitress friend tells the door guy to let him in.
How does Keiko get to the sushi place from LAX?
Keiko and her mother were under armed supervision from immigration officials, you may recall, so it take Keiko’s mother having a change of heart and letting her daughter go, then providing a distraction by hitting a guard with a piece of luggage and suddenly turning into a crazy Japanese lady at airport security. Keiko grabs her guitar and flees, and makes it to the sushi restaurant just in time to stare Bryce in his pretty little eyes come 10 p.m.
How does Olivia make it back from Malibu to her house in the valley?
Barring traffic, it may not be totally impossible to make this trip in the time allotted. But Olivia doesn’t go easily, and she took Charlie off on this little road trip because she didn’t want to fulfill her destiny of being all post-coital and lovey with Lloyd. But Lloyd is determined to solve the “greatest mystery in quantum physics,” the Tachyon constant, which appeared to be what he was doing in his flash. So he stalks Olivia via her security detail, bringing little Dylan along with him, and the four of them high-tail it back to the valley with 27 minutes to spare.
“Should we just take our places?” Olivia asks, sarcastically, but Lloyd says he’s going to keep his shirt on this time (classy). They then find Dylan scrawling a big equation on the mirror in lipstick — it turns out this wasn’t Lloyd’s handwriting after all, but somehow he didn’t recognize that from his flash. They sit and wait for Simon to text, which he does, and Lloyd makes his call to Mark to tell him his revelation: It’s a wave. What does solving this greatest mystery of physics mean? Nothing less than a ballpark figure from Lloyd about when the next blackout will occur, and it will be in April. What’s that you say? You had hoped for something more substantial and less preposterous to come of such a revelation? Yes, so did we.
How do Simon, Janis, and Demetri make it to NLAP?
Demetri drives, Janis rides along, and Simon whips a little device with some microchips and a cell phone that will magically record and then mimic a security guard’s access code card. Janis and Demetri justify to themselves why they’ve gone rogue. Janis then provides a ruse by pretending to crash the car by the entrance and pretending to be having pregnancy pain. Only, she doesn’t have to act, because she is in real pain, falls on the ground, and gets whisked off to the hospital.
Simon and Demetri meanwhile get through this rather lax security, get into Simon’s old lab, and try to crack some codes and reprogram the very particle accelerator Simon designed to do as they say and not cause another blackout. Only, it’s being controlled remotely, and Simon’s not actually such a genius when it comes to the computers, and he can’t stop it all from happening.
How does Janis get to her OB?
Well, she’s rushed off to a hospital after the NLAP security gate incident, and her guy gives her an ultrasound and tells her the baby’s just fine. Must have been gas.
How does Tracy come back from the dead?
The magic of television, ladies and germs. Between last week and this week, her condition, within minutes, went from totally hopeless and deader than dead to, “I think I hear a pulse … a faint one.” And so there you have it, Aaron’s flash can come true. And he is overjoyed.
How does Mark get out of prison and up to his office?
Wedeck bails him out, of course, all while delivering some standard dialogue about “I know I’m gonna regret this.” Wedeck puts him on the satellite phone to Aaron in Afghanistan, who’s never too far away to be a good AA sponsor, and Aaron tells him he needs to “choose what’s next and wind up right where he’s supposed to be.” Mark, who is magically totally sober now, then heads back into the FBI building, where the agents are all jogging around looking very serious because there are bombs now planted throughout the building. Mark sees Hellinger being escorted in shackles, and tells him he won’t be taking his eyes off the prize this time. Hellinger then nods the go ahead to some SWAT guys, who are also in the pocket of the Evil Cabal, and thus we have the masked team of meanies who are hunting Mark in his flash.
Mark sits up in his office contemplating his board and his puzzle pieces. He determines why Gabriel rearranged the red strings — now they spell out when the next blackout is, and just in time! It’s in just a few minutes at 10:14. A Tarantino-esque gun battle ensues, in which we see Wedeck not enjoying a leisurely poop in a bathroom stall as he saw in his flash, but actually hiding in a stall and busting down the door in order to kill one of the bad guys. Mark kills all the bad guys who were out to get him, and then calls Wedeck to tell him to put the call out to the White House and the world that another blackout is coming. Then, Marks makes an arm-slicing run for a helicopter hovering outside FBI headquarters. We don’t get why, and it sure looks like Mark blacks out before he even makes it out the window … but was he really going to jump?
We then see another lovely set of graphics as Simon fails to stop the accelerator, a new blackout hits, and everyone goes unconscious and launches forward — we see a note that says something about 2011, so it appears to be a year’s worth of flashing. But curiously, we see Charlie as a teenager saying, “They found him.” So does everyone flash to different points in the future this time? We see everyone collapsed and asleep except a little dog at the airport, another kangaroo (this felt like overkill), and Lita, who we see pushing a blacked out Janis in a wheel chair toward certain doom. We’ll never what they saw this time, and we’ll never even know if Mark survived, though he’s invincible, so obviously he did. Lloyd kept his shirt on and stayed out of Olivia’s pants, so that’s something.
Now the postmortem: What else is there to say? It was a good show. We’ll miss it … at least when it was good. The creators boasted they had five years of the show mapped out, but maybe they should have been more concerned with how well season one was playing out. Were they just too cocky after the networks went into a bidding war for this show? And seriously, how could V be getting picked up!? We’ll never forgive ABC. Never, we say! At least not until they let David Lynch do another TV series.
