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Rogue9a
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FlashForward recaps

From Zap2it By Josh Lasser

It was, apparently, a day like any other, and then people had a two minute and seventeen second vision of what was going to happen to them in about 6 months, or, what we now call a "FlashForward," because, you know, that's the title of the show. It's also the title of the novel the show is based on, even if outside of the name and the whole seeing the future thing the two have little in common. Clearly I won't be using the novel as crib notes this season.

Some may argue that it wasn't really an average day for Demetri and Mark, mostly because their case against the possible terrorists had finally gotten exciting. But seriously, a terrorist case versus everyone in the world having a vision of the future, you tell me what's interesting and what isn't. And the same is true for Bryce's contemplating suicide - a sad thing to be sure, but less interesting than him seeing the future. Plus, let's net forget that Mark and Demetri got their terrorists and Bryce didn't commit suicide.

What I really wonder about is why Charlie, the little girl, thought that her vision meant that there would be no more good days. Massive death and destruction are obviously not good, but how does that mean that 40 years down the line (or beyond that) that there are no more good days, that they're done forever? Or does the little one have no real wisdom and was she just kind of scared?

I do like how quickly the folks in Los Angeles picked up on the fact that it was a real vision of the future and how to (maybe) prove it - just get corroboration from someone else who was in your vision. Good plan, solid detective work, also, a little crazy. That first call had to be a hard one to make, "Hey, Elizabeth Corday, did you dream about me today, because I certainly dreamt about you." That could go very wrong and quickly end up at "You're always in my dreams, Doctor Corday," which for me may be true, but wasn't really the point of the phone call.

Good old John Cho as Demetri though, he was right about them getting assigned to the case being weird. They get to run point because Mark dreamt of them running point? Maybe I should get a million dollars because I say that I one day will get a million dollars. It's weird - that massive corkboard gets brought into existence because Mark and Demetri construct it based on Mark's recollection of it already existing. What would Emmett Brown say to that kind of thing? I don't think he'd like it.

At this point, quite obviously, we have far more questions than answers, the biggest question being - is this a case of "A Christmas Carol" and can these shadows still be changed, or is what we saw fixed? Take Olivia and Mark, now that they know their marriage is breaking up (maybe) and that she cheats (perhaps), can they fix it? Or, since she thinks that she is going to sleep with someone else, will she sleep with someone else because she sort of already did? I really have no investment in them as a couple at this point, so I don't so much care about the result there, but I do know that I don't want to lose John Cho just because Demetri had no vision.

Perhaps there is a better question, and one with a more immediate answer coming - who is the guy in Detroit who remained awake for the length of the incident? Is that Dominic Monaghan's character, because he certainly wasn't in the show otherwise tonight.

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9/27/2009, 1:52 am

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Rogue9a
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Re: FlashForward recaps

From Zap2it By Josh Lasser

I'm not sure which opening moment of "FlashForward" was more disturbing - the kids pretending to blackout, or the army invading Los Angeles. Both of those things could lead to lots and lots of bad. At least Alan Ruck was there right after the opening to comfort me, even if he didn't have much of a role this week.

Can I say how happy I was that the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Anastasia Markham, showed up to question exactly how the L.A. field office could appoint itself in charge of investigating the flashforward? It's not so much that I had a problem with L.A. being put in charge, but I really just like the fact the show recognized that it was a little odd and bothered discussing the oddness before Markham completely caved to Wedeck.

Wedeck really gave her a hard time tonight. To me, that means that they have history. If not, Wedeck was certainly walking a fine line between arguing his point of view and daring her to fire him.

Speaking of relationships, last week it definitely seemed as though Olivia was the one wavering on the marriage with Mark due to what she saw. This week, it looked as though Mark was wavering because of what she saw. That I couldn't quite figure out, although I did decide that the two were joking about seeing divorce lawyers. They said it a little too deadpan for my liking, but I'm still saying they were joking - even though they had a real fight later.

How weird was that first conversation between Olivia and Lloyd tonight? The two of them were seriously dancing around what they saw during their flashes. I kept thinking that one of them would bring it up, but I guess it's kind of a touchy issue, "I don't know you, but in six months, we're lovers." I love Jack Davenport and think he's hysterical, he played the awkwardness perfectly. I'm really looking forward to the moment when they do have the "conversation."

D. Gibbons, from the corkboard, showed up tonight, and the D stood for Deidra, or Didi, if you will. But then, of course, there was the second D. Gibbons, the actual baddie. He was in Pigeon, Utah buying bus tickets on Didi's credit card. He, as Charlie told us at the end of the episode, is definitely a bad guy. We didn't really need Charlie's word for it though, we had already watched Gibbons (I'm assuming it was Gibbons) set a pretty good blaze at the doll factory (or "dollhouse" in my world).

Now, I know that the name Gibbons and the doll picture seem to undoubtedly have something to do with the case, particularly if Gibbons was on the phone with the guy at the stadium who was awake during the event, but I don't think that means that everything on the board has to be real. Mark could have put the stuff on the board assuming it was real and could have been wrong. His pigheadedness that everything on the board is unquestionably valid really bothers me. I don't know why it does, but it does, and I want him to waste a few weeks tracking down worthless corkboard leads until he learns his lesson.

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10/4/2009, 2:18 am

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Re: FlashForward recaps

From zap2it By Josh Lasser

How right was Aaron at the opening of "FlashForward" tonight? Mark shouldn't be lying to Olivia about what Aaron is doing in the house or what Charlie saw during her vision. Then again, Mark shouldn't be doing a lot of what he's been doing.

Speaking of trouble - can anything good come of Demetri lying to Zoey about what he saw or didn't see? He's going to fess up eventually, even if it's his dead body doing the fessing. Either that or Demetri is just hugely confused and Udaya's "intelligence" is in fact a fake.

Mark wanted to fly to Germany to talk to a Nazi, Rudolph Geyer. Why? Because Geyer's photo was on the board. I'm sorry, I promise not to harp on it every episode of the show but on the board doesn't mean valid, it doesn't mean real, it doesn't mean anything except that it was on the board. It's the sort of circular logic that makes my head want to explode, and that's why I have such a problem with it.

Geyer wanted out of prison for whatever his information was, and Janis was smart enough to realize that Mark was being foolish trading the Nazi's freedom for whatever his intelligence might have been. Geyer had to give a sneak peek at whatever he had, and thank goodness he did before Mark could give away the store with the potential of getting nothing in return.

Geyer's sneak peek was the answer on why the blackout was 137 seconds. Well, it was Kaballah - which, if you write it in Hebrew and add the numbers together that the figures represent is 137 (please, correct me if I have that wrong, but I think that was the insanity he spewed). It's seemingly worthless info and the logic only went circular after that - Geyer explained that Mark should trade Geyer's freedom for the info Geyer had because Mark already did in the future. What it didn't mean was that Mark got good info for Geyer's freedom, just that he traded the freedom for the info.

Mark had stuff explained to him (at least a little) by the German agent at the prison. Why is it that people have to try and talk Mark off the ledge over and over and over again? He seems to not listen a lot of the time however, always preferring to go off half-****ed. He may call it "faith," but I think it may be closer to pure blindness. I'm starting to think of him as the Jack Bauer of "FlashForward," he may head down the right path, but only because the writers script it that way. I'd bet that the crows do somehow fit - maybe the previous blackout theory is right - and that even if they don't, Mark doesn't change the way he operates in future episodes (by the way, did the first graph show the crow population increasing again in the months following the 2009 blackout?).

Don't mistake my complaints for a dislike of the show, I do think it's a lot of fun and that there's a great mystery here, I just think the mystery is with Lloyd Simcoe, Demetri Noh, whomever Dominic Monaghan's character may be (fine, I'm going on faith there), and maybe even Aaron. I'm just not liking the path Mark is travelling down with the investigation.

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10/12/2009, 3:31 am

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Re: FlashForward recaps

From Zap2it By Andrea Reiher

Tonight on "FlashForward," Bizarro Olivia is totally blinded by not wanting to trust the visions, and it turns out her possible new lover Lloyd worked with Dominic Monaghan to orchestrate the blackout. Um... what?

Drs. Olivia & Bryce
A crazy man named Ned comes into the hospital with residual pain from the blackout. He crashed on a bus and had to swim out of a pond. He tells Bryce and Olivia that his flashforward showed him at a club, rocking leather pants, and he was Black. Um, yeah. Turns out he has Addison's Disease, which explains how calm he was in the bus crash and the surgery. It also means his body is producing melanin instead of adrenaline, which is what darkens his skin.

Unfortunately, Olivia lets her bias against the visions keep her from treating the patient for Addison's. Because she's a huge *****. Seriously. I liked the character before thie episode but she is ridiculous this week. Ned almost dies on the table but Olivia relents just in time to give him a shot of hydrocortisone and save his life.

Olivia apologizes to Bryce later. My boyfriend had remarked this episode, "If I worked with her, she'd be lucky that she's a woman." Seriously. I wanted to smack her too.

Lloyd & Dylan Simcoe
Autistic Dylan is freaking out and his dad Lloyd is all up in Olivia's business because he doesn't know what to do about Dylan. She advises him to go over to his late wife's house, which he is scared to do, but he eventually does and sees how organized the house is for Dylan's autism.

Mark & Demetri
Mark wants to enlist a hacker (Cheeto Dust, awesome) to get into a CIA mainframe so they can get satellite imagery of the Somalia incident from 1991. Demetri questions Blonde Terrorist from the blackout and wants to follow up on her terrorism/dirty bomb lead in Indio, so Wedeck sends them to a restaurant in Indio instead of following up on Somalia.

They chase a cook from the restaurant and find a backpack full of weed. Mark is mad that Demetri's being so crazed and drives Demetri to snapping and revealing that he's going to be murdered March 15th by 3 shots to the chest.

Blonde Terrorist knows about Demetri's lack of flashforward, but it's because she read it on the internet, not because she knows anything. Mark questions her about the blackout and she says they should stop worrying about the "how" and start worrying about the "why."

So Mark and Al get Cheeto Dust to hack the computer system. We do not get to see the outcome of that this week.

Nicole
Nicole is back to babysitting Charlie. Apparently Nicole used to be babysat herself by Aaron's daughter Tracy. She goes to visit her priest and reveals to him that in her flashforward she was being punished and asks if God made it happen. He says it's hard to believe a divine hand wasn't involved. He then gives her the phone number of the volunteer coordinator because Nicole wants to help out.

Later she reveals to Mark that she saw someone drowning her in her flashforward and that she felt like she deserved it because she did something wrong and then she just died.

Blackout Conspiracy
At the very end of the episode, Lloyd Simcoe receives a call from Simon (Dominic Monaghan) who says, "We need to talk ... But talking to me is just one of those little inconveniences is just one of those little things you're going to have to put up with now that we're responsible for the single greatest disaster in human history." DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!

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10/18/2009, 11:59 pm

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Re: FlashForward recaps

From Zap2it By Josh Lasser

The way things currently stand on "FlashForward," the future seems pretty much written (at least who is alive and who is not come the end of April). Because of that, big explosions that may or may not kill our heroes at the start of an episode are kind of anti-climactic. Mark and the FBI guys may have had their car blown up before things got going tonight, but we all knew that they weren't in it.

The explosion happened in DC as our heroes were there for a Senate hearing on who should be running the flashforward investigation. I really like that the show brought us to those investigations and had Mark work for his crazy Mosaic corkboard investigation. Clemente is obviously a horrible person, but her asking questions about Mark and the actions of the LA field office was exactly what she should have been doing. She may have known some of the answers she was going to get, but I think questions needed to be asked.

Plus, not all the answers were known in advance. For instance, Clemente asked the million dollar question - why did Mark think his investigation was going to amount to anything. His answer was that gunmen appeared during the vision "presumably" because of what the investigation accomplishes. How does he say that with a straight face (or, how do the writers write it with one)? I've complained about such things enough already during this show that I'll tell you that these scenes somewhat turned me around - Clemente was asking the right questions and I don't imagine that she will just accept any old answer (at least I don't think she would have as a lowly Senator, as a VP she may).

Perhaps the most interesting we learned tonight is that our good pal, Wedeck is friends with the President. That did prove that the show can still surprise us, just not with pretending that our agents got blown up. The President offered Wedeck that pretty swell promotion, wanting to make him the Director of Homeland Security, but I have to figure that after Wedeck blackmailed the President, the job came off the table.

Unquestionably the best scene of the night plot-wise (I did like the shoot-out at the end too) was at the karaoke bar. That moment with Wedeck and Mark where Mark copped to having been loaded during his flashforward was fantastic. There Wedeck was, he had put himself on the line, cashed in his chips with the President, blackmailed the leader of the free world, got the funding, and then learned that he stuck his neck out for his lead investigator who is going to be rip-roaring drunk come the end of April. That had to absolutely crush Wedeck. How safe is it to assume that Wedeck texted Olivia the info about Mark after that?

The dead Somalian crows came back again tonight. The fact that they keep coming back but not yet with any sort of huge information (tonight we learned that there are some towers in Somalia) means, to me, that those dead crows are going to be crucially important down the line.

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10/26/2009, 3:41 am

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