Part of the frustration with the first half of the season of FlashForward was that each episode seemed to introduce a number of new questions without even acknowledging previous questions. It wasn’t building on any momentum or putting things in place. Instead, the show seemed to just be collecting a long list of mysteries. I didn’t think it worked very well, but the show has become more interesting as it has begun to go down the checklist of questions and move the story forward. Two of the bigger questions from the beginning of the season were addressed in this episode: the events in Somalia in 1991 and Charlie’s flashforward.
It was nice to finally learn about Charlie’s vision. Not that there was anything really groundbreaking in the flash, but it had definitely been a huge question. She knew about D. Gibbons because she heard Lloyd talking on the phone, nothing big there. She also saw a couple of strange men outside of her house, saying that Mark Benford was dead. One of those strange men turned out to be Vogel, the marshall working with the FBI. That would certainly point to him having a hand in the conspiracy and being the mole in the group. It will be interesting to see how that develops.
Most of the action in this episode took place in Somalia, where a team was dispatched to investigate the towers. After some extended action/hostage scenes with an angry African quasi-warlord, the team got down to business. There were definitely some blackout experiments happening back in 1991, seemingly led by D. Gibbons, or Frost, or whatever he wants to be called. I don’t really understand the motivation of blacking people out and making them see two minutes of the future, but perhaps that will become clearer as things progress. What is becoming more and more clear is that Charlie was absolutely right, D. Gibbons is a bad man, because it looked like he killed all of his test subjects after his little experiment. Were his experiments created in an attempt to learn about the future, to know everything? If the video at the end of the episode was any indication, Gibbons certainly does have knowledge of the future. I’m very interested to see what the video has to say to Demetri.
I know early on a lot of people were theorizing that Agent Noh was going to be the father of Janis’s baby, and things certainly pointed that way in this episode. If that does end up being the case, and he doesn’t wind up dead, he’s going to have a hard time explaining himself to Zoey. The “she’s gay and desperate to have a baby and I thought I was going to be dead” excuse never really works.
Elsewhere on the relationship front we got another extended look into the annoying marriage of the Benfords. Seriously, at this point I’m almost rooting for them to break up. For one, Lloyd seems to be a good guy, and he and Olivia might make a better couple than her and Mark. Secondly, Mark is a seriously troubled man. He is so obsessed with this case that he is willing to sacrifice his family for it, yet it seems like the genesis of the obsession was to find out why he was drinking again and losing his family. At the end of the day, I just don’t care about these people, which is a huge failing of the show.
What did you think? Are you far more interested in the plot than the characters?
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Apr 01, 2010 @ 21:30 EST5EDT
I haven’t watched tonights episode yet, because I’m not sure I want to. I’d rather read about it. You are completely right in this one. I cannot think of one character that I care about. The closest is Lloyd, and the idea of he and Olivia; but I think that is only because I imagine them together from their respective Coupling roles, even though they weren’t even on the same show. At least I liked them.
I tune into shows for the characters. If someone can write a character that I want to know, someone who I want to spend time with, I’ll continue to tune in. If I wouldn’t want to spend time with at least one person on a program, why the hell would I tune in each week? I spend less time with people I don’t care about in real life.
WTF … they killed the man who was going to end the constant war in Somalia?
hahaha, I was thinking the same thing! ;)
however.. I think it becomes more and more clear, that d.gibbons experiments were about how far you could see in the future during your blackouts. and it seems like he found a way to stretch this time window all the way from 1991 to the present day.
Vogel is not a “marshall working with the FBI.” His first name is Marshall and he’s a CIA agent working with the FBI.
Really? That’s totally embarrassing. I’m reading a book about US Marshalls right now and all the characters call them “marshall.” Clearly, I was confused.
All else being equal, what confuses me most about the authenticity of the flash forwards is that Charlie seemed to take it in stride that Lloyd and Dillon were living in her house, and that Mark apparently was not. You could make the argument that Olivia would be calling Lloyd “Honey” in only a month or two from now, but a little girl who loves her daddy not being extremely traumatized by her father being shipped out and another man sleeping in her mother’s bed so soon after everything was fine at home? Doesn’t that scream that the flash forwards are at the very least not decidedly the future?