Oct 30, 2009 03:00 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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This week's FlashForward answered the question on everyone's lips: Is Charlie from Lost convincing as a charming, threatening supergenius who may be behind the worldwide blackout? Also, Mark met Lloyd and proved again what an asshole he really is. Spoilers!
Previously on FlashFoward: Last week's episode (Not recapped because I had the day off; sorry, FF fans) was the best so far, with people finally dealing with the "Isn't it a bit nuts to have an investigation purely based on Mark's dodgy flashforward" thing, Mark's boss at the FBI finding out that Mark was drunk (and therefore an unreliable witness) in his FF, and someone texted Olivia to tell her that Mark was drinking in his future. As if that wasn't enough, the FBI team all got attacked, with Janis seemingly dying at the end of the episode, but as we see pretty quickly this week, it's all a ruse to introduce some of the oddest medical drama on television. So what happened this week? Let's look at the evidence:
Charlie Is A Super-Scientist
No, really; Charlie from Lost gets more than two seconds on the show, and we find out the following:
- He has terrible chat-up lines that include telling blondes on trains to google "Quantum Physicist Genius" for pictures of him (and it works, apparently).
- He was strangling a man in his FF. Which means that April of next year will be a big month for strangling, considering Nicole the Babysitter saw herself being strangled in her FF.
- He, again, may be the man responsible for the FFs in the first place, if Lloyd's "Our experiment killed 20 million people" is anything to go by.
- He is utterly unconvincing as a credible threat, never mind a genius scientist or, for that matter, a suave bastard. But then again, this is the show where the leading man has all the charisma of a bowl of corn flakes, so there's that.
Janis Has Wolverine-Esque Healing Powers
In the course of an evening, Janis has surgery twice because of her gunshots, managing to wake up seemingly within minutes of both without any kind of grogginess and emote through some expositionary dialogue about having babies and that, now that her injuries and resulting surgery - they did something called a B Lynch, which was never actually explained on the show - mean that she's unlikely to be able to get pregnant, she really wants a baby after all. Don't worry, Janis! We know you'll get pregnant!
Don't Mess With The Blue Hand
Demetri and FBI Dude We're Supposed To Care About But I Don't Know His Name go out to investigate who attacked Janis, only to find out through ridiculously convoluted logic - Dead attacker has blue hand stamped on his hand, which ties in with Mark's FF board having a note saying "Blue Hand", and next to that note was another saying "Baltimore," so what if it's tied in with Baltimore Street and it is, and on the Baltimore Street Stop Sign, there's another Blue Hand but with three fingers so if you drive three blocks there's another blue hand pointing at a house and OMG THIS IS CRAZY JUST GET TO THE POINT ALREADY - a house filled with corpses whose hands have been dyed blue. One of them has a passport on him which identifies him as Mark Rutherford, a Scot - which means it's the start of "the Rutherford case" that FBI Dude and Alex Kingston from er were working on in their FFs. Or something.
Really, It's His House Too
Dylan, Lloyd's autistic-when-it-suits-the-plot son, somehow manages to wander out of the hospital without anyone noticing him (Good security there, fictional hospital) and telling anyone who'd listen that it's "his house too," ends up at Mark and Olivia's house on Hallowe'en. Thanks to his FF, we see that he's saying that because Charlie, Mark and Olivia's kid, tells him that he can eat cookies in the future because it's his house too, and Charlie recognizes Dylan when she sees him. Lloyd comes to pick him up and recognizes the house from his own FF, and puts it together that Olivia is the mystery woman in his future. Mark also realizes what's going on - it's that FBI training - and tells Lloyd and Dylan to leave, before moaning that Olivia should've told him that she'd met the man in her FF and finally coming clean that he was drinking in his and complaining that Olivia can't punish him for something that hasn't happened yet. No sooner has the "You're being a hypocrite, Mark" buzzer gone than Olivia plays the "I don't know if we can trust each other" card, and we're suddenly in the middle of a melodramatic soap opera cliffhanger.
So, what did we learn from this week's episode? Well, that Mark is both self-involved and pretty un-self-aware. That Charlie from Lost is definitely being set up to be a bad guy if not the bad guy for the series, and that it's beginning to look like the show may be more connected to Robert Sawyer's book than it first seemed (Lloyd's "our experiments" comment at the end of the show would seem to tie in with Sawyer's plot about the scientists Lloyd Simcoe's LHC experiments causing the FF). Next week: More on the Blue Hand Gang and probably Mark pouting some more.
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
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