TV Spoilers

We zoom in eerily from space to find a bunch of children laying on the ground. Charlie Benford is the only one standing, nervously watching her peers on the ground. Turns out the kids are just playing “Blackout.” Frankly it’s kind of sick and twisted. The other kids pick on Charlie because she doesn’t want to play. She takes off running and is stopped by the military checkpoint waiting just around the corner and off screen.

Cameron Frye is drunk and ranting at Mark’s AA meeting while FBI agents are quitting left and right. Wedeck is not happy and to make matters worse, the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security shows up to investigate their investigation of The Flash, which everyone seems to be calling the Blackout now. Mark and Olivia meet with Charlie’s principal and renew their vow to beat the future they saw.

The LA FBI is taking some heat for using funds to create a website without telling anyone else in the FBI and they debate over whether or not The Flash was a scheduled event. All the bickering stops when the Deputy Secretary is shown the video of Suspect Zero.

At the hospital, Olivia finally runs into Lloyd Simcoe, the father of the little boy she treated days before and the man from her flashforward. She gets all awkward but he doesn’t even seem fazed by it at all. His son is autistic and he doesn’t know how to tell him that his mother is dead. Olivia is quick on her feet and dumps the case onto Mr. Positivity himself, Bryce.

Demetri bugs Mark about the bracelet he’s wearing, implying that Mark is enabling the future to come true. Meanwhile, they get a visit from D. Gibbons, who remembers mentioning their names while arguing on the phone during her flashforward. We also learn that Wedeck was on the john when the flash happened and is lying about his flashforward with everyone because he doesn’t want them to know that when he woke up he had to give mouth-to-mouth to a man who was drowning in a urinal. I can’t blame him. Ick.

At the hospital, Charlie recognizes Dylan (probably from her flashforward) and freaks out. Mark and the FBI use some fancy gadgets to do some background checks on D. Gibbons. Turns out somebody stole her credit card number and has been using it in Utah. Mark and Demetri head to Utah where they meet a sheriff who didn’t see anything during The Flash either. This gives Demetri some hope. Their stakeout is a bust…at first. After everyone packs it in, Mark remembers seeing a picture of a doll’s head in his future. He, Demetri and the sheriff check out an abandoned doll factory and set off what should have been an easily-detectable booby trap/warning system.

They confront their target in the upper office. Mystery Man quotes Beilby Porteus and then shoots the sheriff dead and sets fire to the joint with some explosions. He gets away of course, leaving Mark and Demetri to pick up the pieces. Demetri is now surer than ever that not seeing anything means he is going to be dead by April 29, 2010.

Janis checks the cell phone that Mystery Man left at the factory and discovers that he too was awake during The Flash because he made a phone call part way through it. Lo and behold, it seems that Mystery Man was reaching out and touching Suspect Zero just before The Flash occurred. Later that night, Janis and Demetri add their stories to the Mosaic database. Demetri gets a call from a mysterious woman who claims she was reading an intel brief during her flashforward and knows that he will be murdered on March 15, 2010.

Mark stays up late and burns the friendship bracelet Charlie made for him. He tells Olivia that they shouldn’t keep secrets from each other but still doesn’t tell her about his future boozing. He kisses Charlie goodnight and she finally opens up about her flashforward. It’s not much but it’s interesting. She tells her daddy that D. Gibbons is a bad man.

Time Flies
After the semi-false start the episode started with, I was glad that it didn’t take very long for the writers to clear up how much time had passed since The Flash. Three days seems like a reasonable timeframe, though we’ll get to plenty of faults this presents later on. This means that the show isn’t rushing things and it’s also not dragging its heels either. It would have been very annoying to spend most of the episode trying to figure out how long it had been since The Flash.


LA FBI Taking Heat for Playing Cowboy
Let’s be honest- if this kind of even were to take place, the LA branch of the FBI would not be the ones calling the shots. I was glad to see some Washington presence enter the picture. Is it too presumptuous to think that other FBI offices might have had similar visions enabling them to corroborate what they saw? Then again, this is only a TV show.

I like how the Deputy Secretary was asking the tough questions that were on my mind. It gave the whole scenario an air of credibility (for a while at least). And I absolutely loved the crack about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ‘hope.’ If you didn’t get that one then you obviously weren’t paying attention last election cycle.

I also enjoyed the tension between Wedeck and the Deputy Secretary. Obviously the head of the building doesn’t want to look bad in front of his people, so the tenacity he displayed in dealing with her was nice. He’s either just that ballsy or their paths have crossed before.


The Wall of the Missing
In case you missed it, when Olivia and Charlie were headed into the hospital, they passed a wall of letters and pictures. It was mentioned but it was here and gone pretty quick. I thought that this was a nice touch, especially outside a hospital. It reminded me of 9/11 without going too far. Very nice attention to detail and I applaud them for handling it tastefully.


Demetri Makes the Point of the Century
I’m just glad that at least one person is thinking rationally enough to point out that people will probably lie about what they saw in their flash. Sure, it makes no sense for people to do so, but we’ve already seen Mark and Wedeck fudge the truth about what they saw. Writing an outlandish future vision for the Mosaic database would be a great way to attract attention to yourself and make you a short-term celebrity. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some people in on The Flash to do just that to help cover things up and lead the FBI down the wrong track for a little while. Mark seems very able to convince people he is right about all this but I’m glad some people aren’t putting the blinders on.


Can You Hear Me Now?
The allure of Suspect Zero fell an awful lot between episodes, which surprised me. I was expecting him to be the focus and he wasn’t. In fact, he was playing second fiddle to “D. Gibbons” this week. Given the fact that watching the footage over and over for three days wouldn’t likely yield much, I can understand why the buzz over S-Z had died down at LA FBI.

If it hadn’t been for that last bit at the end, I would have likely complained about no attempted progress on S-Z. Then again, not sharing the information with anyone probably didn’t help their progress any. Connecting “D. Gibbons” to S-Z did two things- First, it legitimized everything they had done during the episode. Second, it re-energized the whole S-Z plot. What’s better than one person awake during The Flash? Two people awake during The Flash. We now have a connection between the only two people currently known to be conscious during The Flash and if we can discover one more person awake at the time it will officially become conspiracy theory time.


Beware the Ides of March OR Sounds Like a Case of the Mondays!
I was pleasantly surprised to make some headway on Demetri’s lack of a vision during The Flash. I was expecting them to drag that thread out for a few more weeks before getting anywhere. Yet here we are- the second episode of the series and we’re told that Demetri will in fact die before April 29. This raises several key questions though, which you can find in the “20 Questions” section.

Demetri is said to be murdered on March 15, 2010. Not only is this 6 days after my birthday, but it’s also the Ides of March and a Monday. You have to love the allusion to Julius Caesar here. We’ve been given a date that seems credible and this should help make Demetri more interesting. Some very interesting things have occurred on March 15 throughout history, which make me wonder if the date itself is going to be significant beyond Demetri’s purported demise.

Pay No Attention to Those Soldiers on the Corner!
I complained about the premier’s quick dismissal of the destruction and confusion caused by The Flash and argued that the cleanup would take several days. The fact that martial law seems to have been established and the military has checkpoints around the city for added security doesn’t really surprise me. What bothered me is how easily it’s there.

Nobody even mentions the fact that the military is helping to keep the peace. No one in the hospital, no one in Mark’s AA meeting, not even anyone at the FBI. Instead, they are just there. We have no way of adjusting to their presence easily. While it makes sense that they are there, it’s jarringly odd to see our characters so used to it already. If martial law and military checkpoints were to pop up in a major city, I can guarantee you that there would be factions of people leery of their new peace keepers. There might even be skirmishes between the military and the kinds of rights groups and anarchists you see protesting political conventions and world economic summits.

I’m okay with the checkpoints- let that be clear. But one or more of the characters should have addressed their presence in order to make it easier for the audience to grasp.


We Don't Need No Water, Let the Mother %*&@#& Burn!
Maybe I just haven’t lived through enough disasters in my lifetime but it didn’t look right to have buildings still smoldering three days later. It might be possible but I have a hard time believing that there would be that much smoldering wreckage left.


Like a Belt
The Deputy Secretary buckled way too easily on things. She came in asking the tough questions but after seeing the footage of Suspect Zero, she was putty in their hands. That was just too easy.


Didn’t You Get the Memo?
If there was one fatal error to this episode (and it certainly extends to the series as a whole so far) it’s the lack of communication the LA FBI seems to engage in. I really hope that the real FBI isn’t this irresponsible. Do you really expect me to just sit here and believe that a branch of the FBI would keep all this information to themselves?

I don’t really know which is a worse scenario- that only one small portion of our intelligence operations would discover the footage of Suspect Zero or that they would wait three days to bother telling anybody it, even then only when they had to. They barely covered their butts by having the Deputy Secretary join the show. But to go so far as to imply that the LA FBI wouldn’t share the Suspect Zero footage with the rest of the FBI, CIA, Interpol and any other reasonable outfit is just laughably poor.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. If one guy is walking around during The Flash in Detroit, maybe all these other agencies and international governments could check the video cameras they have access to and see if they have a Walkin’ Dude of their own on the loose. The whole scenario smacks of lousy writing and a lack of proper thinking about the story you’re trying to tell. This killed the episode for me outright.


The Entire Stakeout Sequence
This is another fatal flaw that can’t be excused. The sheriff said that there were dozens of troops/officers at the ready to help with the stakeout on “D. Gibbons” and yet, after the initial stakeout is a bust, neither Mark, Demetri nor the sheriff think of calling all those men back to help investigate the doll factory? I understand that it’s more entertaining to have a handful of good guys walk into the dark and spooky lair of the bad guy but there was zero practicality in any of it. Those other men had been right beside them just a few minutes before. It’s not like it would take much to call them back.

As for the booby trap/alarm that Mystery Man set for them? There’s no reason for them to have missed it. If we could see it in the dark on our TV screens, then Mark should have been able to see it too. It was right there and shame on him for not being more careful about ascending the stairs to Mystery Man’s hideout. If you’re not going to check each and every step you take, then you deserve to get shot at and nearly blown up. This is all very basic stuff and they failed miserably at it.

I really hope that the writers and producers see these huge mistakes and do their best to make sure that these sorts of things don’t happen each week. It may be fiction, but it’s fiction that is rooted in reality. Please try to keep it real.

I just want to point out that items falling under the Uh…gly category don’t necessarily mean they are negative. Some of you seem to have interpreted it that way. They are simply things that make me think and the titling is basically a way to incorporate the name of one of my favorite movies into my work. . Now then, on with the show!


The Opening Shot
That long zoom-in from space was odd. Is there something to it or was it just a case of the show makers showing off their SFX budget? They could have just as easily skipped right to flying over LA. It’s not really a burning question of mine but I’m keeping it in the back of my mind. Perhaps they are just trying to keep people guessing as to the cause of The Flash. A cosmic anomaly is still very much in play.


Kids Playing “Blackout”
I can’t rightfully call this bad but I found it to be in poor taste. Blame it on the kids I guess. Children can be cruel and have weird ways of coping with tragedy. Even still, it just seemed very odd. The principal even brushed it off and said it was the same kind of role-playing that was exhibited post-9/11 and post-Katrina. I found this odd because I had never heard of school children playing “terrorist attack” or “Hurricane refugee” in the school yard before. Part of me was relieved that the kids were just playing because the first thing I thought when I saw them laying on the ground was “Wow, that looks terribly fake.” Was Charlie really the only kid that saw something scary and bad in her future? I find this hard to believe.


The Normalcy of it All
I can chalk this one up to my mind simply trying to make too much out of what has happened. At first it seems very odd and almost wrong that everyone has gone back to their day-to-day activities. Businesses are running, schools are open, society remains intact. But when you think about it, it really does make sense. Yes, planes and cars have crashed, likely causing millions of injuries and deaths. But aside from this, virtually nothing has changed.

My mind wants me to believe that a major cataclysm has occurred but that simply is not true. The only thing that has happened is that everyone saw a glimpse of the future. Seeing that glimpse caused some devastation but it didn’t fundamentally alter society the way a nuclear attack or a natural disaster would. I think I am still adjusting to this disaster-without-a-disaster concept still.


Can a Person Really Drown in a Urinal?
No joke. I’m really curious as to whether or not this could happen. All the same, the guy couldn’t possibly have been standing at the urinal when it happened. You just don’t fall like that- I know from experience (just being in a hospital is enough to make me dizzy). He had to have been approaching it but that doesn’t really matter.


Are All Those Gadgets Real?
Seriously, the FBI is loaded with lots of slick, fast-acting toys. Do such devices really exist and can a database really be searched that quickly? This is me being technical and picky but their equipment really allows them to stay on top of things. It’s almost too good to be true.


What’s in a Name?
Did you catch the stats on D. Gibbons? There are 4,000 of them in the US and of that number, a total of 1,000 have criminal records. That means 25% of all people named D. Gibbons have been up to no good. Anyone else think that seems high?

Some questions have already been answered, which is kind of nice. Some questions still linger though. Eventually, some questions are going to have to be put on the back burner so I have room for the latest ones. Click on the button to see the questions that have already been answered.



THE LEFTOVERS:

1. What’s up with Bryce?
I’m still eager to learn what he saw in his future that has filled him with so much hope. It can’t simply be the fact that he is alive.

2. What’s up with the kangaroo?
I read that we may see it again, so this question is still on my list.

3. Is Aaron’s daughter really alive?
Still very significant and still on my list.

4. Did everyone see the same future?
So far this seems to be the case but I haven’t seen anything definitive enough to consider this question answered.

5. Why did some people see nothing during their flash?
We now know that at least some of the people saw nothing because they will be dead on April 29, 2010. But that doesn’t mean all of them will be dead. Still not definitive and still very important.

6. Can the future be changed?
Some argue that the future is always in flux. Others will argue that the fact that people saw the future they did means that that is the future that is going to happen. For the latter, this opens the door to the argument that the future people saw has already happened. This would make sense, as Mark only put items on the corkboard because he saw it in his future. If you believe in time travel then you know that the paradox of time travel or (in this case) seeing your future is that your future self has already done this simply because you are currently doing it in your present. This means that Mark has always put those items on the corkboard because he has always seen them there in the future. This gets into some pretty weighty theoretical physics but it’s not true time travel, so there may actually be ways to work around it.

7. Will peoples’ knowledge of the future cause it to come true?
The jury is still out on this one. The simple fact that they know something will happen doesn’t automatically mean it will happen (if you believe the future can be changed). But Mark’s knowledge of his wife being with another man still might tear him up along with obsessing over his own vision of the future, thereby leading him to drink and thereby causing his marriage to implode.

8. Will any of those items that Mark saw on the corkboard be useless?
I really hope so. If everything works out perfectly and with a purpose I’ll feel slightly cheated. The law of averages should be in my favor on this one.

9. What’s the deal with Suspect Zero?
I’m bundling all of my questions about him into one overarching question for now. Who is he? How is he connected to The Flash? Why didn’t he pass out with everyone else? Why didn’t he try to fit in at the ball field?

10. Can/will the FBI keep Suspect Zero a secret?
So far the LA FBI has managed to keep the video of Suspect Zero from their own people, which is dumb to no end. The question is whether or not they will be able to keep the rest of the world from finding out about him. This sort of thing could create a lot of panic and fear in the populace.


HOT OFF THE GRILL:

11. When will Janis finally get a life?
It seems like she’s always at work early and never leaves until the wee hours of the morning. Does she live there? For crying out loud, no wonder she doesn’t have a boyfriend! The fact that she’s going to get pregnant means she is going to find a guy. I can’t wait to find out how.

12. How does Dylan know Olivia?
She didn’t see him in her flashforward, which likely means that he didn’t see her in his flashforward. I’m going to go back and see if anyone mentioned her name during the scene where Dylan was being brought into the hospital. If he is autistic, it’s possible that he is the kind of autistic child that has terrific memory but social and emotional awkwardness. If this is not the case then it must have something to do with what he saw during his flashforward. While it seems minor on the surface, this could be quite interesting.

13. What else did Charlie see in her flashforward?
We got the barest of details this week. Something in her flashforward involves “D. Gibbons” and from what she saw, she was able to gather that he is a bad man. So what the heck did she see?

14. Who is this mysterious “D. Gibbons” and what is their story?
This opens up a subset of questions similar to Suspect Zero. Who is he? How is he connected to The Flash? How did he avoid it? Was he spotted by any cameras? Why was he calling Suspect Zero?

15. Do Suspect Zero and “D. Gibbons” have any knowledge of future events?
Suspect Zero clearly wasn’t surprised that everyone around him passed out so he was expecting The Flash. But did he know what was going to happen to everyone? I mean, they know what caused The Flash. They have to. Did they know that what they were doing was going to do what it did? Furthermore, do they have any advance knowledge of the future? Or are they all one step behind the rest of the world now because they didn’t catch a glimpse of the future? If The Flash was for nefarious purposes, it almost doesn’t make sense to do what they did if they knew that everyone would get zapped into the future for a moment. It’s not quite Pandora’s Box but it’s close.

16. Was The Flash scheduled?
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. But I have to ask what it was scheduled around. Take a look at a time zone map. At 11:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, it’s 7:00 p.m. in London, 10:00 p.m. in Moscow, midnight in India. The only place on the globe where it’s an awkward time is in East Asia. It would be 3:00 a.m. in China and Western Australia. In Eastern Australia, it would be 5:00 a.m., which isn’t an unreasonable hour for some people to wake up and start their day. So at the exact moment of The Flash, most of the world is awake or could conceivably be awake. Was this by design? Were they trying to maximize the amount of damage done during The Flash? Learning the purpose of the timing will be interesting.



17. Who is Demetri’s mystery caller?
I couldn’t really get a sense of where she was but her accent got me thinking. It sounded like it could be French. Maybe that’s important and maybe it isn’t. What is important is who she is and whether her information is legit. The possibility exists that she is lying to Demetri in order to set him on a wild goose chase. Or perhaps she is the one who is going to kill him. She might be lying about reading it in a briefing. If she was in on The Flash then it doesn’t make much sense for her to have had a flashforward. If she didn’t pass out and is in on it though, then it’s odd that she should know who he is and find out so quickly about his lack of a flashforward. For now it seems too implausible that she’s out to get him so I will remain cautiously optimistic.

18. What is Lloyd’s story?
He didn’t give Olivia a second thought when he first saw her. Olivia has convinced herself that he simply didn’t turn his head enough to see her before her flashforward ended. Perhaps he didn’t recognize her because he didn’t flash. That best explains his ambivalence toward her for me.

If this is true then, how is he connected to whoever it was that caused The Flash. I believe he was mentioned to be a physics professor, so perhaps he’s in on the science of it all. But, if he did have a flashforward then his calmness is all-too-odd for me.

19. Will Charlie make her father another friendship bracelet?
If not, then it will guarantee that the future can be changed. If she does make him a new bracelet, then it opens the door to the lovely debate over course correction. Will the future as they saw it find a way to come true no matter how hard they try to fight against it? I’d be willing to bet that little Charlie makes a new one and that it will screw with Mark’s head even more.

20. Is there any symbolism in the white chess queen, the Ides of March or the Beilby Porteus quote?
I’m cheating a little here to get all my questions in. Sue me.

Regarding the chess piece- it totally explained the title of the episode. “White to Play” makes no sense to me outside of chess. The game always begins with the white piece making its move first. Could the white and black pieces of a chess board be symbolic of the struggle between Mark & the FBI and “D. Gibbons’” people? I’m going to assume that Mark represents the white, making him the good guy. Does this mean that white made its play by busting in on “Gibbons’” hideout? Or does white now have the first move now that the players have met each other?

The Ides of March is the date on which Demetri is said to die. Is this merely an allusion to Julius Caesar or is March 15, 2010 going to be a pivotal date in all this? It’s obviously pivotal to Demetri but I’m trying to think bigger.

Now for Beilby Porteus. “D. Gibbons” utters a line before making everything go kaboom. He says “He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.” This is obviously a very appropriate quote because, if the future is going to happen the way it was seen, everyone who saw bad things in their future will have experienced it twice by the time the future becomes the present. But is there more meaning to it?

The quote was originally stated by Beilby Porteus. All I can find on the man is that he was an Anglican priest back in the 18th and early 19th Century. Nothing that I could find was illuminating nor did anything seem to click with the tone and message of the show. Maybe I’m grasping at straws and am just used to lines like this having some kind of deeper and more important meaning.

This was a very flawed episode. The FBI agents did not act like intelligent detectives at all and withholding information about Suspect Zero is absolutely inexcusable. These two things broke my ability to suspend disbelief, so I was watching this episode from a distance. FlashForward is not a show that you can turn your brain off while watching but that’s exactly what was needed to get past these fatal errors and some of the other goofs from the premiere.

I’m still enjoying the show from an entertainment perspective. I’m not demanding that they do everything by the book, because that would be rather boring and predictable. A little common sense would be nice though. It’s still very early in the series and there’s plenty of potential for success and improvement. As long as the writers and producers realize they have made some glaring errors early on, I am sure that they can prevent these sorts of things from becoming a regular occurance.

“White to Play” was okay. It was almost too much like the premiere, in that most of the juiciest stuff happened right at the end of the episode. The search for “D. Gibbons” yielded some very interesting clues and added another picture to the corkboard. We still haven’t gotten much character development and we’re still not familiar enough with all of our main players yet.

But, it’s only the second episode. As far as information goes, we’ve been handed a surprising amount already. Character development has to be taken slowly and we’ve probably met most of the major players. The show still hasn’t hit its stride yet, which should give us all something to look forward to.

Episode Rating: 5 out of 10

Season 1 Average: 6 out of 10

Okay, I said I was going to stay away from theories for a while but I want to share three thoughts with you all. I haven’t made my rounds through the FlshForward forums and I haven’t read any episode recaps, so these ideas may already be out there. If they’re not, then I will gladly lay claim to them. :-p

1) Bryce Is Janis’ Baby Daddy
Yes, I’m still hung up over what Bryce saw in his flashforward. I refuse to believe that he just saw that he was alive and that has him all positive. There has to be something more. What makes life more worth living than knowing you will have a child? It gives your life meaning and purpose, which is what Bryce keeps exuding every time he’s asked about his vision.

It’s also not impossible either. We’ve seen brief glimpses of Janis’ vision. She’s getting a sonogram and we never see the whole room. It could be that Bryce is sitting out of view the whole time, finding out the sex of his child. Also, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that they could get together. Both are single. Bryce works with Olivia; Janis works with Mark. Maybe something will happen where Janis and Mark have to go to the hospital and she bumps into Bryce. I don’t know how it would happen but it’s certainly not that big of a stretch.


2) Lloyd’s Phone-A-Friend
Olivia has convinced herself that Lloyd just didn’t turn around enough to see her during her flashforward. I’m not convinced. I think that he didn’t recognize her because he was awake during The Flash. This means that he is in on whatever it is that’s going on.

In Olivia’s flashforward, Lloyd gets out of bed and says he needs to make a phone call. We know that another Flash is going to occur at the end of the season and that Season 1 is leading us up to April 29, 2010. Suspect Zero was making calls in the minutes leading up to The Flash. This leads me to believe that the phone call Lloyd is making on April 29, 2010 is to his associates regarding preparations for the next Flash. Perhaps the next Flash will come right after everyone lives though the moment they saw in the original Flash.


3) It’s All in Dylan’s Head!
No, not really but I couldn’t help myself from making this tongue-in-cheek reference.