FlashForward: Field Trip!

I hope you all got your permission slips signed.We open on sweeping views of the uh, exotic Somalian landscape as our bold FBI team comes sweeping in riding on a chopper. Hey, starting out in Somalia? This is going to be a good one! Also, these first few minutes really remind me of the Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains intro.

So their Somali translator is practicing with them and asks what they saw in their flashforwards. Janis doesn’t want to launch into her sonogram story so she just tells the guy that she was baking bread, and Demetri doesn’t want to talk about how he’s actually going to be dead so he just says he was water skiing. For me, those actually turn out to be the same things. Also, I like that it’s pretty much acknowledged that lying about flashforwards is acceptable. I imagine it’s like when you see someone you sort of know on the bus and they ask how your day was and even though you’re having problems at work and your personal life is about as alive as the villainous Flosso and the only thing giving you the willpower to get on the bus instead of simply standing in front of it is the bottle of tequila that you have waiting at home in the secret mini fridge that not even your roommates know about, you just go ahead and say “fine.”

ANYWAYS.

Simon immediately asks for a gun upon landing because he’s expecting a Hillary in ’96 type landing, but Vogel won’t give someone in an advisor role that kind of fire power. I smell FORESHADOWING.

Back in the States, Mark is showing FBI Director a picture of a hydra, the next random-ass clue that the producers have decided he should investigate. He also picks now to fill the Director in on Dyson Frost (D. Gibbons), who apparently has been living in Twin Peaks reruns. He majored in lots of crazy science stuff and Victorian Literature, turned into a chess grandmaster, and only spoke to his kids in French even though they lived in Wyoming. God, as if it wasn’t awful enough just to live in Wyoming.

Dyson Frost is supposed to be dead, but because he blew up on a boat that was named for a guy that drew pictures of monsters, it’s decided he’s probably still alive. Well, heck, that’s good enough for me.

Over in Somalia, the expedition has been cut tragically short by some guys with guns. I know, color me shocked. They ask the translator to let Shooty McGee that they’re just aid workers, which also shockingly fails to work. Oh, and the translator dies, but the rules of sci-fi say that since we just met him five minutes ago this is not tragic.

So the members of fake Red Panda (soon to be DEAD Panda! Hi-oh!) are ushered into some death shack and told that they can speak English because the crazy pirates learned it just in case they were ever visited by an FBI team. Unfortunately, Simon’s fame proceeds him and Mr. Unpronounceable accuses them all of coming here for something other than humanitarian aid. Turns out that this is that cute little boy from like Episode 3 when we first saw the towers, which were apparently built as alleged power plants. But then everyone in his village died.

The guy (who really should say his name slower and more often if he wants it mentioned in the recap) demands to know their true purpose is and marches away.

Bryce is throwing up. Wasn’t he doing this like ten episodes ago? I distinctly remember making hang-over jokes. Oh, wait, the cancer. He only has like one distinguishing feature, you would think I could remember it. Anyways, he runs into Nicole in the hallway and she reluctantly admits she’s taking premed classes.

“I’m trying to develop a character, goddamnit.”

So then there’s some filler about their names and her being a doctor and blah blah blah and then thank God we’re back to Somalia.

Agent Vogel calls Demetri out for basically being a sissy because he knows he’s going to die and then they start fighting and my hunch is that they’re pulling the same stunt that Tim Allen and Alan Rickman did in Galaxy Quest.

And sure enough that was the master plan, so now the team has a supply of rifles. Demetri is excited to capture and interrogate their leader, or at least throw him in jail for six months and then let his fiance agree to legally defend him.

They manage to make it to the chopper, but then they accidentally shoot a guy holding a rocket launcher (!) and the whole building explodes and crazy leader man shows up with an armored machine gun car and kills all his men for failing him. He’s awfully flippant with resources for a pirate in the middle of the Somali desert.

Mark arrives home and Dr. Olivia again wants him to consider moving to Denver, because they could both get good jobs and not be hunted down or have affairs. Then they both suddenly remember that they have a daughter (I know! I forgot too!) and Mark says it’s suddenly really important to know what was in her flashforward. They both set out on a quest to locate Charlie, which might be tough because I don’t think she’s been featured in almost ten episodes.

Mr. Pirate wants to play politics and tells the team that America sucks for not stopping malnutrition, but Janis is just dorky enough to know the actual aid figures and tells him that it’s all stolen by pirates like him. Day-um straight, girl! USA! USA!

He threatens some red shirt and finds out that they’re CIA here to investigate the tower, and Demetri tells them it has to do with the Black-Out. There’s a really awkward moment where the team is like, dude, maybe those people in your village were just flashforwarding and not dead and you shouldn’t have run away and turned into an insane pirate, but he counters by telling us that the giant-ass camel he saw was a symbol of death. Can’t argue with that, I guess. Then there’s his mini life story and a summary of his flashforward in which he was addressing the world, fighting for the “better angels” and as the new face of Somalia. Because I guess you definitely want the face of your country to be pretty much everything people already stereotype it as.

Now Mr. Pirate demands planes and tanks and boats (oh my!) and shoots that guy we never met. Huh.

Agent Vogel says that obviously they can’t meet their demands, so what’s left? But this little powwow is cut short by the Big Man himself storming back in (do you love how I’ve continued to avoid butchering his name?) and wanting to shoot some more people. Survey says Simon, but Janis interrupts him by saying that the guys flashforward was wrong. So he drags her outside and into a pretty nice office, where she gives him a many history lesson.

Something something something Abraham Lincoln, and Janis says that the “better angels” was from his inaugural address. She logs him on to Mosaic and shows him other people who say that they were at the African Peace Conference and saw him speaking and he was wearing a necklace that belonged to his mother, and also he was quoting Lincoln. So no tanks or guns because you’re actually really peaceful, jerk.

There’s some random little girl with Dr.- oh wait a minute, it’s Charlie. Olivia uses a reference to that weird children’s show and asks Charlie for what she saw in her flashforward. It turns out that Dylan wrote “D. Gibbons is a bad man” on the fridge, and then weird guys in the backyard said that Mark was dead! Oh noes!

Mark is filled in on the vision, but says it’s illogical. Olivia uses this as fuel for her pro-Denver campaign, but Mark wants to stay. The tension, it’s thick. Mark says he needs to stop the next Black-Out and Olivia walks away sullenly. If only there was another man that could comfort her…

So now in Somalia the angry pirate is their best friend and walks the team to the tower. And he’s never been inside. It’s an EVIL place! But now it’s DESTINY! And as many other one-liners as you can think of. It’s tower time!

There’s more talk about how Simon thought of this design but it was inexplicably stolen from him. And then they find a chess board! Jinkies, gang! So Demetri plays a creepy-looking video tape that he got from under the board and finds interviews with people that Somali Pirate knew from the village. They all say that what they saw in their visions came true. Oh, and there’s his mom. She says something ironic about her son becoming great.

The video ends with D. Gibbons rocking a 90′s hairstyle and talking about the power of the flashforwards, and then Simon finds a creepy tunnel and they all take their flashlights and rush down there ridiculously fast. NO, SIMON! Did you learn NOTHING from your time on Lost??

Down in the depths they find science-y stuff, and Simon says this is what released the tachian (sp?) burst that served as a beta test for the Black-Out. So there was a mini-Black Out back in the 90′s! Then Agent Vogel calls them all over to a room filled with skeletons.

Vogel channels his inner Emily Deschanel and tells us that these people were all executed by firearm, and I think Janis puts it best and most ridiculously when she says that “they showed them tomorrow and ripped it away.” Then Somali Pirate finds his mom and takes the necklace from her bony neck (which I think we were all waiting for) and now he’s ready to start killing people again. ANAKIN SKYWALKER TIME. Oh, except Agent Vogel shoots him before he can kill Simon. THE FUTURE HAS BEEN CHANGED! IT’S HAL ALL OVER AGAIN!

Back in America, Olivia again insists that they leave: check yes or no, Mark. Mark continues to refuse and Olivia says that this has got to be how their split happens, so he’s in effect choosing for them to be apart. She asks him again, yes or no, and the camera dramatically pans away.

Demetri and Janis are drinking rum and eating chips that they got from the pirates that were trying to kill them, like, five minutes ago (because apparently now that they’ve killed the crazy leader, they’re Gods to the lowly Somali) and Janis mourns the loss of Willa, the fake baby she can’t have anymore. If she was really going to name it Willa, it’s just as well.

Janis keeps talking about how this was her last chance, and FlashForward fans everywhere begin to root for/recoil in horror at a possible Demetri/Janis pairing (“Danis”). He sort of offers to put a baby in her, and she calls it disgusting (hehe) and cites Zoe. But he just gets all mopey that he’s going to be dead soon and says it would be nice if she had a daughter AND THEN THE MUSIC GETS REALLY SLOW AND SAD AND OH MY GOD THEY’RE GOING TO DO IT.

Outside, Simon is polishing a gun menacingly and he and Vogel are exchanging friendly banter about strangulation and finger amputation when we finally get Vogel’s flashforward, in which we learn that he was one of then men that Charlie overheard reporting Mark’s death. Which means Charlie was even useless in this instance.

Oh, God, the hospital. Nicole wants to be a doctor and Bryce gives her a calculator that he once owned and DEAR GOD I’M READY TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL. Bryce and Nicole are stuck in the scene that will not end until Bryce says something vague about not being around. Is that because of the cancer or the Japanese girl? If only I cared.

Demetri is all on edge in Somalia, and we viewers are scrutinizing closely for an afterglow. The the D. Gibbons videotape starts TALKING TO DEMETRI even though it was recorded in 1991! !!!

So, did they make a baby? And what’s the deal with the tape? And is anyone else anywhere near as annoyed with Bryce and Nicole as I am?