TV RECAP: ‘FlashForward – Black Swan’

This week’s episode opens on the day of the FlashForward in a park, with some weird-ass Bjork playing over the background. In this opening you witness everyone pass out, some planes explode and a bus drive into a pond.  In the bus, the blacked out people are drowning except for one guy who rescues a blonde.

And now this guy, Ned, is at the hospital being interviewed for some internal bruising by Dr. Olivia Benford and her resident surgeon Bryce who before the blackout was trying to kill himself. Bryce asks what Ned saw in his flash forward which was seeing himself as a black man, which is pretty strange considering Ned is about as white as Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock.

Cut to back at the Benford house where Joseph Fiennes does some Dad-humor with an egg that I didn’t really understand and Olivia makes a crack about him not exactly being the Shakespeare of Dad-humor. Considering his role as Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, this was a little cringe-worthy.

Nicole (Peyton List), the Benford’s babysitter, is at the park with Mark (Fiennes) sponsor who saw his daughter alive and she was telling him her flash forward and she was being drown by someone.  So she spends the episode thinking that she has to atone for something that she did, because she feels like she deserves to die in her flash forward. She goes to some priest who likes crickets to volunteer but he acts in a non-priestly way pushing her away to some volunteer coordinator, and giving her a lame t-shirt. Not very priestly of him.

Much of what happens with the FBI this week is a total wash.  Fiennes makes his case to go to Somalia to find out about the mass black out the evil German nazi guy hinted at in the last episode but gets shot down, because the CIA blocked the FBI on investigating further.  Demetri (John Cho) which is a weird name for a Korean, I say, interviews the blonde terrorist Alda (she was being tailed by he and Mark at the time of the flash forward to get a lead).

She hears something about how he’s going to die because everyone is talking about it in the office, and sends Cho and Fiennes off on some wild goose chase to Indio, California where they chase some pot dealer through a trailer park that inevitably gets the dealer body slammed into a kiddie pool. Is it just me or does every foot chase in trailer parks lead to the guy being chased getting form tackled into a kiddie pool?

Back at the FBI, Fiennes interrogates Alda and they go off about some Suffi parables and Black Swans. She analogizes that Benford isn’t asking the right questions about the black outs, most of the questions he’s asking is finding out what caused them, but she says the most important question is why.  And that he’s some lost boy in the dark.  Not too over the top.  Regardless, Mark talks to some guy in his office that knows a hacker to hack into the CIA mainframe to get the info on Somalia.

Meanwhile, while Olivia is busy trying to avoid Simco (Jack Davenport), who she sees in her flash forward as the man she’s with rather than with Fiennes.  She tries getting his kid, Dylan, into physical therapy but some doctor jargon about white blood cells caused me to nap for a moment and the kid and Simco are back under Olivia’s auspices. Regardless, she spends alot of the episode snapping at Bryce about focusing on Ned’s flash forward and why his pigment changed. Bryce’s fixation though saves Ned’s life when they operate on him.

He has Addison’s Disease which causes his pigment to change, and also creates an adverse reaction to normally high tension moments and is very dangerous during surgery.  The disease explains why he was so calm during the bus accident.

At the end though, Nicole tells Mark about her drowning flash forward and Mark tells her that he’s going to have an LAPD friend of his come by with a sketch artist to get the face of the guy who was drowning her.  While Simco is entertaining his son he gets a phone call from Dominic Monaghan who says they both are responsible for the world wide black out.

Queue Joss Whedon-style-end of episode-blackout.

This episode was really silly. I mean the jazz saxophone playing while they chase the drug dealer dealing pot out of a yellow cake uranium case, was kind of, silly. The rest of the episode was just kind of stuff that I didn’t really care about, but by far this was the worst episode yet this season, but you know, not every episode can be a gem.