This week we meet Dominic Monaghan’s character of Simon, but we do not get anything more than a tease on how he and Simco killed 20 million people in their experiment with the blackout. So that mystery is extended, but at least we know who is responsible and how they got it. Also, Mark (Joseph Fiennes) meets the man who will replace him in the bed of his wife (Sonya Walger), and she finds out that Mark was drinking in his flash forward. All this and more in another innocuous episode of Flash Forward.
We open on a train ride coming from somewhere and going to Los Angeles. Here we have Monaghan’s character seducing a woman by explaining quantum physics, achieving something in three minutes the Big Bang Theory has been trying to do for however long that show has been on.
Following the last episode, Agent Janis Hawk survives her gun fight, but in having been wounded in her pelvis will never be allowed to bear children. So, this raises the question of how she will be pregnant come April 29, 2010.
The over coming thread throughout this episode is now that we know the future: will it actually happen? It seems like this episode seems to suggest no, not exactly. With Janis now not being able to give birth, and Simco’s super weird kid trailing the Benford’s super weird kid to their house, causing Simco and Olivia to finally realize their flash forwards was kind of ridiculous but creepy-cool. Creepy cool in a way that The Shining is creepy cool and those two kids are straight up creepy, with their chant over that doll of the Benford’s kid.
The rest of this Halloween episode was focused on Demetri Noh (John Cho) and Agent Gough (Young) they follow up Hawk’s attackers how have some kind of weird blue hand tag that is only visible in ultraviolet light. The device is over-complicated but eventually leads the two agents to bodies in an abandoned house with blue paint on each body’s hand. It must mean the Blue Man Group, after years of being marginalized, have decided to make a new name for themselves.
While this is happening, Simco’s weird kid ends up at the Benford’s where Fiennes and Olivia come to the realization that Simco and Olivia end up together. Fiennes just about throws Simco out hand over body, leading to Olivia begging and pleading with Mark to tell her what’s bothering him. He finally owns up to drinking in his black out, causing a rift.
The show, in it’s sixth episode, really works the line between character driving the story forward and the story driving the character. I guess, you could scream aloud at my bullshit intellectual context, and I wouldn’t blame you, but this is just lingering in the back of my mind. What I mean is when character drives the story forward it means that the principal players are the story, but when its vice versa the story creates the character. Its not necessarily a bad thing, but its not a good thing either.
In this latter idea, the principal players exist mostly to just drive the story forward, and I get the idea that David Goyer and Company are playing dangerously with this idea. I say this because Dominic Monaghan’s appearance, while a pretty cool scene, does very little on a character level he just drives the story forward by doing what he’s already done, continuing to say that he caused the blackout.
And, oh yeah, it seems like he’s killing someone on April 29th, who that was I can’t recall but it seemed like either it was Simco or that doctor that was trying to kill himself.
