I never usually watch commercials for upcoming episodes for shows I watch. There's not a lot of subtlety rampant on television. Despite these things, I accidentally watched the ad for this week's FlashForward, and rued the day I requested to cover this show for this site. But like a nondescript shoebox at the top of a father's closet, dull packaging can sometimes conceal surprising things.
This is probably the most mature episode of FlashForward yet, which doesn't make it the most interesting, or the most exciting, but it definitely averages out better than many previous episodes. Information is parceled out with excellent timing, and is usually only stated once, instead of ad nauseum. There's a major A story that only drifts into a B story when needed, and doesn't even bother with a C story, just some C details. The thing I don't get is that this episode is placed the week before Thanksgiving pre-empts things, and doesn't end with a bang, so there's no reason to eagerly await the next one. Truth be told, I'll be enjoying this week off. But I digress.
It took me too long to get used to the subdued tone of this episode, but I really should have gotten it right out the gate. The opening sequence is a pretty solid start, both story-wise, and in its visual themes. We see the differing stories of both Dr. Bryce (who finally does more than oppose Dr. Benford), and the Asian lovey-dove from his flash forward. Starting a month before the blackout, we find out Bryce suffers from a late stage of cancer, and is undergoing chemotherapy. This does worlds for my opinion of the guy, whose suicide attempt never had legs before now. Through spliced scenes, we meet Keiko, a free-spirited robotics engineer in need of a job ranked high enough to please her buzzkill mother. This show was in definite need of a character who isn't so self-important, and Keiko is definitely that. Then we get a rehash of Bryce's walk down suicide alley, and when he blacks out, we get a full flash forward segment, but only bits and pieces of Keiko's, a clever editing move. (Otherwise, the show would have been pretty short.) Essentially, the episode follows the two as they act and react to those around them. Bryce, when not needlessly adding extra hair-lines to his way-too-numerous drawings of Keiko, admits his (year-long) illness to Dr. Bedford, whose concern is rather convincing. She tells him to take a flight to see a specialist in Houston, TX, which he of course ignores, and obviously flies to Tokyo to look for his soul mate.
Let me set something straight here: I don't believe in soul mates. I've been happily in love with the same girl for many, many years, but if this love was something I had felt for only two and a half minutes while passed out on a pier after wanting to kill myself, I probably would not loosely pick up a foreign language and fly across the world on the off-chance of finding said lover based on the Sushi restaurant symbol on her T-shirt. I don't really think I would have remembered the shirt symbol anyway. This isn't important, and we know already that the blackouts were caused by experiments of some kind, but everybody's super duper recollect about their flashforwards bothers me, if I assume they were unconscious. I guess if the "experiments" put them in heightened states of awareness or something, I can forgive exceptional character memories. The devoted soul mate founded out of a vision of the future, though, doesn't sit with me, perhaps because it's an emotion rather than a specific event. But then I don't have cancer, so I don't know what my limits are.
Anyway, Keiko's new job is less than impressive. That she is the only female relegates her to schlepping coffee and tea for the higher execs, despite being at the top of her graduating class. This suits her fine though, as she'd rather rock out air guitar to anyone from Woodstock. These details are obvious when told, but explain Keiko's personality better than almost any other character has been explained on the show, and we just met her. The incidentals done with character work on this show are definite steps up, and can hopefully transfer to some of those dull FBI agents. Anyway, to sum this up, Bryce is unsuccessful in finding Keiko in Tokyo (go figure), even being denied by her family, who have also given up on Keiko for leaving her job. So Bryce comes back home empty-handed. But wait a second...Near the end of the episode, we get to see Keiko's full flash forward, and indeed most things match up to Bryce's, except for the small detail of the restaurant actually being in Los Angeles, and not Tokyo at all. Some of these things could be seen coming, but at least the show didn't make a point of building any suspense around this reveal. It came naturally, and coupled with the strong character work, was actually a little sweet.
Our smaller stories could have been left out completely, but I suppose that just wouldn't fly. Aaron and Tracy are having troubles at home, because Tracy drinks herself to sleep, and Aaron can't put up with it. Decent acting in these scenes, even if they're so droll it's almost funny. Mark pops in the middle of this anguish, asking Aaron if he was the one who texted Olivia about Mark being drunk during his flash forward (which Mark obviously found out about). Aaron gets a tad too insulted, and tells Mark he can't be his sponsor anymore, the drama queen. Later on, though, he breaks down to Mark, asking for his friendship. O'Byrne's work as Aaron is too natural for the bullshit written for him to say, but that will help whenever his story becomes more centered.
The other small plotline deals with Noh getting flagged for his unauthorized conversation with the woman putting a date to his eventual death. Wedeck and Benford end up getting a hold of the recording, and after some major detective work (removing all audio except for background noise, which is kind of not possible, unless the frequencies were all different), it's decided the woman was calling from Hong Kong, which is where Benford and Noh will probably end up soon, despite being denied the funds. There is also some handy computer enhancing done to show us the symbol on the ring of the guy who was the only one awake during the blackout, complete with a useless explanation as to why they could enhance the ring but not the guy's face.
I don't predict this being an uphill climb for this show, but rather a singled out victory against rampant plotting. No exciting carrots were dangled in front of our faces, but we got to the end better for it. Hopefully, the L-tryptophan in everybody's turkey doesn't make the next episode a snoozer.
