Flash Forward: White to Play

Tagged with: flash forward FlashForward

By Lisa Fary
What’s worse than the humiliation of flashforwarding sitting on the toilet while you’re sitting on the toilet? Waking up and having to give mouth-to-mouth to a guy. A guy who was drowning in a urinal. In his own pee.

At least FlashForward has a bit of a sense of humor.

You wouldn’t know it though, considering this ep started out with a little girl in front of a tank. Why, yes, she wore pink and held a stuffed animal.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare in Love is at his morning AA meeting, where the guest speaker is Cameron Frye. His day off with Ferris Bueller did not lead to him being a well-adjusted individual. 23 years later, he’s an angry drunk. An angry drunk with only one line.

At the FBI office, Shakes, New Sulu, and Token Girl fill in the deputy Secretary of Defense in on their website, the Mosaic Collective. They get scolded about spending millions of dollars on the project, but it should be easy enough to fund. Just shave it off of the abstinence only education program. The Mosaic Collective, although a gamble, is a hell of a lot more likely to work.

The Future Team is already filling in the blanks on the Mosaic corkboard, starting with the D. Gibbons card. A pink track suited woman named DeeDee Gibbons arrives, telling about her flashforward: in hers, she’s on the phone, arguing about her identity being stolen and something about pigeons.

I took her cry of “cockadoody pigeon” to be a cutesy, non-obscene expletive. The Future Team determines it’s a place: Pigeon, Utah. There turns out to be a D. Gibbons there using her credit card information.

In Pigeon, New Sulu meets another law enforcement professional who saw nothing during the black out. She’s nonchalant about it; perhaps Sulu had the wrong idea about his lack of vision?

The Pigeon op appears to be a bust until Shakes remembers a photo of a burned up doll on his Mosaic wall. Annnnd, in Pigeon, they’re standing in front of an abandoned doll factory. Inside, it’s just a creepy as you’d expect: dolls hanging from the ceiling, a crazy booby trap, and a man in black, surrounded by CPUs in liquid, speaking a cryptic and unintelligible pronouncement.

Why, yes, he blows the place up.

Oh, and not having a flashforward is tantamount to a red shirt. New Sulu’s non-flashingforwarding buddy got shot dead.

The doll factory guy was doing some heavy duty hacking. GPS, Mosaic, NSA. New Sulu draws a stunning conclusion: he was ruling out possible causes of the black out, the Feds aren’t the only one investigating the flashforwards!

Umm, what? How did you get there, New Sulu? That’s hell of a leap. But, the investigation did reveal that D. Gibbons was awake and on the phone with Suspect Zero during the blackout. Two people make a conspiracy, which the deputy Secretary of Defense finds comforting.

The Future Team also managed the impossible: they saved DeeDee Gibbons’ credit score, rendering her flashforward null and void, and leaving room in the closet for New Sulu to hang up his red shirt.

Or not. Shortly after, he gets a phone call from a woman who says that, in her flashfroward, she was looking at a case file. The case file for New Sulu’s murder.

This ep was far better than the premiere. It kept a steady pace and was equally divided between Shakespeare in Love’s home life and the Mosaic investigation. Although, I don’t care about Shakes’ home life; being a girl, I think I’m supposed to dig that part most of all (it’s a low-fat smoothie of human drama and emotion!), but, nope. Don’t care. Would rather Penny just bang the sad, British widower with the Autistic kid NOW, and get it over with.

You KNOW it’s going to happen. Shakes is going to get all paranoid, which will lead him off the wagon, which will lead to Penny throwing him out, which leads to a naked British man in her living room. That’s how it works. Duh.

Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She’s angry that it’s almost 2010 and she still doesn’t have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram.