Events from last week’s episode had left me pondering whether “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” would give us our first set of answers to some of the show’s mysteries. After all, if Agent Janis were to die from the gunshot wound she received we would know that the events people saw in their flashforward are not set in stone.
Throughout this episode the writers tease us with the question of what will happen to Janis, reversing her condition on several occasions before reaching its conclusion. Those hoping for answers in this episode however will be disappointed as instead of reaching a firm conclusion the writers devise a situation in which the future appears unlikely to occur but yet acknowledges that it is still a possibility. Ultimately it feels like more of a manipulative trick on their part than if the character had just lived and recovered.
Operating on Janis is Mark’s wife, Olivia, who begins the episode concerned about her husband. She has left messages on his cell phone but has yet to receive a reply. Unaware that he was also attacked in the events of the last episode, Olivia worries that he may be drinking again having learned that he was drunk in his flashforward from an anonymous tipster.
She discovers early on that her suspicions were wrong but it foreshadows the conflict that is central to this episode; that neither she nor her husband trusts each other as a result of their flashforwards.
This conflict comes to the surface when Lloyd’s son walks into their house, remembering the address from his flashforward. When Lloyd arrives to take the boy home he realizes that he is stood in the living room he saw in his own vision. Simultaneously Mark realizes that this is the man Olivia said she was sleeping with in her vision and becomes angry, telling the man to never come back to his home and accusing Olivia of lying to him.
In these early episodes, the exploration of how knowing the future can cause devastation to people’s lives has been the show’s most effective theme. It is the aspect of the show that is easiest to connect to for an audience, as it is easy to imagine how disruptive knowing your own future would be.
The scenes between Olivia and Mark are reasonably effective here but are perhaps not quite as strong as they could be. Besides some limited interaction between Mark and his daughter, we have rarely seen them as a family unit. Without that sense of what they have to lose, the scenes do not feel as tragic as they ought to. Nor is there shock at their marriage crumbling away when it has appeared unstable since the very first episode.
Demetri’s storyline has been more effective because he was happy and carefree before the flashforward happened (or rather, in his case, didn’t happen). We heard him talking about his upcoming wedding and we’ve seen that he had plans for his future. It is easy to understand how finding out that he will soon be dead would change him.
In this episode he decides to investigate the attack on Janis with Agent Gough rather than resting and recuperating after their own attack. Finding a tattoo on her assailant’s body that becomes visible under ultraviolet light, he makes a connection to an item on the investigation board Mark put together and the adjacent index card with ‘Baltimore’ written on it.
Demetri thinks there may be some link between these two clues, believing that Baltimore must either refer to Baltimore Street in Los Angeles or the city of Baltimore in Maryland. The pair chooses to investigate Baltimore Street first as the nearer option, discovering blue hand insignias that lead them to find a body in an abandoned house.
Although the discovery sheds relatively little light on the ongoing storyline right now it does point to the start of a new investigation. It also provides some of the episode’s more memorable imagery, particularly that of a corpse with a painted blue hand lying under some blood-soaked sheets. Expect to see more about this in the next few episodes.
This episode also gave us our first extended look at the character of Simon (Dominic Monaghan) who, two episodes earlier, we saw calling Lloyd to gloat about how they were responsible for the flashforward. Back then I complained about how the line felt cheesy and unnatural, clearly being designed as an end of episode twist to surprise an audience rather than emulating how a real human being would talk.
Unfortunately while he gets more screen time here, the character still seems to be acting to influence an audience rather than because it makes sense for him to do so. For instance, at the start of the episode he chats up a woman on a train, explaining the theory of quantum superpositions to lead into the line “alive or dead – decide for yourself” as the opening sequence begins.
Monaghan clearly is having some fun with the character and I admit the cheesiness of this scene in the train is quite enjoyable, but it is also a reminder of FlashForward’s greatest failing. Too often the show’s characters seem more like tools to move the plot forward rather than people we should empathize with and invest in.
While it is frustrating how slowly FlashForward moves its story on, I have little worry that it will be able to provide plot twists and revelations. To my mind the series’ most serious problems remain in its weak character development.
I was pleased with last week’s episode largely because it started to address some of these issues, fleshing out several characters. Unfortunately “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” turns out to be a frustrating sidestep for the show, seeming more concerned with filling time than by making us care for its characters.
– Aidan Brack
