FlashForward – Recap & Review – White to Play

photo: abc

FlashForward
White to Play

Original Air Date: Oct 1, 2009

Caitlin- Senior Reviewer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com

Last week’s series premiere started the show off with a bang- literally. This week’s episode starts with a creepy rendition of “Ring Around the Rosie” while a bunch of little kids lie on the ground. Charlie is with them, though, and is still standing. Turns out they’re just playing a game of “blackout”, but she doesn’t want to play and ends up getting in a fight with them and running off. She’s almost hit by a couple cars, and then comes to a halt right in the face of several army vehicles paroling the streets.

Mark is at one of his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and getting annoyed with the other people there. He again talks with his counselor, who’s been maintaining a Zen-like sense of calm through this whole thing. Mark’s FBI boss briefs his crew, trying to pump them up to calm the public down. Afterward, Mark and Olivia head to talk to Charlie’s teacher, who is concerned about her behavior. Mark, who at first comforted Olivia about her vision, is now concerned that his daughter’s unwillingness to talk about what she saw could mean she saw something that made her worried about her family’s future, too.

For now, though, their angst is short-lived. They’re sure they can make it through anything. Meanwhile, the FBI team is explaining their plans to a superior. She doesn’t want to hear them making wild theories, so she might not be too pleased with the whole “mysterious walking guy in Detroit” thing. Olivia takes Charlie into the hospital with her and, to calm her down, starts doing pretend emergency surgery on a toy of hers that got ripped when Charlie was fighting with the kids on the playground.

When we come back, Lloyd, Olivia’s man from her blackout and the father of the boy whose life she saved is trying to talk to her. His wife, the boy’s mother, was killed and he’s now trying to deal with his son’s autism. Mark and Demetri are at work now, and Demetri notices Mark’s bracelet. He sees the fact he’s wearing it as a sign he wants the future to come true, but Mark assures him this isn’t true. They are then informed that a D. Gimmons has come in to talk to them- D. Gimmons being a name Mark saw himself investigating.

Next, a shot of humor. Mark confronts a coworker who said he was a meeting. The coworker was actually on the toilet, saw himself on a toilet, and when he woke up, had to save someone else from drowning in another toilet. But the laughs don’t last long, and as Olivia walks Charlie through the hospital, Charlie panics when she sees the young boy hurt in a bed. She knows Dylan because he was in her blackout.

The agents investigate Ms. Gimmons, but she doesn’t seem to be guilty of much except having issues with a credit card company she saw herself screaming at. They track this lead down to Pigeon, Utah, but before they can follow up, Olivia confronts Mark with what she found out through Charlie. He’s slightly less confident everything will turn out to be okay now, and they start to argue, but soon he has to leave and actually go to a military base in the city of Pigeon.

The female officer who meets him and Demetri tells them she didn’t see anything, either, but she’s not panicked the way Demetri is. The other FBI agents are looking into the guy who was walking around in Detroit, but only know his approximate height and weight. Mark, Demetri, and the officer track down their own leads, which seem to come up blank until they stumble upon an old doll factory. Mark saw a burnt doll, and the place is full of creepy doll parts. And then things get intense. A bunch of dolls hanging from the ceiling seem to start singing the rendition of “Ring Around the Rosie” from the opening scene, and our crew confronts a strange man standing stoic in a side room. They try to talk him down, but he ends up blowing up the building, and the officer gets shot down in the chaos. Maybe she should have been worried, after all.

While she’s wheeled away in a body bag, Demetri shows Mark the mysterious man’s possessions- a cell phone and an oversized chess piece. Olivia speaks again with Lloyd, who has to go tell his son his mother is dead. It’s a heartbreaking little scene, and at the end of it, Dylan asks for Olivia. Back at FBI headquarters, D. Gibbons suddenly becomes a lot less innocent as the agents track down cell phone calls she made just before the blackout…right to the walking man now known as Suspect Zero.

The FBI website where everyone shares their stories is up and getting hundreds of thousands of hits. For all their suspicions, the agents are more than willing to accept the cupcakes Ms. Gibbons offers them for their help with her credit. Demetri talks with a coworker about his fears, which have of course increased since seeing the officer be killed. She persuades him that he might be able to find out more through the website, like someone who saw how he died so he can prevent it. It works- a woman soon calls him to see she was reading an intelligence report that said he’d be murdered on March 10, 2010. Mark and Olivia could use some comfort as well. They talk some more, and he burns the friendship bracelet in the fireplace. Finally, he goes upstairs to say goodnight to Charlie. She wakes up and tells him “D. Gimmons is a bad man.”

We’re getting fragments of this puzzle at a time, and for everything we learn, there are just many more questions. What is Didi Gibbon’s connection with Suspect Zero? Can Demetri do anything to save himself- or can anyone else? Speculate and talk in comments!