flash forward: so1 e02 white to play

The problem with these high-concept shows is that the pilot can be fantastic, but then the actual making-it-into-a-show is really complicated. I'm willing to see it through, but this episode seemed like alot of waiting, and I'm not a big fan of wheel-spinning (it's what plagues whole seasons of Lost sometimes, and it makes me feel bad for Penny). It's not that this was a bad ep, only that it wasn't as fast or as tense as the first.

So here we go:

Olivia and Mark are starting to feel a little rocky because of her affair in the Flash, and they haven't forced Charlie (why does this lady keep having kids named Charlie?) to tell her story, which means they don't know why she's acting up at school. All the kids keep playing Blackout, where they all lay on the ground and reenact the Flash, then wake up and tell everyone what they saw, and it's all good things-- though who knows how much of that is real. Probably most kids would have seen something ordinary. But not Charlie, and she doesn't want to play, and she runs away. Which brings her face to face with a military blockade that hasn't had much to do with the story yet, but brings into focus that the seeming return to normalcy isn't real-- everything's still weird just around the corner.

So her mom takes her to work, and while she's at the hospital, she sees Dylan, the kid that knew Olivia's name in the pilot, and flips out over the fact that someone hurt him, said she knew him from her dream, but wouldn't say more.

Meanwhile, Dylan's dad is Loyd, who happened to be the man Olivia saw in her Flash, but he apparently didn't see her, so she has the option to change history-- he doesn't know her, and maybe she can avoid him and the affair that comes with. Except that Dylan asks for her, so now he knows that she's something important to them.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Mark is following the leads from his wall. All the D Gibbons' in the country are being tracked, but the one in question walks into the office with cupcakes (and really, this convenience of the future already happening might start getting old if they don't shake it up and get a little more creative; it's bad plotting to have characters know when they should enter, though it could be a really great meta-commentary about plot itself if they do it right). She's never done anything wrong, but she dreamed about an argument with her creditors and knew Mark and Dimitri, and came looking for them to see what it meant. investigating her led to finding that someone had stolen her credit info and was using the card elsewhere in Utah, which led them to another D Gibbons who's been hacking networks, apparently doing what they're doing. And his phone says he was awake during the blackout and talking to the person at the stadium that they know was also awake. And it sounds like a conspiracy.

he blew everything up and got away, but the picture of the burnt doll happened there, and that's proof that they don't know enough to change anything yet, and so far, things are going to happen. So much drama. It's a shame it took this long to get to it.

Other things that happened this episode:

- Homeland Security was questioning how they had the chutzpah to assign themselves as the head of the investigation, which resulted in them showing her the video and getting the green light to continue allocating government funds.

- Charlie tells Mark that 'D Gibbons is a very bad man'-- so apparently her vision is some sort of lynchpin we really need to know about.

- Dimitri and tech girl enter their stories into the Mosaic on the off chance that someone has info they can use to help them make sense of their own visions, and by the end of the night, very shortly after, Dimitri gets a call from a woman with an accent telling him that she was looking at a case file that said he was going to get murdered.

- Lloyd doesn't know how to be a dad, but alot of the pressure of telling his kid that his mom is dead is lessened by the fact that the kid already knows from his Flash. But he's also autistic, and that'll probably come into play later, or else there's no reason for it.

- Joseph Finnes continues to have a nice, even, believable bland American accent.

So, like I said, not a bad ep, but not as tense as the first, and not as exciting, though there was alot of info delivered, and less of the quick decisions and acceptance of weirdness that was my only complaint with the first ep. And I'm even more excited to see how it goes.