In The Jane Austen Book Club, Kathy Baker’s character finds out that Grigg (Hugh Dancy) is related to her doctor and her friend. When she does, she remarks that their “[lives are] an English village,” meaning that they were all connected in that Kevin Bacon kind of way that people discover they are when they start connecting.
It’s kind of like our gang in LA. Dem, Stan, and Janis work with Mark is married to Liv, who works with Bryce, who’s searching for Keiko but who will hopefully end up with Nicole, who was baby sat by Tracy who is Aaron’s daughter, who is Mark’s AA sponsor.
Did you get all that? Because there’s more….
Six months after the blackout, Liv will be sleeping with Lloyd, who is the father of Dylan and works with Simon who I keep wanting to call Charlie (for obvious reasons), but I can’t because she’s Liv’s daughter with Mark, who according to Nahdra, will kill Dem in March which will result in Zoe being a ghost bride, and likely no one finding D. Gibbons who Charlie knows as a Bad Man, even though her Flash Forward showed her hanging in the kitchen with Dylan.
It’s enough to exhaust anyone. Luckily, I’m here to help. Miss an episode? I’ve blogged them all. Plus, here’s the deets on where we last left everyone at the mid-season break.
A sort of Flash Back, if you will…
Mark: Has just gotten himself fired. No, this isn’t a sign of the economy, but instead a sign that when your boss tells you not to take your partner to Hong Kong to find the woman who called him with the details that he was going to be murdered on March 15, you should probably not take your partner to Hong Kong to find the woman who called him with the details that he was going to be murdered on March 15. You should especially not react to the news that YOU are supposedly the one doing the murdering by grabbing said woman and starting a Mexican stand-off in the streets of a foreign country who didn’t want you there anyway. I’m just saying.
The thing about Mark is that at least some of his behavior is justified. A recovering alcoholic, Mark’s struggling with the fact that his flash forward not only reveals him drinking in his office, but he’s also being hunted by a strike force bent on murdering him. Plus, there’s that whole thing with his wife sleeping with Lloyd, and that he’s apparently responsible for solving the whole “why did it happen?” mystery. It’s enough to push anyone over the edge. I admire him for his resolve in staying strong this far.
Demetri: Mark’s partner is one step closer to being dead on March 15 after all. At least this is what his fiancée, Zoe, has finally come to accept. All season long, she’s been trying to convince herself that the wedding ceremony she saw in her flash forward was their wedding, but in the last moments of the last episode, she came to realize that the ceremony she actually saw was Demetri’s funeral. On the plus side, my second-favorite character threw himself off a building to prove that everyone has a choice. Just as Al will be dead on the 4/29/2010, Demetri could be alive. This, so far, is the most intriguing mystery of the entire show. Plus, I love John Cho.
Lloyd was kidnapped by a couple of guys who work for people ticked beyond belief that he announced that work he’d done caused the blackout. The thing is, I’m not entirely sure if they’re ticked that he did it or, like Simon, that he said he did it in an international press conference. Either way, the guilt’s off his chest, but he’s got a few things to worry about. Despite this, he’s got a whole new set of problems to deal with that sort of trump the fact that his son’s doctor is the woman he’ll be sleeping within six months and the huge medical bills his son, Dylan, is racking up because he’s been in hospital since the blackout. My guess? There’s more to Dylan’s condition than meets the eye.
Aaron: is dealing with the return of his daughter, Tracy, who is now being hunted by a civilian Special Ops team ala Blackwater. He’s no longer Mark’s sponsor and denied sending Liv the text message. Plus, he’s drinking again. He’s hired on one of Tracy’s fellow squadron members, and this could be a great decision or the worst one ever in the long run. Do we really know who the new hire is working for?
My most intriguing (potential) love story award has to go to Dr. Bryce. Now, I know I picked on him a little earlier in the season for always asking about everyone else’s vision without giving up his own. However, I was promised a pay-off, and we definitely got one when practically an entire episode was devoted to his journey to Tokyo to find the girl he’d been sketching since the blackout happened. The best part of that episode, hands down, was when he couldn’t find Keiko in Japan and flew back to the states on the same flight that Keiko was using to move to LA. I’ve long said that all Bryce needed was a girl to make his problems go away. Since he’s fighting Stage Four cancer, I will amend that slightly to needing a girl and good chemotherapy options. We know that he’s having dinner with Keiko during his flash forward, but the sneak-peeks at the end of the last episode we saw show him kissing Nicole as well. This, of course, is assuming that he lives that long. His own doctors had told him that there were no more traditional options available, so Liv set up an appointment for him with a friend in Houston who was running a clinical trial. Instead of going to Houston, though, he jetted off to Tokyo. Did he make a decision that will ultimately cost him big?
Dr Liv always said that she’d leave Mark if he started drinking again. It wasn’t the drink she couldn’t handle, it was the sneaking around and lying. Now, he’s doing the same thing. Even though he hasn’t yet touched a drop, Mosaic has started to drive a wedge between them. Add that to the guilt she feels over sleeping with Lloyd in six months, and she’s got some major problems. When we last saw her, she had just figured out that had she stayed in New York in the 90s, instead of following Mark to LA, she would have lived in the building next door to Lloyd. As it was, she didn’t go, and Lloyd met and married the woman who did live there. The next thing she knows, Lloyd is being snatched by goons, and she’s left to care for Dylan.
Janis: Shot through the womb but still seeing herself pregnant and getting an ultrasound in six months, Janis is grappling with a lot. She’s determined to start trying for a child, but since she’s a lesbian, she opts to go the non-traditional route of obtaining the baby matter. Bryce gives her the names of a couple of clinics, and project baby-maker 2009 is on.
People we still don’t know much about:
- Nicole: She’s fallen HARD for Bryce, lived in Japan as a kid, Tracy was her babysitter, and her flash forward shows her being drowned/murdered for something she hasn’t yet done. She’s working at the hospital to atone for whatever that might be.
- Stan: His son’s away at college, was in the men’s room during his flash forward, and appears to be sacrificial lamb of the current Presidential Administration. According to her flash forward, his wife adopts the child of one of the agents killed during the blackout.
- Simon: One of the musical montages showed him playing with name bracelet that reads “Annabelle.” He designed the tower that seemed to have caused the blackout in Somalia back in 1991, but he’s a little surprised to learn that it was up and running in 1991 because he designed it in 1992. He’s agreed to work with the FBI on this one.
Questions that remain to be answered:
Beyond the standard, “Who is suspect zero?”/”Who is the mole in the FBI?”/”Why did the blackout happen?”, here are the questions that were still burning at the end of the mid-season…
- Why is Dylan still in hospital? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. Is it just serving as the world’s most expensive day care since Lloyd’s on his own?
- Why did Charlie freak after her blackout? Likewise, why does she know D. Gibbons is a bad man? Al and Fiona proved that visions of shared experiences will only differ in that everyone will have a different take on the same experience. Since Charlie’s in Dylan’s vision and Dylan’s vision shows the kids sneaking cookies and laughing, this should mean that Charlie’s vision was a nice one.
- When Bryce gave Janis the name of the “really great clinic,” he was a little more enthusiastic about it than might be normal. On the one hand, Bryce seems to be a big-doer of a character. On the other hand is it possible that he has, um, intimate knowledge of how great the clinic actually is? Or am I just trying to justify the guess I made way back in Episode 1 or 2 that he might be Janis’ baby-daddy?
- Speaking of Janis, if she’s in LA during the flash forward, she’s getting what appears to be a routine ultrasound at 11:30 PM. Why?
- Who is Annabelle and what does she mean to Simon?
- If the blackouts lasted the same amount of time, why didn’t Demetri wake up in the car with Mark?
Well, that’s it for now. Thanks to American Idol, the show was pushed back another two weeks to March 18 at 8 PM. If we’re dealing with the real-time timeline they’ve put forward so far, Demetri will have either just escaped death or will only be seen in flashbacks for the rest of the season. Any takers as to which one?
