SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching FlashForward. Don't read ahead if you haven't seen episode 19 yet.
Anna Pickard's episode 18 blog
"Course Correction"
There's a serial killer targeting people who have outlived their FlashForward death-dates – which is obviously worrying Demetri, given that he's barely had time to celebrate outliving his own. He joins up with Scotland Yard's Inspector Fiona Banks (Alex Kingston), who would have been investigating these deaths with Agent Al, except he topped himself to prove free will and save a stranger called Ceilia. Ceilia returns, reminds us of Al's sacrifice ... then gets hit by a car driven by Inspector Fiona Banks instead.
Behind it all is the man from the Blue Hand Club (remember them? The underground movement of anarchistic soon-to-be-dead fatalists? Don't worry if you don't, it hasn't been mentioned in months), who is acting as an agent of fate, killing the people who should be dead anyway.
Meanwhile, Simon's kidnapped sister (again, don't fret if this has slipped your mind) has returned, but only with the proviso that whoever took her gets Simon and his magic ring instead. Benford's cogs slowly clunk into place, and when the technical geniuses at Mosaic HQ compare the height, weight, girth and gait of Simon Campos to Suspect Zero, they find out the big twist of this evening's episode: Simon IS Suspect Zero. Which is something the rest of us have known for weeks.
Flash review
Robert J Sawyer, the writer of the original novel on which the series is based, has been a creative consultant to the show, but this is his first attempt at writing a full episode. So you might have expected a firm back-to-basics approach and, perhaps, an attempt to answer some of the questions that have been hanging around for so long.
Sawyer certainly tries. A few of the longer hanging threads are tugged – the Blue Hand Club, Al, Ceilia, Simon's link to Flosso, a stadium in Detroit – but when there are already so many other threads, characters, theories and double-bluffs hanging about, the effect is a little like reintroducing a couple of dimly familiar faces into a large crowd of people all shouting for our attention.
"The future has a way of pushing back. Small things may change, but the forces of the universe might be nudging us back to the futures we saw," said Lloyd in a television interview with soon-to-prove-his-point Ceilia, setting up the intriguing new premise for this future-might-be-unavoidable after all U-turn.
Call me a bloody-minded rationalist, but saying "The universe is pushing back" is not enough. Once you have extraordinary things like people being able to see six months into the future, it's decidedly woolly to fall back on fate. In a series so determined to find a scientific explanation for how a tiny signet ring can disrupt a global future-jumping mindmeld, simply falling back on a hazy explanation – "Yeah, it's, um, destiny, and that's all there is to it" – seems weak. And like someone's watched too many Final Destination films.
Forward planning and flashy thinking
• If the future is determined to get its way by any means necessary, Demetri needs to be looking out for any variation on Agent Benford's gun that could possibly kill him. Benford's new gun? Another FBI gun? Benford's Swiss army knife? Demetri needs to get busy.
• Bryce and Keiko are now at least in the same building, but with Bryce's cancer in remission, his passion for Nicole reignited and his short-lived search for the Japanese love of his life long-forgotten, it's hard to see how that's going to work out.
• There are only three episodes left! Possibly ever! How on EARTH are they going to tie all these loose ends up AND squeeze in another FlashForward, a wedding and at least two more major character deaths? Will they play the rest out at 4x speed, everyone talking like The Chipmunks? FlashForward in FastForward, I say. Fingers crossed.
