There's a lot going on in this episode, so let's break it down subplot by subplot: Bryce bribes the intake guard at the detention center for Keiko's contact information. He then meets up with Nicole, tells her that he looooooves Keiko because "it's meant to be," and runs off to find her at the restaurant. Keiko, who has escaped the clutches of INS thanks to her mom assaulting several federal officials (no, really), runs right into her flashforward.
Nicole, meanwhile, drives right into hers. But she doesn't drown -- she gets rescued by a clean-cut good samaritan who explains that in his flashforward, he saw himself rescuing a drowning woman, and it's a relief that he didn't fail or let down the future. Ed introduces himself and Nicole gives him a look like, "Hello, lover!" Good for her!
Tracy has miraculously come back from the dead. If you're Aaron or Tracy, this is good news. If you're any of the viewers who was perhaps hoping to tie up some of the show's loose ends, not so much.
Wedeck bails out Mark and hands over his badge and his gun. They end up back at the FBI building on account of someone planting bombs in the building (of course! Run toward the danger!). Since Wedeck doesn't trust Mark to stay in the car, he connects him to Aaron and they have a little heart-to-heart where Aaron more or less encourages Mark to commit suicide. Mark hops out of Wedeck's car and heads into the FBI building. The masked men are preparing to sweep in -- as are Wedeck and Vreede, who are honestly more frightening-looking in their steely resolve. Give these men a spinoff!
Janis and Demetri help Simon break into NLAP -- Janis by swooning thanks to her placental abruption -- and Simon and Demetri go looking for the piece of software. There's a nice moment when the two men -- neither of whom had a flashforward -- welcome each other to the future as they know it, when things are unknown. But then Simon discovers someone else accessing the mainframe via the backdoor code, and it kickstarts the particle accelerator. (Oh, BTW: We also find out that Janis is actually carrying a boy, which suggests the future is slightly malleable.)
Dylan and Lloyd end up meeting Charlie and Olivia at the beach -- courtesy of their FBI guards kibbitzing -- and Lloyd gives an impassioned speech about needing to recreate the conditions under which he'll solve the equation that will... prove cold fusion is feasible? Provide an alternative to our petroleum-dependent infrastructure? The power of his words magically teleports everyone back to Stately Benford Manor. As Olivia and Lloyd dicker over keeping their clothing on, Dylan creeps upstairs, grabs one of Olivia's lipsticks and writes the magic formula on the mirror in the bedroom. Turns out the formula is "the greatest mystery in all of quantum physics." And Lloyd has to solve it right now. Naturally, Olivia picks that moment to put the moves on Lloyd. This woman is determined to destroy the universe! I bet if we had Season Two, we'd discover she's got a sleeper personality that controls the flashforward cabal. ANYWAY, the two of them manage to keep their clothing on, and Lloyd solves the equation with a little help from Simon. And guess what? He's just figured out that there will be a flashforward sometime in the next two days.
Mark takes this and runs with it, comparing his big Mosaic board against Gabriel's and realizes that the next flashforward will be... in ten minutes, as in April 29, at 10:14 p.m. He spends the next ten minutes ducking a positive hailstorm of ammo from the masked thugs (they're great with costumes, bad at shooting), then kills some of them. Wedeck gets one in the bathroom. He also gets Mark on the phone; Mark tells Stan to alert everyone to the time of the next flashforward, then decides to hang out in the building that's about to blow up. Which it does.
We then get a montage of the world passed out again, including a ring-wearing Lyta wheeling the unconscious Janis out of a hospital. We also see someone's flashforward, in which a teenaged Charlie is saying happily, "They found him!"
And that's it. Decent season finale, terrible series finale.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We begin at 8:42 p.m. Mark is sitting in a holding cell -- surprisingly empty, leading one to conclude that perhaps everyone who flashed forward to being in jail took steps to prevent that future from coming true -- and sniveling as he scratches his friendship bracelet and stares at his wedding ring. If he's trying to make us feel sorry for him, it's not really working.
Meanwhile, Olivia and Charlie are on a beach in Malibu. Nicole is sitting at Bryce's place, marinating in self-loathing. Keiko is slouching into LAX with her mom, trying to convince her that really, what she needs is to be with the man she saw in her flashforward.
Speaking of which, guess who's just bribed a security guard at the detention center for information on Keiko? Bryce may be a fickle SOB, but he really does commit to his lady of the minute.
And this show throws us the biggest bone EVER by getting rid of its Plot-we-can-dispense-of-in-a-paragraph before the five-minute mark. Here it is: We zip to Afghanistan, where the sheer power of Aaron's belief in his flashforward brings Tracy back from the dead. Yes! Just like in Pet Sematary, only without the unholy ghouls possessing the reanimated corpse! Merely Tracy's completely unwinning personality! Aaron is so relieved that his future came true just as he foresaw, he willingly babbles to Mark on the phone later about how "we'll wind up where we're supposed to be." And then we never see him again, so the First Unanswered Question of the show is: How ever will Aaron and Tracy get out of Afghanistan? (Corollary to the first question: Do you care?)
Back in the states, Demetri, Simon and Janis pull up at one of NLAP's many access points. Simon matter-of-factly outlines his plans to get inside, find the software he had planted, and use it to destroy the shadowy cabal. Demetri merely shrugs; he's worked with Mark long enough to know what grandiose nonsense people are capable of spouting. And Janis looks peeved, since "identify these people to the government" and "destroy them on my own" are not really synonymous and Simon had already agreed to the former. Simon could care less about Janis's moods. He whips out a doodad and says someone's got to get it close to the security guard, so that the device can then transmit relevant security codes to Simon's phone, and he can thus break into NLAP with a minimum of A-Team-style mayhem. Demetri pooh-poohs this latest scheme, but Janis figures she can multitask: A. Get close to the guard by gabbling about her possible miscarriage, and B. Get the code transmitted to Simon while she waits for an ambulance to whisk her off to Palo Alto's finest medical institution.
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