There's 4 episodes left in the season and probably series, and I'm genuinely interested in the show again. With ABC first increasing the order to 24 and then decreasing it back to 22, I'm guessing the plotting of the season was thrown off, which might have actually helped the show. Instead of those all too familiar scenes of people yelling at each other for no apparent reason, we're finally learning more about the flashforwards and it's actually not bad. And since this is FlashForward it's not great either. I wonder how the show would have turned out if the first few episodes after the pilot were this interesting and focused.
There were lots of subplot in Afghanistan that didn't really go anything, but the center of the episode--Olivia, Gabriel, and Janis--worked quite well. There are lots of flashbacks of Janis going through Quantico and getting recruited by the "bad guys." Christine Woods does a nice job showing how conflict Janis is, and we never really understand why Janis became a mole since she wasn't that into the cause or money, until the bombshell flashback revealing her as a double agent for the CIA. The point was kind of lost because we don't see what she does for the CIA, but at least it cleared up her motivations.
Gabriel shows up all over the place and seems to have knowledge of the future. The small tease in last week's episode didn't work, because he was saying incoherent things. This week, we learn almost everything about him and the Raven River experiment. Vreede and Oliva visit the site of the experiments, and learn that Gabriel, a savant, was used by Dyson Frost to undergo flashforwards and recap the future. Inevitably, those being experimented on went nuts and were quickly discarded.
Now we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately, the ratings are in the toilet, so I doubt we'll get another season.
Score: 8.8/10
Thursday, April 29, 2010
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