Starting a new thread for tonight’s episode. Open spoilers for episode as it airs. Spoiler box anything from future episodes, next week’s preview, or the book. Episode teaser:
In Germany, Mark and Janis meet an imprisoned Nazi who claims knowledge about the mass blackout; a tip causes Demetri to fear the worst about his future; Aaron asks Mark to help him get his daughter’s remains exhumed and DNA retested.
Eh maybe a mod can change the title date to 10/8 lol.
Done.
I missed a bit in the prison.
What was the former Nazi writing on the paper that referred to the 137 seconds of the blackouts?
A bit of Hebrew numerology, but:
it was a red herring. He was just making shit up to get the FBI agent interested.
Anyway, Joseph Fienne’s character so far is, like, the worst FBI agent ever. Whether or not it’s the writers’ intention, he’s coming off as a bit of a dim bulb when it comes to investigation. Several of the characters (like Korean FBI agent), in fact, seem to be making a fundamental and rather stupid mistake: they are letting what they think they saw of their futures dictate their actions now, so of course their futures will come true.
With that said, the subplot involving the AA guy and whether or not the remains of his daughter really were her remains was an interesting turn. The whole thing with the crows made for rather striking imagery; have no idea whether that was part of the original book.
Oh, yeah: Ex-Firefly cast spotting! Gina Torres as the woman who envisioned adopting an orphaned kid, and Morena Baccarin (looking really different from Inara) in the V promos.
Thanks.
This show has really become a balancing act between the good and the bad. For example, the fact that they’ve sent that video over to the NSA and still haven’t gotten anything good yet, about a week later. There was no magic “zoom in and enhance.”
On the other hand, apparently you can type “worldwide crow population” into the FBI database and instantly bring up a chart showing the DAY BY DAY population. And even though they were able to track the drop-off in crows online, only some German guy took notice.
Agreed. Frankly I should have said “The whole thing with the crows made for rather striking imagery despite being utterly ridiculous on its face.”
That brings up one of the most glaring absurdities in the series so far: not a single person in the FBI, apparently, has given the slightest thought to asking an actual scientist, in any discipline, to help try and figure out what’s going on.
The premise is interesting, but they seem to be killing it with having the characters alternate between believing the flash forward or not believe in it. I could do without their impassioned speeches on one side and then turning around and making the fervent arguments for the other side. (Later seasons of Heroes have a this problem every episode, though. In Heroes the character’s whole personality changes.)
The characters also seem to alternate between being adequately competent and dense. Why did the female who set up Mosaic not understand the importance of crows dying on the same day, nor the importance of the crows dying en masse in the past.
I don’t who at DHS the CDC contacted about the Sudan incident in 1991, but I suspect they didn’t get an answer since DHS didn’t exist in that year.
I like the visual effects, though.
If you spell Kaballah in Hebrew and assign numbers to each letter, it adds up to 137, the same number of seconds as the blackout lasted.
What choice do they really have though - they have to follow up on whatever leads they have from the mosaic boards. And with regard to making the future happen, there’s kind of a catch-22 situation with regards to that in order to change something you have to have enough information about it to be secure that your attempts at change will succeed - but in order to get that information you have to let at least some of the future start to play out the way you saw it.
Yes that was quite silly. Equally silly was their strange inability to get a pardon that was contingent on whether the info the guy gave them was useful.
I’ve been wondering since the beginning of the show whether non human animals were affected by the event. Now we see crows were. Was it just crows? And were they killed by the event itself, or by being unconscious and falling to the ground?
I didn’t quite catch the very beginning of that scene - was there some indication of where and when it was supposed to be occurring?
Well they had the scene with the unmanageably large number of files related to theories about the event. Presumably a number of them were from legitimate scientists. But I do think they have focused on the detective work surrounding the mosaic board a bit too much at the expense of looking at the physical evidence. About all we got so far in that area was that it affected all people and crows, and what the brain scans showed.
Despite the occasional glitches, I find myself still really enjoying the show.
soooo… the bit about the crows(I thought they said Somalia) in 1991 is fiction?
I caught this last night for the first time. I had been meaning to watch it based on the previews, but forgot about it. Pretty good episode. Are episodes available online? Have I missed much?
Yes, I thought that, too. Seemed to be a bit of a weird ‘gotcha’ – ‘you said I was free, so now you must let me go!’
Also yes to the crow thing. Huge numbers of crows suddenly fall outta the sky the very same moment all of humanity falls unconscious and glimpses the future, and nobody suspects a connection?
Though I liked their choice of messenger bird – crows are astonishingly intelligent, after all, so I wonder whether the implication is that they, too, had sort of a ‘flash forward’, which caused those that were flying at the time to drop out of the skies (note that not all crows died, apparently).
Just cause it’s not being shown doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Not a lot of excitement in a bunch of phone calls involving lots of guys in lab coats saying, “How the fuck should I know?”.
Anyways, all of the crackpot ideas they were making fun of from other countries could be considered to be addressing that point.
-Joe
I was less than thrilled about them showing airports back up and running, while wrecked airplanes and debris still littered the runways.
Either they have had the chance to clean up the wreckage (which would be priority one, I imagine) or not, but they wouldnt just expect the pilots to dodge the odd (still smoking) crumpled fuselage that is still laying in the middle of the taxiway…
The little things (worldwide crow population) are getting in the way of the entire premise, and they need to tighten down the details to make it more believable
I’m done with this show. I’ll probably watch some more in April, just to see what happens on the fateful day, but for me the eventual answers are intriguing, but the journey there is just a snooze. It’s another case of real character development, motivation, reaction and action taking a backseat to what’s expedient to the plot and the necessity of dragging it out for months. The guy, and his wife, with the supposedly dead daughter are the only characters who seem to be even remotely acting like real people would act in such a situation. Aside from the tiny bit where the main protagonist (see, I haven’t been drawn into it enough to even remember any names) dumbass FBI guy burned the bracelet from his daughter (and we all know for a fact that she’ll make him another one before April), not one person has made even the tiniest attempt to make what they saw impossible to come true.
Dumbass FBI guy’s wife is all angst-ridden about having an affair, so what does she do? Talks to the guy she’s going to fall for, making it all the more likely to happen. She saw the guy, in her house, sitting on her current furniture. If that were me, and I really didn’t want that to happen, I’d at the very least buy all new furniture. I would certainly and absolutely just never talk to the guy, period.
But if she did that, it would ruin the ability of the writers to draw out the fake angst, so she talks to him, clearly starting the ball rolling towards the “inevitable”.
A similar vein that, for me, really points out how little the writers want to actually deal with the "what if"s of seeing the future: How come no one had a flash wherein they clearly remembered having the flash, or in which the future was clearly a result of the flash having happened? Like, I saw myself living in a mansion, looking at a winning lottery ticket for, say, October 10. Because, now that I know that the flashforward was of April 30 at 10pm (or whatever it is), I’m going to buy a ticket for tomorrow’s lottery using the numbers I saw in my flash, and then on April 30 at 10pm make damned sure that I’m looking at it.
Instead, everyone is just going about their normal lives, la-di-da, I’ve seen the future, that’s cool . . . I’m going to be in a meeting and see a bird hit the window . . . I’m going to become a customs official and be on duty . . . I’m going to be having an affair while my husband is being shot at . . . just makes me want to scream at these morons.
My whole post is a spoiler from this episode…
[spoiler]So, birds are highly sensitive to magnetism, right? Could that be what drew them to the emission source in 1991? Obviously, Somalia was an early testing ground for the technology.
So, now for the speculation:
I’m thinking the “flash” technology is amping up… birds are drawn to it… then voooomp… the birds flashforward, drop out of the sky and die (or maybe it just scrambles their brains and they die directly). Then it hits higher mammals.
Now, in the pilot episode, one of the agents was in London when a bird hit their window. I’m guessing the 2 mins & 17 seconds of “D-Day” are prior to a second flash they’ll all have. Perhaps this has some temporary erasing of any knowledge the flash happened, so no one is aware they’re currently experiencing the flash moment… which would explain why no one’s aware of it… then another FF will occur?[/spoiler]
And I agree… the insta-search of the daily crow population numbers was silly. But I’m hooked. I’m a sucker for these kinds of shows.
The crow thing is utterly stupid. Okay, let’s have this mythical daily counting of world-wide raven counts going on. And let’s accept that their population dropped by about ninety percent one day. Fine.
But then they show the population starting back up at a significant rate IMMEDIATELY. We’re supposed to believe the surviving crows laid new eggs, hatched them, and the offspring took to the air to be counted in just a couple of days??? Bullsh*t.
On a different aspect, I think I know what’s going on with the dead/not-dead daughter. In the first show the father/FBI agent’s mentor gave a speech about how his daughter’s remains were only 37 pounds even though she’d weighed 115 pounds. (Or some numbers around that, I don’t have it on tape to check.) And in his flash forward he sees her lying on the ground under some blankets, looking ill but alive.
What happened is that the daughter was WOUNDED, in fact, my guess is that her legs were blown off in an explosion, and the remains that were returned were those legs. Thus the daughter is alive but legless and the ‘remains’ are naturally a perfect DNA match. No miracle, just whoever collected the legs thought thought they were the only remains left after the rest of the body was totally disintegrated by a bomb while in fact the rest of the woman had already been taken away for medical treatment.
I was starting to feel the same as Roadfood, in that I’m getting tired of this show already, but the only thing keeping me going is the AA sponsor and his daughter’s story.
Yep, I had the same thought.
My suspicions after E2 were this wasn’t for me and the latest hour pretty well confirmed that; it’s Spielberg level nonsense with evil Nazis, aliens messages, kids providing cheap emotional shots and desperately crunchy dialogue. The superfluous scenes and nonsensical plot points don’t help.
Fwiw, I think there’s probably a good idea in there – perhaps notably about the big elephant in the room, religion – but it’s lost among the filler, CGI and the push to hit all the important audience demographics: They’re looking for the multiplex audience having a night at home which is fine, but I’m out of here.