Is there any show more annoyingly inconsistent on television right now than ABC’s FlashForward? After finally moving the series’ plot forward last week and giving us our first set of answers, I had hoped that we may have reached a turning point; that the chunks of filler material might be at an end and that the characters might turn their thoughts once more to actually investigating the blackout.
Unfortunately old habits die hard and this episode sees the series use its most brazen time-wasting device to date; having Simon and Lloyd play poker against each other to decide whether they will reveal their role in causing the flashforward.
The James Bond film Casino Royale proved that, with appropriate stakes for each character, card games are capable of being gripping. Here however the situation feels so contrived and the stakes so low that the sequence is completely devoid of tension, playing out with a final hand that everyone will see coming.
The principal reason that this sequence fails where other poker sequences succeed comes down to a matter of character. For a scene to build tension we must be emotionally invested in the outcome, wanting either one player to win or the other to lose. As neither Simon nor Lloyd has proven particularly sympathetic so far and we still have little idea what they actually did to cause the blackout, the outcome of this sequence feels somewhat irrelevant.
Away from the poker table, Mark begins the episode enjoying a weekend’s break with Olivia. In previous weeks the character has seemed somewhat one note, trapped by a fatalistic belief that he is destined to lose her to Lloyd. Now knowing that he can change the future, courtesy of Agent Gough’s suicide, gives Mark a new and very welcome positive outlook for much of this episode, making him much easier to spend time with.
In this episode he is shown a video taken on a cell phone of an engineer being shot and of a case being stolen from him. Spotting that one of the assassins had the same tattoo of three stars on his arm that Mark saw on one of the people storming the office in his flashforward, he and Demetri set out to try to catch him and to avert that future.
Yes, once again the team is ignoring the lead that they worked so hard to acquire in favor of investigating more loose leads from Mark’s corkboard. Given that they freed a Nazi war criminal to get hold of that information it is reasonable to assume that they would at least check it out. Wedeck even appears to forget that he has a lead in Somalia later in this episode when he and Janis revisit the footage from the sports stadium during the blackout in search of more clues.
In hunting down the figure from the cell phone video, Mark shows two sides to his character that we really see for the first time this week. Firstly we observe that Mark has a dark edge as he decides to kill the man with the tattoo in the hopes that it will prevent his vision coming true. Secondly we realize that Mark can act stupidly as he never considers that more than one person might have that same tattoo.
While we have seen Mark act irrationally in previous weeks, chasing a group of teenagers in “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” and brandishing his gun at them, it is satisfying to see something approaching another side to him. Dark Mark turns out to be much more interesting than moping Mark.
The other significant story thread in this episode is that of Mark’s friend Aaron who discovered last week that his daughter Tracy is alive. In the course of this episode we learn why she has pretended to be dead and who she is afraid of.
That she is hiding from military contractors is not in itself all that interesting although presumably there is some greater significance to what she saw that will tie in with the flashforwards. The scenes though are amongst the strongest in the episode largely because of some nicely understated performances from Brian F. O’Byrne and Genevieve Cortese (Supernatural).
It would be relatively easy to make the mistake of trying to go too big with such scenes, drowning the audience in emotion. Instead they hold back, giving the emotions that do come through even greater impact. This heightens the material, overcoming its predictability and its lack of a clear connection to the main storyline to become one of the strongest elements of this episode.
The maddening thing about FlashForward is that the series has shown that it is capable of doing some things well. It set up its concept nicely, has featured some incredible set pieces and some interesting subplots, particularly that of Demetri.
Instead of expanding on these successes however, time is wasted on story threads that make little sense and fail to advance either the overall story or to enhance our understanding of the characters. The effect this has on an episode like “Playing Cards With Coyote” not only makes the episode feel imbalanced, it also draws attention to the lack of movement in the overall storyline.
While the episode does have some promising and entertaining elements, ultimately it turns out to be yet another FlashForward episode that has failed to live up to its potential.
– Aidan Brack
