Episode 17 - The Garden of Forking Paths
27 April 2010
Review
Synopsis: Charlie details her conversation with Dyson Frost and a meeting with Mark is arranged in Grand Central Station. At the meeting Frost tells Mark how to escape his surveillance and instructs him to come out into the mountains for a discreet meeting. Frost has Demetri tied up with a gun pointed at him and sets a countdown for when the mechanism will shoot him. Alda pushes Zoey to get her a hearing that day and uses the opportunity to escape. She follows Mark out to the meeting place and kills Frost. Mark finds Demetri and uses clues Frost left with Charlie to disable the mechanism and move the gun away from Demetri. Meanwhile Agent Vreede asks Olivia to take a look at the homeless man who Frost shot. He was the one who sent her the text about Mark's drinking. He was probably a savant and a friend of his approaches Olivia warning her about something.
The Good: From the moment we entered a flashback showing Frost working with Alda and company until the waters came down on the blackboard this was relentlessly tense. Ignoring the contrived and convoluted parts of the plot this was a terrific achievement. It's very rare that a TV show can keep up that very real sense of anticipation which keeps you on the edge of your seat. Again it's not that the drama was so exquisite or the acting was excellent. Instead it was just the simple fact that for about twenty eight minutes of the episode you felt like anything could happen, that people would die, that the events had real consequences and that you wanted to see it play out. Twenty eight minutes is a very long time to keep that level of tension going and I give the producers real credit for this achievement. Sometimes good TV is the simple exploitation of human anticipation, regardless of how good a story really is.
Along the way the show tapped into some really good stuff. Borrowing heavily from The Bourne Supremecy and 24 Mark was put in a position to have to move fast and alone. The old meeting point covered by police cameras scene was simple and effective. Then Mark chased further and further into the wilderness which made Frost seem smart for not allowing himself to be captured unless it was under his terms. As a good hero should, Mark outsmarted Frost and spits gas water in his face. Alda steps in to kill Frost and I thought his death was well acted and directed. He looked in tremendous pain and died quickly, standing in contrast to the usual TV visual of a relatively peaceful demise including a long final conversation. Good on Mark for asking as many questions as he could in case Frost said anything of value. Mark finds more of the clues from his flashforward in Frost's bag which added a nice sense of inevitability to the situation and even up to the last moment it felt like Demetri would die anyway.
I appreciated Frost's attempts to explain his bizarre decisions to Demetri. His attempts to survive the day was a plausible justification for the elaborate set up he made to keep Demetri's demise firmly on the radar. It was also interesting to see that he was being used by a larger organisation and that his attempts to contact Mark had been for a good reason. He was attempting to come in and help the Mosaic investigation bring down an organisation that now wanted him dead. Demetri showed good desperation as he tried to reason with Frost and the point was well made that he couldn't move or would be killed. The visual of the dominoes was impressive even if it was only a bit of fluff.
I enjoyed the Olivia sideplot too, if only in a clichéd way. TV shows have relied on this particular trick for so long that it managed to amp up the tension of the moment. So often when something intense is going on on one side of the plot, something seemingly mundane happens elsewhere. The usual juxtaposition ends up being that the intense plot is resolved peacefully while the mundane plot ends up delivering something violent. So with Agent Vreede moving very slowly, Olivia being reluctant to help and even a neuro-scientist enjoying a sandwich I was fully expecting something horrible to happen. In the end nothing did though a new player arrived in the shape of an apparently homeless and possibly savant man (James Callis) who may bring in more clues as to what is going on. It's ironic that my anticipation of a cliché actually enhanced the tension for me but it worked nonetheless.
I liked Stanford's subtle way of giving the Benfords a moment alone together. I also liked the way Charlie finally provided Olivia with some justification for her behaviour toward Mark. Now that Frost had creeped everyone out by approaching her, Olivia understandably wants her as far away from Mosaic as possible. So now she has a pretty strong reason to demand Mark move away from LA with her to save their lives and marriage. I liked the brief scene where Bryce picks up on Olivia's continued relationship with Lloyd and she ignored him.
The Bad: Though to be fair, if Olivia is that worried then why doesn't she move away with Charlie? I don't see how shacking up with Lloyd is going to make their lives any safer.
The trouble with the show, though not this episode, is that its way too complicated for its own good. In this episode the relentless tension covered up for the failings elsewhere. For example, how did Alda know where Mark was going? The most logical explanation is that Frost's bosses knew where he was and told her. But in that case why hadn't they already killed Frost? And why did they send her? Surely just having got out of prison she wasn't the ideal candidate and if they had failed to bust her out surely they would have sent someone else to assassinate Frost? But no instead they had to send her to do it, a successful assassination which required an implausible number of hoops to be jumped through for it to succeed. You would think such a powerful organisation would have more than one assassin on their books.
Then you have Frost's attempt to fool the future into allowing him and Demetri to escape death. Whichever way you slice it it's going to seem contrived and ridiculous for Demetri to be rigged up to a revolver like that. Again the show is trying to compensate for its lack of characterisation through ever complex conspiracies and ever more dubious science. Mark's detective skills were also ludicrously sharp as three times he decoded Frost's riddles just at the right moment to find what he needed to.
The Unknown: Frost says Mark will be saved by "The lady you see every day." What did he mean by that? Who were his former bosses? What are the Raven River experiments? QED seems to refer to the rings which help people avoid blacking out but there is clearly more to the formula than that. How does anaesthesia relate to it?
Best Moment: Frost's death, uncharacteristically authentic and effective. He died in pain, shock and disappointment as real people do.
Epilogue: Flashforward's finest hour. They built up to Demetri's death all season and throughout the episode they made his life seem really important. The tension never let up and overcame the contrivances to present a really compelling episode. I doubt anything from this episode will carry over to make the show better but this was one of the most tense episodes of any television show that I have seen. Good job.
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