Spoiler Warning: Do not read this post unless you have seen the episode or don’t mind spoilers

One Sentence Review

A tense character driven episode

Episode Synopsis

Find it here

Thoughts and Analysis

After the drama of the previous episode, there was a danger that this episode would be a bit of a let down. Thankfully this was not the case and in many ways the title of the previous episode “Gimme Some Truth” could equally apply to the developments in Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. Unfortunately (for me) several of the developments in this episode also served to kill off some of my own pet theories about where the series was heading.

The main thrust of this episode seemed to be to bring the increasing mistrust Mark has been shown towards Olivia to a head, which was catalysed by the surprising arrival of Dylan Simcoe at their house having seen it and Charlie in his Flash Forward. This led to Olivia finally finding out that Mark was drinking in his Flash Forward. The fall out from this lack of trust has put their marriage in a perilous state.

While I do have some sympathy for Mark it is limited, as he has been warned by Aaron that this could happen and he had been treating Olivia quite badly. The main questions have to be, will Mark seek solace in a bottle perhaps leading to the death of his marriage, or will he have the strength to try to save his marriage.

It was curious that Dylan and Charlie were both at home for their Flash Forward as it does not explain how Charlie knows about D Gibbons, one possibility is that after that she encounters him in her Flash Forward and he tells her his name. This does however kill my theory that Nicole’s murder is tied directly to the kidnap of Dylan and Charlie.

Another theory which looks like it has probably been killed is that Simon was phoning Lloyd as I cant see him breaking off in the middle of fighting and killing someone to call Lloyd and Lloyd’s phone call seemed to be in the same time frame as the fight. As Simon implies that there are others in his group it is still possible that the phone call was from a member of his group.

We also get told that Simon and Lloyd are responsible for the deaths of 20 million people, now while the obvious candidate for this is the blackout, using last weeks minimum level from China of 0.5% fatalities as a baseline and the world population of approximately 6.7 Billion the lowest number of deaths is actually around 33.5 million. This suggests that it may not actually be the blackout Lloyd is referring to but something else.

There are a few ways it could still refer to the blackout, the first one is that the CIA mentioning China’s less than 0.5% was referring to the fact that they suffered less than America’s high of 0.5% and given that you have over 2 Billion people in similar timezones asleep then this could bring the total number of World Deaths to around 20 million. The second is that if the blackout was carried out at several locations Lloyd is only claiming responsibility for the ones he and Simon caused in their specific experiment which I assume would cover North America. If that was the case though I go back to my main gripe about the series so far that there has not been enough emphasis on the human cost of the black out.

I was also confused about Simon’s “explanation” of the Flash Forward, though admittedly he was just using it to chat a woman up on the train. My current assumption is that since he was talking about the Observer Effect and Schrodinger’s cat which IIRC is summed up by the statement that anything is possible until it is seen, that by seeing the future we have fixed its state, but it could also be taken that because we saw it we changed its state. However given that I am not a physicist I could easily be wrong. On a related topic the Robert Wilson Award does exist and is a prize for achievement in Physics related to Particle Accelerators.

If it is the blackout that is being referred to then it is possible the producers are using part of the novels explanation for the Flash Forward and linking it to the use of Particle Accelerators. Of course they could easily be mistaken about their responsibility and their experiment just happened to be running at the same time as the blackout occurred. I also don’t know how they tie in with Subject Zero and D Gibbons as both Lloyd and Simon experienced a Flash Forward with the time matching everyone else. Like I said however, the 20 million dead could refer to another incident we have yet to hear about.

In other developments, we see the Kangaroo again which must mean that it was responsible for the Flash Forward! and on a more serious note, the blue hand clue comes into play. This ties into the start of the Rutherford case, which may tie in to the Flash Forward in some way given the link to the blue hand. This also leads us to discover that there is more to Al’s Flash Forward than we initially saw. Janis also gets news that she is unlikely to ever become pregnant, which makes me think she almost certainly will, probably after a 1 night stand with another member of the main cast.

One thing which did not come up however, is whether or not the attack tied in with the President. At the moment Demetri (and probably the rest of them) are assuming that it has to do with the Mosaic. I suspect that Director Wedeck may suspect otherwise given that he spends a lot of time with Janis in this episode which could just be him caring that she got shot on his watch or that he feels responsibility as he ordered her to get the dirt on the President for him.

I am curious to see what direction the show takes in the next few weeks, will the Somalia investigation be a priority or will the blue hand angle be the main one, especially seeing how it ties in with the attack. As long as the quality of episodes is maintained I don’t really care and can’t wait to find out.

Episode Rating

7/10