Remember that great reveal from last week?  Agents Benford and Hawk discovery an area of Somalia that reported dying birds and local villagers blacking out.  It linked Herr Geyer’s story and gave them something to work toward in finding out what caused the global blackout.

But forget all that because we have an FBI agency director that’s mad at his agent for coming up with bupkis so he’s going to side with the agent who’s judgment is clouded by the fact that he may be murdered within six months.  Senior Agent Wedeck tells Bedford that the Germany trip was a major loss and they shouldn’t be chasing these weak leads.  HE suggests following Demetri Noh’s desire to interrogate Alda Hertzog (Rachel Roberts) and her involvement with the suspicious characters from episode 1.  We’re not exactly sure what they do or what the FBI wants them for, but Alda is not giving up any information.  She knows Demetri didn’t have a flashforward and she nudges him into chasing after what turns out to be a small time drug runner.  Noh and Bedford blow up at each other after running down the perp and Demetri finally tells him about the mysterious call.

Olivia Bedford and Bryce Varley encounter a regular man who’s in the hospital after a couple weeks for some pain resulting in a bus accident during the blackout.  He recounts being very calm and actually helping someone out of the sinking bus.  His vision was of him in a club wearing leather pants as a black guy.  It seemed odd but the combination of that vision plus his calm nature during crisis leads Bryce to believe he has Addison’s Disease, an adrenal gland failure that can cause people to turn black, apparently.  Dr. Bedford won’t listen to him and she goes in for surgery to repair some internal bleeding.  But when the patient almost dies, she has to admit Bryce was right and the patient survives.

After a zinger of a line between the Bedfords that Mark’s antics with Charlie weren’t very Shakespeare-like, Nicky confides in Mark that she went missing because her flashforward of her being drowned by someone was frightening and she thought she was being punished.  After being rebuffed by a priest, she talks about it with Mark and he’s very understanding.

Larry Simcoe is no closure to admitting that as a dad he’s just fine and at the end of the episode he gets a call from Simon (Dominique Monaghan) it’s revealed that Larry and Simon are involved in the blackout.  (With a wonderfully cheesy line about being responsible for the worst disaster in the history of the world.)

This whole episode was a bit of a filler.  Mark and Demetri don’t get anywhere interviewing Alda other than she’s creepy and shifty.  Olivia comes to terms with the avoiding of the flashforward reliability question.  Almost too late she admits she’s wrong but it’s obvious that she’s pretending they don’t exist.  She doesn’t like her vision and it’s easy (and probably common) for people to admit to themselves that they aren’t real or true.  People with visions they don’t like are going to be the believers in changing the future.  Those with positive visions are going to decry the merits of fate.

So far the only one on the show that makes any sense is Aaron Stark.  So far he’s done very human things and reacted in very normal ways.  In the preview for next week, he’s also apparently the only one giving Mark the what-for for lying to his wife.  He may have some weird South Boston accent for a Los Angelino, but he’s the porridge Goldilocks settled on.  Where other characters may be dynamic or sexy, Aaron so far is the only real one.

The entire episode felt like it was a set up for the last few seconds with Simon and Larry’s phone call.  It wasn’t completely boring, but it fell a little flat.  There were more than a few times when witty banter or quick dialog was weighed down by long scenes without an edit or without any movement.  Imagine line delivery from West Wing delivered by people standing stock still.

It was scattered, unsettled and very two dimensional.  I hope it picks up next week.  Three out of five broken clocks.