Agents Noh, Vreede and Benford and Director Wedeck are coming out of a building and getting into the car that the valet has brought to them.  Mark’s on his phone telling someone Wedeck saved them all somehow.  As they start to drive off, a large black SUV hits them.  Several Asian men emerge from the SUV and begin shooting at the FBI car, then one pulls out an RPG launcher and destroys the car.

Opening Credits.

This episode of FlashForward really shows where the show’s strengths lay; in the political world.  The show has floundered a little by focusing on interpersonal relationships between people who, by the nature of television, are unable to be honest and forthcoming.   In “Gimme Some Truth,” however, we’re treated to a bit more of what the FBI has to deal with from those who control the purse strings.

39 Hours earlier, Agents Benford, Noh and Veerde are undertaking polygraph tests.  Veerde is shown leaving the office through a secure door, he doesn’t know why.  Mark flips a coin that says 7 Years on one side and Keep Coming Back for More on the other.

Director Wedeck has his hands full when he’s in DC with a Senator Clemente.  Something has happened in his past and Clemente was involved or knows about it and she intends to pull his field office’s funding for the MOSAIC project.  Mark Bedford’s testimony before the committee doesn’t go well and he, and by proxy Wedeck and the whole office, come off sounding like a bunch of conspiracy nuts.

All is not lost, however, as Wedeck and the President are old friends, as we see earlier by them playing some 1v1 hoops.  The Prez alludes to the fact that Wedeck was his choice for Vice President but Wedeck had refused.  Now the President offers him the job of Secretary of Homeland Security.  Wedeck has to roll in the mud and pull a skeleton out of the closet in order to get Clemente off his back.  The President had an affair with an African American woman and from that union came a child.  They paid the woman off but she lives close by in Georgetown.  Wedeck was able to find her again through MOSAIC and pays her a visit.  He’s awfully chummy with the young boy, like he’s a favorite uncle, and the woman says it’s been a long time.

Wedeck shows the Pres a picture of the woman and asks that the Pres makes sure Clemente doesn’t pull his funding.  It’s a dirty play, but it gets the job done.

Olivia overhears Aaron talking to Mark on the phone.  He’s there to help fix some things on their house.  Aaron tells Mark to find an AA meeting while in Washington.  Olivia and Aaron talk and she doesn’t trust that Mark won’t start drinking again.  It happened before when he was stressed and in Washington.  Aaron tries to talk her down, says it’s no good to lie to each other, which of course is all they’ve been doing.

Agent Janis Hawk is seen kicking someone’s butt in Tae Kwon-Do or Karate class.  The ass-kickee asks her out, she says maybe, but then later we see her with the chick from the class instead.  They’re having a nice dinner, they kiss, the next morning over breakfast the lady says Janis needs a new alarm clock and asks to see her later at an art show.  Janis says of course and goes to work.

There’s going to be a lot of flak caught by the show about Janis Hawk.  There are going to be all sorts of reactions ranging from pandering to moral decrepitude.  The LGBT of America will say it was horribly written, there was too much PDA and that Janis Hawk being gay is a token.  The more religious of viewers will, I’m sure, write angry letters and emails and message board posts about how seeing two women kiss, make breakfast and promise to see each other later is the reason behind teen pregnancy, AIDs and the Cubs not winning.  I only bring it up because after watching it twice, and living with and knowing a few lesbians, I have to say there was nothing to it.  It happens to be a budding relationship and so far it’s nothing more than Demetri Noh and his fiancée have done.  This is me telling everyone to get over it.  But it’s important to the show because her almost girlfriend (they’re unsure at this point) says her flash forward has her wearing a wedding band and Janis’s was of being pregnant.  She’s earlier said, “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”  Now we start thinking about how these two end up.

Janis and a few other agents are able to find satellite photos of the Ganwar region of Somalia and they see comparative photos over several months in which several pylons are erected around a spit of a village.  It’s enough proof to send a team to investigate.

Something happens earlier in the committee hearings.  CIA Director Keller (played by perpetual agent of all kinds Michael O’Neill) reports that the CIA has reason to believe that the Chinese are behind the Blackouts.  When they happened, it was 2am in China, virtually no damage or loss of life.  What better way to weaken America, China’s biggest rival?

In a bar after the hearings, Agents Noh and Veerde sing some horrible karaoke and Mark tells Stan that he can’t remember all of his flashforward because he was drunk.  This shocks Stan, he’s put his whole career on the line based on Mark’s vision and now he finds out that Mark was hammered at the time.  There was a little confusion because they made it seem like Mark was drunk WHILE he blacked out, not IN his blackout.  I don’t know if that would have mattered.

So, they agree it was a bad day, go get the car and are attacked by…Chinese?  We don’t know the affiliation.  Mark is on the phone to Janis Hawk when it happens.  After an RPG hits the car, from behind the burning wreckage come all four FBI agents, guns ablaze as “Like a Rolling Stone” cover plays.  They take out the bad guys decisively.  Janis is worried about the gun fire but as she’s walking home with groceries, she is attacked by Chinese gunmen.  She is able to take one down in hand-to-hand, but another is about 20 feet away and shoots her in the gut.  As she lays there bleeding, her flashforward plays in her head.  She’s getting a sonogram and the technician tells her it’s a girl.

But does she die on the street with the rolling alarm clock given to her by her friend trailing blood in little circles saying, “Wake up, it’s time to get up?”  We don’t know.  She’s bleeding a lot, there’s no one around, we’re left to assume she dies and that her vision of the future will not come true.  But we don’t see her flatline and we don’t see people watching her body be put in the ground.  It’s all too likely that next week she’s miraculously found by an EMT who sustains her life until she can be patched up at the hospital that’s only blocks away.  I bet you it’s Olivia’s hospital.

I hope there’s an EMT around to save this show from its own acting.  I wanted to give this episode a lot of praise for showing a little bit of political reality and a little bit of life outside the Benford House of Lying, but the acting was atrocious.  I can’t tell if Fiennes is just having a hard time with the American accent or if he’s playing an American FBI agent with a migraine, IBS and shoes that are too small.  He’s contorted and forced and truly unbelievable in this roll.  Vance’s performance during the bar scene was out of place and hard to follow.  It was like watching a horror movie that you knew was trying to be evil and serious and yet you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity.

There was no Larry Simcoe, no Charlie Merry, but they keep pushing smaller characters on us and it’s starting to water down the cast list.  There’s ensemble casts that survive on their own in vignette showcases from week to week, then there’s this smattering of “Well who is that now?” that FlashForward is doing.

It’s not everyone and it’s not all the time, but this episode was without major reveals to the story and it hence must rely on the strength of its writing and acting and it just didn’t have it.  But I do hope Janis isn’t dead.

Two and a half out of five broken clocks.