Agent Gough’s tragic and vivid suicide and his note to Celia have been picked up by the media and the implications have spread like wildfire.  People are no longer accepting their flashforwards as scripture.  But as with most of the show, if we start out with absolute certainty that the future will come to pass, by the end we’re absolutely sure that it can be changed.  We see early examples in the Benford’s having a romantic getaway, Nicole seeing a flier for something called Sanctuary,  Agent Hawk returning to work, Agent Noh actively pursuing leads from Mark’s board and Lloyd Simcoe sending an email to a few people saying they need to take responsibility for what they’ve done.

Simon finds Lloyd doing card tricks for Dylan at the hospital.  He chides him on the email and says in response to Lloyd’s playing god comment with, “Twenty million deaths on our shoulders. That’s what you said. If that doesn’t qualify us for Godhood, tell me what does?”  It’s a stiff line I would think more suited for Horatio Caine, but we push on.  Simon challenges Lloyd to a card game.  Poker.  If Simon wins, Lloyd apologizes for the email and they don’t go public.  If Lloyd wins, they go public.

The Benford’s sexy sexy is interrupted by a call from the FBI.  Mark gives Olivia some lingerie and leaves.  She recognizes the outfit from her vision.  In her defiance toward fate, and her wanting to save her marriage, we see later that she’s thrown it away.  The call from the office says they’ve got a witness to a murder, Ingrid Alvarez.  It ties to the FBI and the MOSAIC board because one of the shooters has the three star tattoo on his arm.  Two men take something from a third, then shoot him.  A pet store owner gets a video on her phone.  They find her because she was almost killed herself.  Her roommate was killed, likely by the men who knew she was a witness.  In the video, there are just a few details.  Ingrid remembers them saying QED but no one knows what that means.  (I hope they know what it means, just not in relation to the shooting.)

Tracy’s return is not as warm and receptive as Aaron would have liked.  She’s scared and distant and can’t sleep.  She recaps her last moments in the humvee and how it wasn’t Afghani insurgents that shot the RPG, but a military contractor known as Jericho.  Earlier, she was on a recon mission where she saw Jericho wipe out an entire village.  As a witness, she is being hunted by Jericho and can’t trust the military.  She told her superior and was thus sent on her mission with Mike where she was nearly killed.  She spent two years running and she was kept alive by a man named Khamir, who appeared in Aaron’s vision as well, handing him an envelope.  Aaron asks Mark if he can help.

Janis Hawk returns but wants to quit.  Wedeck doesn’t accept her resignation, seems to settle for her taking some time off.  She’s overseen by Wedeck later looking up information on sperm donation and fertilization.  Her video of the man in the baseball stadium has come back from the NSA, and they’ve cleaned it up more but not enough to make an ID.

Lloyd is losing badly to Simon; the later full of confidence about his eventual triumph.  He uses QED in his description of his foregone win and he makes a last bet; winner take all.  Lloyd agrees.  Simon has four of a kind, Lloyd has a straight flush.  Lloyd helps us remember the card tricks he was playing with Dylan earlier by producing an Ace from his sleeve.

Benford and Noh and Hawk set up a trap for the killers by using Ingrid in her pet shop.  The power goes out, Janis reports movement and Mark and Demitri rush in.  One man appears to make a move on Mark and Demitri and Mark shoots him dead.  Not alive for questioning, and being only one of the two men were there, Ingrid has to go into witness protection.  She agrees as she believes it was in her flashforward.  Mark tells Olivia that he had a good day because he killed the man that was going to come after him.  We cut to a warehouse where different men are loading boxes, driving trucks, etc.  We see tattoos of three stars on several forearms.  One forearm brings the briefcase to a squat little man who opens it and we see six Alpha rings.  He says there’s one missing.  Then he shoots the messenger and walks away.

We’ve added more to the mystery; Tracy’s Jericho military contracting group.  There are secret soldiers wiping out villages and I’ll be you they are the security contractors in charge of providing protecting and logistics for Simon and Lloyd’s scientific experiments.  Possibly like the giant pylons in Somalia.  Ingrid says she heard one of the men say QED, Simon uses the same phrase later in the card game.  Outside of math and philosophy, QED is not a widely used phrase.  The fact that it’s in this episode twice is a clue.  Some how Simon, the three star tattoo men and Jericho are all related.

Despite the opening as music video, soundtrack provided by Pearl Jam (no foolin’,) “Playing Cards with Coyote” is fairly well put together and had some really decent moments.  I think of everyone on the show, character wise, I appreciate Aaron and Bryce the most.  They have a conviction the others lack.  Aaron’s may be due to him being in AA or possible a veteran (not sure on that, he just seems like he may have been in the service) but he has a faith of purpose that the other characters don’t possess.  They float around in this waffling mode, unsure of who they are or where they’re going.  Bryce’s story has yet to be told.  We don’t know why he was on that pier with a gun trying to kill himself (I’m guessing either gambling debts or illness) but something in his vision has assured him that he’ll be around in six months and life is worth living.

The question all these people should be asking is why it happened.  I think it’s short sighted of the writers to put people in a hole dug with promises of the future.  Yes, your vision says you’ll be alive in six months.  What about six months and one day?  They need a character that steps up and says they’re going to live their life the best they know how and not make plans based on what might happen.

Three and a half (out of five) broken clocks.