Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (FlashForward)

Plot

Aaron meets with Wedeck’s contact in Afghanistan, who offers to help him find a doctor of a medical relief group that Aaron had met in his flashforward. Aaron and his contact are ambushed by a rebel group out in the desert, but Aaron is saved by another armed group, this one led by the Kahmir, the doctor he had been seeking.

Olivia continues to be accosted by Gabriel, who seems to know a lot about her and her life. Olivia also learns Gabriel has been following her around; Olivia checks older photos of her and spots Gabriel in many of them. Olivia finally visits Raven Rivers, a psychiatric hospital, where Gabriel explains where it had all begun. Gabriel reveals that he and other savants like him were forced to watch flashforwards, generated by experiments run by Dyson Frost; their eidetic memory allowed them to record what they saw in great detail. Gabriel explains his flashforwards always concerned Olivia, and that in all of them, she had always been with Lloyd, having never even met Mark. Gabriel explains he kept trying to push her on the "right path," ever since she had decided to attend UCLA instead of Harvard, where she would have met Lloyd, instead of Mark in Los Angeles.

Flashbacks from two years ago show how Janis was first approached to being a mole in the FBI. She agreed in order to earn the extra cash, and was to report all her findings to the owner of a local pet store. However, it was later revealed that around this period, Vogel had also secretly arranged to meet her, and told her she would be the most likely candidate for being approached on being a mole. Vogel told her to accept the job and act as a double agent. After the blackout, Janis confronts the owner about wanting to quit, horrified she had helped in something so catastrophic. The owner, however, tells her she can’t and will have to continue her job.

In the present, Mark has begun deciphering one of the pictures found on Frost: a large blueprint of an ancient mechanical device. Janis takes the blueprint to an antiquities professor to figure out what it means. When Janis shows a copy of the blueprint to the pet store lady, she orders Janis to take back the blueprint and destroy the other copy on Mark’s mosaic board. Janis successfully infiltrates the professor’s office and takes the blueprint, and also wipes his computer’s hard drive. When she sneaks into Mark’s office to take the copy, Mark catches her, and Janis hurriedly explains she needs it to replace the one that the professor had lost. Mark tells her he’ll make a copy in the morning; the next day, the professor tells them his findings, as he had already taken pictures of the blueprints: he uses a computer to construct a model of the blueprints, which depict a clock-like device with many gears. The professor explains the machine outputs dates, with the first one being October 6, 2009, the day of the blackout. Meanwhile, Mark tries to interpret Frost’s dying words: “You’ll be saved by the lady you see every day.” Mark realizes the “lady” to be the white queen chess piece tacked on his mosaic board, the one found with Frost at Utah. Mark breaks the chess piece open to reveal a ring, the same one Suspect Zero had been wearing. Lloyd and Simon identify the ring as a QED, or quantum entanglement device, and wearing it would make someone immune to the effects of the blackout. Mark theorizes that this might be the reason men come to attack him on April 29. Later, Janis reports to her handler, who orders her to retrieve the ring and not mess up again like she did with the blueprints. She also gives her a final task: to kill Mark Benford.

Title sequence image

Gabriel tied down in a bed for the Raven Rivers experiments.

Reception

This episode was watched by 5.17 million viewers in the United States, down from last week's 5.56 million viewers. IGN gave the episode a 7.8 rating out of 10. The episode also received a B from The A.V. Club, stating "there was a surprising amount of good stuff in this one."