I'm not at all surprised that the second blackout was at the end of the season. This is pretty much how I would've guessed it might play out -- they don't stop the next blackout but they warn people in time to save lives. Though it's hard to believe two minutes' warning would be sufficient.
Some of the cliffhangers at the end of last week's episode were resolved too soon and too easily. Obstacles like Mark's imprisonment, Tracy's evident death, and Keiko's deportation were only obstacles long enough to serve the cliffhanger and then were handily and too-conveniently wrapped up once they'd served their purpose. I particularly call foul on Tracy turning out to have a pulse. Last week, the doctor declared her dead several minutes before Aaron gave up on the CPR. It seemed way too definitive, so it felt like a cheat to reverse it now.
They seemed to be trying to have it both ways -- "fate" was moving everyone into position, but with slight differences. That's a little awkward. Although in the grand scheme of things, Janis having a boy instead of a girl is not a slight difference; that could cause changes for generations to come.
A lot of the flashforwards, unsurprisingly, turned out to be misunderstandings, like Nicole thinking she was being drowned (the outcome there was obvious and predictable), and the explanation for Dylan's "It's my house too." The one about why CIA guy said "Mark Benford is dead" was particularly awkward -- he wasn't really reporting a death, just expressing an opinion that Mark had no chance of survival.
I was hoping there'd be an explanation, other than escaping death, for why Demetri didn't have a flashforward. That would've been a more interesting "surprise!" revelation about a flashforward (or lack thereof). I mean, given where he was, it should've turned out to be some consequence of proximity to the accelerator as it powered up. Or maybe a result of having the QED ring on his person.
Hmm, I wonder, did Simon put on the ring? That would mean he'd missed two flashforwards.
Though I never really bought the way characters assumed that they must be dead if they had no flashforwards. This was brought up in the first episode, that he could've just been sleeping, and Dem replied, "Then why wasn't I dreaming?" Which is bogus, because we only spend 20-25% of sleep time dreaming. Not to mention that he could've been knocked out, sedated, or something. So that was always conceptually sloppy.
The whole thing with Mark and the gunmen was way too Rambo, with Mark, who's drunk, by the way, somehow able to take down a whole gang of thugs all by himself, all while figuring out the moment of the next blackout in the most ridiculous way possible (if Gabriel knew the date and time, why didn't he just say so weeks earlier instead of hiding it on Mark's board?). But the climax of it -- running in ultra-slow-motion from an imminent explosion, trying to jump out a window and grab a passing helicopter -- was there any hackneyed action-movie cliche they didn't cram in there? Good grief.
In that montage of flashforwards at the end, it looked like there were various different dates being seen. We saw a sign reading 2015, a bit of writing saying March 2011, and a version of Charlie who was significantly more than five years older than she is now. I wonder where they were going to go with that.
And I wonder if Mark would've miraculously survived the kaboom in some wildly improbable way, or if they would've done the sensible thing and dumped Joseph Fiennes for the second season.
Well, anyway, we know the show has no future. And I can't really say I think it deserved one.
One thing I do want to praise -- I really liked the last 15-20 seconds of the music that always accompanied the recaps at the start of each episode. I never really got around to checking who the composer was, which is odd for me; turns out it was Ramin Djawadi, the fellow who did Iron Man. The rest of his score didn't do that much for me, but I really like those last 14 bars or so of the recap music.
And Keiko was so pretty!!!!
