The episode picks up from the penultimate scene of the previous episode (White To Play) with Demetri on the phone to the mysterious agent in Hong Kong. He asks to know more details about his death. She only tells him that the report says he was shot in the chest three times and that it was murder. She tells him this in the hope that he might be able to prevent it. After she hangs up Demetri asks a fellow agent to track the call so he can see where the call was made from and hopefully find the woman that made the call. The trail is a dead end. He then has to leave the office to meet his fiancee who is returning from a work trip away.

Mark and Janis meanwhile go through some of the information that has been uploaded onto the Mosiac website and while reading a report by one person they discover that a former Nazi soldier had a flashforward in which he met Mark and Janis and was later released from the prison he is in. Mark and Janis decide to follow it up and head to Germany to meet with the man. At their meeting he claims to know why the blackout lasted 137 seconds. He says that he will give this information when the FBI have got him released from the prison. Mark and Janis refuse telling the man that they will move him to a minimum security prison but that is all. He tells them he must be released before he can hand over the information as he saw it in his flashforward. He then tells Mark that in his flashforward he arrived back in the US and was greeted by a newly trained customs officer. Mark has Demetri check up on this and the future customs officer confirms that that was also what he saw in his flashforward and that it resulted in him signing on to join customs the day after the blackout.

Mark reluctantly agrees to have the Nazi freed in exchange for the information on the basis that the man is too old now to be of any trouble. Janis does not agree with this and believes the man is playing them, her suspicions are confirmed when he gives some silly excuse regarding religious mythology and symbols to explain the timing of the blackout. This angers Mark who realises he has been taken for a fool. The Nazi then reveals his second piece of information: That when he awoke from the flashforward, the courtyard outside his prison window was littered with crows lying on the concrete. An angry Mark and Janis then head back to the states. Meanwhile; Demetri meets up with his wife-to-be and she is keen to know what he saw in his flashforward. He curbs the subject by telling her that they should go to a hotel and speak about it there. They do and his girlfriend reveals that she saw herself on a beach with the sun blazing down and the waves crashing while she walked across the sand in a wedding dress. She tells Demetri that she saw their future wedding. Demetri is confused and asks her if she really saw HIM in her flashforward, she claims she did, although the viewer never sees him up close. She then asks him what he saw and he claims he saw the same thing which pleases her, although she is unaware that he actually saw nothing.

Having seen his daughter alive in his flashforward, Mark’s friend Aaron goes to see his wife to get some papers signed to have their daughter exhumed and her DNA tested. His former wife refuses and asks him to leave. Aaron then calls Mark and asks him to help him “push the paperwork forward” as they are friends – Mark agrees. The body is then dug up and tested. Aaron later returns to see his ex-wife and tells her that he is sorry but he went about the testing anyway. At first she is angry but then she comforts Aaron after he breaks down and reveals that it is their daughter in the grave.

Back in the US, Mark and Janis meet up with the rest of their team and their friends and family to pay tribute to eight fellow officers who died during the blackout or in the aftermath. During the ceremony FBI Assistant Director Stanford Wedeck makes a speech about the eight people. There is then a wake in their honour. During the wake Stanford questions Mark, Janis and Demetri as to how many wakes they think there have been since the blackout. Someone comments that wakes and funerals are probably happening “all over the world”. This jogs something in Mark’s memory and he and Janis return to the office where he asks her to look up any times in history where there have been a massive decrease in the number of crows. She does so and the pair discover that the last date when large numbers of crows fell was the day of the blackout. Mark then asks her to check for any other dates. She does and they find that in Somalia in 1991 numbers of crows fell dramatically at the same time that the population of the towns and villages all lost consciousness. Mark deduces that the blackouts have occurred before.

In a flashback to 1991, a young boy in Somalia is walking alone through the vast deserted landscape. Overhead he sees a massive flock of crows which fly to the brow of a hill and suddenly fall from the sky. The boy heads to the hill and looks out over it where he sees a small community littered with dead crows and a massive chimney type structure which is emitting a cloudy substance into the sky.

“137 Sekunden” is the third episode of the first season of FlashForward. The episode’s teleplay was written by David S. Goyer and Marc Guggenheim. The episode was directed by Michael Rymer. It originally aired in the United States on ABC on October 8, 2009.

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