Is my sparkfun serial lcd defective?

I got two serial LCD's for a project. One works and one doesn't. The second one can't communicate, but I do notice that the backlight flickers at the same time that the TX light on my arduino does. I'm using an arduino decimilia powered via usb.

I tried sending the board the reset signal

Serial.print(0x07, BYTE);
  Serial.print(18, BYTE);

According to the pdf it should reset the serial backpack to 9600 baud and such. Unfortunately I don't get any of this happening.

Also, I'm not getting any splash screen.

Talk to Sparkfun about it.

It sounds like your Power pin on the lcd is actually going to TX on the microcontroller. This would explain why it is flickering when data is being sent ie it is getting a bunch of 5V pulses that are turning it on and off instead of sending it data.