Unless you’ve been living under a rock, don’t watch television, or have been generally avoiding everything to do with ABC for the last several months, you’ve definitely heard of Flash Forward. The premise is simple: One day everyone on the planet blacks out for two minutes, seventeen seconds and has a vision of six months in the future. The show is based on a Robert J. Sawyer novel, though I suspect that the show will only take the framework of the novel and tell the story a different way.
We’re not going to belabor the Lost comparisons (despite the shows sharing a basic framework and two actors), but Flash Forward opens in the wake of a disaster. We see Joseph Fiennes climbing out of an overturned vehicle, looking out at flaming wreckage and we quick flash back to earlier that day when everything was tranquil. There’s a number of quick character introductions of folks who we’re not going to remember for a couple of episodes, John Cho, and Penny from Lost.
Then we get to it. The two minutes and seventeen seconds of flash forward. The trouble, and I can’t express how happy I am that the logical result of blacking out for two minutes actually occurred, is that when everyone on the planet blacks out for the same two minutes a lot of bad stuff is going to happen. Cars and planes will crash, people in need of desperate medical attention won’t get it, and pretty much everything else that could happen probably will.
Los Angeles looks like it was the victim of a terrorist attack. It looks like the apocalypse. What is beautiful here, from a realism perspective, is the reactions of the survivors on the freeway. Shock, fear, a bit of terror, and the belief that the United States has just been hit, and hit bad by terrorists. The revelation that San Diego has also been hit badly hammers that home. Viewers at home who have seen a single preview know that this is bigger than a terrorist attack, but that’s an honest response and it resonates.
Now, as awesome as the wreckage of America is from a visual perspective, there needs to be a human story for Flash Forward to work. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the mystery of the flash forward will be what keeps people talking and thinking about how it all pieces together, but the show needs characters who are interesting and characters to care about. I’m not convinced we have them yet. Joseph Fiennes’s cop is ostensibly the lead, and he gets the first full flash forward of the series, but he’s a fairly neutral character. He’s sort of like the lead character in some video games who is a fairly blank slate for the players to put themselves in that leading role. That doesn’t work so well for television and I suspect that the writers have much more in store for the character. Yeah, Penny’s the wife and a surgeon and yeah, she reveals that in her flash forward she was with another man, but what is lacking in this first episode is anyone to really care about. We’re supposed to care about Joseph Fiennes and Penny and the awesome John Cho (more about him in future columns), but there is just so much going on in the episode that we don’t. Or, more specifically, I didn’t.
What works is that the initial premise is more than enough to hook me through the first episode and into the second.
The video footage of people dropping is chilling and the story-tease of the video from Tiger Stadium in Detroit of a man walking while everyone else was blacked out is quite excellent. It reveals there is something larger is out there. Of course there is, because there wouldn’t be a show without it, but it’s an early glimpse. The writers / producers could have waited to show that and very little would have changed. Except the hope that the writers know what they’re doing. The obvious comparison here will always be with Lost, and with Lost it took until the announcement of the show’s end date for viewers to have honest hope that the writers have things under control.
We need to know that right away. Now. We need hope and the promise that this is all figured out. That there is more than a season’s worth of thought and that there is a defined destination.
It’s a big introduction episode. Who are the characters, why should we care about them, and what the hell happened? We’ll see.
Is it good? It’s interesting. It has the potential to be good. It has the potential to be really good.
I agree that the concept is fantastic, and applaud the realism, but I think the writers have given us characters to follow and care about. Fiennes and his wife have a quirky relationship where they insult each other as terms of endearment, and both are frightened that they will be the ones to cause their impending marital break up–his inability to stay on the wagon, hers to stay out of an affair. I thought the beauty of the first episode was how minutely they covered multiple characters who interpret the event differently.
For me, this is a human drama that has been set in motion by a science fiction event. I loved it and the second episode as well. I think they do an excellent job of expanding the human element in the second episode. The AA mentor who looks out onto the street of people and basically says that everyone has become a prophet. The “idea” is staggering–multiply “what if you knew the future?” by Billions–everyone’s got their own version, or their own 2:17 slice. It’s rife with story ideas.
I compared it to “Knowing” the movie, saying that Knowing tried to be this kind of movie, but the writing sucked. The concept was there, but completely lost inside “Knowing”s deterministic theology. No wiggle room for the characters to try.
http://jeromestueart.com/2009/09/26/flashforward-the-excellence-that-knowing-could-have-been/
I love the second episode of Flashforward. The main couple are determined to make their marriage work no matter what the future said, but it’s got a tragic feeling to it already.
I will say that I’m starting to predict plotlines…but have no idea if I’m right or not. The nature of the show is that it showed you the premiere and the finale simultaneously and you have to patch up the narrative middle! Good stuff!
For a movie that starred Nic Cage, I liked Knowing far more than I should have. It wasn’t great, or exceptionally good, but it was okay and enjoyable. Plus it had plenty of solid destruction and doom at the end, and I can’t get enough of that.
I didn’t talk about the relationship stuff so much in the Ep 2 article, but I just don’t care about that marriage. I don’t necessarily want it to end and I am even less interested in the stuff with Mystery Man, but I’d rather that was ignored.
Actually, I think the writers *tried* to give us characters to care about. I don’t think they succeeded. Maybe I’m morbidly gloomy this month, but I want the writers to drop a moon on most of the characters and call the show John Cho Doesn’t Remember the Future.
That’s not true (about the moon), but I’m suddenly enamored with the idea. I do believe that the writers tried and mostly didn’t succeed with anyone remotely a major character.
Courtney B. Vance was a more interesting character during the first episode but became borderline slapstick in Ep 2. Too much so.
The characters who are more interesting are characters like the Sheriff in Ep 2. She was compelling. What was HER story? I thought she was lying about not seeing anything, but they kind of suggested why with her resolution…that builds into John Cho’s storyline a bit, but I preferred the idea that she was lying.
Actually, that’s something I’d like to see explored more. People lying about their visions in a variety of ways. Just like kids would play Blackout, we’d lie our socks off.