Flash Forward - season 1 - Page 6

I love that we have at least two big budget shows on TV that deal with concepts like time travel, predestiny, etc. I like the actors and the characters (not the same thing). I wouldn't jump on anyone who disagrees, but I can't imagine not watching the show to see how this all plays out. I don't see the show as treading water at all. The world saw it's future -- one person at a time. What would happen if such an event occurred? A million things you might expect at at least another million that you wouldn't.

What would you do if in your flash forward you saw any of these things...

- Loss of spouse (or other family member) due to death
- Divorce
- An affair
- Loss of job
- Loss of house
- Loss health

And those are just some personal things. Did someone hear where Microsoft stock will be in 6 months? What about gold? The Dow Jones? Earthquakes? Tsunami? Hurricane? Terrorist Attack?

The list goes on. It's actually too big a concept to handle, but I find it fascinating to see how the characters are struggling through the situation, trying to get a handle on it, and trying to squeeze order from chaos. At the very least, the show causes me to ask, "What would I do in that situation?" and that's worth something to me right there.

I love a good game-changing episode.

Especially when a solid, primary character is killed, truly permanently.

Revisiting this idea....

It appears that the future can be changed or can it.

I was listening to Dom MOnahan talking to that girl on the train last episode and thought I heard him say something that seemed to be alluding to the idea that events can happen in 2 different time frames at the same time.

So the ff actually happened during those 2 minutes, not necessarily 6 months in the real future, so....
since these events in the ff already happened there is no reason what was seen in the ff cannot be changed.

the ff actually happened in real time during those 2 minutes, so whatever happens in 6 months is not written in stone.

I was really looking forward to FF before the season. It started out not too bad, but then what Tony D says above took over. I gave up last week - just seems too much like writers using the show as their therapy session or something. I swear the recent TV season, at least the new "genre" shows I've tried, feels like a bunch of daytime soap writers have been imported. (Well, I haven't given up hope on Stargate Universe yet and it may turn the corner.) Blech. I don't want drivel, but stuff like Pushing Daisies, Reaper and Chuck were at least fun and engaging - yet gone. *grumble*

Uh, Chuck is still on.

Despite what I said I'm sticking with the show because I like the premise, hopefully it will get better.

It was such a chore watching this show.  Waiting for it to get better but it never does.  About to throw the towel in.

Tonight's was pretty good, at least for me.

I thought last night's episode was a good one.  I had a feeling (probably expressed in an earlier post) that someone with a flash forward was going to die and so prove that not all the futures seen had to come true.  Now they finally went through with that. 

Next we need to find out what kind of scientific experiment caused the flash forward.  The big question in my mind is why no one has been investigating that avenue yet.  Whatever it was it had to have been expensive, so there must be a money trail somewhere.  They did get sidetracked by the attempt on their lives. It might be hard to suspend my disbelief when it is revealed, but you never know.

I'm still enjoying it. In fact, I look forward to it.

Last night's episode did indeed feel like a game changer. It's the first time we've seen the future changed. Now for the fallout. If it holds up, it will be a big relief to some people. I've thinking since the show started someone should simply test that theory. Surely someone would have seen something that could be tested. We finally got the test. At least it appears that way so far.

 

Edited by Mikah Cerucco - 11/6/09 at 11:32am

Another route to take would have been to have someone with a flashforward think they were bulletproof and start taking risks that led to their early death.  When the guy who jumped first played Russian Roulette, I was thinking, "This attitude doesn't add up.  Drive a car on the freeway blindfolded and I can almost guarantee your vision won't come true*."  Of course, if he had done that, that might have been how he killed Celia.  Anyway, that way of demonstrating the malleable nature of the future--which would have less impact in light of his suicide--reminds me of the old saying, "Trust in God, but row away from the rocks."

* - of course, you could just crash and survive and still have your flashforward

I've seen and read depictions of knowing the future where there's literally nothing you could do to alter it. If you were alive on January 1, 2010, picking up a gun and pulling the trigger at your head would result in a misfire, dud bullet, somehow passing through useless brain tissue (as if), or ricocheting off the skull... whatever. Until now (so far), we just haven't known what the model is, and I've been patiently waiting to see how it would unfold. Learning the rules is part of the fun.

    Quote: I thought was another possibility which we could have seen. We might have seen some of that attitude in the firefight they had in DC. 
The future that they saw definitely incorporated the event of the FlashForward, but perhaps it didn't incorporate the knowledge of the future.  That is, all of the things on the board might have been discovered eventually without having seen them on the board in the first place.  The fact that you know of the future means that this future can't happen exactly that way.  It is just a possible future.  As we saw in the sequence at the end, they are all realizing that their future isn't written in stone and they can do something about it.  Dem should still wear a bullet proof vest and other protection on the day of his "murder" and play it safe.

Or disappear into a cave.  But, since the future's not written, that'll just mean his murderer gets him on a different day.

They opened this escape hatch the moment Monaghan's character referred to Schroedinger's Cat in his (not) meaningless train scene. (Which also established that he was a scientist - which we did not know from his previous appearance where he only said that he and Lloyd were responsible for the Blackout.  Similarly we don't know until his later scene with Lloyd that the Blackout was the result of an experiment gone wrong, an unintended side-effect, not the point of the exercise.  At least as far as Lloyd knows. This makes his three scenes quite different.) 

Moreover, it now appears that each storyline has only two possible outcomes, not an infinite range of them.  Either Demetri dies or he lives to marry.   Either Mark drinks or he doesn't.  Either Olivia has an affair or she saves her marriage.  This fits with Schroedinger's ideas about quantum uncertainty, the two possible fates of the cat - living and dead - existing at the same time until the box is opened and an observer enters the picture - at which point they collapse into a single outcome, dead or alive.  What is most interesting is that Al's death doesn't establish that the flashforwards everyone has seen won't happen, but that there may not be a single future that everyone is rushing towards.  (This was hinted at in the wedding vision that Zoey had, which contradicts Demetri's "blank".)  The future may, in fact, be a "mosaic" of their visions, with some coming true and others not doing so, as the moments arrive.  (Cause and effect may also be reversed.   Mark assumes that his marriage is at risk because he's drinking on April 29th, and Olivia always swore she'd leave him if he fell off the wagon again.  But what if Olivia's betrayal is what drives him to drink instead of his drinking ending the marriage?)  I suspect the Mosaic project is soon going to turn up instances of two people who saw the same place and time, but saw very different events happening there. 

 

I'm still intrigued and enjoying it.  Yes, the RPG attack was improbable, but frankly if you can buy the entire world taking a coordinated two minute and seventeen second nap with bonus visions of the future, I'd think you're threshold for the improbable would be pretty high already.  And I do like the characters, but that is a matter of taste, and taste can't be debated.  You either like chocolate ice cream or you don't.  I can't present a series of logical propositions that will demonstrate all the reasons why you should like chocolate ice cream and prefer it to vanilla and expect you to change your mind.  So if you don't find the characters on this show appealing, I can't present a case that they really are appealing and you're just missing it.  But conversely you can't prove that they aren't appealing.  And that, I think, undercuts the attempts to differentiate the reactions we're seeing to this show from those to every other "arc" show that's been on American television in the last 15 years.  I think in terms of plot, movement and story Flashforward is having at least as good a first season as Lost and a better one than Babylon 5. 

If you're one of the people who had similar reserverations about Lost but "forgave" the show, or stuck with it because you liked the characters, I submit that it was objectively no "better" than Flashforward.  The reason you like this show less has nothing to do with the way the stories are told or the kind of stories or how much "soap opera" (which is always what the "plot first" crowd brands anything that - Heaven forbid - smacks of character-development or personal drama) it contains.  The characters don't grab you, so "flaws" which were just as present in Lost grate on you more.  Which doesn't change how you feel about the show, or in any way invalidate your reaction, but I think it does diminish the attempts to argue that this show is in some indisputable way inferior to the others it is being compared to.  And reaction to the individual characters aside, I can't really see any difference at all between the criticism being offered of this show now and the kind of thing I was reading about B5 on usenet in 1995.  "Where's the arc?"  "They never resolve anything"  "They're just spinning their wheels".  Well, we know it wasn't true about B5.  It wasn't true about BSG (although it was a lot closer to the truth, because they were flying by the seat of their pants a lot more than the folks behind most other arc shows.) It wasn't true of Lost.  Why is everyone so sure that it is true of this show, when the people who said that same things about all those other shows were wrong?   

Yes, the episode repeat information because the producers have to make them accessible to new viewers (and to regular viewers who have missed an episode.)  That's simply one of the realities of this kind of show.  This isn't a 13-part mini-series where you can more-or-less count on everybody's having seen all the other episodes.  Each show in this type of series has to be able to function as a stand-alone and not leave somehow who has just dropped in utterly baffled.  (This is especially important during the first few weeks a show is on the air, when new viewers are sampling different shows.  Leave a new viewer with the feeling he can't understand your show because he hasn't watched it from the beginning and he will soon be an ex-viewer.  Regulars who want a show to stay on the air really need to chill and and accept this fact.)

Regards,

Joe

I know I've criticized the show before but this week's episode was pretty good. I was positive that the flashforwards would come true no matter what so it was cool to see that get changed up.

And if I was going to sacrifice myself to protect a woman and her children, I think I'd choose a much less scary way of doing it than diving off a building.

Maybe he was scared that an overdose would've been treated or something and he wouldn't have died.  Besides, jumping off a building makes for dramatic TV.

 Good post Joseph.

I had a similar thought after last night's episode. It's like Sliding Doors. You either turn left or right and your life path could go one way or another depending on what choices you make.

Great post, Joe, except one unforgivable blunder:

This, of course, is wrong. You both and dislike chocolate ice cream. Until you open the carton and taste it. But until that carton is opened...

That's true (and something that I acknowledged and understand) but there's been times when they repeat information in the same episode. Case in point, the episode with Gina Torres where her flashforward shows that six months from now, she suddenly has an older child that she's putting to bed. By the end of the episode, she sees the kid at a memorial service and you realize that's the kid in her flash. If you couldn't figure it out, her performance told you that but they still showed the flashforward. It's like they reiterate the info for either the dumbest viewers or the people that tuned in halfway through the episode.

My issue is more basic.  The storytelling is not honest.  And when it is not, you do not care about the characters or the story any more.  The action sequences from the last episode I watched are a case in point.  The underground garage scene and the FBI female agent getting shot were cheats.  Once that happens, no amount of compelling story telling or character development can restore that trust. 

For, once having set that precedent, who is to say, they will not cheat again?

One can compare this show to Lost on many fronts but Lost has never, ever, cheated.

Quote:
I think it's the former.

Quote:
Or that they're trying to figure out how to keep the casual, perhaps erratic, viewer watching. They're not worried about the core, dedicated group that sets aside time to watch every episode without distraction. I think they're trying to deal with the reality that this type of show has had no second chances: a viewer misses one episode and they will never try to watch again, because they know it's too complex to try and figure out after that. (I have friends that don't bother with Lost since they can't watch every show.) Perhaps, by repeatedly, redundantly, showing key plot points, they can keep the more casual viewer interested and up to speed.

This may also be useful when the show goes on hiatus for the typical 4-12 weeks over the holidays and next year I'm wondering where I left off and what's going on.

Quote:
What wasn't "honest" about the female agent being shot?

The garage scene doesn't bother me (except for the improbably bad choice of music); but I can agree that the physical staging of it made no sense.

As for Lost never cheating? They've done some major retconning, which is cheating for some.

The hit man shoots her, has her dead to rights for the second shot but instead turns tail and runs.  Ohkay.

What retconning has Lost done?  If the retconning does not contradict what went on before I do not understand your point why that would be considered being dishonest.

That scene in FF isn't exactly like that.  The second gunman shoots her in the abdomen, Janis falls to her knees while drawing her sidearm.  The gunman is sizing up a second shot (or perhaps ismply watching his handiwork) just as she draws, at which point he turns and runs, only to be shot in the back.  The only real "cheat" is that the shots of Janis are in slo-mo, and the shots of the gunman are regular, so it appears that he is just standing there for like 10 seconds, when in reality it all takes place in a few seconds.

Sure, the gunman didn't double-tap her, but pausing for 2 seconds is hardly a cheat.

I do, however, agree with you that LOST hasn't been guilty of retconning anything.

One more thing--why do people have issues with the choice of music during the parkade shootout?  I thought it was a clever use of the same song Agents Noh and Vreede were signing in the karaoke bar ("You got any Stones?  Anything by the Rolling Stones?), repeating the lines "How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / A complete unknown / Just like a rollin' stone."

Was it the same song? I didn't notice that. The tone, style, pace, everything about the song felt all wrong for that scene. I was cringing the entire scene. I'll take all the plot cheats in the world over song choices like that :)

I had no problem with the music during the garage scene.  Music can "work" by being  an exact match to the on-screen action or by being in ironic counter-point to it.  In Cabaret a character is brutally beaten in an alley outside the club while an upbeat musical number is being performed on stage.  The film intercuts between the performance and the beating, but the soundtrack stays with the club music - no sound effects, no dramatic "guy getting beat up" music, just the up-beat song.  I thought it worked pretty well. 

Regards,

Joe

I've mostly been enjoying it all along, but I thought this was one of the better episodes besides the pilot.

The only issue I had this week is that I feel like Mark is too smart to think that it's only possible for one person to have a tattoo of 3 stars like that on their arm.

Seems pretty clear that they're pointing at the mercenary company (Jericho, I think it was), though I'm hoping it's not that predictable.

   Quote: I would have thought they might have done some research on the tattoo.

It does seem that the mercenary company is connected with the people who invade the FBI.  How they are tied in with the experiment is another question.  There seem to be too many people involved in an experiment for the secret to stay quiet for too long.

The next question is why Simon is drowning Nicole in the future.