I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard-- I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up.
Anyway, I've been watching, and I have to say, I'm really not blown away at this point. The AV Club recap of last night's episode gets one of the main reasons why:
I was talking with someone on the Twitter, our official demon overlord for the year 2009, about how I generally think the series is much, much better when no one is actually talking, and this episode seemed like a perfect exemplification of that point. There were a handful of striking, inventively directed musical sequences. There was a cool question at the center about what one of the guest characters saw in his flash forward. Again, there were some good guest players (someone in the show's casting department is getting some great actors to play the smaller parts). But most of the time when the characters speak, they're not even coming close to saying something about their inner lives. Instead, they state, as baldly as possible, either what we can already see on screen or exactly what they saw or think.
That nails one of the big problems-- the dialogue is just crashingly awful. Like, J. Michael Straczynski bad. The blonde female terrorist was particularly bad-- not only were her lines awful, she delivered them with all the subtlety of a local tv car commercial. It was excruciating.
There's another problem with the show as a whole, though, one that's familiar to any reader of Slacktivist's Left Behind posts: the writers and producers haven't put enough thought into what the world would be like after an Event of this magnitude. Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau puts his finger on part of it:
So, the natural question is, why wouldn't most people's visions of the future involve them being in church waiting for the messiah, or in Times Square waiting for the aliens to land, or manning the barricades (if they're cops or soldiers) for the riots, or waiting in the bunker for the collapse, or whatever? Whatever one thinks of the visions, somebody or something with astounding power, and a willingness to inflict mass casualties, has declared a keen interest in that moment 6 months from now. You'd think a lot of people would freak out.
It's an excellent question, and one that sort of undermines the tension the show is trying to set up regarding the visions. Everybody knows the exact moment of the flash-forward, and yet the visions that people have seen do not appear to reflect that knowledge (except for Joseph Fiennes's bulletin board). Having had the visions, though, it's really hard to believe that anybody would be going about their business in as blase a manner as they are in the visions that we see. Which strongly suggests that the future seen in the visions is not fixed and immutable.
There's also a whiff of the cosy catastrophe to the whole thing. For the most part, we see middle-class people doing middle-class things. Nobody we've seen has had a vision of themselves working the late shift at their second job, or anything like that. They're either doing boring affluent-people things, or they're suffering some sort of Event-related violence.
As a result, there's a kind of incoherence to the whole thing. I'll probably give it another episode or two, but really, it's not looking terribly promising at the moment.
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Having had the visions, though, it's really hard to believe that anybody would be going about their business in as blase a manner as they are in the visions that we see. Which strongly suggests that the future seen in the visions is not fixed and immutable.
Ah! Yes, that is exactly what bugs me about the show! Everybody is all, OMG WE SAW THE FUTURE, but the "future" they saw was so obviously not a future where everybody saw the future. So, all the people assuming that they SAW THE FUTURE just seem to be acting stupidly.
I'm not sure that the trauma of Flash Forward equates with the trauma of Left Behind (plotted trauma, not the trauma inflicted by reading/viewing). In LB, millions(?) of people disappear, so there is physical proof that something very weird happened, something that cannot be explained by any rational means. In FF, everyone passes out for a time period, and has visions that may or may not be true. The passing out is admittedly weird, but still has potential to be explained through some global poisoning or the like, perhaps even an extreme case of mass hysteria. Unlikely, but still with a possible rational explanation. The visions could be merely visions, until they are proved true. And no one will really believe that the visions are proved true until their own vision comes to fruition. So it is easier to picture a FF person dusting themselves off after passing out, saying "That was weird," and trying to go about living their life again, than to see an LB person who witnessed someone vanishing before their eyes (and there were so many that it should be well less than six degrees of separation between any given person and an eyewitness) attempt to do the same.
That said, I haven't been watching the series, so my views aren't influenced by mind-numbing dialog or plot details that may make the experience more universally real.
Like, J. Michael Straczynski bad. "A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles." If you were a cute kid or a pet on Babylon 5 you died a horrible often ironic, audience-satisfying demise. Good.
TV engages viewers who will embrace advertisers' $19.95 wonders and Detroit vehicles. "When I brake it recharges the motor!" They drink lite beer brewed from rice, their bathrooms smell of (-)-limonene or pinene to infer cleanliness, they brown-nose god, and they live paycheck to paycheck. The average person is stupid, and so its targetted entertainment.
I haven't seen this series, and all I know of the Left Behind series are the Slacktivist posts I've read, so take this with a large grain of salt.
I think Scott's partially right about there being a difference in the nature of the traumas here. In the LB universe, it's clear that something traumatic happened which everybody knows about and therefore life should not be as "business as usual" as L&J portray it. The Flash Forward scenario is that certain people have seen certain parts of the future, but most have not, and even the ones who have have only seen part of the picture. Thus it is reasonable to assume that most people in the Flash Forward universe would be going about their everyday lives.
Except that there is one gaping flaw in that argument: why are the characters who have had these visions going about their everyday lives? Short of being in denial somewhere upriver of Khartoum, these folks should be talking with their therapists (if they really are the upper middle class sort, as Chad suggests), or having some sort of major religious conversion, or even in the insane asylum (because they and/or the people around them have good reason for thinking they might actually be insane).
#4: No, the premise in the show is that EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD (with very few known exceptions[*]) blacked out and had a "dream" of what appears to be themselves, 6 months in the future. Chad's right: the future-dreams should contain a lot more awareness of the flash-forward experience than they have to date.
That being said, now that I think on it, the old Nazi guy in last week's episode said something to the effect that in his vision, he knew that telling Joseph Fiennes about his FF experience resulted in the circumstances he experienced in his vision (namely, getting out of prison). So that's one example of the people in the show's world showing awareness of the FF experience *during* their FF experience.
I'm not sure that the trauma of Flash Forward equates with the trauma of Left Behind (plotted trauma, not the trauma inflicted by reading/viewing). In LB, millions(?) of people disappear, so there is physical proof that something very weird happened, something that cannot be explained by any rational means. In FF, everyone passes out for a time period, and has visions that may or may not be true. The passing out is admittedly weird, but still has potential to be explained through some global poisoning or the like, perhaps even an extreme case of mass hysteria. Unlikely, but still with a possible rational explanation. The visions could be merely visions, until they are proved true. And no one will really believe that the visions are proved true until their own vision comes to fruition
That's fine as far as it goes, but there's also the fact that the global blackouts led to at least thousands, probably millions of deaths worldwide. The drowning of an entire busload of people, seen at the start of this week's episode, is only the tiniest fraction of what went wrong-- planes crashed, cars wrecked, etc.
This ought to have led to vastly more distress and disruption than we see in the show. There's an occasional nod toward this-- the airline executive sitting in an otherwise empty plane-- but not nearly enough.
Also, what Pam said.
i'm guilty of dissecting tv shows/movies like this frequently. however, i'll have to pass along a comment my wife makes every time i argue it out:
"suspend your beliefs/logic for a little while and just enjoy the make belief 'what ifs' of it all"
if the plot line to this show was put together by you, it would have everybody's flash forward be nothing more than the entire world's population standing around saying things like "i saw this 6 months ago!"
and that is not good entertainment!
PS: Uncle Al, don't think so highly of yourself as you're just one of the masses and obviously watch tv to some degree. I'm sure we can poke holes in anything your highly evolved intellect would consider 'entertaining'.
enjoy!
That's been bugging me, too. The characters know when their glimpse is coming. Why not send themselves a message instead of doing something as though they don't know their past selves will see it?
Heck, why is the FBI boss on the can? He's very embarrassed by it, but he knew that moment was coming, so why didn't he plan to be doing something different?
It would be one thing if the future they saw was one in which the flash-forward hadn't happened, but at least two of the character's visions make it clear that it had happened.
BTW, shouldn't a significant minority of people have been asleep during their flashforward? The part of the world on the darkside of the earth should be seriously shortchanged. The guy who assumes he's going to die because he got no vision, why doesn't he assume he was napping or otherwise unconscious?
Thanks for the link. It does surprise me that nobody in the future shows much awareness of the moment. Even if nobody freaks out, you'd think people would at least stand around and be like "Wow. This is the moment that the whole world flashed to. Weird. I thought it would be more special, you know?"
And I'm surprised that nobody in the future makes a point of sending themselves a message. Me, I'd sit down at my table with a list of major stock movements and horse race winners, and read them over and over and over again during those 2 minutes and 17 seconds, so that the me 6 months earlier could make the right investments and bets.
The only way normalcy sort of makes sense is if the entire world is somehow persuaded that the moment of the flashforward won't be significant after all. Being that it's an action drama, I suppose that most of the villains behind the flashforward could be caught in the middle of the series, and their plans are foiled, and the whole world breathes a sigh of relief at the news that no evil scheme will unfold at that moment. So when it arrives, it's just a normal day and nobody is worried about anything.
Of course, our hero suspects that there are some big and badder people still at large with some sort of bigger and badder backup plan, so he keeps hunting them while his colleagues and superiors dismiss his efforts. He becomes marginalized, his life falls apart, and finally in desperation he goes to the place where he knows the assassins will be looking for him, so he can try to confront them and get to the bottom of it all.
That's the only thing that sort of fits: The world doesn't make a big deal out of it because something bad has been averted and it's just another day. And only our hero has reason to suspect otherwise, but nobody believes him, hence he is where he is.
"It would be one thing if the future they saw was one in which the flash-forward hadn't happened, but at least two of the character's visions make it clear that it had happened."
I don't think so. I think the future is one in which the flashforward did not happen, and that the Nazi Prisoner was playing them when he said that he knew that telling them his flashforward was what had got him released. Notice that he did not actually provide them with any information. He told them about the crows, but I seriously doubt that had not been noticed by other (unshown) researchers.
@oscarzoalaster
Then what about the main character's vision? He's investigating the flashforward in a future where it didn't happen?
@hawkins
That's what a lot of other people tell him, so I don't think there's anything odd about that. He assumes the worst, others suggest he was just sleeping. He's a pessimist, not a plot hole.
Oh noes! I was really digging this show until you turned on the skeptic's lamp...
These questions are legitimate, as the proble the fuzzy fractal border between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi.
I quite like the series, albeit differences abound between it and the original novel, which was (to me) clearly Science Fiction. I like canned asparagus, and I like fresh asparagus. They differ. So?
The problem with a TV series or novel in which a Big Thing affects everyone on Earth is: not everyone is cinematic. On the flip side, a novel can show the rich interior life of someone who is boring on screen.
So the test of Stfnal authenticity: are the highly selected characters who get close ups THINKING about the Big Thing, and their own connection to it? I see that the answer is clearly "yes" in both novel as TV series.