'Flashforward' Rewind

ABC, always on the lookout for high-concept genre serials, has picked up and run with Flashforward, a science fiction mystery created by writer/director David S. Goyer (Batman Begins scribe/Full Moon Entertainment alum). Adapted from the late-nineties novel of the same name, it tells the story of a sudden phenomenon that causes every person in the world to lose consciousness for roughly two minutes. In that time, they all see glimpses of themselves, through their own eyes, six months in the future. Once the exact date and time of the flashforward is universally agreed upon, each person has their own way of dealing with what they saw.

The protagonist is one Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), and he's your typical television hero: slightly scruffy federal agent with a tendency to bend the rules. He's a family man, so of course the viewer can expect to sit through lots of narrow-eyed declarations about how he'd do anything to protect his daughter, and so on and so forth, blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay, so the show is as dry as a box of pasta left in the middle of the desert. That might not be so bad, except it's about eight times as long as it should be. Either the writers were on a desperate binge to fill time, or they have a ridiculous obsession with repetitive, heavy-handed 'sit-downs'. The show's many subplots seem to be on an endless loop, making the entire series a never-ending spell of "You're the Man Now, Dog". Mark and his wife Olivia are doing great until the flashforward, which reveals to Olivia that she is destined to be with another man. Later that day, she meets the man from her vision, and naturally she's upset. She tells her husband how upset she is, and they agree that they'll work through it. In the second episode, she's upset. She tells her husband how upset she is, and they agree that they'll work through it. Same in the third. In the fourth episode, she pretends like it isn't true, but she's obviously upset. She tells her co-worker about it, and they agree that they'll work through it.

They can make it if they work together... again

John Cho almost makes the show watchable, playing Mark's far more interesting partner, Demetri. It turns out that Demetri didn't have a flashforward, even though he was unconscious like everyone else. This of course means that he won't be alive in six months, so naturally he's upset. He tells Mark how upset he is, and they agree to work through it. Second episode... do I really have to go on? The only thing that isn't stuck on 'repeat' is the main storyline, which concerns Mark's quest to unlock the mystery behind the flashforwards. In his own vision, he saw himself working on the investigation, and so he appoints himself as lead investigator. The Los Angeles FBI office is turned into flashforward headquarters, and there's no real explanation as to why. Assistant Director Wedeck organizes a brain trust immediately after the blackout, and there's no explanation as to why Mark and his team are included. Are they close personal friends? Or are there only eight people working in the Los Angeles field office? The latter seems to be the case.

There are some great post-disaster scenes, and the show definitely acknowledges the destructive power of such an event. Planes have crashed in public areas, and death tolls are in the millions. It's the biggest worldwide disaster in the history of mankind, and the writers are well aware of it. The premise itself is fascinating, but don't let that fool you. If there's something interesting on Flashforward, you can expect it to be ignored in favor of cheap family moments and endless scenes of pointless melodrama.

The episodic progression of the investigation is also pretty ridiculous, sometimes to the point of being offensive. For instance, Mark is questioning a woman who apparently knows him in the future, and her name matches that of their prime suspect. It turns out to be a coincidence, but she mentions that in her vision she was talking about pigeons. Then, the audience is shown her flashforward, and she does indeed talk about pigeons. The agents don't know what to make of this, until they track their prime suspect to Utah, and realize that she didn't mean pigeons, she meant Pigeon, a small town in Utah. Hardy har fucking har. There, they track down their suspect and some intense stuff happens. Someone must have thought this was really clever, but it's not. It is so far from clever, it's just plain volatile. It's a cheap stunt, high in concept and low in brains. But maybe you're a fan of that kind of thing. Maybe you'd like every mystery to be like Regarding Henry, with "He's not calling out for Ritz crackers, he's remembering his affair at the Ritz hotel!", even though the crackers were named after the damned hotel to begin with. But okay, maybe that's your bread-and-butter. Is it too much to ask that it make sense, though? In her vision, she clearly says "the pigeons". She pluralizes it. She's not talking about a city, she is definitely, unquestionably talking about birds. In her recounting of the vision, she also pluralizes it. This cannot have been connected in any way to their investigation, yet somehow it's what they used to crack the case.

The case-breaker

Another asinine plot point happened in the very next episode. A German prisoner claims to have critical knowledge about the flashforwards, but it turns out that he is an ex-Nazi war criminal who demands his freedom in exchange for the information. Of course, this is all a big confidence scam, because everyone knows Nazis are EVIL and DECEPTIVE and they're NAZIS and NAZIS are BAD. It's like they couldn't think of a three-dimensional villain. He's portrayed exactly like the antagonist from Marathon Man, even though that movie was made in the 1970s, when it was still very plausible that an 80-year-old man could be an ex-Nazi genocidist (in fact there are actual cases of it). But now it's 2009, which means that Mr. Geyer was 10 or 11 when World War II started. When Germany was defeated, he was what, 17? That sounds like he was an infantryman who lied about his age to join the battlefront. We're supposed to believe he was one of the great Nazi masterminds who committed mass genocide, laughing in his underground dungeon lair, the highlights in his white hair illuminated by the glow of beakers and bunson burners? He was 14! Come on! Seriously? Even if he was slightly older, I wouldn't buy it. No, I'm not sympathizing, I'm simply calling out Flashforward's writers for using a ridiculous cliche archetype to add weight to an otherwise flimsy and weak story. Just think about it for a second: the guy turns 17, the war ends, and what does he do for the rest of his life until he's caught? They mention that he wasn't apprehended very long ago. What has he been doing for sixty years? Evil schemes? Evil Nazi stuff? No, of course not. See, by making the character a Nazi, the writers don't have to explain to anyone why he's so evil, and if you're a damned hack writer, not having to explain shit is your favorite passtime. They conveniently never mention what actual war crimes he was arrested for; we're just supposed to assume the very mention of his name struck fear into the hearts of Jews everywhere, even though his mother still packed him a lunch and he hadn't gone through puberty yet. It's just ridiculous. This whole show is ridiculous.

I'm tired. I keep watching this show, not because I expect it to get good, but because there's just so little in the way of science fiction TV these days. There's more I could talk about, such as the fact that the cast is divided into two employment fields: FBI and Resident Surgery. Okay, we'll talk about it for a second. Four people in the main cast are FBI agents. Two are doctors in some big hospital, and another is a man who has more or less moved into his son's hospital room. Oh, and his son was injured in the blackout. That should pluck the heartstrings. Wait, no, let's keep going. His son has autism. And cancer of the heart. And he's blind and deaf, and alright, I'm making that up. But the blackout injury and autism are real. Autistic kinds make everything dramatic, apparently.

The show just can't make up its mind about who it wants to market itself to. It's like watching an episode of ER where the whole cast happened to have a glimpse of the future, and then the next moment it's like watching an episode of Law & Order where the whole cast happened to have a glimpse of the future. That's it. The show does not break from this at all. You'll get more science fiction out of a trip to Starbucks. There's only one really interesting storyline, and ironically, it involves the only character who isn't some kind of doctor or government super agent. Aaron Stark (Brian F. O'Byrne) is a recovering alcoholic, and close personal friend of Mark's. He's also Mark's sponsor, because making Mark a recovering alcoholic gave the writers yet another excuse to make this show about whiny middle-aged angst. But Aaron is cool. Yes, that's my professional, critical analysis. He's a bearded nobody whose daughter was killed in combat in Afghanistan. In his flashforward, he sees her alive, in his arms. This launches him into a downward spiral of hope and confusion, as he goes off on his own path to find answers. The entire show could have been about him. The entire show should have been about him. Think about the premise: bearded, recovering alcoholic with very little impact on the world has a vision of the future where his daughter, presumably killed in Afghanistan, is alive and well. He goes off searching for her, unraveling a giant conspiracy he was never meant to be a part of. No FBI agents, no doctors, no Nazi archetypes that further cement Western racism towards Germans and German-Americans. Just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose, and how he gets in over his head with the kind of stuff that run-of-the-mill, stupid, predictable, sycophantic shows are all made of. Like Flashforward, for example.