* Warning, spoilers from recent episode of FlashForward. *
After an uneven first half of the season, ABC’s FlashForward made up for it with its last handful of new episodes which have propelled the story forward in interesting ways, while sprinkling in some character depth along the way. By having two scientists admit publicly that their experiment MAY have caused the killer global blackout -- in which people experienced two-plus minutes of a day six months into the future -- the show has moved beyond the crazy mess and muck of the plotlines involving a Nazi, black crows and suicide societies, which is a good thing.
I was just about to delete FlashForward from my DVR’s scheduled recordings – as I did with Fox’s Fringe which just couldn’t keep me hooked, as much as I am a fan of J.J. Abrams – when I saw the seventh episode, “The Gift,” where a FBI agent committed suicide in order to avoid having his flash-forward come true: That he accidentally kills a mother of two small children. “Live your life,” the man wrote in a letter to the woman whose life he saved by taking his own. “Live every day. And know that the future is unwritten. Make the most of that.” Although this appeared during the Fight Club-like suicide society episode, the FBI agent’s suicide was the most dramatic and interesting part as it established that the flash-forwards folks experienced were not inevitable.
The final new 2009 episode, “A561984” -- where we learned that FBI Agent (Now suspended? Fired?) Mark Benford was the man seen murdering his partner, Demetri Noh, in a mysterious CIA-linked woman’s flash-forward – provided another welcomed and unexpected twists, in addition to Demetri realizing he has to be concerned about his safety around his (former?) partner. The violent abduction of the now-reviled scientist Lloyd Simcoe, which left his son in the custody of his doctor, Olivia Benford, was likewise a smart move, unavoidably binding Lloyd and Olivia together after they shared an odd moment where she realized she almost moved into the building where Lloyd’s wife lived when he first met her. (The side story about Demetri’s fiancé Zoey realizing that her flash-forward wasn’t of their wedding, but of his memorial service, nicely nurtured the emotional, human thread of the episode.)
FlashForward’s behind-the-scenes staff has recently endured a bit of a shake-up, and there was a brief production stop in late November ordered by ABC execs in order to “boost the writing.” What does this mean for the show once it returns in the spring? Will we be treated to a smart and compelling drama that makes viewers care about the characters, or will we go back to that bad place with the crows and the Nazis and I delete it from my DVR's schedule? I’m hoping for the first option.
I watched the premiere of V last night on ABC, you know, that new drama about the aliens "visiting" Earth as their ginormous spacecraft hover over the world's biggest cities.
The pilot episode was intriguing, but I think I’m a tad biased because I'm a fan of Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost) who plays single mom FBI agent Erica Evans on V and has been convinced that the "visitors" want to annihilate humankind. She’s not as enthralled by the attractive, smooth talking aliens as, say Scott Wolf (Bailey from Party of Five) who’s been flirting with the alien's leader, Anna, and, as ambitious TV news guy Chad Decker, is benefitting from being the one journalist on Earth to whom Anna will grant exclusive interviews . . . that is if he agrees not to ask any questions that cast the aliens in an unflattering light.
So there’s a battle coming: The skeptics, like Erica Evans, plan to take on the aliens and subvert them because they believe there's at least one (if not more) sleeper terrorist cell of aliens -- who look human on the outside -- that has been on Earth for some time and whose members are bent on doing evil things. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Earthlings appear to be celebritizing the self-professed peace loving aliens -- who have the power to miraculously heal the sick -- as they entice young people into joining “ambassador” programs and training them aboard their ships. People are selling, "I Love Vs" T-shirts and bowing down reverently in the presence of the "visitors'" ships.
That’s all obviously good potentially dramatic material. On paper. But can the writers maintain the momentum and promise of the pilot, keep things fresh and not get bogged down with minutia and subterfuge too quickly?
Plus, there’s the odd decision made by ABC execs to air four episodes and then go on hiatus until 2010 after the winter Olympics. If V succeeeds in getting traction and ratings, all that will grind to a halt. If it’s stinking up the joint, will ABC just pull the plug? Why not just hold the entire series until 2010 so they could air the 13-episode run in consecutive weeks? This puzzles me.
Anyway, here’s a snippet from last night’s premiere. The scene features Wolf’s character prepping for an interview with chief alien Anna:
Over on ABC’s other cataclysmic/conspiratorial new show FlashForward – where (virtually) everyone on Earth blacked out for nearly three minutes and saw a glimpse of their lives six months into the future – six episodes have aired. As with V, I liked the pilot, but feel as though the show has lost some steam since then, gone creatively astray a bit what with tangents about the crows, a Nazi prisoner and bizarre congressional hearings.
What keeps me tuning in to FlashForward -- there've been a few times when I wanted to just delete an episode, unwatched, from my DVR -- is that I like the main characters and am eager to find out how they get from where they are now to where they are in the flashforwards. (Once that happens, I hope the writers have a logical plan as to what'll they'll do then. Hopefully not another global blackout.)
For example, Sonya Walger (Penelope from Lost) plays Dr. Olivia Benford who’s married to FBI agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes from Shakespeare in Love). In Olivia’s flashforward, she finds herself living in her same house but her daughter, as well as with another man she'd never met and his son Dylan. After they experienced the flashforwards, Dylan became Olivia’s patient and he remembered being in her house and seeing Olivia's daughter during his flashforward. FBI agent Mark is holed up in his office in his flashforward, back on the bottle (his drinking had caused a previous marital separation), and he’s investigating the cause of the blackout when he’s attacked by masked gunmen. Seeing how Olivia and Mark get from point A to point B is what has kept me watching through the nonsense about the crows and the inane power politics of Washington, D.C.
I’m also interested in the storyline for FBI agent Demetri Noh (John Cho), who doesn’t have a flashforward and assumes that that means he’ll be dead before April 29, 2010, the date everyone saw during their blackout. When Demetri posted his experience on a web site where others have posted the details of their flashforwards, he received a call from a woman who said she knows he'll be murdered.
However, as much as I was a fan of Dominic Monaghan when he was the self-sacrificing chap named Charlie on Lost, I can’t stand what I’ve seen of him in FlashForward, but then again, I’m not supposed to. Don’t like his whole sinister this-is-one-big-science-experiment-gone-wrong storyline. Don’t really care either.
The video below is of the man and his son Dylan at Olivia and Mark’s house on Halloween night; both the son and the father realized that this was where their flashforward took place:
While lots of folks like to knock Lost because it’s become so complicated in recent years, it wasn’t that way at first. It was a character drama where a group of strangers crash-landed on an island and were presented with constant, life-threatening situations. The storyline slowly unfolded by explaining the characters and their backstories so viewers felt they understood their present actions and what was motivating them. By the time the show got to the level of Easter eggs and requiring a PhD in Lost-ology in order to understand the episode threads, viewers had already bonded with the characters. Which is why I think it’s important that, while they advance the plot forward (which some viewers complained Lost didn’t do very well in its initial seasons), the V and FlashForward writers need to make sure that they make us care about what happens to the characters in their shows. Otherwise if they waste time with extraneous distractions, they could wind up being high-concept, high-profile bombs on their hands.
