So, my plan to watch a lot of new TV shows has somewhat fizzled out. I didn't manage to catch a single minute of Hank, gave up on Cougar Town after six minutes, lasted one episode of The Middle, and two episodes of Modern Family.
For some reason, though, I've been glued to Flash Forward all the way through. It's had its ups (the first episode) and downs (the third), but overall the story has been just enough to keep me hooked.
The story of Flash Forward is fairly simple - in the first episode (episodes are set in real-time, so if a show airs in December, it's December in the show), everybody on Earth suddenly and inexplicably blacks out. A minute and a half later, they wake up. This causes problems which are both obvious - traffic accidents, mass confusion - and melodramatic - botched suicide attempts.
As people begin discussing just what happened, they realize a common pattern - it wasn't just a blackout, everybody got a glimpse of the exact same time next April.
The initial question - 'did that really happen?' is answered quickly, as people are able to corroborate the flash-forwards of people they had never met as of the blackout.
The show then starts following a number of plots, all of which somehow revolve around the main character, an FBI agent whose flash-forward showed him leading the investigation into the incident - therefore he is picked to lead the investigation into the incident. His partner, played by John Cho, is worried because he didn't have a flash-forward - which seems to point at him dying, especially after the one other person he meets who didn't have a flash-forward is killed in an investigation of a suspicious warehouse. Then he gets a call telling him he'll be assassinated on March 15.
Other plotlines revolve around the FBI agent's wife, who saw herself with another man, his AA sponsor, who saw himself with the daughter he thought was killed in Afghanistan, and his daughter's babysitter, who saw herself being drowned and feeling like she deserved it.
In the meantime, we're also slowly learning more about the flash-forwards themselves - they were planned, because somebody was captured on video at a baseball stadium in Detroit walking around during the blackout and seeming to know what they were doing. They'd happened before - in 1991, although they only affected a small community in Somalia at that time. And what the audience, but not the FBI, learned at the end of this week's episode is that one of the men behind the blackout is the man seen in the wife's vision.
Indeed, it seems as though everybody the FBI agent (I'm really bad with names from this show for some reason) cares about is going to be targeted by the bad guys as a means of throwing him off the trail - his wife seduced, his partner assassinated, his daughter's babysitter drowned...and whatever happened to the daughter, it caused her to remark that "Dee Gibbons [one of the bad guys] is a bad man".
Now, remember that this show was based on a book by Robert J. Sawyer. Going off what I know about Sawyer, I suspect the book was full of theories about whether it would be possible to change the future that had been seen, or whether (and this is my theory for the show) the future that was seen is based off of everything the characters do between now and April. For example, the FBI agent might have seen something else originally, and just lucked into being put in charge of the investigation - but because of what he investigated, his flash-forward showed *that* rather than the initial experience, and the world is essentially reliving these few months without realizing it.
I'd have preferred the hard theories to characters constantly talking about "making our own destiny" and saying "it's the future, you can't change it!", anyhow.
It's not a great show by any means, the acting can be pretty bad at times, and I'm still convinced there are some plot holes. But it's a decent enough story to keep me watching. Maybe you will too.
--Ryan
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