On October 6, 2009, the world goes tripping via some unknown scientific experiment executed by some unknown people. For two minutes and seventeen seconds, the bulk of the people are passed out and the bulk of those go on to see visions.
The visions take place six months in the future and they have included that you're going to have a baby, that you're run over by a car, that you'll be with someone other than your current spouse, that you'll be president and that you'll go flying 'round the world with the Banana Splits. Sadly, we're joking on the last and the show could certainly use a lot more humor.
For example, Demetri Noh (played by John Cho) had no vision. That basically makes him the guy who's hitting the group's stash while repeatedly insisting, as he puffs away, "Marijuana never does anything for me." On and on he goes, "I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die." It's a rare episode (and we've seen 21 -- all in the last week) that he's not whining. We imagine the audience is feeling like John Lennon when Peter Fonda wouldn't shut up about "I know what it's like to be dead." Sadly, no great Beatles song will come of this.
FlashFoward flips and changes from episode to episode. In fact, episode 19 (which aired last week) is called "Course Correction."
Over the years, a number of e-mails have come in with one basic point: "Why don't you review Lost?"
We (Ava and C.I.) were not big TV watchers before this became our job here at Third. We had never watched Lost. That show started in September 2004. We started reviewing here in January 2005 (the first month was a group effort that also included Dona, Ty, Jess and Jim). The show had already been on for a season and we didn't have the time to play catch up. Back then, we were catching things on TV. (After six months of doing that, we began asking friends for episodes and scripts and now we do the bulk of our reviews off those. We were asked -- for the fourth time -- by friends with the program to do this review you're reading.) Now Lost is going off and we will have made it all these years without ever weighing in.
Point?
Is this what Lost is like? After we got done with all the episodes, we started asking that of anyone we could including a friend in the Lost cast. He said that FlashFoward is nothing like Lost and more like the episode of Dallas where Pam (Victoria Principal) wakes up and realizes the whole thing was a dream.
And of all the feedback we got on FlashForward last week, that rang the most true.
So much never makes sense. Take Janis.
Mark: You know I can't stop thinking about Frost's last words, "In the end you'll be saved by the lady you see every day." What the hell does that mean?
Janis: Well clearly that means I'm going to save your ass, Mark.
It turns out "the lady" is a queen on a chess board. But Janis' remark works in that scene because we're at the FBI and she's apparently the only woman agent. There was another, Marcy, but Janis (played by Christine Woods) aided her downfall.
Janis outed her. She was a mole. So is Janis. Are you confused?
Watching FastFoward, are you ever not confused?
Janis' flashfoward was that she was at the doctor's for a sonogram and she was told she was going to have a girl. That's a bit of a problem for Janis. She's single, yes, but that's really not her problem. She couldn't legally marry someone she loved if she wanted to in most states.
Yeah, Janis is a lesbian. And somehow she ends up pregnant? Well not somehow. There's a subtext about these 'visions' that has some people bringing on their own deaths, but they're also bringing on other things. Janis, in Somalia on a bad trip (and in a bad episode), is so worried because the window of time for her to get pregnant and to have what she saw in her 'vision' is slipping away. She tells that to Dimitri who -- apparently thinking it counts as foreplay -- again trots out that he's going to die. 'So, what the heck, let's do it.' What a charming seduction.
Janis ends up pregnant by Dimitri. Did her 'vision' come true or did she make it come true? Seems to us she pretty much forced it. Seems to us that without having seen that vision, she never would have felt the need to get pregnant in six months.
There's a difference between plans and destiny.
Destiny earlier brought Janis together with a lesbian -- in the FlashFoward universe, one other lesbian exists in all the world -- for a nice little dinner followed by some intense making out. The morning after, the woman and Janis meet up in the kitchen. Janis has no time for breakfast, has to rush off, tells the woman to make sure she locks the door when she leaves (those doors, that you can lock and then close, always exist on TV). She tells her to eat breakfast, relax, even snoop through her things. Janis meets her after work and again brings up that the woman could snoop through her things. The woman didn't. But she did kind of "Google" her, she "Mosaic"ed her.
All the people who passed out that had visions or didn't have visions are encouraged (by the FBI) to share them online. Demetri urged Janis to put her vision online. She did. And she put her name to it.
So we're really not getting why Janis suddenly glares at the woman, serves up a how-dare-you speech and tells her it's over before walking out.
Again, Janis posted her 'vision' online. With her own name to it. She told the woman to feel free to snoop around her apartment but she's upset that the woman found her online?
The woman was asking for a very basic reason. She and Janis were moving towards a relationship and she asked if Janis also dated men because she was confused how exactly Janis was supposed to get pregnant?
Janis makes no sense. She helped Marcy's downfall, as we noted earlier. Marcy was a do-nothing minor character (like the one Seth MacFarlane also plays on the show) until suddenly she was the mole! She was the mole, it was figured out and Marcy quickly figured out that it had been figured out. Brandishing her weapon at the FBI office, she should have alarmed a nation. She shot like crazy and was able to take out a good number of agents while herself never getting hit once.
She even made it out of the basement of the building where she hopped on the back of a motorcyle driving by an unknown person (who waited down the street every day in case it was the day she was outed?). Janis came running out and shooting and fighting ensued. First the driver of the motorcycle was shot and s/he crashed into a fountain. As s/he stays submerged, Marcy decided to use this brief spotlight for all it was worth and she and Janis slug it out. Janis is the victor.
Mark (Joseph Fiennes) grabs Marcy and asks her how could she?
When the viewers were probably asking: How could they?
Do what?
Not unmask the motorcyle driver. They leave him or her in the fountain. No one removes the helmet. No one's even remotely interested in who the dead person was.
Janis rarely makes sense. In the episode we're talking about? It ends with an exchange between Janis and Simon (Dominic Monaghan) where it's revealed that Marcy wasn't the only mole, Janis is also a mole working for the other side.
But that's episode 15 (we think) and by episode 19, Janis is not just a mole. Being a FBI agent who is really working with the bad guys behind the blackout would make her a double agent. Janis, it turns out, is a triple agent. She's actually working for the CIA who want her to work for the FBI because they know something big is coming and they need her to be a mole.
If you follow that, tie this onto it: We learn that in a flashback which took place two years ago.
For a show called FlashFoward, there sure are a lot of flashbacks. In fact, viewers spend a large amount of time in the past and a little in the present. Not a great deal in the future.
That's too bad because scenes set in the future would be free of Demetri's whining that he's going to die (either because he died or because he didn't and found something new to whine about).
A woman went on the equivalent of Larry King in the episode last week and explained she was supposed to have already died from a car accident and she hadn't and things could change and we control our destiny and it's all so uplifitng and spiritual and life-affirming . . .
By the time a car's tires were squealing, you were practically begging the driver to run her over.
That woman makes no sense. Or made. She died. But she made no sense. How did she know she was going to die? Demetri knows (or 'knows') he's going to die because he had no vision during the blackout. People who had no vision are supposed to die (as he constantly reminds everyone within ear shot). In fact, in the second episode, he and Mark team up with a sherrif to stakeout a mystery guy and around the time the sherrif's saying that she doesn't believe in the visions because she didn't have one, you know she's going to die shortly after she steps into that abandoned factory. Which she does.
So how did this woman on TV see her own death? You can't reconcile that with Demetri's theory.
A man who also was supposed to die (he taught high school which many would argue is its own form of eternal death) didn't and he began killing people who were supposed to die. He was aiming his car at her (she's be his second victim). He ends up thrwarted but the woman's run over by Alex Kingston who's suddenly shown up for no reason. Maybe she missed her one-time brother-in-law Joseph Fiennes?
Kingston (beloved by TV viewers for her portrayal of Dr. Elizabeth Corday on ER) plays an inspector named Fiona Banks who is apparently on loan from the FBI headquarters in Bristol. Regardless of how the character came over, the show needs her and Kingston manages to overcome the bad dialogue, the confusing storylines and the often poorly written scenes.
Back to her former real-life brother-in-law's character, Mark. Mark's vision is that six months from now, he's in his office (drinking, he's currently in AA) when masked intruders break in apparently to kill him. He's married to Olivia (Sonya Walger) and a young daughter Charlie. In Charlie's vision, she's at her home and her brother Dylan's there. Dylan? Olivia's vision finds her married to Lloyd (Jack Davenport), a man she's never met when she has her vision.
She meets Lloyd when he seeks out the doctor who treated his son . . . Dylan. When Charlie sees Dylan she knows his name and him. The same way Dylan calls Oliva "Olivia" the first time he sees her.
Mark and Olivia play the half-honesty game when it comes to their visions. He leaves out the part that, according to the vision, he'll be back on the sauce in six months. She leaves out the fact that she's now met Lloyd. She does tell him . . . after she shows him to Charlie to see if Charlie recognizes him (her daughter doesn't -- which Olivia sells to Mark as a good thing).
In the episode that aired last week, Olivia and Lloyd end up at his house after some intense sharing and they kiss. There's a knock at the door. Lloyd opens the door. It's Mark. He looks at Olivia, she at him. She says she has to go and leaves with no further word. Mark then talks to Lloyd about the blackout (Lloyd's a scientist and the mentor of Simon). Mark never mentions Olivia is his wife. Olivia's not filled Lloyd in on that either.
Does any of that make sense? Does any of it sound remotely like humor behavior?
Maybe four episodes from now we'll learn Olivia's not just a doctor, she's triple agent. And then we can excuse the character's lack of consistency?
But what of Mark?
The show's already pushing it when they have Olivia offer the common sense solution to Mark that they pack up and move to Denver with their daughter and then she (Olivia) will never meet Lloyd and Mark's vision won't come true either. He refuses to do that.
Everyone refuses to attempt to break out from their visions.
So we're already supposed to stomach that plot convention and they want to add on that a guilty wife and a jealous husband encountering one another at the home of the man she's supposed to leave him for aren't going to say anything to one another? Aren't even going to exchange such a look that Lloyd would ask: Do you two know each other?
In Sleepless in Seattle, Rosie O'Donnell advises Meg Ryan, "Your destiny can be your doom." FlashForward is a highly verbose show and, as the season draws to a close, you might expect a few serious conversations to take place about fate and self-deterimination and, in fact, self-fulfilling prophecies. But that doesn't happen.
Instead we get a lot of bad conversations -- especially if the character is an immigrant which tends to lead the writers to create borderline racist scenes -- that rarely make sense but often manage to name check something -- like a Pixie's concert. The show would probably offer a lot more meaning to viewers if some of those pop-cultural references were dropped long enough to allow for some serious discussion about how much impact we actually have on our outcomes. In one episode viewers were treated to a man who saw himself as a great leader . . . turned out to have had a vision of himself as president. Only the president was Abe Lincoln. He didn't have a vision of himself at all. And like an LSD vision, how accurate are any of these? How dependent are they on the person's own fears and beliefs and personal make up?
By episode 21, this should have been addressed. It hasn't been. If, like us, you watch 21 episodes of this show in one week, it's not a bad show. But we honestly couldn't put up with waiting a week for each episode, especially when everything's always changing. Now maybe this is what made Lost a hit? We don't know. But we do have to wonder how many drugs it took for this show to get the greenlight?