Some Thoughts On FlashForward (TV Version)

This week saw the series premiere of ABC's FlashForward, based on the Robert Sawyer book of the same name. I remember when Vicki was reading the paperback (quite a while before I even heard it was going to be made into a TV series), and how enthusiastic she was in describing the premise to me. I haven't yet read it, but I still might.

While the TV version appears to be significantly different in a few ways, the basic premise is the same: all at once, everyone on the planet "blacks out" for a short period of time (2 minutes and 17 seconds here) during which time most of them catch a glimpse of their own future. For the television audience, that turned out to be 6 months ahead; in the book, it was more than 20 years into the future. As you'd expect, a mass, simultaneous collapse of humanity wreaks havoc everywhere: cars crash into each other when their unconscious drivers lose control, helicopters falls from the sky, patients die on the operating table, and so on. As people come out of the blackout and deal with the consequences, it quickly becomes apparent that it was a worldwide phenomenon and that they all - or mostly all - saw the exact same time in the future. An interesting experiment is done by one of the show's principle characters: since he saw himself talking to a person who he's had previous contact with, he calls her to ask what she saw. When she relates the exact same scene, but from her perspective, they know that this couldn't simply be a case of mass hallucinations. For the rare people who didn't see anything, though, the question remains: does that mean that they'll be dead in 6 months' time?

I was intrigued by the premise of this story when Vicki laid it out for me, and after one episode of the TV show, I'm similarly hooked. A lot of comparisons have been drawn between FlashForward and Lost (not the least of which because they're both on ABC and have a couple of actors in common). I wouldn't say that this week's premiere had quite the breathtaking appeal that Lost Episode 1 did, but I definitely see some similarities. And there's certainly a mystery at the heart of FlashForward to rival anything that's been dangled before our eyes by Cuse, Lindeloff and the rest of the Lost writing staff.

One of the aspects of the premise that nibbles away at the corners of my mind, though, is this: if the vast majority of the planet's population saw themselves in the future, what would the most extreme contrarians among them do? After all, we have nutjobs aplenty in the real world today who deny the Holocaust, the Moon Landings and even Obama's birth details... so wouldn't there be someone out there who would set out to invalidate what they'd seen? I'm not talking about, for example, the main character's vision of falling off the wagon and how he's now going to try everything he can to ensure that he doesn't start drinking again. I'm contemplating much more extreme responses (of the sort we see regularly now on the nightly news): someone deciding to cut a finger off to prove that their vision, in which they still had all 10 digits, couldn't possibly be true; or even just getting a tattoo on their arm, in a place where the skin had been bare in their flashforward experience. Hell, someone might desperately want to kill a person who was present in what they saw, and set out to do so. Anything of that variety would seem to put the entire premise to the test: is the future that everyone saw set in stone, or is it still malleable? And if it's the latter, then shouldn't simply knowing about it be enough to cause significant changes over the course of the next 6 months?

When I asked Vicki about this, she mentioned that there was some attempt to deal with that question in the book, but she couldn't think of any specific cases where it was really answered. With the shorter time horizon used in the series, I think that they almost have to tackle it, in order to be taken seriously. Otherwise the whole event comes off feeling like a gimmick or plot device, rather than a real thing that follows some set of logical rules.

At any rate, we plan to keep watching this to see how it all plays out. The first episode was definitely a grabber, but if you missed it, I'm sure you could catch up quite easily.