Essentially, the show loves its high-concept and is at pains to reiterate it. That's fine; the notion that everyone on the planet has glimpsed six months into their future is a fun idea to play with and encourage speculation. The trouble is, there's little sign of a truly compelling direction beyond this temporal intrigue, and it feels that FlashForward may become little more than the FBI chasing shadows and piecing together a puzzle using thousands of anecdotes uploaded by the public to a website creating a "Mosaic Collective" (no snickering). I'm sure the producers have an arc planned for how these characters will progress over the next six months, but nobody's intrinsically interesting. Do we really care about Mark (Joseph Fiennes) and Olivia's (Sonya Walger) marriage failing, for example? Are we worried that Demetri (John Cho) might die because he didn't have a vision?This episode couldn't rely on the special-effects and action that kicked-started the pilot, so it instead felt very talky. Worryingly, the show might drift on this formula if it's not careful. There's a FBI investigation into who triggered the blackout and why, and some ominous talk about the state of the future, but I'm not sure there's enough to justify 22 episodes. Worse, it feels like the damage has been done, so the FBI are closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. In some ways it reminds me of 24's sixth season, where terrorists nuked L.A and the rest of the show couldn't top that. Similarly, where do you go from everyone on the planet being knocked unconscious? Maybe if we had more of a sense that this will happen again, or that the divination of the future was a symptom of something far worse going on.
Here, Olivia met the man from her vision she was cheating on her husband with; handsome Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport), single British father of Dylan (Ryan Wynott), the little boy whose life she saved yesterday. Olivia's desperate to ignore Lloyd and thus change her fated marriage breakup, but it's clear there's a spark between them. We also learned that Olivia's daughter Charlie's (Lennon Wynn) vision was very disturbing, and apparently involves Dylan.
Elsewhere, Mark and Demetri follow a lead presented to them by a middle-aged woman known as "D. Gibbons" (a name seen in Mark's vision), who recalls her own flashforward and sets in motion a trip to the town of Pigeon in Utah, to find a suspect who cloned her credit card to buy a bus ticket out of town. Once there, Mark and Demetri discover an abandoned doll factory (also from Mark's obliging vision), and surprise a silhouetted computer hacker inside, who promptly escapes after quoting Beilby Porteus ("he who foresees calamities suffers them twice over".) The mysterious hacker's cell phone is found and studied, proven to have made a call during the blackout to the FBI's "Suspect Zero" – the figure seen moving around at the baseball stadium when the crowd were unconscious...There are some interesting threads here, but FlashForward's going to have a tough time knitting them together in a compelling way. The producers are at pains to insist that the show's sci-fi root won't have much baring on the season, but that feels like a terrible mistake. We've had our inciting incident, but did it deliver enough of a wallop to sustain a whole season, and potentially years, of story? Right now, I'm still prepared to give FlashForward time to lay out its cards and show us how it intends to progress, but I can't quell my concerns.
5 October 2009
Five, 9pm
written by: David S. Goyer & Marc Guggenheim (story by Brannon Braga & David S. Goyer) directed by: David S. Goyer starring: Joseph Fiennes (Mark Benford), Sonya Walger (Olivia Benford), John Cho (Demetri Noh), Jack Davenport (Lloyd Simcoe), Zachary Knighton (Bryce Varley), Peyton List (Nicole Kirby), Brian F. O'Byrne (Aaron Stark), Courtney B. Vance (Stanford Wedeck), Christine Woods (Janice Hawk), Bryce Robinson (Dylan Simcoe), Lennon Wynn (Charlie Benford)
