'FLASHFORWARD' 1.22 - "Future Shock"

WRITERS: Scott M. Gimple & Timothy J. Lea
DIRECTOR: John Polson
GUEST CAST: Hira Ambrosino, Genevieve Cortese, Michael Ealy, Neil Jackson, Dominic Rains, Blake Robbins, Yûko Takeuchi, Lennon Wynn & Ryan Wynott

[SPOILERS] As promised, my response to FlashForward's highly-anticipated series finale: sigh. To elaborate; what a dull disappointment. The show was always going to run into problems trying to make its finale feel exciting, as we've spent the entirety of the series knowing what the key moments will be. The only characters who never had a flashforward (Demetri and Simon) thus had freedom to do unpredictable things in this finale, so why were both tied into a predictable story about accidentally causing the next blackout from Simon's lab? Bad move.

We got was an hour of piece-moving everywhere else, with the script trying desperately to give us some surprises or subvert expectations. Nicole's flashforward about her being drowned by someone and feeling like she deserved to die? Well, she just crashed her car into a river and was being rescued by someone. Olivia wanted to stay away from her house and Lloyd, to prevent their vision of a full-on affair coming true, but smoothie Lloyd played the "I need circumstances to be recreated exactly to elicit a breakthrough with some equations" card. I'm just surprised he didn't insist they have sex, for the sake of accuracy. Anyway, it turned out it was Lloyd's son Dylan who actually wrote the equation on Olivia's bedroom mirror in lipstick. That kid's nothing but a creepy plot-device.

Bryce went to the restaurant to meet his "true love" Keiko, who likewise rushed to join him after her mother took pity on her daughter's predicament and caused a scene at the airport during their deportation. A laughable moment, with Keiko giving a dozen airport officials the slip by just ducking under a table and walking away. But hey, Bryce and Keiko together at last! It was the meeting we've been waiting months to see! The romance of the century! Right? All based on two people with little in common, from different cultures, who've only ever seen each other in a two-minute vision. I bet Keiko's ensuing conversation in pigeon-English about her criminal behaviour at an L.A garage was a let-down for Bryce.

The big action set-piece was seeing a half-drunk Benford released from custody by Wedeck, only to enter the FBI building against orders during a bomb scare and single-handedly dispatching an entire armed team (the lack of peripheral vision on those masks were to blame for their ineptitude, I think), before realizing that savant Gabrielle had spelled out the exact time of the next blackout on his clue-board: giving Benford a ridiculous three-minute window to alert his boss, the President and the world to get ready for another vision. In other words, get everyone to stop driving, operating machinery, carrying babies and trimming hedges incase they have an accident. I know information can spread like wild fire in the information age, but I doubt a three-minute warning helped very much.

And lo, everyone in the world had another vision -- this one stretching forward to New Year's Day 2015, where Benford's now-adult daughter Charlie exclaimed "they found him!" I assume she means her father, who appeared to be "killed" during a slow-motion run to jump out of his office window from a bomb's explosion. Was it always the intention for this finale's vision to jump so far ahead in time, as the source novel did originally? I have my doubts. I think we'd have been give some individual flashforwards for the regular characters if a second season had been assured, instead of some vague visions worldwide. It also strikes me nigh impossible to keep much of a narrative drive if the future everyone's seen wasn't going to happen for years, particularly as we've learned from season 1 that it can be avoided or tweaked. But maybe the writers would have included greater regularity of flashforwards, so a few could be closer to the current time period.

Elsewhere, Wedeck's vision of sitting on the toilet was humorously played out in an action context, Janis had her fated ultrasound, and Aaron's daughter Tracy (whom nobody but himself cares about) survived her life-threatening wounds in Afghanistan. And the few viewers still watching this show wondered why the Presidential coup never amounted to, and why the writers appeared to have such misplaced belief they'd be picked up for another season.

It's all academic now, anyway. The show was axed and it's over. Why did FlashForward fail? Oh, you know why: its interesting concept eclipsed the uninteresting characters, but a show can't survive solely on a cool idea; ABC's "next Lost" hyperbole raised expectations too high; the fact they hired the wrong Fiennes brother to do "brooding"; reckless, choppy narratives; the writers throwing malformed ideas into the mix to give the illusion of complexity; reliance on a "who caused the blackout?" mystery nobody truly cared about; and way too many characters to tackle.

31 MAY 2010: FIVE, 9PM