Flash Forward: "No More Good Days" 9/24 - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Aragorn
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Agreed. Wondering if God was responsible for the blackout would be a very natural reaction. Heck, I think even a lot of atheists would have the same thoughts.
Didn't strike me as particularly prominent. And whatever prominence it has should be derived from the real world - just how much prominence would real-world denizens of LA give to theological explanations for this event? At least as much as we saw, probably more. Then again, the upper-middle-class professionals that this show chooses to focus on might be more inclined towards rational explanations that give them at least an illusion of control.
That's not to the show's credit. TV overall focuses too much on upper-middle-class professional white people, just because that's the only social milieu that TV writers understand. I'd like to know what the Hispanic gardener thought about all this stuff, as long as the white males writing this show were capable of writing that character in a non-cringe-inducingly-cliched way. Yeah right. Better not to even try.
Add in the show is set in Los Angeles where in April 2010 most people still believe in God. To pretend otherwise for a political point distracts from the show. The viewer will ask why don't the characters ask. Notice how they added religion to the mix over on Fringe
I don't think the writers of this show should feel compelled to follow the book in a lockstep fashion - I never feel that way about adaptations. They should adapt whatever from the book fits their goals for doing a job on the show. Maybe they just take the name, the premise and some aspects of the characters and run off in a totally different direction. I'll judge the results according to whether they work within the confines of the show.
Oh cmon, you can't ask this show to compensate for the deficiencies of another that is completely unrelated!
(Although that would be ironic, is Braga now expected to make it up to us because his erstwhile co-writer Ron Moore did something that annoyed us? Isn't Moore supposed to be the Good Trek Writer and Braga is the Minion of Satan?)I don't watch House, or "mainstream network shows" because they bore me. Lemme take inventory of the shows I do watch:
Dexter - very little reference to religion - Dex did make some reference to "God" looking out for him, to explain away his ongoing ability to evade capture, but I chalked that up to the writers' trying to distract the audience from the way he does evade capture, which gets increasingly unbelievable every year, and anyway I think Satan is more likely to be his guardian angel.
Lost - they killed their one religious character out of a large cast a while back; the mystical dimension has more to do with "destiny" and "fate" than God.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - God would make an appearance only if the writers wanted a target for mockery.
Sons of Anarchy - No religion in S1. One character is possibly becoming slightly religious due to intense trauma but I think she's just as likely to go on a killing spree than to go to church.
Breaking Bad - Can't think of any particular religious content.
Mad Men - S1 had a priest as part of Peggy's story but that seems to have been dropped.
Curb Your Enthusiasm - Religion is introduced in order to amp the comic mayhem, eg, Christians vs Jews fighting over a Jew being baptized. It's just comic fodder.
Entourage - Ditto. Characters will go to Temple if the writers want to show what awful, disgusting hypocrites they are and can't stop being greedy and competitive for ten seconds even when their religion demands it.
Heroes - Like Flash Forward, the premise could lead characters to believe in a theological source for their powers (makes more sense than that eclipse garbage). Nathan showed a little religious interest but that was one of about two dozen abortive plotlines that this show has dropped.
24 - Religion = evil Muslim terrorists.
Chuck - The only religious mention is the Indian guy who is - wait for it! - Jewish. Once again, it's just comic fodder.
Big Love - This is actually about religion, so of course it has religious content the way a cop show has law enforcement content. And it depicts religion in the most hideous way imaginable.
Overall, it's pretty much what you'd expect from TV shows being written by people who are a good deal less religious than the average American. Very little religious content and what there is tends to be comic fodder or negative. There is far less religion on American TV than in American reality. I don't particularly mind - having Flash Forward's answer be "God did it" would be a brick wall, dramatically - but I'm certainly not going to complain about a passing reference to an event where God would be far more than just a passing reference. If a TV show is jarringly divorced from known reality, it loses some credibility.
Why? Can't we have a civilized discussion? The Heroes threads are nastier than this one so far.
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I would hate to watch something only to spend hours writing a scathing review.
Agreed. It was ONE sentence.
And who cares that Sawyer is an atheist? Just because he doesn't believe in God, does that mean that they should portray the citizens of an ENTIRE COUNTRY (indeed, the entire globe!) as atheists? And that, in a time of global crisis?
Come on....talk about ridiculous.
Seriously, some of these guys who get all worked up about ONE sentence where the word "God" is uttered really need to relax. Because the fact is that in a global crisis such as that, there WOULD be people falling down to pray. Like it or not, that is what would happen.
But what about the people on this board who watch movies (or ENTIRE RUNS of TV shows) with the intent to hate every minute of it so they can bitch about it?
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Archangel
Guest
Wasn't JMS an atheist, yet religeon was fairly prominent in Babylon 5? The scene that particularly comes to mind is the Preacher giving the sermon near the end of "And the Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place". That followed by the song/hymm of the same name superimposed over what was going on on Narn with Lord Refa
BSG was as much social commentary as science fiction. And while the ending was spiritual, how else woud you have ended it without discarding major plot lines?
Yes. From the opposite side of religion I totally agree with you. Have a conversation that stayed a conversation.Why? Can't we have a civilized discussion? The Heroes threads are nastier than this one so far.
I want to see how that tread plays out, some of the daughter flesh was "mixed" with someone elses body, could happen in combat.
Cho's charactor, don't have names down, why couldn't he just have been asleep? Some people must have been. And not everyone dreams. That say, he's dead.
Just finished watching the premiere and wow, that got my attention really quick. The pacing was absolutely great, and it still allowed me to get into the characters, and I love a great mystery. I think this is a show worth sticking around for. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Excellent
Excellent
Loved it. Will definitely be following the series.
Loved the final scene.
Loved the final scene.
Oops, somehow you managed to quote the wrong person but I'll answer the question anyway.
To have rescued BSG would require revisions to the premise. Trying to salvage it in the fourth season would have been an exercise in futility. Where it all went wrong was when RDM & the gang decided to tout the "brilliant" Cylon plan every week like it was going to be the most amazing thing ever when it was finally revealed. And then it was...amazingly lame.
Kinda hard to recover from a botched premise. All the blather about religion, fate, the cosmos and angels was just hand-waving to cover for the fact that the show was built on a foundation about as strong as cotton candy.
I would have ditched the tawdry idea of touting an amazing plan each week to try to bamboozle the audience into watching, if I had no follow-through, and just depicted the Cylons as murderous because they wanted to boot the humans out of their nice planets. What's wrong with that as a motive? Plenty of wars are simple fights over desirable territory. It's better than a motive that makes the Cylons look like idiots.
I also would have put more effort into depicting the Cylons as definitely non-human alien intelligences rather than making them so human that it was hard to envision them as "robotic" in any meaningful way. They could have just as easily been a pack of angry Taurons who whomped the other colonies because they were sick of being treated like dirt. The whole robot angle - the most interesting part of the story! - was lost. Maybe Caprica can pick up the slack, assuming it doesn't get cancelled when viewers get bored of no kewl space battles.
But anyway, back to Flash Forward...
He could verify things pretty quickly by getting info from the side of the globe where people would have been asleep at the time (even in the future - most people are going to be the same place in six months where they are now) and comparing it to the experiences of the terminally ill who can expect to be dead in six months. Since it's unlikely that Demetri Noh (that's his name - sounds like a Bond villain, maybe his parents were fans?) is going to be let off the hook, I'm sure we'll find out that the sleepers did remember their dreams.
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And just to prove it, Penny and Charlie (arguably the two LOST characters with which he had the most meaningful personal interaction) are now in an alternative universe!!!!!
Thank you! I knew I had seen the female doctor somewhere before, but I couldn't place her!
And as for the God reference . . . I'm a hardcore atheist, too, but the show was just being realistic. A major unexplained phenomena has just rocked the world to its foundations; OF COURSE some people are going to look to religion for answers. It would be unbelievable if they didn't. And that hardly consitutes an endorsement of religion. It's just a realistic depiction of human nature. (Are science fiction writers supposed to pretend that religion doesn't exist?)
Plus, I didn't hear anyone state definitely that God was responsible, just lots of nervous speculation.
"Did God do it?"
Sounds like something a typical person would say.
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Nah, polar shift. That bird hitting the window looked like a clue.
Or that guy at the baseball game just wanted some peace and quiet for a couple of minutes while he went for a dump.
Or that guy at the baseball game just wanted some peace and quiet for a couple of minutes while he went for a dump.
They could have kind of found a way to execute this.
Since in the book, the reason given for recording devices not working was the observer effect. They claimed since one human was conscious at the time nothing had actually happened during that time and after the time period ended the world went to the most likely state it should have been. Thus, you could say, since the stadium had an observer it would still have been recordable while nothing else is.
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