FlashForward 1X10: A561984 - Grading and Discussion

[Daneel]

EW did an interview with David S. Goyer about the show, asking him about the hiatus and the recent week-long shutdown of production. Basically, he said that the hiatus means that all remaining 13 episodes of the season will air on consecutive weeks, without interruption, which he believes will be good for a serialized show (can't argue with that logic, but the length of this hiatus still concerns me somewhat). He also says that the tinkering that went on during the shutdown was to speed up some of the storylines.

They also asked him about what the show's scheduling might be like in its second season, but given the ratings of the fall finale, I'm not so sure it'll get to Season 2 (the last episode pulled in about 7.3 million viewers, down about 700,000 from the previous episode, and over 5 million from the premiere).

 

[Trekker4747]

EW did an interview with David S. Goyer about the show, asking him about the hiatus and the recent week-long shutdown of production. Basically, he said that the hiatus means that all remaining 13 episodes of the season will air on consecutive weeks, without interruption, which he believes will be good for a serialized show (can't argue with that logic, but the length of this hiatus still concerns me somewhat). He also says that the tinkering that went on during the shutdown was to speed up some of the storylines.

They also asked him about what the show's scheduling might be like in its second season, but given the ratings of the fall finale, I'm not so sure it'll get to Season 2 (the last episode pulled in about 7.3 million viewers, down about 700,000 from the previous episode, and over 5 million from the premiere).

Those numbers don't concern me too much, the premiere is always going to be higher, not everyone is going to stick around. And 700,000 drop between the last two episodes doesn't strike me as too bad in the grand scheme of things and also could likely be chalked up to people forgetting about it after the week break -assuming the show was done until next year.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Above Average. I wanted to vote Excellent for it being well-crafted, well-paced and focused only on the interesting stories, but it still has some glaring logic problems in the premise...

-Why didn't the woman in Hong Kong simply tell Demetri that Mark is the killer before now? The guys shouldn't have had to schlep to Hong Kong to force it out of her. If it was because she thought there was nothing he could do to stop it, she should have changed her mind after the worldwide news story about Gough's predestination-thwarting suicide, and called Demetri to warn him how he can easily save his life.

-Why are Mark and Demetri acting sulky? They've solved the problem! They just need to be on opposite sides of the globe on Murder Day. If Demetri doesn't trust Mark (even though - or perhaps because - he's now acting so obsessively protective of Demetri that I'm starting to wonder what's really going on with him), then Demetri doesn't have to tell Mark where he's going. Head for the Arctic Circle or Kathmandu. There's no predestination problem anymore, and therefore nothing to fear. Might as well worry about being squashed by an asteroid or hit by a bus on that day.

The ratings have crashed so I guess we'll be lucky to get a full year out of this show. Despite well-crafted episodes like this one, the premise is so screwed up that that's probably for the best.

Just because something's possible doesn't mean it's easy. You can deflect one or two pebbles in an avalanche, but redirecting the entire avalanche is a much more difficult proposition.

The problem is, they don't know if there's an avalanche on the way, or just a couple random pebbles plunking down the hillside. Nobody has any way of knowing whether the visions are 99% likely or .00000099% likely to occur.

Sure, they should err on the side of caution, but why don't they DO THAT? Why not make plans to foil fate in any and all ways? And why spend all this time sulking, when as far as they know, the odds of being hit by a bus before the fateful day are actually higher than whatever it is that they fear happening?

We all live with a certain risk of messy death every day of our lives. We could lock ourselves in the basement and still die from a blood clot in the brain. There's nothing about this scenario that is any different from normal life.

It then got me thinking of her flashforward and whether this vision of herself wasn't actually the alternate reality in which they were married.

If the visions aren't visions of the future at all, but glimpses into a parallel reality (which they might be able to visit when the next flashforward inevitably occurs), that would be an unexpected and interesting twist. Everyone is just assuming they're visions of the future - something that has not been proven, and cannot be proven until/unless they actually occur.

Other than visions and parallel realities, there's also the possibility that the visions are pure hallucination, divorced entirely from reality, but with a hive-mind element that linked certain people based on affinities such as similar jobs or geographic location.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

EW did an interview with David S. Goyer about the show, asking him about the hiatus and the recent week-long shutdown of production. Basically, he said that the hiatus means that all remaining 13 episodes of the season will air on consecutive weeks, without interruption, which he believes will be good for a serialized show (can't argue with that logic, but the length of this hiatus still concerns me somewhat). He also says that the tinkering that went on during the shutdown was to speed up some of the storylines.

They also asked him about what the show's scheduling might be like in its second season, but given the ratings of the fall finale, I'm not so sure it'll get to Season 2 (the last episode pulled in about 7.3 million viewers, down about 700,000 from the previous episode, and over 5 million from the premiere).

Those numbers don't concern me too much, the premiere is always going to be higher, not everyone is going to stick around. And 700,000 drop between the last two episodes doesn't strike me as too bad in the grand scheme of things and also could likely be chalked up to people forgetting about it after the week break -assuming the show was done until next year.

The ratings are much worse than you're assuming. Remember, the total numbers don't count - only demos do. The demos are now 2.2/6 - the same as Heroes, which is generally considered DOA, even on pathetic, desperate NBC.

Speaking of FlashForward, since premiering on Oct. 1, it has dipped by 3.44 million viewers (10.73 to 7.29 million) and 41 percent among adults 18-49 (3.7/11 to 2.2/ 6).

We'll be very lucky to see it back in March. The saving grace may be that ABC's mid-season lineup is rumored to be laughable (and not because they're all comedies!)

 

[Greg Cox]

I don't care if the nurse has an affair with the mass murderer.

Er, she's the chief surgeon, not a nurse.

 

[Christopher]

Just because something's possible doesn't mean it's easy. You can deflect one or two pebbles in an avalanche, but redirecting the entire avalanche is a much more difficult proposition.

The problem is, they don't know if there's an avalanche on the way, or just a couple random pebbles plunking down the hillside. Nobody has any way of knowing whether the visions are 99% likely or .00000099% likely to occur.

Maybe I should've used the analogy of a river, a continuous flow, instead of an avalanche, a single event. I was referring to the entire cumulative flow of events in the world. Any single event that happens is going to be the end result of dozens or hundreds of preceding causes, and each of those in turn is going to be the result of dozens or hundreds of preceding causes, and so on. So if you're trying to prevent a specific future event, altering one of its causes may not prevent it from happening but instead may only cause it to happen in a slightly different way. So just because the future is mutable, that doesn't mean it will be easy to prevent or alter what's been seen.

And from a dramatic standpoint, that's the only approach that makes sense, which is why both FF and TSCC have used it. If it's easy to prevent the future, there's no drama to the story of trying to prevent it, and if it's impossible to prevent, there's no point to the story of trying to prevent it. In just about every story, the goal needs to be attainable but only with extreme difficulty, hard work, and luck.

If the visions aren't visions of the future at all, but glimpses into a parallel reality (which they might be able to visit when the next flashforward inevitably occurs), that would be an unexpected and interesting twist. Everyone is just assuming they're visions of the future - something that has not been proven, and cannot be proven until/unless they actually occur.

Uhh, yes, it has been proven that it's the future, at least in a strictly chronological sense. The calendars in people's flashforwards all said April 29, 2010. That's in the future relative to October 6, 2009, regardless of which timeline it's in.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

If it's easy to prevent the future, there's no drama to the story of trying to prevent it

Well, true. It means that the characters are in a situation that isn't any different than normal life, where people have a certain risk of dying every day and it's hard to calculate the odds.

But the premise doesn't rule out the possibility that the characters are in just that boring sort of situation. So I can't really give the writers credit for coming up with a thrilling premise, because...they haven't.

The calendars in people's flashforwards all said April 29, 2010.

They couldn't hallucinate that?

The reason we "know" these are future visions is because of external reasons - the show is based on a book about future visions, and we've read stories and interviews describing the show's premise. There's nothing in the show that conclusively proves the visions are valid at all.

Mass hallucination with ESP elements is just as plausible an explanation as precognition. ESP doesn't require any messy metaphysics like precognition does. To see even "a" future requires that that future exists in some real form. But if these are just hallucinations that are "educated guesses" by the subconscious about scenarios that may happen in the future, there's no metaphysical problem. And there's no real drama either because how is that different from daydreaming?

The way for this show to pull out of the doldrums (though given the ratings it's probably too late) is to forget using the flashforwards as the central mystery and get on with the notion that there will be another flashforward event at some unpredictable time in the future. That will paralyze society since nobody will dare do anything that could kill them if they fall asleep for two minutes.

 

[Christopher]

The reason we "know" these are future visions is because of external reasons - the show is based on a book about future visions, and we've read stories and interviews describing the show's premise. There's nothing in the show that conclusively proves the visions are valid at all.

People who are in the same place in their flashforwards have all consistently verified each other's accounts in every detail. Multiple predictions of the flashforwards have been verified as true -- not of events of April 29th, of course, but of events leading up to it. What the flashforwards present is a self-consistent model that makes testable predictions, many of which have been verified. By scientific standards, that makes them pretty likely to be real. At the very least, by scientific standards they constitute a credible, well-supported theory of the future that's worth acting on in the absence of evidentiary support for an alternative model.

Conclusive proof is something of a chimerical standard. Very few things in life are ever absolutely proven. We determine the accuracy of our models of the world based on their consistency with the evidence and within themselves, and on the validity of their testable predictions. If a model meets those standards, we accept it as valid unless proven otherwise. That's as true in everyday life as it is in science. When you get to know someone, you learn things about them and build a model of who they are, and you relate to them based on that model. If the evidence demonstrates that someone is a loyal friend, it doesn't conclusively prove they're not an alien android sent to infiltrate your life and steer you toward a grisly death, but it would be irrational -- in fact, clinically paranoid -- to assume that they were. We never have absolute certainty, but we have reasonable models of the world that fit what we know, and if we're reasonable people we accept models that are supported by evidence over models that aren't. And all the evidence to date is consistent with the theory that the flashforwards represent an actual possible future and that their predictions are accurate beyond what any non-precognitive hallucination would be capable of.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Did anyone else get the impression that Ertha/Nadra(?) had been privy to other visions or information about even further into the future than everyone else had experienced in the flash forwards?

She had a regular flash forward to April 29, 2010 like everyone else, and in that vision she saw evidence of Dmitri's murder in the middle of March. But then she described his murder as "The first in a long line of dominoes that I'd rather not see fall down." It seemed strange to me to describe the chain of events of only a month and a half stemming from Dmitri's murder as a "long line of dominoes," and made me think that maybe she knew of events well beyond 4/29/10.

We know there was an earlier test of the technology that caused the flash forward in 1991, but we never found out what the result of that test was. Did it see events of the future as well? Since it was localized to Somalia and not the whole world, the logical assumption would be that it was less powerful and perhaps didn't see as far into the future, if at all. But we don't know that, and it could have potentially seen much further into the future (perhaps to some upcoming global extinction-level disaster which people like D. Gibbons are trying to avoid).

 

[Christopher]

^If events move fast enough, a long line of dominoes could certainly fall within a month and a half. Heck, a literal long line of dominoes takes seconds to fall, or minutes if it's really long.

 

[Bad Bishop]

Agent Mark Benford, to the mysterious woman Nhadra in the Chinese restaurant:

Can we just skip over all the other hystrionic action movie clichés?

Agent Benford, handcuffed on the ground, minutes later:

This isn't over.

 

[js]

-Why are Mark and Demetri acting sulky? They've solved the problem! They just need to be on opposite sides of the globe on Murder Day. If Demetri doesn't trust Mark (even though - or perhaps because - he's now acting so obsessively protective of Demetri that I'm starting to wonder what's really going on with him), then Demetri doesn't have to tell Mark where he's going. Head for the Arctic Circle or Kathmandu.

Or melt the gun into slag or drop it into the ocean. I wondered why they didn't just immediately destroy the gun that's supposed to kill him?

I also wonder if the production shutdown to 'speed up storylines' was because they're now not coming back until March. Which means they only have one episode that can air before Demitri's murder date and only a few weeks before the flashback date comes up. I wonder if that's what messed up the production schedule - they would have had more time for other stories if the show had come back in January, but far less time now as they do seem to be trying to air the show in something close to 'real' time.

 

[Greg Cox]

Agent Mark Benford, to the mysterious woman Nhadra in the Chinese restaurant:

Can we just skip over all the other hystrionic action movie clichés?

Agent Benford, handcuffed on the ground, minutes later:

This isn't over.

Hah! I admit I noticed that, too.

 

[Trent Roman]

Average. I appreciated, particularly after the last episode, a return to the broader issues of the Flashforward itself, but everything good about the storyline with Simcoe and Campos was counteracted by the relentless absurdity of Harold and Benford: Escape from Hong Kong. That line about avoiding action movie clichés coming just before they indulged in an entire sequences of them, and particularly Benford's sudden, inexplicable degeneration into a rogue cop cliché of his own (and Fiennes' terrible delivery of such), made watching those scenes next to unbearable. Seriously, what happened to Benford? A few episodes ago he was fine, having sorted out his issues with his wife, then he finds out that somebody sent a text message and that sends him into a self-destructive spiral. The writers are just doing whatever they feel like, and damn characterization or verisimilitude. After all that, the discovery of a second Mosaic wall doesn't even feel worth the effort.

Still, the rest of the episode I enjoyed. The disastrous news conference, the resentful eyes tracking Simcoe wherever he sent; even the kidnapping at the end was well done, such that I look forward to finding out who and what is happening there, if only because there are so many suspects. Jericho and the real minds behind the flashforward? The rogue faction of D. Gibbons and Persian Lady? A rival intelligence agency? Civilians looking to take 'justice' into their own hands? Plus, with the boy now parentless, we have a good reason for Olivia to take him into her home, moving us closer to their flashforward. And I'd be happy if Campos takes on a more regular role at the FBI--it's about time that we have someone there who can actually provide answers, and Monaghan's character has a hell of a lot more screen presence than Fiennes does.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[DevilEyes]

This is the first time I've voted a FF episode "excellent".

Is it just me, or is D Gibbons giving off a Tobin Bell feeling?

D Gibbons is Management!

Anywho, you'd think Olivia would at least hold some resentment towards Lloyd for admitting he played a role in the deaths of 20 million people. No amount of "Daddy loves his little boy" would make a Doctor swore to protect life not feel a little upset at the guy.

Ah, but not only has he been brave in coming forward - let's be honest, he is a much more likable guy than Mark, who has been challenging Dr Jack Shephard for the title of the most irritating lead in an SF show. Which might have partly be because I've never found Joseph Fiennes to be a very good actor, while I've always liked Jack Davenport. Am I the only one who really wants Olivia and Simco's affair to come true?