Re: FlashForward: "Playing Cards with Coyote" 11/12/09 - Grade & Discu
This show just doesn't depict people behaving like I know people behave.
Not in the face of what happened. They got back to normal so fast it was unrealistic. Other than moaning over their possible fates.
No one seems freaked over the plane wrecks, car crashes, deaths, etc. No one lost anyone? I guess the main cast was very lucky.
I need to start doing my "Jericho-type" "reviews" again. Jericho was so ridiculous that all one could do was watch and laugh (or switch channels.)
Technically speaking, Simcoe lost the permanent caregiver for his autistic son. Also, Dominic Monaghan's character lost someone, it's just Davenport claimed it didn't matter to him.
And, technically, the horror of the losses are supposed to drive Fiennes to make a choice between sacrificing his marriage to fulfill the flashforward and catch the perpetrators, or sacrificing the capture to save his marriage.
But, obviously, picking characters who don't have much personal loss means not dramatizing the deaths. Merely verbalizing makes it less real, of course. And, waiting weeks to casually toss off "twenty million" is in my opinion an even more telling symptom of the decision to downplay the human toll. I think there are two motives for this. One, is that grief is genuinely dark. Lurid stuff like the blue hand cult is fake dark, which by contrast is generally acceptable. They even imagine this sort of stuff is bold, I suppose.
The other reason is that, if the flashforwards are to be some sort of divine warnings or rearrangements of surviving characters' lives, you can't ask sensible questions like, are twenty million deaths really a reasonable price for "Bryce" to get laid? Millions of people do in fact think that God is playing stage manager in a cosmic drama starring themselves. Sometimes they console themselves that they are the suffering hero of the play, but they never worry about the redshirts. They merely assume that the redshirts will utter their dialogue, then dramatically die on cue. (Nonsense about how people don't believe in predestination is extraordinary. I suspect some people are just making stuff up, to blast the evil Brannon Braga.
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But, every supposed redshirt is the star of his or her own drama. If each of us is uttering the dialogue in someone else's drama, where is our free will? Predestination means fulfilling a plan. But, if the future is instead the product of everyone's freely willed choices, where is the destiny? Every grownup knows there is a limit to our powers to affect the future. Indeed, every grownup knows that some things are beyond our power to affect. This is commonly felt to be tragic. All this is genuinely dark, which is why the novel, as well as the TV series, insists on the paradoxical ability to change the future.
Dramatizing the human toll threatens to raise the theological problem of evil. Hollywood is very conservative. It is surprising that FlashForward goes as far down that road as it did. It might even explain why first Braga, then Guggenheim were pushed out?
Foreknowledge is not the same thing at all as predestination. In practice, our free will, our ability to make choices, is profoundly limited by our ignorance. The flashforwards, if real glimpses of the future, offer choices, empower our free will. The pet shop keeper's initial attempt to fulfill the Bronx Zoo future
because she wanted to is just the latest example of this in the show. The dramatic intensity of the choice between marriage and justice is why Joseph Fiennes is THE STAR of the show. The show has repeatedly shown characters as defined by the choice of how to respond to the knowledge offered by the flashforward. This is the dramatically valid choice. The mystery plot is the dubious part.
As I said above, millions of people do believe in predestination. But in daily life they don't think about it. That's because it is nonsense and has no practical application, save as emotional balm in times of crisis. When the characters talk about their fates and make choices about how to respond to their flashforwards, they are most definitely not acting like people today.
But they are acting as real people might in such a bizarre situation.
This weird concept happens to dramatize issues about what we think of our lives, as in Does God have a plan for everthing? etc. As pointed out, the fact that millions shared a common vision compels the characters taking predestination and free will seriously. If we accept the internal premises of this factually impossible show, then questions relating to our lives arise. That's what makes the show interesting. As ever, if you can't accept the premises while viewing, then the show will be unengaging.
The mystery plot is horribly strung out. The need to limit the discoveries to the main cast and to stretch them out in time by such childish devices as having Fiennes refuse to question his own daughter about how she knows D. Gibbons is a bad man is due to serialization. Popular as serialization is in the bbs conventional thinking, it is responsible for such bad writing.
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