The new ABC series “FlashForward” certainly sets us up with a hook. It’s “Flash”, not “FastForward,” which would mean something else. The series is created by David S. Goyer and Brannon Barga. This pilot needed to be a full two hours, like a “movie” – watching this pilot was a bit like going to the movies anyway. Officially, the series is distributed by ABC Films (that is, Walt Disney Pictures) and “Five”.
The premise is intriguing enough, inasmuch as it takes the public some time to figure out what the question is. On October 29, 2009, everyone in the whole world (except for one cloaked figure in Commerica Park in Detroit – no wonder it made Sports Illustrated) blacks out and loses 137 seconds of their lives. Carnage ensues, with massive auto wrecks (on a two-way traffic bridge in LA which I do not recall ever driving over). Los Angeles is in shambles, and for a while the authorities go through the usual suspect possibilities: dirty bomb, EMP, coordinated attack. It’s a little while before people realize it happened all over the world, and then they start building “do tell” websites for people to compare the visions that they experienced, to match up exactly what will happen on April 29, 2010. (Will Tampa Bay be playing in Boston’s Fenway Park and sweep a series on the road? Only MLB knows now. It’s funny that some of the foreshadowing in this series involves baseball, so far.)
Joseph Fiennes is the strongest character as a tall, thin vigorous Charlie Banford; John Cho suspects, from the absence of vision, that he will be dead. Do can we change the future without the usual paradoxes?
With a mystery like this, one wonders how the media would cover it. AC360 would be a good start. Of course, the question is "why?" Is it an aberration in the fabric of space-time? Is it the kind of scenario that the History Channel Universe series says could destroy the planet?
My own dreams recently seem like visions, and I certainly won’t identify anyone in them (at least not within the purview of Internet search engines). But in one dream I was trying to get into a Minneapolis-style skyway that seemed to be on another planet, with the problem that the outer tunnels did not connect to the inside, that seemed to be in a parallel universe, across branes. And then I gave in and enjoyed a barbecue brisket breakfast, and read a critique of my websites, blogs and films (that according to the dream I had succeeding in making, finally). The reviewers felt like I was living in my journaling (even if English teachers encourage the activity) rather than really living, as if then the writing had no purpose, as it could not support any specific person. Everyone was left behind.
Then, the next night, a visitor comes to the house, and rear ends my car in the driveway. I am angry. I do not want to forgive him or her. I cannot do business with the person. But the anger and lack of forgiveness makes my heart race, and I wake up.
Then another vision was a bit like “Stagefright”. I’m walking on a movie set where the actors are rehearsing a street mugging, maybe even looting as after the “FlashForward” mayhem. I am captured, as if I am an actor in the skit, perhaps an audition. One of the players pierces my chest with a needle, and it goes into my heart. I realize that the robbery is “real”, not just an act, that I am to be expropriated. I wake up from rem sleep. The heart rate slows down after I walk around.
In the show, however, the people just come to, into mayhem if they were out and about, especially driving. Think about texting for 137 seconds while driving.
In my own experience, telepathy may become the next technology. I sit, eating a burger in an ESPN sports bar, before going to a Landmark Theater next door for a movie, and think of a particular person. I look up at a particular college football game on the flat plasma screen, and there he is, in the crowd.
Attribution link for Comerica Park in Detroit picture in Wikipedia (given another name in the show), Creative Commons License. (It's often mispronounced as "commercia".) It's very much a pitcher's park, still.
The Tigers won only 43 games in 2003. Look how good they are now. There is hope for the Nationals yet!
Update: December 3
The show had just one episode after Thanksgiving, and resumes March 10, 2010.
Tonight two scientists from a plasma laboratory in Palo Alto, CA said that their experiment could have caused the blackout (no, they weren't from Facebook!) But then EMP towers in Somalia, photos taken in 1991, need to be explained as the scientists say they started their work in 1992. Were they hacked by the people in Utah and Commerica Park? Did they get their technology from aliens? Will there be a second blackout if too many people "change the future" as Joseph Fiennes's character did in Hong Kong tonight.
The premise is certainly intriguing!
Third picture: no, not an EMP tower in Somalia; a cell phone tower in DC's Shaw Neighborhood, not too far from the Town DC.
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