Flash Forward, Left Behind

I’ve watched the first few episodes of “Flash Forward” more or less as they aired– I’ve been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard– I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up.

Anyway, I’ve been watching, and I have to say, I’m really not blown away at this point. The AV Club recap of last night’s episode gets one of the main reasons why:

I was talking with someone on the Twitter, our official demon overlord for the year 2009, about how I generally think the series is much, much better when no one is actually talking, and this episode seemed like a perfect exemplification of that point. There were a handful of striking, inventively directed musical sequences. There was a cool question at the center about what one of the guest characters saw in his flash forward. Again, there were some good guest players (someone in the show’s casting department is getting some great actors to play the smaller parts). But most of the time when the characters speak, they’re not even coming close to saying something about their inner lives. Instead, they state, as baldly as possible, either what we can already see on screen or exactly what they saw or think.

That nails one of the big problems– the dialogue is just crashingly awful. Like, J. Michael Straczynski bad. The blonde female terrorist was particularly bad– not only were her lines awful, she delivered them with all the subtlety of a local tv car commercial. It was excruciating.

There’s another problem with the show as a whole, though, one that’s familiar to any reader of Slacktivist’s Left Behind posts: the writers and producers haven’t put enough thought into what the world would be like after an Event of this magnitude. Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau puts his finger on part of it:

So, the natural question is, why wouldn’t most people’s visions of the future involve them being in church waiting for the messiah, or in Times Square waiting for the aliens to land, or manning the barricades (if they’re cops or soldiers) for the riots, or waiting in the bunker for the collapse, or whatever? Whatever one thinks of the visions, somebody or something with astounding power, and a willingness to inflict mass casualties, has declared a keen interest in that moment 6 months from now. You’d think a lot of people would freak out.

It’s an excellent question, and one that sort of undermines the tension the show is trying to set up regarding the visions. Everybody knows the exact moment of the flash-forward, and yet the visions that people have seen do not appear to reflect that knowledge (except for Joseph Fiennes’s bulletin board). Having had the visions, though, it’s really hard to believe that anybody would be going about their business in as blase a manner as they are in the visions that we see. Which strongly suggests that the future seen in the visions is not fixed and immutable.

There’s also a whiff of the cosy catastrophe to the whole thing. For the most part, we see middle-class people doing middle-class things. Nobody we’ve seen has had a vision of themselves working the late shift at their second job, or anything like that. They’re either doing boring affluent-people things, or they’re suffering some sort of Event-related violence.

As a result, there’s a kind of incoherence to the whole thing. I’ll probably give it another episode or two, but really, it’s not looking terribly promising at the moment.