Losing consciousness

ABC may have a big hit on its hands with the new show FlashForward, airing Thursday nights at 8 p.m. Or it may just be trying to pawn off a poor man’s version of Lost onto fans of the soon-to-be-ending series.

 

The show, which premiered last week, is a sci-fi drama set in the present day, starring Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) as FBI agent Mark Banford. The pilot opens on a close-up of Mark regaining consciousness. He has been in a car accident and, as he slowly crawls out of the wreckage, becomes aware of a major catastrophe around him.

 

Mark wakes up to mass casualties on a Los Angeles interstate. Meanwhile, his surgeon wife Olivia, played by Sonya Walger (Penny from Lost), wakes up on the floor of her operating room. Throughout the rest of the episode, the characters try to figure out what the hell happened.

 

What happened was this—for two minutes and 17 seconds, everyone in the world blacked out at the same time. The result was a grand-scale disaster as cars crashed everywhere and planes fell out of the sky. But it wasn’t just that people lost consciousness. As Mark first proposes to a room full of FBI elite, their consciousnesses “went somewhere else.”

 

People compare stories to find that everyone’s mind “flashed forward” to the same point in time about six months into the future, a date in April 2010. Most of the characters are disturbed by what they saw—attackers, adultery, nothing.

 

The premise of the show is utterly original. It also poses the age-old literary conundrum about destiny: If you knew your fate, could you change it, or would your attempts to alter the future just lead you on the same path?

 

But what’s really surprising is that in the last seconds of the show, a security camera reveals that, somewhere in the U.S., there was at least one person up and walking around during the global blackout.

 

If the episode wasn’t gripping enough, the two-minute teaser of things to come was absolutely thrilling, promising a lot of action and surprises.

 

It looks like the rest of the season, if not the series, will deal with why the “flash forwards” happened. And it looks like Mark is just the man for the job.

 

The acting is really solid, with veterans of film and television rounding out the cast, most with unfamiliar names but dozens of bit parts to their credit. And the drama is TV-good, if a little unbelievable.

 

John Cho (Harold and Kumar) also stars as Mark’s FBI partner, Demetri. And, though he didn’t appear in the pilot episode, Dominic Monaghan (Lost, Lord of the Rings) will be playing Simon, someone who appears to play an integral role in demystifying the flash forwards.

 

FlashForward‘s writing isn’t particularly clever. Then again, the pilot was all business, focusing on exposition rather than character development. The special effects, which included a few gratuitous explosions and the disturbing image of a helicopter sliding down a skyscraper, were the quality of CGI to which we’ve become accustomed.

 

The show seems to be off to a good start, with a total 12.4 million viewers tuning in last week, making it the most-watched show in its time slot and beating the second episode of Survivor: Samoa on CBS. Its marketing plan, no doubt, had a lot to do with that. ABC has been hyping the show for weeks, with ads pimping it as the drama event of the year. FlashForward has a lot going for it and the potential to be a very smart, gripping drama. What the creative people involved have to be wary of is pandering too directly to Lost fans, or they risk alienating other viewers.