FlashForward Episode 1 “No More Good Days” – Thoughts and Analysis
Warning: This post contains spoilers if you have not seen the episode
One Sentence Review
A superb introductory episode that sets up the intriguing mystery of the Flash Forward that will drive the first series onwards
Episode Synopsis
Thoughts and Analysis
Unfortunately I only remembered about this series starting when I saw a trailer for the third episode on the Spoilertv site, so my thoughts on this and the second episode are late. However given the content of this episode I thought it important to review it given the details that emerge, and the hints of what is in the series to come.
The series is inspired by a 1999 book of the same name by Robert J Sawyer, only in the book the flash forward is 21 years into the future. Going from the Wikipedia entry, the series story has already diverged from that of the book in several ways including that technological devices were working all around the world (in the book they did not due to the Obsever effect) and the main characters are different. This means that the cause of the Flash Forward and other details are unlikely to be the same as in the book.
The first thing of note is that everybody in the world is sent forward 6 months to 29 April 2010 at 5am GMT (6am in London which is on BST at this point) and are there for 137 seconds. The main vision we see in this episode is Mark Benford’s and it appears that he is in charge of an investigation into the Flash Forward and is in the process of coming under attack from 2 masked men, presumably because of what he knows.
In addition to some of the more prominent clues seen in the vision, there are several briefer flashes seen in the seconds leading up to the full vision, including a Vision of Aaron, Mark in bed with Olivia, Mark being given a friendship bracelet with Charlie this last one also appears in the full vision as if he was recalling a memory and we see it occurring at the end. I have taken screencaps of some of the more quickfire “flashes” and these can be seen in more detail by clicking on the Thumbnail below (will take you to a Picassa album)
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Judging from this episode I suspect that the season will end on the day of the flash forward and we will see what if anything has been changed and I suspect one of the ongoing themes of the series will be is the Future fixed or can it be changed. There are certain indications in this episode that some events are already in motion that will lead the future seen in the flash forward to occur. My personal view on this aspect of metaphysical philosophy is that the Future is fixed unless we have sufficient foreknowledge of it to change it and even then we run the risk of having our attempts to change the future to cause it to occur.
One thing that I did find curious was that the future people saw, seemed to be one in which the Flash Forward had occurred if Mark’s Vision is anything to go by as he was investigating its cause, yet there seemed to be no mention of it being the time of the Flash Forward in people’s visions. This makes me wonder if rather than looking into the Future of their world the flash forward was into that of a parallel world where the Flash Forward did not occur but future Mark is investigating a related but different incident.
Some evidence of this can be seen from Al Goughs Vision of the Future where we see a backdrop of London which apparantly seems undamaged yet the background in the present shows some of the same buildings burning including Big Ben. While it is not unfeasable that the buildings could be repaired in 6 months it does suggest that maybe the flash forward did not occur in the future we saw (again clicking on Thumbnail takes you to a Picassa album). Its still early days however so hopefully this point will be cleared up at some point.
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Linked to this is the question of if Future Mark experienced the same Flash Forward why would he stay alone in his office, knowing that 2 armed men are going to try to kill him, but given that it looks like he has lost his wife and is drinking he could have a death wish by this point.
Another mystery is what happened to Demetri in the 2.5 minutes and how did he escape the crash with only minor injuries and be nowhere near the car? The car overturned and Mark who was wearing a seat belt had to struggle out the back, yet Demetri who was not wearing a seat belt and I would assume be thrown out of the car at high speed through the windscreen as he would have blacked out losing his grip on the seat belt has only a few scratches to show for it. This could be a Red Herring or a hint that there is more to Demetri then we initially know.
While I did enjoy the episode I did have a couple of problems with the plot. The first problem is how quickly people went from trying to recover from the aftermath of the flash forward to discussing it on the news. Now while this would happen I found the time frame to be a bit too quick given that given that it was worldwide I would assume there would be millions of people killed as a result from fire, road traffic accidents, plane crashes and other assorted tragedies.
Yet I found the plot moved too quickly from this aspect of it too the “Wow everyone saw 2 minutes 17 seconds of the future isn’t it amazing”. I just thought that in this episode there was too little emphasis on the tragedy element of the flash forward in relation to the “coolness” aspect of it. It seemed to me that this should have been a 2 part episode with the characters working out 1-2 days later towards the end of the episode about the shared flash forward aspect of it.
My second problem was how easily Mark was given the investigation and that he put the Mosaic board in the same place as he saw in his vision. From a personal standpoint if I had been given Marks vision I would want to try to change things and one simple thing would be to put the Mosaic board somewhere else.
These gripes aside I was hooked by this episode and look forward to seeing how the season progresses. Given that we will probably reach April 29th by the end of this season I expect that this season will end on April 29th but there may well be another Flash Forward at some point, this time showing a cataclysmic future that they have to prevent.
Episode Rating
9/10
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