Boding - for well or otherwise - is what FlashForward is all about, and the single most riveting story of foreboding tonight was Demetri's - Mark Benford's partner. Demetri, as we learned last week, had no flash forward. And although that might well only mean that he was sleeping six months from now - as pointed out by Janis (pregnant in her vision of the future, no relationship now) - it could also mean that Demetri doesn't survive. Demetri would therefore like the visions, including lack of visions, to be meaningless hallucinations rather than glimpses of the future.
But he gets wrenching proof tonight that they're not, when another agent, in Utah, tells Demetri and Mark that she had no vision during the blackout either. She's shot to death minutes later.
Mark is struggling not against death, but the death of his relationship with Olivia, who is with Lloyd Simcoe in her future vision. But his work, in particular the case he's investigating tonight, is inexorably filling in the pieces of his vision, putting them literally up on his board. Tonight the same action that kills the Utah agent provides Mark with a photograph of a burned doll which was right up there on his future wall.
Why doesn't Mark just refuse to put the pieces of the puzzle up there - why not just throw the photograph away, rather than use it to flesh out a future he doesn't want to occur? Mark can't bring himself to do that - so far - as an FBI agent. But he can try in his personal life, and in a powerful moment tonight he burns the friendship bracelet his daughter gave to him.... It will no doubt turn up, or another bracelet that looks just like it, before this season is over....
Not everything in the visions is profound. Courtney Vance's Stanford, head of the FBI LA Office where Mark, Demetri, and Janis work, found himself on the can six months from now, which is where he was in our present when he had his vision.
But the deft kaleidoscope of philosophic puzzle and human touches, action and agonizing, humor and hints of conspiracy, means that the can is the last place FlashForward is likely to land.
See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost
Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer
6-min podcast review of FlashForward
6 comments:
Nice post. Also important to note that Demitri has already changed the future. When DiDi Gibbons came to the offices and spoke about her vision, he told her he was Korean. Which means that even if her credit card company is still hounding her in six months, she won't shout that he's some kind of Asian. She will probably know and remember.
That is, of course, assuming that whoever she was speaking to decided to come in to work and make that call.
In Fiennes' flashforward, he knows about the blackout. He's investigating it and has a wall full of evidence about it.
So why does his boss, presumably also knowing the date and time of the flashforward, having lived the case for the intervening six months, choose to spend that slice of time on the can?
Surely he wasn't so desperate that he couldn't hold it in for another 2 mins 17 secs.
Plus, in the vision, the woman who's name I can't remember doesn't know what gender her baby is. But now that she's seen the vision, she knows it's a girl, and won't have to ask the question-- bam, the future is different.
Welcome to the delicious paradoxes of time travel, Cam, Kevin, and Celeste.
In the intriguing examples you cite, we have one of two possibilities:
1. The future has been changed by the FlashForward, so the original FlashForward is no longer valid.
2. Something unforeseen will happen between the present (second episode) in the series and the time of the FlashFoward, so the people you mention, and who knows who else, will no longer know what they've learned as a result of the FlashForward, and therefore will behave in the FlashForward exactly as we've seen.
And then there is the additional point about Kevin's critique of Courtney Vance on the can: when you gotta go, you gotta go. Nothing can stop the call of nature, including flashforwards...
Oh, I dunno Paul, I'm pretty certain I could cross my legs for 2 mins 17 secs, especially with 6 months notice :)
Well, you have a point, Kevin - Vance could have trained for the occasion over the six months, to build up control...
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