FlashForward Ends on a High Note

A fine finale for FlashForward tonight, which makes me feel more than ever that the series deserved at least another season.

After tempting us and taunting us all season long with which of the flashforwards would come true - the only we knew for sure did not was Gough's, who committed suicide - we had an excellent series of confirmations of the future against all odds tonight, which included

• Bryce and Keiko meeting in the restaurant after all, when her mother distracts ICE officials at the airport, allowing Keiko to get to the restaurant, and Bryce earlier explaining to Nicole that his true love is Keiko
• Nicole almost drowning after all - she was not being baptized - which explains her bad feeling about her flashforward - but the guy she saw briefly in the hospital didn't come to hurt her, but rescue her
• Aaron's daughter, who seemed to have died last week, coming back to life after all.

But the most interesting, and satisfying story, concerned what happens to Mark.  He of course ends up in FBI headquarters.   Meanwhile, we've seen the first flashforward which did not come completely true - Janis's sonogram in the hospital shows her baby's all right all right, but the baby's a boy not  a girl.  So the flashforwards can be almost completely true.   At chez Benford, Olivia, Lloyd, and the kids are in place, but Lloyd elects to keep his shirt on.   When Olivia looks down at him from balcony, it's clearly not after they just made love (they did kiss pretty passionately).  So their flashforward also came almost true.   And though Vogel does say, outside the Benford house, that Benford is dead, it turns out that that's just the first part of a longer, conditional statement that ends along the lines of, there's no way he'll get out of that building.  So he's not really saying that Benford is dead, but that Benford will be dead.  Nice touch.

And though Mark's attacked by the masked team, he kills them at all, after figuring out that the next flashforward will occur in just 14 minutes.  He gets word out to Stan - who managed to kill a bad guy with a shot from the toilet - and a little of the world is warned, but there's also a bomb that's about to blow up the FBI building, and Mark may not be able to get out.

For those who may be seeing this one and final season Flashforward at some time in the future, and may be reading this, I won't tell you the very ending, except to say it is very good, indeed.

Indeed, like Coronet Blue in the 1960s, I predict that FlashForward and all concerned will fare well in the future.  The television series was a good extrapolation of Rob Sawyer's novel, and deserved a longer run, but sometimes it takes the world longer than expected to realize what's happening....


5-min podcast review of FlashForward finale

See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost ... 1.2: Proofs and Defiance of Inevitability ... 1.3: Conficting Visions and Futures ... 1.4: FlashForward Meets Shaft and House ... Drunk FlashForwarding in 1.5 ... Across the Universe in FlashForward 1.6 ... FlashForward 1.7: The Future Can Be ... FlashForward 1.8: The Nightie as a Grain of Sand ... FlashForward 1.9: Shelter from the Storm ... Olivia Benford at Harvard in Flashforward 1.10 ... Flashforward 1.12 Parts 1 and 2 ... FlashForward 1.13: Aaron's Daughter, Mark's Gun, and Magpies ... FlashForward 1.14:  Somalia, LA, Fate Irresistible and Resistible ... FlashForward 1.15: Who's That Lady? ... FlashForward 1.16: Mark's Gun and Demetri's Wedding ... FlashForward 1.17: Mark, Demetri, and Hari Seldon ... FlashForward 1.18: Triple Forks ... FlashForward 1.19: The Stubborn Universe ...  FlashForward 1.20: Rehearsal for Unwarranted Retirement

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer