FlashForward Pilot - Recap and Review

The episode opens with the lead character (officer Mark Benford) awaking in his crashed upside down vehicle. He exits to find chaos in the street, every car stopped or crashed, fires, burning buildings, injured people, and everyone experiencing the same wonder and surprise. Cut to the beginning of the day, before the events of the opening sequence. The lead and the rest of the main cast begin the day. Bedford says goodbye to his wife and daughter as he heads off, greeting the family babysitter on his way out. Another man stands on the dock of a beach that seems intent on killing himself with a visible gun. Bedford attends his AA meeting while listening to another member speak of his daughter who was killed in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Bedford's the babysitter fools around with her boyfriend. Bedford and his partner tail a suspected terrorist on her way to supposedly detonate a dirty bomb in the capital. A car chase ensues during which the agents' car slides toward an oncoming truck, but suddenly they and everyone on the planet blackout. A multitude of fragmented and hazy flashes appear depicting each person's future. At this point, time catches up to the point of the intro scene.

Awaking from the blackout, one man finds himself stuck hanging precariously from atop of a power pole, the babysitter finds herself on the ground and rushes to see if Bedford's daughter is fine only to find her saying all good days are gone, and (as it was shown before) Bedford emerges from his flipped car. Bedford has a vision of himself looking at a board of leads and drinking right before a group with guns storms in with the seeming intent to kill him.

Upon finding that his family is fine, Bedford returns to FBI headquarters and has a meeting with his peers. They discuss what happened to them and reveal the visions they saw, which they conclude are visions of the future which lasted exactly 2 minutes and 17 seconds and were set at the same date and time, six months from now, April 29^th, 2010 10pm. (And it happened to every person on the planet, or so they think.) Each character contemplates the meaning of what they saw in their vision. Bedford thinks his vision relates to whoever was behind the event and believes it is the key to finding them. His partner saw nothing during his blackout and believes he must be dead in the future. Bedford then meets with his sponsor to discuss his apparent future drinking and death and how much he does not want that to happen; however, his sponsor goes on to tell him he saw himself finding his presumed dead daughter and says he wishes his future will come true. Our protagonist returns home to wife. She tells him that her vision was her with another man. He tells her what they saw is not necessarily going to happen. Later he goes outside and is visited by his daughter, who gives him a homemade bracelet to wear (the very same bracelet he saw himself wearing in his vision). Meanwhile, Demetri (partner of Bedford's character) is back at their office looking at videos of the blackout and finds one where there is a man awake walking through a stadium of unconscious people.

FlashForward Review - Is It As Good As They Say?

A great concept can't save this lacklustre version of Lost. FlashForward has been the most anticipate series of fall 2009. Critics have been buzzing about the pilot episode for a while now, and they have proclaimed it the new Lost. Some people may expect that mean it's as good as Lost, or the pilot episode was as surprisingly as Lost was when it surprisingly debuted with a great pilot and lots of followers. But when you see the first episode of FlashForward, you realize it's not the new Lost, it was just meant to copy it. The very first scene is a flat out copy of Lost's. Stunned people awaken in a daze to find a catastrophe around them and rush to help those in trouble. I thought: very familiar, if only they had a plane crash, a polar bear, and a dinosaur (there was a dinosaur in that first episode of Lost, believe that). Then there is the mystery of the flashforward, a world-wide event where every person on the planet blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 second, during which they see their futures, set at the same date and time. When it's all over, a group of people, FBI agents in this case, investigate this mystery. On top of that, there is a strange person, probably a part of a larger group, who is captured on camera awake during the event and curiously calm about it. So there is this mysterious event, a similar opener, a mysterious group they they might as well call the others. You see by the end of the episode, you realize that Flash forward was meant to have all the elements of Lost that made it popular, but their version falls short. It has the details but lacks the essence, so to say.

So what is wrong with it, you might ask? Well, for a show centered on a mystery, there is nothing that makes you excited about solving it. It's not very exciting to watch people discuss calmly what's happening in the episode instead of doing something, which is what a TV series is supposed to be all about, if I'm not mistaken. There is a feeling that the producers of this show failed to make the show as interesting as it could be with such a great concept. When something as big as a global black out happens, the importance of that needs to be shown. However, what they did produce was, let's just say, anti-climactic. Basically, they show various people pass out during their activities and wake to find the inevitable chaos and harm a global blackout would obviously cause. It turned out a little tamer than the sublime chaos there should be in such an extreme circumstance.