Loaded Couch Potatoes

I don’t want to sound like one of those guys who is practically busting a nut to say that the pilot episode of FlashForward is kinda like a caffeine-free version of the pilot episode of Lost, but … well, it kinda is.

I do want to be one of those guys busting a nut to say that this is not entirely a bad thing.

The similarities are somewhat superficial: the episode starts out with an ambiguous scene of catastrophe, which involves people screaming and people dying and things on fire and explosions.  The rest of the episode (titled “No More Good Days”) revolves around mysterious events happening to a large cast of actors.

Only this time, Penny is there!  And also, director David Goyer is no J.J. Abrams!  And also, the screenplay doesn’t have even a fifth as much subtlety, wonder, and genuine, lean-forward-in-your-seat mystery as that Lost pilot had.

And that, folks, is gonna be the last time I compare this series to Lost; assuming future episodes don’t involve Dominic Monaghan’s heroin habit or a character discovering and plotting a way to infiltrate some sort of hatch in the ground, I just don’t know that further comparisons would be either fair or useful, to either series.

So let’s move on, shall we?

I’m going to give you my short, general reaction first, and then we’ll start getting into somewhat spoilery specifics.

My reaction is that I enjoyed the pilot.  I didn’t love it.  Some scenes didn’t quite work for me, and on the whole, things felt more than a little bit rushed. 

I mean, sure, I get that something genuinely awful has happened, and that it’s happened worldwide.  Personally, I think I’d've liked to see this play out a bit more.  Maybe it might could’ve taken more than what seems like two minutes for everyone everywhere to accept the events of the day…?  Shouldn’t there be something more along the lines of societal panic, and shoulsn’t that panic last more than fifteen minutes?  I’m just sayin’.

But, that’s not the direction David Goyer and Brannon Braga have decided to go in … and possibly some of this is also coming from Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, on which the series is based.  (Robert J. Sawyer, eh?  Alright, stopping.)  I’ve not read that novel, and therefore can’t comment on it or be informed by it, and therefore, this will be the last time I’m going to be considering it.  From this point forward, I’ll be assuming that the producers are writing the story afresh … which, really, they are, whether they accept it or not.

So, ignoring my (mostly unfair) thoughts about how I’d have done the series, I’ll focus instead on how they did the series.  For better or for worse, it’s what we’ve got, and yes, in fact, I did enjoy this episode.  It’s a cool idea, and it’s got a good cast, and if the story from this point forward develops satisfactorily, I won’t care that the pilot seems rushed.

Let’s go back to that cast.

There’s Joseph Fiennes, playing Mark Benford, an FBI agent.  He’s a recovering alcoholic, whose marriage is seemingly repaired after a long bout of hanging by a thread.  He is apparently the only person at the FBI smart enough — or self-reflective enough — to realize that when the whole world blacked out, it didn’t just black out: he had a vision of the future.

And not a pleasant one: he’s drinking again, and being hunted by a man with a very large gun inside the FBI offices.

Fiennes does a good job, and certainly handles his American accent capably.  He seems like a decent enough fellow to hang a series upon.

Who’s that fellow Joseph Fiennes is clutching?

Why, you’re absolutely correct; that is John Cho!

He plays Benford’s partner, Agent Demetri Noh.  Man, I really wish he had been a doctor instead.  Cause, um, Doctor Noh.

Cho is actually quite good.  He’s very plausible as an FBI agent, and between this and Star Trek, his career is obviously developing quite nicely.

Noh’s vision during the blackout is possibly the most disturbing of the ones we hear about, no so much for what it is as what it isn’t: anything at all.  Noh doesn’t have a vision, and he assumes that this means he’s not going to be alive six months in the future.  Crikey!

Demetri is part of a task force with Mark and a female agent whose name escaped my notes.  She finds security camera footage of a baseball game during the flash forward … and amongst all those thousands of people lying there passed out, she finds a man walking around.  Well, that’s got to be meaningful, right?

Sonya Walger — Penny on Lost, for those of you who don’t know  — plays Mark’s wife, Olivia, a surgeon who loses a patient during the flash forward.  Even worse, she has a vision in which she is obviously cheating on her husband with another man.

That man there, in fact.

That’s Jack Davenport, and I’d wager that his role on this show won’t be as funny as his role on Coupling.  He plays the father of a boy whose life Olivia has to save after the flash forward; when he comes into the ER, he already knows her name.  Creepy.

Zachary Knighton plays Bryce, a colleague of Olivia’s who, at the time of the flash forward, has a gun pressed beneath his chin.  He’s just about to pull the trigger, so he’s obviously got some issues, but they seem afterward to mostly be gone: he’s had a vision of the future in which he is alive and happy, and who is he to question a vision?

That’s Dominic Monaghan.  I didn’t see him in this episode, but apparently, he is a cast member, and will show up next week.

There’s Brian F. O’Byrne — you might recognize him as Colin from the gone-too-soon Brotherhood – who plays Aaron, Mark’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor.  He has a vision in which his daughter, who came home from the war dead, is still alive somewhere in Afghanistan; unlike many of the people in the world, he’s hoping that what he saw will come true.

O’Byrne is pretty good here, and Aaron threatens to be one of the most interesting characters on the show.  O’Byrne’s American accent is flawless; I knew I’d seen him somewhere, but with that accent and a thick beard, I had to rely on IMDB to tell me who he was.

And yes, that is in fact Seth MacFarlane, who has a small role as another FBI agent.  I can’t abide Family Guy, but I think I kinda like MacFarlane himself.  I’ve seen interviews in which he was actually funny, and here, he doesn’t seem at all out of place playing an FBI agent.  Dunno if he’s recurring, or if this was a one-off, but I’d not mind if he came back.

Summing up, this was by no means a great pilot, but it certainly has potential, especially if the writers are able to mine some nuggets out of the rich vein of symbolic meaning to be found in a series about people’s actions when they think they know what is going to happen in the future.

For example, that tension between Mark and Aaron — one who wants his vision to be false, and one who desperately wants his to be true — could well hold some good drama.  And does Demetri’s lack of a vision indeed mean that he won’t be around come April 2010?  With Olivia’s vision, does it actually mean what she thinks it means, or could something else be going on?

I hope the writers here are canny enough to take advantage of the premises they’ve set up.  If the reason why the pilot feels a little rushed to me is that they were really more interested in getting to stories that can properly exploits those premises, then I’ll take that as good news.  Only time will tell.

Personally, I’m hoping to be watching FlashForward for several seasons to come, and while this episode doesn’t quite convince me that I will be, it also definitely leaves the door open.

To be continued next week…