FlashForward Lowers the Bar!

FlashForward, in addition to its pretentious, gramatically incorrect title, is a show whose basic premise (everybody sees six months in the future, mass deaths ensue) is unbelievably thrilling, and whose execution is amazingly dull. I could go on and on about the contrived plotting, terrible pacing, the fact that Joseph Fiennes seems to be attempting with all his might to present the least interesting main character in the history of network drama (Take That, Felicity!)…

But the triumphant return of FF last Thursday is worth mentioning for one single reason: It contained the second-worst comeback ever.



How could someone say that with a straight face? Did he not listen to the previous sentence? The entire point of the Hobbit’s character is that he’s supposed to be one of the ten smartest people on the planet. Yet he didn’t understand that the ‘country’ she was referring to was the one he just left, and not the one he was flying into? Does spending your life working on physics leave you unable to determine how sentences are constructed?

Also, seriously? ‘Royal Toronto’ airlines? Is that an airline that only goes from Toronto to other cities and back? Wouldn’t that be an incredibly limited market?

Weirdly, although I’ve been really hard on FlashForward just now (and always, really) I’m completely going to watch it next week. Why? Because in the last fifteen minutes of the two-hour return things got extremely exciting, and the Hobbit revealed himself to be an interesting character worth watching. Not to give away what I loved about the ending, but he might bring as much value to the show as William Fichter did to Prison Break.

Oh, Prison Break. Why didn’t it occur to me until just now that FlashForward has the exact same problems as you? Government/Industrial conspiracies, bland lead characters, a large image whose pieces only obtain meaning as we go through the year – and, most importantly, a self-terminating premise guaranteed to kill the show’s relevance after a single season.