A quick thought on ABC's "FlashForward"

Spoilers up to 11/5/09!

I've been watching ABC's serial sci-fi drama "FlashForward" almost in real-time, meaning that it just sits on my TiVo for an hour or so.  (To put it in context, I haven't gotten around to the "V" re-make yet, despite having high hopes for it.)

In "FlashForward," everyone on the planet -- except for one creepy person spotted in a baseball stadium surveillance camera -- blacks out at exactly the same time, for 2 minutes, 17 seconds.  Thousands are people are killed in plane crashes, auto accidents, hospital operations, and the like.  Most, but not all, of the survivors had a glimpse of where they would be in six months.  Some had happy visions, others not so happy.  The ones who had no glimpse at all begin to fear that they're going to be dead.

It's a pretty intriguing set-up, and the producers have been doling out small answers regularly, for which I'm grateful.  The one big complaint I have is that the producers have revealed too much, yet not enough, with regard to two characters -- Lloyd Simcoe and Simon Costa -- who are revealed to have caused the global blackout.

Now, the difference between American mysteries (as opposed to British, Agatha Christie type mysteries, where there's no action at all) and thrillers might lie primarily in the fact that thrillers generate suspense by showing you things from the point of view of the protagonist and the antagonist, whereas mysteries show you only the point of view of the detective.  I think Alfred Hitchcock once explained how he built suspense -- if two men are in a room playing chess and a bomb blows up, that's shocking but not suspenseful.  On the other hand, if you see someone plant the bomb before the chess players walk into the room, that's terribly suspenseful!  With a mystery, on the other hand, it works if the detective unravels the clues pointing toward the planted bomb, and then the detective must race the clock to get to the room before the bomb blows up.

Back to "FlashForward": it's nice for us to know that Simcoe and Costa are responsible, but it's frustrating that we aren't told everything they obviously know.  Why do they think they're responsible?  What project were they working on together, and how might it have caused the global blackout?  They might not know, but they obviously have suspicions.  By not sharing those with us (the viewers) -- only showing us the same conversation over and over ("We're responsible for killing 20 million people!"), the producers are artificially dragging things out.

It's too late to unring the bell, but really, I think it would have been better to have shown us nothing about Simcoe's and Costa's conversations, and simply give us only the same information as the FBI agents have.

Comments

[Josh J.]

Frustrating, yes absolutely. But I think it's also incredibly appealing in the same way Lost is. In fact, it's the similarities between the shows that makes me like this one so much. However, I know some people HATE Lost for this very reason, so they'll probably hate this one as well.