It’s their answer to LOST’s polar bear.
Sonya Walger is British, Joseph Fiennes is British. Why not keep them Brits instead of them both having to put on (admittedly decently good) US accents?
Jack Davenport, playing the paramour and father of the injured child, is British, too, but I guess they’re giving him a British accent. Guess that’s additional confirmation that Swingtown won’t come back.
I finally caught this on Hulu over the weekend.
I missed watching LOST when it came out, and I was told that most people were left LOST, even when they watched all the episodes. Having the chance to get in on this one, from square one, I jumped.
I skimmed this soon after the poster with the Spoilers from the book. Thanks A lot. it’s called a spoiler tag for a reason.
That being said, I saw the Oceanic and Desperate Housewives ads, thought they were good, and nice and easter eggy. Same for the Kangaroo.
Questions / Speculation ::
Red Panda : Did I or did I not already hear, long before last week’s show, that this will be a faction?
**
The Flashes** : I think Cymk got further on my speculation than I did: How can the flashes be as they are, if people knew they had them, before they got there?
Something about that continuity just doesn’t jive for me. I mean, for what ever reason, everyone blacks out. I am on board there.
Then, they all have Deja Vu, except, it hasn’t happened yet. I have had enough Deja Vu experiences in my own life, to also get on board here.
But, would they keep on the same path they saw?
Then again, the Main character [Name escapes me at the moment] Started his investigation, simply because his flash was of him working on the investigation. How did he get started on the investigation in the first place?
**
Something is wrong with the plot as stated, and I can’t quite finger it.**
The video at the end? Great. I should have seen something like that comming, but the entire thing hit me the exactly right, wrong way. [If that makes sense]
I think this thing can make at least one Season. I hope it handles it’s growth well. [I’m looking at you Prison Break.]
Oh, that’s an interesting speculation! Seems difficult to execute in a convincing manner, but it would very nicely explain why almost everybody just went on with their daily lives during flash-time (but still, even then, why did the main protagonist not write himself just a few slightly more helpful hints? I’m hoping there won’t be any ‘we mustn’t change the past’-handwaving).
Another, less likely and somewhat muddled, explanation would be that in the timeline that was glimpsed during the flash, there had indeed been a flash, as well, though it went to a (perhaps only slightly) different point in time than the flash in the timeline we’re seeing in the show – would explain how the protagonist can be investigating the flash case, while seemingly everybody else is oblivious to anything extraordinary going on during that time.
Or they could go with what seems to be to me the currently dominant time-travel trope, what I call the ‘attractor’ picture of time: the future is neither set in stone, nor easily thrown off by small changes – certain events are very, very likely to happen, and it takes a great effort to get the timeline to significantly diverge at certain points; nevertheless, small, random details can be changed at will. So, for example, New York might get blown up even if you kill the guy with the bomb – it’s just that somebody else detonates instead. Heroes did this to some extent, and also Terminator: SCC; Doctor Who has some similar underpinning to the whole ‘certain points are fixed in time’-thing, and there were hints of something like that in the last seasons of Enterprise, what with the discussion of multiple ‘possible’ timelines grouped by their outcomes.
So it could probably be the case that the future seen in the flash was indeed a future where no flash had occurred, but certain key events – like the main protagonist investigating some big conspiracy, or his wife hooking up with another guy – were more or less bound to happen, anyway, though they might now happen through different means.
The future can’t be “business as usual.” They can’t forget the flash-forward. Too many people just died. Too much property damage occurred. How do you forget that Air Force Two crashed? No, it has to be a “possible.”
And the main guy, just like everybody else, in his flash forward, does nothing to show recognition that he is now living through the moment he already saw.
Yes, his is the only one that reflects any evidence of the flash forward since we see the results of the investigation into it, but he doesn’t do anything that says “oh, this is that moment!”
I think the flash forward should have been 6.2 billion people suddenly stopping and saying “whoa! wicked deja vu!”
I was gonna say that what they can’t forget is really the blacking out thing, there’s nothing to say they can’t forget having seen the future during that time; however, there’s gonna be copious amounts of records of that fact everywhere (including the mosaic website and stuff like that), so you’re quite right there.
I hope they are going to address the disaster the flashforward was for other countries. My guess is that places like Bangaladesh will burn to the ground. Imagine all the untended cooking fires that suddenly get out of control, and nobody able to put them out until they have burned down the city. Multiply this by however many LDC cities you can count, and the body-count hits the millions. Hard to forget that.
I agree with the growing speculation that the other people have been made to forget.
Let me play devil’s advocate on the above point, however :
I have had a few “wicked deja vu” moments. By the time I realize I am in one, the moment at best plays out for 3 more seconds.
(I would barely have enough time to identify, then begin to change my course of action, implementation would be the fourth or fifth second, at best. I am not sure anyone could have enough time to freely act, once they remember “I’ve been here before”.)
– I wonder if we saw all of the main character’s flash forward.
**1. But then again, it did jump around didn’t it? Was he just in that board room with the Heroes-esque time line?
2.It would be interesting, if the at home tv viewer [Us] were to be subjected to the main characters flash again — but it had changed. **
That would be something, if we too got brainwashed (more or less) to the point we can’t recall the flash, if we were to see it happen in real time. [We have intel that the flash date, in real life, corresponds to a “very special” FlashForward.]
They did something similar to my second point in an episode of Fringe called “The Equation”. That was one of the better episodes so far in that show.
The flashforward occurred at around 11am PST, so in Bangladesh it would be 2 or 3 in the morning. Most of the population there would be fine. In fact, in the FlashForward universe, South-East Asia generally would have suffered far less casualties and infrastructure damage; they’d be in a very strong position economically. I doubt if this aspect will be addressed, though…
Or it could mean that the show has REALLY thought all of it through.
I mean, if you wanted to give other countries a head start to match up with the US in terms of power, what better situation?
Yeah, I really hope there’s a decent explanation for why people in the flashforward don’t act as if they knew the flash would be happening. The only thing I can think of that makes sense is what people have said above, that these futures are now changed. It would be interesting, though, if the visions are true for a few people, like the main character, but not all. So as time goes by, most people see things that make their visions impossible, and that becomes the accepted explanation. But for the few people like the cop, the vision comes true, but they can’t convince anyone of this.
Also, my prediction for the cop’s partner: He didn’t have a vision because he got knocked out by the guys coming to shoot the main character, then he wakes up in time to save him.
It seemed to me like he knew the bad guys were coming. Although that doesn’t mean he knew because of the flash…
Maybe the time-loop/paradox of knowing the future and making changes based on that knowledge eventually settles itself. There’s a website that translates a phrase back and forth from English to Japanese until it finally settles on something that comes back the same. Maybe precognition would work similarly. Imagine something like Daybreak (he relived the same day with memory of previous iterations), but only seeing how the last day played out after you’ve tried all the different options and settled on the one you dislike least.
So basically, the future they saw has to happen because if they saw a different future that they were able to change then they would. Which means they’d see that changed future that resulted from their changes to it… and so on until it settles itself to something that they either go to willingly, are unable to change or that end up the same even with the attempted changes. We may have seen some examples of each of those:
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Choose Willingly: The FBI guy is going to choose the same future, because he’s probably going to realize that solving the case is more important than saving his marriage. Like with the friendship bracelet, he is incapable of making a different decision.
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Unable to Change: The FBI guy’s wife has no ability to do anything to save the marriage, because her husband decides to ruin it. She promised to leave him if he started drinking again so she will be left with no choice when he does.
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Ends up the Same Anyway: Maybe Harold will end up in this boat. While the events that led up to his lack of a flash may be completely different, he still ends up unconscious/dead at that time anyway. So his “flash” is the same and he would take the same actions leading up to it.
Maybe. I’m hoping they have an explanation and it isn’t just an oversight.
Because some next April’s big episode it is going to be very odd if everybody is sliding into the seen events without any awareness of it.
It could have been avoided to some degree if nobody had seen clear indications of the date and time. As it is not only should they recognize they’re approaching the foreseen moment but they can anticipate it to the minute. If they didn’t know the exact date/time it would make more sense that they were just in the flow of things when it happens.
This is a good theory, but I don’t see how they can pull it off for such a large number of people. It’s one thing for the vision of the main character; he’s obviously in distress, racing against time, and so on. But what about his FBI boss? Sitting on the toilet, reading the sports page, he’s going to realize it’s the moment of the flash and just keep reading?
To me that’s the easiest one to explain. You can’t plan your bowel movements. He could do a million things differently and still need to go at that time. We don’t know what he was doing right before that, he could have been on his way to a flash forward party when nature called. If it takes him a long time to go he could have been reading the paper for 20 minutes before that and lost track of the time (sports page is usually at the end).
The other thing is I don’t think anyone so far has said they knew what they were thinking (internal dialog) during the flash. He could have been sitting there thinking about how he missed it and how it’s kind of funny he ended up on the toilet anyway and having an internal laugh.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see where they go with some of these.
The hubby and I are betting he’s in a coma, actually.
But then there was that bit in the previews for the rest of the season, so who knows?
The only sensible thing to do in such a predicament is find a main character that saw a corroborated future and try to shoot him or her. If they died, the future is malleable. If the gun refuses to fire, or an earthquake strikes at that moment and knocks the shooter down, or whatever, we confirm the rightness of what Hawking called the Chronological Protection conjecture".
Most time travel plots go to great lengths to avoid settling this, at least earlier than the plot calls for.
You can make a drinking game out of each occasion in which somebody should be killed to test whether the future changes, only to be saved by some clumsy device. I’ll bet you should use small shots to avoid getting overly drunk in any episode.
I have some baseless speculation that would at least be consistent with the depiction on the show. The flash forward is actually closer to a flash sideways into an parallel timeline. In this timeline, the flash forward happened but into a different portion of the future. Thus, nobody in the flash forward universe would have any idea that we would flash forward to that moment in time.