Flashforward 10/22

I said in some earlier thread that this was a cop show with pretensions, not an sf series. It still is.

All this talk about people having to know in their flashforwards about the flashforwards drives me crazy, though.

In just about every time travel plot of this sort, the plot only works if there is a beginning. Time is like a circle. You add a bead to that circle at some point. Later you come back to that bead. But that bead wasn’t there at some earlier time.

You can’t have a show about people remembering their flashforward in the flashforward. (You also can’t have a show in which five months from now the deputy director of the L.A. FBI office will be sitting in the bathroom knowing his agent will be attacked by masked men, either. That’s why so many people hate sf and time travel plots. They lead into absurdities.) The show as a show can only exist for two reasons. One is to find out how the bad guys caused the blackout. The other is to see how they maneuver the characters into doing what has been set up for them.

Nobody will die early. Nobody’s flashforward will be exactly what you’ve been led to expect. It will all end in tears.

But I’m saying that as someone who gave up on Lost in the first season because I saw the idiocies ahead. I can’t figure out why anybody would still be watching that. So either you play along with the show as the show has to be and we already have seen or you don’t. I wish people would just stop complaining that it should be something else. Go watch Lost if you think that.I want to watch them dig themselves a hole. :stuck_out_tongue:

Unfortunately the show is making the nature of the premise part of the mystery/suspense. There’s several different ways things could work with regards to the time travel, paradox, and predestination issues, and at least a few of the possibilities could be proven or ruled out fairly easily with certain actions or perusing mosaic website. I rather they address these sooner than later, because I find the other mysteries more interesting than “can we really change the visions?” and as soon as we get to April they’ll no longer be able to use that anyway.

Exactly. And we’re too far into the season for them to suddenly think of this. So it won’t happen.

That would make it an sf show instead of a cop show.

What about the next flashforward that will take place in the last episode of this season?* :slight_smile:

Of course, my immediate question after finding the pylons in Somalia would have been, did satellites find any of these before Oct. 10 (or whenever)? But that’s not a job for the FBI’s L.A. field office, is it? :stuck_out_tongue:

Aim low, boys, they’re riding ponies.

  • What would be more fun is if on April 29 they woke up and it was Oct. 10 again, but that was an episode of ST:TNG which was sf, so that won’t happen.

Thanks for the earworm…

We didn’t see an indication of where she was, so it’s possible she was in a place where it was morning/daytime.

He didn’t want the cabinet position. The director has put a lot on the line and given him a lot of leeway (ridiculous amounts of leeway, in a non-flash-forward world – they arranged to release a Nazi just because this guy’s photo was supposedly on the Mosaic board) based on the notion that the Agent’s vision of the future was accurate. The fact that he was drunk off his ass in his vision means that even if the vision is an accurate representation of what will happen, his memory of it might not be so reliable. Basically they’ve been building their investigation on a house of cards.

Which brings me to the first thought in my head watching this: why are all these smart people assuming the visions are accurate? They have nothing concrete to say that definitively. The fact that some people saw each other in their visions doesn’t mean that it was a glimpse of a shared future – it might just mean a shared hallucination. Which isn’t any weirder than seeing the future. (Yes, I know it’s a conceit of the show, it just bugs me that out of all the weird assumptions they could make about what happened, everyone lands on the same one? No one thought it could be, say, a collective subconsciousness sort of thing? or telepathy? No one at all, anywhere in the world?)

And speaking of changing the future – Agent Noh had a chance to definitively alter the “seen” future by turning in future-TSA-guy for the bong he kicked over. Why didn’t he? They just let that drop, when Noh, of all people, would want to know if the future they saw (or didn’t see) in the visions could be changed!

I hate to be the one to point this out…but the show had just ended…how do you know the press and the FBI didn’t notice??? We won’t know until the next episode…unless you had a “flashfoward” that showed part of the next episode and no one mentions the attempted hit

[quote=“MPB_in_Salt_Lake, post:6, topic:514806”]

But an in-the-closet lesbian FBI agent, making out in a public restaurant with someone she is on a first date with, then bringing her back to her place, where the next morning she leaves for work, and invites her new ladylove to stick around and root thru her apartment?!?!?

[QUOTE]

Obviously you don’t kow any lesbians…

here is an old gay joke (my ex-boyfriend told me)

"What does a lesbian bring on the second date?
A U-Hauls

and what does the gay man bring on the second date?
he asks ‘Whats a second date’"

I’m speculating. Let’s see if the next episode does indeed deal with it.

OK, President Coyote had an affair and a kid with a black woman. He’s just named Senator Clemente as his next VP as a horse-trading maneuver. If his affair were outed, he might have to resign. He would still be addressed as Mr. President, but she would be president. That could account for the disparate FFs that the two of them had.

Coyote is clearly not A Nice Guy. Is it possible that the attacks on the FBI people were the result of the matter he referred to on the phone as needing to be taken care of? After all, the Bureau Chief had just essentially blackmailed him. I know this is not realistic in real life, but then cars blowing up when someone shoots them are not realistic in real life either. Yes, the attackers were Asian, but that could have been intended to throw off investigators; presumably one can hire assassins of any race, color, creed or sexual orientation.

The car blew up because one of the Asians hit it with what appeared to be a kind of RPG. I’m no expert, but I would expect a car to explode after that.

OK, if that’s the case, it’s more plausible, but the point is, this is TV. Things are more dramatic on TV than in real life.

I don’t think you do.

I was wondering if anyone was ever going to pick up on that.

[quote=“Kylede, post:47, topic:514806”]

I’m not lesbian, but my problem with this isn’t the depiction of “lesbian” behavior so much as it is an FBI agent’s behavior.

The FBI agent SAID she’s in the closet, and then plants a liplock on a woman in a public place with lots of strangers around, any ONE of whom could be (a) another FBI agent, (b) a friend or relative of an FBI agent, or (c) a random stranger with a camera who thinks posting that photo to his or her Facebook page would be a good idea.

In other words, I don’t believe an FBI agent concerned about revealing her sexuality would have kissed a woman in a public place like that.

That said, while it was a first date, the agent obviously knew the woman and had known her for some time – they’ve been taking the same karate class together for some unknown time. I had no problem with the agent letting the woman stay at her place in that circumstance.

There seems to be an epidemic of hot lesbian FBI agents (2) in new series.

Here, the agent is afraid of censure.

On White Collar, the agent’s boss says the policy is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Care.”

I wish these documentarians would get their stories straight. TV needs a consistent policy to the FBI’s policy on hot lesbian agents.

Someone else replied that we don’t have a location for her, so wherever she was it might not have been 10 p.m. But even so, that appeared to be a routine ultrasound, not an emergency one, and therefore she’s more likely to have it in her home city – at the moment, her home is L.A., but in six months she might be stationed overseas or somewhere else.

The deputy director has far more motive to do it than the sponsor. Though whoever did it clearly either didn’t think or didn’t care that sending that message might just lead the doctor to leave Benford, which might just be what sends him back to the bottle.

With “friends” like that, Benford sure doesn’t need enemies.

Answered upthread.

But my question is this – and I hope there’s an FBI agent in the house to answer it: Are alcoholics allowed to be FBI field agents? Recovering or otherwise? I don’t know, but that threw me in the first episode, and I haven’t wrapped my brain around it yet.

I’m blaming this on bad editing, actually. They started moving as soon as they saw the doors of the SUV opening, because they knew (or should’ve known) that was a deliberate hit. That said, I did expect one of the two on the passenger side (Benford or the older black agent) to be singed a bit. Benford should have lost his cellphone at that point, though – he would’ve dropped it to have both hands free for the escape and return fire.

The bitchy chick was Senator Clemente, who apparently has a grudge against the deputy director and is therefore so blinded by that grudge that she can’t look at evidence objectively. (Which does nothing to excuse the other members of the panel for not looking at the evidence.)

As mentioned upthread, the Secret Service guy addressed him as “Mr. President,” which by itself isn’t conclusive, but “Something’s happened,” is, to my mind, conclusive. If Peter Coyote is out of office, then Clemente is president, and even if she hasn’t named a vice president by that point, there is a clear chain of succession in place, so Peter Coyote would never be consulted in that manner (unless, of course, Clemente named him vice president, but that thought makes my brain hurt).

That’s the second absolute contradiction in flashforwards we’ve seen. Unfortunately, those two absolute contradictions mean that the hubby’s suggestion – that everyone saw the future that would have happened if the blackout hadn’t occurred – doesn’t flow logically.

Even allowing that what we’re seeing in the flashforwards is subject to interpretation, I’m thinking that most of this show can easily disappear in a puff of logic. Which is a shame, because it’s only finding out who caused it and why that’s keeping me watching.

Unless, of course, Peter Coyote is being woken and told “Something’s happened – you’ve been accused of treason and your vice president will take over until an investigation is finished” or something of that nature, while Celemente’s flash-forward is of her being told “You are now the acting President”. I don’t see any contradictions yet, necessarily.

You said what I was trying to say perfectly!!!


I still like this show, but the Sci-Fi (woo-woo) aspects of the plot are actually easier for me to swallow than the day to day details the writers just cant seem to get right.

For example, in the second? episode it showed the airports re-opening even while airplane wreckage was still smouldering on the adjacent runways:dubious:

                                                             or

The day or two after the most devestating disaster mankind has ever faced, a surgeon (whose professional skills may have been needed after 1000’s of people had been involved in savage accidents) went to her hospital and had nothing more pressing to do than spend the day sewing up her widdle daughters teddy bear:rolleyes:

I watched the last two episodes yesterday and was it me or was the ultrasound of a more fully-developed fetus than one would expect from a relatively new pregnancy? If I’m correct, the baby looked to be at least in the second trimester, which means that FBI agent Lezzo needs to get crackin’ on her manhandling skillz.

With regards to alcoholics, FBI agents can drink alcohol, just not on duty. Applicants are probably expected to disclose any past problems, but I think it’s up to the psychological evaluation person to determine how that factors into the application, depending on the severity of the problem, how long ago it was, and how stable the individual currently is. I don’t know what they do about agents who develop a drinking problem after they become agents. I imagine whether they ever drink on the job would be a large factor. It might even be considered a job related health issue such that they get disability while sent to rehab.

In terms of the ‘absolute contradictions’ I’d say they are more apparent contradictions. Right now they are just contradictory in interpretation - Cho’s wife thought she saw him, but from our perspective she was far away and just assuming he was part of the group in the distance and that it was their wedding. We saw the President being called Mr President and summoned by an agent, but in terms of the new VP, all we have is her statement. I don’t think either is a mistake - they are purposely written as mysteries to be expounded upon later.