I dont know if I am the only viewer left (I understand the ratings are pretty low) but even while there are many little details in this show that ring false, I still think it is overall a mostly enjoyable (if lightweight) series.
Did Mark actually lose his job at the FBI?
You are not the only one. I really enjoy this show. I had wondered about the alternate universe theory.
We were eating dinner while it was on so I missed the phone call Mark got. I don’t know if he really got fired or not. I also missed the very beginning but take it dark haired English man went on TV and said he caused the flashforward? And is Blondie McBadass telling the truth about trying to figure it out or does he know how it was done and he’s just screwing around with the investigation?
Let me get this straight, an incident occurs that kills 20 million people and the only agency investigating is the LA office of the FBI. And they are in danger of getting their funding cut?
The CIA guy told them that Mosaic was much bigger than they are and is part of a huge investigation. It isn’t that funding is being cut to investigate the blackout, it’s that they (the FBI guys we’ve grown to love) are being cut out of it.
You are right, dark haired English man and Blondie McBadass had a press conference where Dark Haired said that they were responsible because their experiment was at the exact time of the blackout, and they won’t do that experiment again, so there won’t be another blackout, and that they’re sorry. People became understandably upset when he said all that.
I’m pretty sure Blondie is telling the truth about he doesn’t know why the blackout happened and will try to help figure it out. Because he’s right, they can’t know for sure that their experiment caused it. I didn’t quite follow what the experiment was, it sounded something like they’re doing at the Large Hadron Collider, since that’s one of the current science boogeymen that people are afraid will destroy the earth. But just because the experiment happened at the same time as the blackout doesn’t mean that the experiment caused it. Billions of things happened at the exact moment of the blackout. And Blondie rightly pointed out that Dark Haired was feeling guilty because his wife died in the blackout.
But anyway, it’s a ridiculous show, but I’m enjoying it. And I often get annoyed at characters who are repeatedly referred to as geniuses and who talk about the future Nobel prizes they’ll be getting, but I’m enjoying Dominic Monaghan in that role.
I’m still watching. I don’t care if it gets cancelled after this season even if they end on a cliffhanger, but I’ll be pissed if it doesn’t last long enough to give us a blackout day episode.
That press conference drove me batty trying to remember where I’d seen the third guy before, the one who introduced Symco and Dominic Monaghan. After checking IMDb, I know him as Thomas Cromwell from the first two seasons of The Tudors.
Really? It’s not getting good ratings? Figures. It always happens to shows I like.
Didn’t Mark say something to the effect of “now we have something in common. Neither of us is FBI.” to the CIA guy in Hong Kong?
Yup, he said that.
Parallel universes, huh? I’m not sure if I think that’s a cop-out or not – seems like that’s too easy a way to weasel out of any and all flashes according to the writer’s whim.
I like him too, but getting ‘Somalia’ from some random assortment of dirt and bushes? That was a bit too ‘oh look at how smart I am’.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. As I’ve said in almost every thread, lots of stuff people complain about tends to get addressed pretty quickly.
I’m going to bet that it’s not just a matter of him being all smart about rock formations and bushes - I’m going to bet that there’s only certain places his little devices would conceivably work. Since it wasn’t the arctic or the middle of the ocean on an oil right it had to be Somalia. Or something along those lines. But why not make yourself look like Sherlock Holmes instead.
And, yes, Mark definitely got fired. It doesn’t mean that it won’t get fixed, of course. After all, it seemed like on TNG we had someone resigning their commission from Star Fleet on a weekly basis.
Also, I think the alternative universes, besides a little handwaving, was actually Jack Davenport laying the groundwork for some nookie six months down the road. Unless…they future they saw was the alternate universe where she went to Harvard and he never met his wife? Of course, then they somehow ended up in LA and living in the same house…
I’m going to go with “alternate universe” being nervous physicist for “I’m already doing you in another universe so what are you doing Tuesday?”
-Joe
Oh…and I’d like to see some ratings info. According to The Futon Critic, Flashforward is beating all the comedies it’s up against.
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=20091124abc02
Looks like ditching Earl for P&R may not have been so smart for NBC. Shocking.
-Joe
Well, it could conceivably come down to some concealed knowledge on his part, but keep in mind that at this point, he didn’t know his devices were involved at all, and I think it was a genuine shock to him that somebody had those things in '91.
I’m still watching. I actually like it a lot better than V, which I find pretty formulaic.
I’m a little confused - the sultry dark-haired woman in HK, is she working with the CIA dude? and D. Gibbons? I missed some of the conversation in the airport (although I got that Mark was suspended/fired). Obviously she’s working on Mosaic and had a lot of the same information that Mark had on his board.
That is meaningless because NBC is meaningless. Seriously, the mere act of comparing your show’s ratings to anything on NBC is a big honking red flag that your ratings suck balls.
Earl’s ratings declined sharply every year, going from 11 million to 9 million to 7 million to 6 million during its four seasons. Parks and Recreation started off terrible but has been growing, so far averaging 5.3 million this season. There is no reason to believe Earl would be doing any better than that this year.
FlashForward came in a weak third for this episode:
And Private Practice, the following show on ABC, picked up more than 2 million additional viewers.
This is the last episode until March, presumably why they loaded it with cliffhangers. Those are now the only things worth watching because the police work that was once the heart of the series has been thrown out for lone avengers making idiots of themselves. Not one of the relationships is worth spending emotional time on. There are bunches of random nameless bad guys, the embodiment of the banality of evil. The future is both fixed and mutable, essentially a Christmas present to the writers who can make anything they wish happen without having to justify it in their philosophical framework.
I predict that the series will lose 15% of the audience over the winter break. That would bring it down to 6.2 million total viewers, or almost exactly half the viewership of the first episode. ABC, which I thought once promised a full 26 episode season, is now saying there will be only 13 additional eps, making a total of 23. And I see the future vividly and no season two is in my vision.
I concur with your assessment Exapno. My emotional involvement with the show went from excited, to frustrated, to bored, to apathetic. I will likely take it off my DVR series recordings.
Three developments really annoy me.
*I clearly haven’t invested enough interest to learn their names on Flashforward if I still think of them with their Lost character names.
Slight sidetrack: V apparently has a new guy at the helm of the show producing the episodes from here on in - so might be worth sticking it out long enough to see whether it improves in the next episodes.
And I wasn’t sure what the HK woman’s deal was - didn’t get the sense that she was working with the CIA guy though. Maybe organised crime of some sort, but has ‘an understanding’ with CIA dude.
I gotta give you the trip to Hong Kong. But I have two other top choices.
A world-class scientist gets up in front of the media and announces that his experiment caused the blackout because it happened at the same time, apparently never having been taught that correlation is not causation.
For the upteenth time we see a tower from 1991 that apparently caused the same effect and for the upteenth time nobody says, hey, we better look for one of those in 2009.
Yep. Those are definitely trump cards in the game of Flashforward ridiculousness.
It honestly amazes me that none of the writers behind this show have any idea that 1991 was almost 20 years ago. Dominic Monaghan was 15 years old when his character supposedly invented those towers. Maybe his character is significantly older than the actor’s 33, but he doesn’t look it.
And the way they kept referencing 1991 as something that just happened instead of something they should be investigating in 2009 is maddening.