[spoiler]Charlie (from Lost, I keep forgetting his FF character’s name) was “Suspect Zero”, the guy who was awake in the stadium during the blackout. His personal history - he’s a child genius, and an “uncle Ted” - the bearded fgat guy who we saw in that “blue hand club” - has been shepherding him through his schooling and advanced research and stuff, in order to use his genius in the service of the person who actually caused the blackout, which seems to be “D. Gibbons.” “Uncle Ted” had Charlie’s father killed in order to manipulate him into being where he could be caught and sent to that stadium, where he was given a ring that kept him awake during the blackout. Charlie then killed one of the henchmen of “Uncle Ted”'s group, and pretended to others that this killing was his Flash Forward. (and in the end, Charlie kills Uncle Ted as revenge for his father and for his mentor, and to “cut out the middleman” so as to force a confrontation with the gguy in charge)
Uncle Ted is the guy who kidnaped Lloyd Simcoe at the end of last season. He says that Lloyd’s experiment did not cause the blackout, but violently demands to know the results of Lloyd’s experiment, which involve a search for “tachyonic dark matter”. Lloyd says he did not find that but came close. (Lloyd, and Charlie, who is also kidnaped by them, is eventually rescued by Mark Benford)
Mark Benford, using some sort of drug therapy, remembers that some of the missing time from his flash forward involved a phone call from Lloyd, in which he warns of the likelihood of a second blackout.[/spoiler]
I stuck to the end of the first season of Lost, but FF took less time to lose me as a regular viewer.
The opening of the show was great, just like The Earth Stood Still’s one minute of powerlessness, but without the compassion to stop planes falling out of the air and the like
It just seemed to peter out for me when John Cho’s character didn’t take the chance to give fate the finger and arrest that would be airport security man.
I didn’t like the most recent episodes. My feeling is, if I wanted to watch “24” I’d watch “24.”
But that is probably what they are going for since 24 is so popular. Personally, I don’t like it. I’d rather have the mystery without all the unnecessary bombs, kidnappings, murders, torture and seemingly useless relatives in danger for leverage crap.
Still watching, but curiously uninvested in the characters. Though I had to admire Simon’s badassery at the end there.
Does anyone know who played the guy Simon strangles in his flash forward scenario? He looked really familiar, but online cast lists all seem quite truncated.
I was interested in it; then the hiatus killed it for me. I don’t care anymore; I’m done.
Will someone please tell the networks that putting a new program on for a few weeks and then going into weeks of hiatus is not a good thing?
Oh yeah, same network that moved the cast of Ugly Betty from LA to NYC for the 2009-10 season, then changed the great Thurs. night time slot (to put on FlashForward incidentally) to the dead zone time slot of Friday, thereby KILLING a successful program in favor of the newcomer program which they put on hiatus anyway. Duh…
Ugly Betty was definitely not a successful program by the time it was moved to the Friday wasteland. (Cite)
Season 1, Thurs 8pm, 11.3 million viewers
Season 2, Thurs 8pm, 9.4 million viewers
Season 3, Thurs 8pm, 8.0 million viewers
Season 4, Fri 9pm, 4.5 million viewers
The move to Friday clearly hurt it, but by the same logic the primo Thursday spot artificially boosted it. The first year was successful but nothing to brag about. Normally a successful show debuts in the mid to upper teens and falls back to 10-11 million viewers many years into its run. Betty started with those slack numbers and rapidly went down.
Instead of blaming ABC for killing it, you should be praising them for keeping it on the air after it failed. (8 million viewers at 8pm on a Thursday? For a major network that’s brutally bad.)
I’m still watching it and enjoy it. I was almost one of the people that forgot to watch the show last week - not because I gave up on it, but because I had gotten so used to it not being on that I almost forgot!
It’s not life changing TV, but I find it quite entertaining.
I just watched the two-hour return, but not the following episode.
I’ve been watching mostly to see how they dig themselves out of the holes they created for themselves, so watching them dig deeper was sorta fun in a perverse way.
It wasn’t doing too badly until the last half-hour or so, when the plot depended, utterly depended, on the FBI being totally incompetent in a predictable way. Moving the focus away from Mark was good because I hate watching him as much as anybody but turning Simon (yes, Simon: I don’t care what his character’s name was in a show I didn’t watch) into a superhero action star is ludicrous and his backstory has now become the plot of Heroes that turned everybody off that show.
From the comments it looks like its going to get even worse. Just like the ratings. At least that means they’ll have to come to a conclusion this season because there won’t be a second one.
FWIW, the two hour return from hiatus was the last from the old show runner. I saw one of the writers at a convention last week and from our discussion I get the sense that they’ve all good sense of what they are doing, and how to fix the things that veered off course a little. From last week’s episode you can see that they have already started to change things - the original showrunner didn’t want to reveal Suspect X until the finale, but already we’ve seen that it’s Simon. Originally they were going to do more with ‘arch villain guy’ but now as you’ve seen, they’ve dispatched him… So I’m optimistic that even if the ratings don’t improve, the show itself has already started to get better (not that I thought it was horribly bad to begin with mind you).
What still kills the show for me (though apparently not enough to force me to quit watching) is how absolutely unbeliveable some of the characters act, not the woo woo sci-fi stuff, which I can just sit back and allow myself to go with…
For example, there is a Hott Blonde Terrorist woman who is in FBI custody. Every time she is in contact with those who would have the power to release her she shit-sasses them, she tells them that she does indeed know the info that they want so badly from her but isn’t about to spill, and basically tells them to fuck off.
This is NOT how someone in custody acts towards those who have the power to free them—In real life HBT would tell them ANYTHING (even if she had to make it up) to get her tight lil ass out of that mollyfocking jail cell. Prisoners don’t generally go around telling their captors to fuck off when they are desperate to get released. It is laughable that someone would really act that way to those with the authority to help them go free.
Little nonsensical things like this really detract from my enjoyment of FastForward—I don’t watch almost any other sci-fi stuff, so I don’t know if this kind of sloppy writing is par for the genres course or not, but it certainly is not realistic to me…
No comments in a while, but this show seems to be pretty solid since the break and progressing nicely (unlike many seasons of Lost). I was thinking the show was unlikely to last beyond this season because of the low viewership, but perhaps I’m mistaken.
I agree it’s been better since the break, and I liked last week’s Dyson Frost episode quite a bit (although the Rube Goldberg gun mechanism was a little over the top). Haven’t seen last night’s episode yet, though.
You know, I had a thought (likely due to faulty memory and quickly-deleted episodes):
To me, the major flaw with the premise is this: I have a vision of the future that, because it’s shared with the rest of humanity, can be pinpointed to the exact second. Since the vision, I am now aware that I will have a chance to send a message back to the past. So why weren’t a large majority of the visions from people trying to do this?
However, as the show progressed it seems (again, likely because of faulty memory) that this is what they were trying to do (no matter how badly). Mark was looking at his board. His boss was reading the paper. Simcoe read the equation that was written on the mirror. The lady FBI agent was having a sonogram.
Are there any other FF’s that fit along this theme, or am I just trying to rationalize the premise?
Mostly I would say just rationalizing the premise, but Mark’s FF is a bit of an anomaly. Here’s how I mostly see it:
When the flash forward happened, everyone witnessed a vision of a future timeline in which life proceeds normally and the flash forward did not happen. After the flash forward completes, they are now operating in a new timeline/reality as their actions based on this new info subtly changes how things play out. It’s already been shown several times that this has already happened where people have changed their futures.
Were there to be another flash forward (as apparently will happen), presumably everyone would see a future where they were aware of the first FF but not the second yet. The only way to “send yourself a message” would be to trigger a FF knowing the future target date in the original/pre-FF timeline. The only person known to have accomplished this is the Frost character, though presumably that’s something the evil conspiracy folks are after also.
So that would explain most of the FFs and why they are basically innocuous, but back to the anomaly of Mark’s FF. He sees a future where he’s conducting the Mosaic investigation, but according to my theory in a timeline where the FF does not happen. Was the investigation prompted by something else? Frost manipulated the FF so that Mark saw the new future instead of the old one? A slip-up by the writers? Hard to say at this point.
Yeah, I liked it, I was sad to see Frost go. He may have been a bit of a sociopath, but he was an understandable one. He just wanted to survive the extremely likely bad fate he saw coming to him.
As for the complaints above - HBTG…do we know what she saw? If she’s confident that she won’t be in custody in six months, and she knows WHY she wasn’t in custody in six months (ie. She definitely didn’t cut a deal), then she gets to be a bitch if she feels like it. Not to harp on some things too much, but in the FF world, LOTS has changed about cause and effect. In some ways, and in some specific cases, effects have preceded the causes.
