It’s for the second time that one of my favorite science-fiction series is canceled after the first season. Luckily it happens once every 15 years. Last time it was Earth 2, a space travel saga on an alternate Earth world which was not too happy to receive visitors. This time it’s FlashForward, one of the fest of the few science fiction TV series that were left last year on screens, of course, excluding Lost which is also over and was in a league of its own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kXHgWg938
(video source screenslev7n)
Maybe the comparison with Lost and the fact that some of the producers were the same damaged to a certain respect the impact of FlashForward. Sure, FF is different, both as concept, and also at the level of the execution. Based on a novel by Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, the show combines the story of a planetary catastrophe caused by scientific experiments fallen under the wrong hands with a FBI team type of story and with soap opera. As the whole planet blackouts for two minutes, every man on Earth is capable of seeing a glimpse of their future six months ahead, and then needs to deal with this future, try to live it or to avoid it, to fix or to welcome it. Excellent premises for several parallel stories about how men deal with their destinies and how they control their lives and relations, in the conditions where some of the unknown becomes known, and when time gets one more relative dimension. Both the scientific and the phylosophical grounds of the story are sound.
The first season of FlashForward was far from perfect and its development during the 22 episodes could not keep the pace and the interest built in the first quarter. As the season advanced the amount of soap opera and of stereo-typical situations grew at the expense of the intriguing questions about the roots of the events. Not all characters were interesting to the same extent and many of the events became predictable not because of the blackout but because they just belonged to predictable TV. Yet, there was enough good stuff all along, acting was good (Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Sonia Walger, Dominic Monaghan – the last two also acted in Lost) and the ending just opened the gate to further questions. This show has the promises of developing into new and interesting territories, as the different alternate future paths that the story tells about. It deserves to be continued. Please bring it back!