FlashForward Pilot Review

A great concept can’t save this lacklustre version of Lost. FlashForward has been the most anticipate series of fall 2009. Critics have been buzzing about the pilot episode for a while now, and they have proclaimed it the new Lost. Some people may expect that mean it’s as good as Lost, or the pilot episode was as surprisingly as Lost was when it surprisingly debuted with a great pilot and lots of followers. But when you see the first episode of FlashForward, you realize it’s not the new Lost, it was just meant to copy it. The very first scene is a flat out copy of Lost’s. Stunned people awaken in a daze to find a catastrophe around them and rush to help those in trouble. I thought: very familiar, if only they had a plane crash, a polar bear, and a dinosaur (there was a dinosaur in that first episode of Lost, believe that). Then there is the mystery of the flashforward, a world-wide event where every person on the planet blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 second, during which they see their futures, set at the same date and time, April 29th, 2010 10pm. . When it’s all over, a group of people, FBI agents in this case, investigate this mystery. On top of that, there is a strange person, probably a part of a larger group, who is captured on camera awake during the event and curiously calm about it. So there is this mysterious event, a similar opener, a mysterious group they also call the others. You see by the end of the episode, you realize that Flash forward was meant to have all the elements of Lost that made it popular, but their version falls short. It has the details but lacks the essence, so to say.

So what is wrong with it, you might ask? Well, for a show centered on a mystery, there is nothing that makes you excited about solving it. It’s not very exciting to watch people discuss calmly what’s happening in the episode instead of doing something, which is what a TV series is supposed to be all about, if I’m not mistaken. There is a feeling that the producers of this show failed to make the show as interesting as it could be with such a great concept. When something as big as a global black out happens, the importance of that needs to be shown. However, what they did produce was, let’s just say, anti-climactic. Basically, they show various people pass out during their activities and wake to find the inevitable chaos and harm a global blackout would obviously cause. It turned out a little tamer than the sublime chaos there should be in such an extreme circumstance.