FlashForward: Season One, Part One

If it looks like Lost, if it sounds like Lost and it skips around in time like Lost, you’re probably watching FlashForward. Using several familiar faces from the show and a similarly secretive storyline that is both addicting and frustrating, the first half-season of FlashForward appears primed to appease Lost fans when it makes its exit in the spring.

One day, the entire world mysteriously blacks out for a couple of minutes. Vehicles pile up, planes crash and all sorts of other catastrophes take place. The end result is 20 million people dead and a world paranoid both about the cause and the possibility of another blackout. But that’d be too easy to base an entire series on. During nap time most everyone has a vision of the same moment in time a few months in the future. What everyone sees is connected. So say if two people are sitting in a hip drink joint sipping on bubble tea and they make eye contact, they’d both see one another in their vision.

With literally billions of possible leads to center the show around, the central storyline focuses on a team of FBI agents who set up a special task force called Mosaic. The theory is that if you get enough people’s stories together about the future, you can start pulling clues as to what happened. From there the cast expands to a close ring around those on the team. They’re a misfit bunch who are made all the more sour by the future fate appears to have in store for them.

Like Lost, there’s a whole lot going on at once in FlashForward. Most of it is intriguing, however with so many threads it’s difficult to keep track of them. Some storylines, however prominent, have a tendency to take a backseat while other threads are introduced or developed. If it follows the Lost template, before long even the main characters will find themselves sitting out entire episodes to make room. Although I enjoy the complexity the storyline brings, there is a limit on how much one can take. With a show like this my hope is that the writers have a definitive plan that will give the overall storyline a chance to play itself out. I suspect that a lot of what has occurred in the first ten episodes is merely a smokescreen for the big picture with more reveals coming toward the end of the full season and throughout ensuing seasons.

The groundwork that has been laid has me interested. The fact that I watched the entire ten episodes in one day proves the addictive nature of the show. It’s not quite on the scale of the first season of 24 or the final bath of episodes for The Shield, but they’ve still got me curious.

FlashForward: Season One, Part One DVD Review

The Part 1, Season 1 DVD of FlashForward is aimed at being a primer for those who might have missed the show’s launch. It collects the first ten episodes of the debut season on two discs. Each show is presented in enhanced widescreen (1.78:1 aspect ratio) with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio with subtitles available in English, French and Spanish.

The bonus features are led by “Creating Catastrophe: The Effects of the Global Blackout,” a behind-the-scenes look of the awesome sequence from the show’s premier. There’s also a five-minute reel of footage from the season’s second half, as well as a promo for the remainder of the season. The package also includes a coupon for $15 off the complete first season when it arrives in stores on DVD and Blu-ray in August.