Robert J. Sawyer writing an episode of Flash Forward

He mentions two Flash Forward sites:

Join the Mosaic a replica of the Mosaic site the show uses to capture a pattern of the world's Flash Forwards. Features people's "stories" and news reports. A funny one: a woman was watching the series finale of Lost. "The bomb worked and Charlie and Claire end up together." Too clever to slip that in.

Red Panda Resources A fan site run by David Goyer "The Official Site of the Creative Team Behind ABC's TV Show "FlashForward"

FlashForward: Gimme Some Truth

Since this takes place largely in Washington D.C. during Senate Hearings into the FlashForward Mosaic Program and possible ongoing funding, the title is humorous.

The episode certainly has plenty of tension, skullduggery and backroom dealings, however.

It turns out Wedeck, FBI LA Bureau chief is a long lost pal of the President of the United States. He uses this and a bit of blackmail to make sure his group gets additional funding despite the nasty witch-hunting Senate Intelligence Committee head Joyce Clemente (who sees herself as President in six months).

Agent Janis begins an affair with a female restaurant owner, and they seem perfect together until the restaurant owner pushes her luck and says she "Mosaic-ed" ( a variant of "googling" for the Mosaic era crowd) Janis, knows about her pregnancy, and her own Flash shows her newly married. Janis apparently has privacy issues (though she put her vision out on the Mosaic boards) and commitment issues so she stalks out, outraged at the intrusion and her own unresolved feelings about the baby in her future.

Mark, under pressure in Washington as he testifies about his Mosaic board, worries his wife and Aaron, who both know that the last time Mark went off the wagon it was in a similar situation. He tells his boss Wedeck that he is drinking in his FlashForward and so his description of events isn't as detailed as the Intelligence Committee would like.

Someone texts Olivia that Mark was drinking in his FlashForward. Since only Aaron and Wedeck know, it has to be one of them. My bet is on Aaron, who might feel that it would be better if she knew and they dealt with this before it happened. I can't see any reason for it to be Wedeck, really.

The episode begins and ends with an attack on Mark, Dmitri, Wedeck and crew in a D.C. parking garage, and a simultaneous attack on Janis back in L.A. by what looks like Chinese terrorists (casually mentioned by a C.I.A. agent in testimony before the Senate Committee as the proposed cause of the Blackouts). Mark and company handle their attackers in style and are fine. Janis, though she guns the bad guys down, is terribly wounded and lies in the street bleeding and seeing her FlashForward as she fades out.

My prime suspect for sending out the assassins is the President who was seen making a phone call to have something taken care of, calling in his own favor. Guess he doesn't like being blackmailed, and he for sure couldn't have liked buying off Joyce Clemente by offering her the vacant Vice Presidency. The episode should have been called "Gimme Power".

A final thought: This is the second episode which presents two very conflicting FlashForwards. The first is Dmitri seeing nothing and his fiancee seeing them wedded on a beach. This episode has the president seeing himself in bed and having an advisor step in and say something is wrong. Joyce Clemente says her FlashForward has her as the President. It is possible that because we don't see anyone's entire Flash that these conflicting visions could both be true. So, will the show at some point show anyone's or everyone's complete Flash?

Flash Forward: Black Swan

This is the episode of AWFUL MUSIC. Gack. The opening shows people dropping to sleep to a slow and horrible tune that I thought would never end. Make it stop! And the jazz music playing while they chased a pot dealer, eeeeww. It was just intrusively ugly stuff.

Anywho. We have Mark Benford obsessively trying to grasp any lead that ties into his blackout Mosaic board. FBI chief Stanford Wedeck refuses to fund a trip to Somalia to check out the crow deaths there 18 years ago.

Instead, Dmitri, taking a cue from blond terrorist detainee Alda, gets to take the team to Indio, California to find a connection at a restaurant (I wrote the name down grr grr but can't find it).

The restaurant owner says his "group" is currently just that restaurant and that their plans for the future include a new flavor of yogurt. Then he loudly announces that they need to get some food for these FBI Agents. An employee scoots out the back door and the guys give chase to screeching jazz, have a confrontation about Dmitri's impending death and they go home. Mark assures Dmitri after this confrontation that they will solve his murder ahead of time, and it will not happen.

My first thought was that the whole scene with the restaurant etc was wasted air time, but thinking about it, it makes no sense that the restaurant owner would shout out that the customers were FBI agents as he did. I'm hoping he knew that his cook was a Pot Potato and that he knew the guy would would run and the agents would be distracted away from him and his "group" which they were. I expect them to pop up again later in the storyline so this big chunk of the episode isn't fluff.

Mark later interviews Alda (aka snotty blond terrorist) and she tells him he needs to ask Why the blackout happened (implying it was done by human hand) and she mentions that she runs with some nasty types who will do anything for their own idealogical reasons. She sneers that Mark isn't the kind of person who will do anything necessary to find the truth, leading him to defiantly arrange for a Cheeto eating hacker to sneak into CIA satellite images of the Somalia dead crow zone from 18 years ago.

Alda describes a Black Swan event as High impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of human expectations.

Olivia deals with her seemingly inevitable fate as she tries to pass off her future lover's son to another unit in the hospital. He bounces back to her because he is still on anti-biotics.

She crosses swords with her co-worker Bryce, who wants her to treat a patient based on a diagnosis driven by the patient's very odd FlashForward vision. She is able to save the patient only by trying a treatment that makes no sense without the future element as a factor. She is crushed to see that the patient's FlashForward is probably correct, and by extension her own may be inevitable as well.

Wayward babysitter Nicole returns. Her vision was of herself being drowned by a man and feeling that she deserved to die, that she had done something worthy of being killed. She is wracked with guilt and terror. She seeks help from a pastor who is a real bumbler, distracted his duties and not listening to her at all. She finds her consolation with Mark, who tells her they will stick together and find out who the man is she saw in her vision.

The episode ends with Dominic Monaghan calling Lloyd Simcoe (father of the autistic boy and Olivia's future lover) and telling him they are "responsible for the greatest disaster in human history".



Further Reading

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable from the New York Times Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the history behind Black Swan Events.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page intriguingly called Fooled by Randomness.

Delve deeper with the wiki entry on Black Swan Theory

Flash Forward: 137 Sekunden

Sekunden is German for "seconds". Agents Mark Benford and Janis Hawk visit a Nazi war criminal in Munich who barters his vision for freedom from prison. The really grizzled, half dead looking Rudolf Geyer claims to know what the significance of the 137 seconds of blackout time means.



Janis and Mark wrestle with their consciences before making the deal. Mark is conflicted yet ready to do whatever is necessary to learn anything. Janis does not want to make the deal and release the monster. Good character exposition in this bit, revealing much about how they will operate in the future.

Dmitri Noh is re-united with his fiancee, who is so sweet. I just adore her. In a fascinating twist, she happily reveals her Flash Forward to Dmitri. She sees them getting married on a beach on April 29, 2010. She is ecstatic and happy. Demetri is puzzled, since he is convinced both by his blackout being being blank and the untraceable phone call telling him his death date is known to be March 15th, 2010.

I conclude that this means people can change their fate. All they have to do is use their foreknowledge to avoid their fates.

Other tidbits:

Aaron, the AA pal of Mark who saw a vision of his dead daughter alive has her grave exhumed with Mark's help and the DNA tested. It is proven that the DNA is hers. This results in a small reunion with his wife. There is speculation on the ABC Flashforward site that because her remains were only 37 pounds and she was shown in Aaron's Flash Forward only from the waist up, maybe she lost the lower half of her body and she is still alive. Will he find a motivation to keep searching for her after his disappointment?

Rudolf Geyer, aka Icky Nazi, who attributed the 137 seconds to a cabalistic bit of numerology, also provides what turns out to be a significant tip: he saw dead crows in the prison courtyard. He gives Mark a field guide to birds that later makes Mark question if there have been other mass crow demise incidents. He finds that there have indeed been large incidents in the past. So we know that perhaps the method of knocking people out has been tested before and a bit of pattern is revealed.




The show ends with a Somalian boy seeing a village full of dead crows and a mist surrounding a tower in the town.

Further Reading

From TV Guide Let's FlashForward and Get Lost with Sonya Walger

From The Examiner FlashForward: Demetri Noh will be murdered on the ides of March

ABC's Official site with preview of tonight's episode Black Swan which introduces former Lost actor (and former Hobbit) Dominic Monahan.

Lastly the most excellent news that Flash Forward has been given the go ahead for a full season of episodes! Yay!

Flash Forward

I'm really enjoying this series so far. The first episode established the worldwide blackout for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and led us on our merry way to see if everyone will be trapped in the future glimpse they saw, or if they can change their future now that they know what might be.

In addition to the issues of free will vs fate inherent in the storyline, we have the intriguing video showing someone in Detroit stadium walking around awake and casual during the blackout, and the revelation that someone in Pigeon, Utah was apparently calling the man in Detroit during the blackout.

The FBI agents are taking the stance that these wakeful people may have had something to do with the blackout, and that the blackout could re-occur.

Agent Mark Benford and his family are at the center of the drama in a way, because Mark saw an entire bulletin board of clues he had put together about the blackout and it's causes and the bulletin board is shaping up with those same clues even after just two episodes.

His very likeable wife meets the man in episode two that she saw herself having an affair with. She is so horrified to meet him and I like her so much for being honest with her husband about her vision and the fact that the man has come to the hospital where she works.

Her husband has not been honest with her at all about returning to drinking in his vision, and you can see he thinks her guilty already of the affair. The future seems inexorably to be set in motion.

Their little girl Charlie is not so likeable, seeming very whiny and pouty. She does give a clue or two to her vision by being upset that Dylan, the autistic son of Mr. Affair has been hurt, implying she and he are close. She also tells her father D. Gibbons is a "bad man", belying the idea that the cupcake lady named Dee Dee Gibbons who seeks out agent Noh in episode two is the D. Gibbons of the Mosaic board.

So...is the cupcake lady all a part of some larger plot, is she trying to drive the team towards a solution or put them off of the trail?

Agent Noh, who saw nothing, puts his name out of the Mosaic Bulletin Board and he gets a call saying he will be killed March 15th, 2010. This would explain why he saw nothing in the vision, but if he knows how and where he is killed, can he avoid his death?

Click to enlarge comics!







Dying to know even more about Flash Forward?

Flash Forward Official site
ABC's official page. View episodes, character biographies, episode guides, topical discussions (for instance, do you think Dmitri will die as predicted?)

Robert Sawyer's site. He is the author of the book Flash Forward upon which the series is based, and many other novels.

Wikipedia for the television show, episode descriptions, overview of series and plotting, cast.

Another Flash Forward Wiki This one includes forums and a blog (not updated since June 10th as of today however).

Flash Forward Forum (The Fansite and Forum for ABC's television show Flash Forward) A place to discuss episodes and your theories as the plot unfolds.

FlashForwardBlog A personal blog by someone with the clever byline Flashforward. He includes forums, polls, video clips.