FlashForward: Gimme Some Truth … Just Gimme Anything

Another episode of the ABC thriller FlashForward and another episode in which we have gained zero ground on the mystery that is the worldwide blackout.  For some reason there is something about the show that keeps me interested despite its painfully gradual build-up of new discoveries and ‘potentially’ important information—it’s like the love child between Lost and a dozen other cable television original series.  Maybe it’s the universal practice of making sure to not provide us viewers with the only exciting scene in an hour’s worth of television until the very end that deludes me into believing that the full episode was the best yet and that each subsequent week promises to be greater than the last.

For this week’s episode, however, the best and worst moments of the show are courtesy of Agent Janis Hawk’s (Christine Woods) budding every-man’s-dream type of relationship with Maya (Navi Rawat) and their ensuing break-up. (I’m really hoping for this to be more of a movie star celeb break-up and not a real-world-career-in-the-way kind of break-up) Besides those brief moments, I spent the other 43 minutes or so trying to find the problem with Agent Benford’s (Joseph Fiennes) future involving booze and why exactly it invalidates the division’s search based on already concrete leads (Seriously, the guy has armed agents ready to take him out with some mean looking guns – you wouldn’t be able to stay sober either is my guess), how the President became a white guy from Harvard, why I was not watching more of Janis and Maya, why there was no mention of Charlie from Lost and Lloyd Simcoe’s (Jack Davenport) evil plan, and why John Cho (character – Demetri Noh) is in this show.

Actually, the majority of the episode seemed to completely ignore most of the interesting plot driving the show, besides a brief discovery of suspicious towers found on a map of Somalia before the crows dropped dead from a similar black-out incident years earlier.  Instead, we got to see Mark get picked apart by the voracious Hillary Clinton-like, Senator Clemente, and Agent Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) blackmail the president after refusing a Director of Homeland Security cabinet position.  I don’t completely understand why exactly Congress seems to be taking this issue so lightly by threatening to discontinue Mosaic funding, but I guess that’s just for the sake of an extra aired episode.  As an added bonus I was forced to view a 4 minute shootout sequence to the tune of a slowed version of “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan – MUSIC SELECTION FAIL.

With the intention of not giving too much away for those who have yet to catch this particular episode I would have to say that there is little to ruin as far as spoilers go.

All in all, I found the hour to be fairly extraneous in regard to what we have been learning in previous episodes (Please don’t let this be another Lost – I don’t think my brain will be able to realistically function should it be provided any more perpetually unsolvable mysteries).  Much like other shows I think that FlashForward has already fallen victim to the cliché story lines that make for a marginally successful TV series, culminating in a main character wounded by a bullet laying bloody on the ground as the screen fades out.  Oh well, next week will surely be better…

Season 1, Episode 5: Gimme Some Truth (originally aired October 22, 2009)

Thursdays at 8/7c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC, Craig Sjodin, and Ron Tom