Comedy
The Neighborhood
The Neighborhood, like all neighborhoods, isn’t free from problems. But it feels relatively safe.
Bam.
For two minutes, about 6 billion people black out. Planes crash. Cars smash. Swimmers drown. For two minutes, the world is in pandemonium—and no one even knows it. Then, as quickly as it hit, whatever it is goes away and the world revives.
As order is slowly restored, people begin to talk about these crazy visions they had while unconscious. FBI Agent Mark Benford, a recovering alcoholic, caught a glimpse of himself drinking while working on a case called “Mosaic.” His wife, Olivia, found herself with another man. Mark’s boss, Stanford Wedeck, was reading the sports page in the john. And Demetri Noh, Mark’s partner, saw nothing at all.
Turns out, though, these aren’t just bizarre, disconnected dreams; they’re visions of the future, six months hence—and everyone saw the same two minutes. Have they been given insight into what the future might hold?
Never mind that glimpsing the future is a surefire way to change it. Never mind that the show’s logic has enough potholes to deep-six a semi.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
If families could have seen it coming, maybe more of them would have avoided all the negative content in this episode. Bloody shootouts, lesbian lip-locks and pretty provocative language (some of it sexual in nature) litter the hour-long drama. Sex and violence (and sometimes sexualized violence) seem to be the name of the game in both the present and the future when it comes to FlashForward.
Mixed into that is a stubby story of sorts: Mark, Stanford and much of the FBI office in Los Angeles go to Washington, D.C., to procure continued funding for their work. There, Stanford visits the home of a woman and her little boy—a boy who turns out to be the illegitimate son of the President of the United States. Stanford helped the POTUS cover up the relationship oh-so-many moons ago, and Stanford now uses what he knows to coerce (blackmail) the leader of the free world into giving his office the funding it needs.
But before he, Mark and the others can leave town, they’re ambushed by gun-wielding assailants and have a massive shootout in a parking garage.
Back at the ranch (FBI headquarters in Los Angeles), agent Janis Stark goes out on a date with a woman she met in her martial arts class. The two kiss at a restaurant and, later, we learn they spent the night together.
Time for another shootout, don’t you think?
While Janice manages to disarm one of her assailants, the other shoots her in the gut. The episode closes with Janice gasping for air, bleeding profusely, recalling her own flash-forward that suggested she was going to have a baby girl.
Beyond the negative content on display—and despite an intriguing, mind-blowing premise—FlashForward is too poorly acted and too poorly written to earn very many artistic points. So will it even manage to survive its freshman season? Maybe its characters already know the answer to that. But our guess (and hope) is no.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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