On our last episode, we told you about “Flash Forward” getting a pilot order from ABC. This promising new series, based on Robert J. Sawyer’s sci-fi novel of the same name is one of the hot properties in Hollywood right now and could be a companion piece to “Lost.’ This week we’ve brought you a bit of casting news about the series and now, executive producer David Goyer is talking more about what the show will look like.
“The basic idea, without giving too much away–because not unlike “Lost”, … it is a serialized show and there are a lot of sort of twists and turns–but in the pilot there is an event that happens, and everyone on the planet, 6 billion people, all black out at exactly the same time,” Goyer said. “And they black out for two minutes and 17 seconds. For the same duration, and wake up at the same time. And so initially there’s tremendous amount of cataclysm–people that are driving cars and flying planes, things like that. But what you learn in the pilot is it’s not just that they blacked out. The consciousness of the human race actually jumped forward five months for those two minutes. So if five months from now, the two of us were going to be having this conversation, you and I would both remember those two minutes of the conversation. It’s a consistent future.”
The pilot follows a group of characters around the world who have to deal with the consequences of that glimpse into the future, Goyer added. “Having glimpsed that future, what choices do you then make?” he said. “You know, if you’re engaged to be married, but in your flash forward you see that you’re not married, do you still get married? … It’s all about … how that one glimpse of the future kind of changes the world forever.”
Goyer says the show will follow a dozen or so characters and feature a serialized storyline like ABC’s “Lost.”
“It’s pretty serialized, yeah,” Goyer said. “We’ve worked out, you know, we definitely know how the first season ends and how the whole show ends and things like that. … The first season will go just one day beyond the five months. So we’ll see by the end of the season sort of did everyone’s kind of glimpse of the future really happen or not, or did some people in trying to avert their future cause it to happen? And then we’ll go one day beyond it, and then there’s a big giant cliffhanger that happens which I can’t say, at the end of the first season, which changes everything.”
If ABC picks the show up based on the pilot, there may be Internet and other supplementary stories as well, Goyer said. “Funnily enough, we have a big meeting about it on Tuesday,” he said. “We’ve got some ideas. It’s sort of, kind of tailor made for that. … The glimpse of the future is 2 minutes and 17 seconds, so it opens up some ideas for some interesting webisodes kind of things.”
Let me be the first to say *yawn*. I predict four episodes will air!
Errr, what is the point of this? So a John Doe finds out he’s not married in five months, whose going to care? Unless these characters actions are connected in some way, so their attempts to change events in the future have an impact on the bigger picture, then this is a pointless series.