FlashForward Ends!

A friend introduced me to the ABC series FlashForward last year. But it was not until a couple of months ago that I started downloading and following the series. After the first couple of episodes, I was hooked!

The basic plot is as follows -- on Oct 6, 2009, everyone in the planet blacked out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. During that time, everyone saw their future in Apr 29, 2010. To some, it carried hope; to others, hopelessness and death. The main story revolves around the FBI with agent Mark Benford (played by Joseph Fiennes) playing the lead role. There is apparently this large criminal syndicate that caused the blackout and is using the FlashForwards to know what lies in the future and use it for geopolitical and economic gain.

The first season was made up of 22 episodes. After finishing the series, I think there were a lot of episodes with subplots that seemed to lead nowhere and were superfluous -- ex. that Nazi criminal in the earlier part of the series, or even Dyson Frost's involvement. And why is it that "Dyson" is often associated with geniuses whose invention causes problems (remember the other Dyson in Terminator 2?).

Anyway, I was curious enough to want to find out about the original book that inspired the TV series. The novel's synopsis can be found in Wikipedia. I was surprised to find out that aside from the physicist, Lloyd Simcoe, pretty much everyone in the TV series were not really part of the book's original story. FBI agent Demitri's name was also obviously taken from the assistant of Simcoe in the book, Dimitrius. Their storyline were also similar -- they did not see anything in the future, which implied that they died before that date. There were no FBI people involved in the original story, and the setting was in CERN Switzerland instead of California.

In any case, ABC decided to cancel the show after the first season. This really sucked because while the last episode nicely tied-up the cycle and showed how the visions of most people came true, it left a lot more things hanging. The writers must have been hoping for several more seasons so that they can slowly unravel things. But no such luck. The series probably did not gain enough advertising dollars to justify its continued existence. That's too bad as a lot of fans seem to think its a good show. Granted that some series like Heroes really dragged on with poor storyline, but FlashForward seemed pretty interesting. Oh well, that's the thing I hate about TV series. They don't properly close. They just get cancelled (ex. Sarah Connor Chronicles).