A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW, THE RAIN HAS COME: A late FlashForward thread.

One of the problems with apocalyptic science fiction is, of course, that everything is broken. Sometimes, the producers dodge this by having people already in the badlands (Road Warrior) or things having trimmed the population down so badly that there is a reliable supply of canned food for the conceivable future (28 Days Later, the Stand). It's hard to look at what happens to society itself in the wake of something very big and very bad. Whitley Striber's WarDay was close - a limited nuclear exchange that destroyed a few American cities, but put America back to about 1930.

FlashForward seems to have found a terrific conceit here: everyone goes blank for 2 minutes and change and that causes a lot of problems. The bones of society ought to largely continue to operate since most big stuff (power plants, water systems, and the like) operates on automatic. So they have the canvas to look at a non-fatal apocalypse and, on the first one, seem to be taking the premise seriously. The question I have, of course, is whether they will follow their own rules. India and China ought to be in the catbird seat, given that they were largely asleep when this happened and if this thing plays out political angles, I'll be mighty disappointed if they don't see that.

I have a few plot quibbles, of course - no doctor is going to go home from the hospital for days after an event like this given the body count, the information flow of what happened was way too smooth, most airplanes are operating on autopilot so 800+ airline crashes seems high. Still, I hope it stays with the thriller/science fiction angels and doesn't spend the entire show staring into its own navel about the emotional fallout of it all.

The cliffhanger itself was a dilly. I was not expecting that. Wow.

But, for now, I'm in. Until it sucks.

N.B.: Notice the advert for Oceanic Airlines on the billboard behind the FBI partners right ahead of the chase scene? I hope that's merely a shoutout and not a suggestion that this has any tie-in with Lost.