Blackout: Why "FlashForward" is Still Frustrating Me

Oh, FlashForward, I really do want to love you. But I keep finding that I just can't.

Last night's episode of FlashForward ("Gimme Some Truth") was the worst yet and underlined once again the problems that I have with the series, which seems to be coasting by on some lazy plotting, wooden acting, and an odd mix of tones that's ultimately frustrating. Despite its promising concept and a pilot episode that had one of the best cliffhanger endings in recent memory, subsequent episodes of FlashForward have been alternately dull and unintentionally hysterical. (What it needs to be is better.)

There are moments of cleverness, such as last week's Bjork-laden opening sequence but for the most part, FlashForward continues to chug along at an almost glacial pace, introducing new mysteries that aren't all that compelling and forcing many of the characters into situations that are just completely unbelievable. (Last night's example: having Aaron at Olivia's house just so she could overhear a conversation in which Aaron tells Mark to go to an AA meeting while he's in Washington.)

Last night's installment was almost sleep-inducing. At this point in the series, I should care for these characters but "Gimme Some Truth" did nothing to make them more three-dimensional or sympathetic. Part of the problem is that much of their dialogue is of groan-inducing variety (case in point: Demetri's "There's still time, my friend. There's still time") that doesn't work on the page, much less on screen.

Additionally, Joseph Fiennes still hasn't won me over as as FlashForward's leading man. His Mark Benford is so icy and dull that it's hard to root for him. I keep half wishing he would take a drink just so that he'd warm up slightly. Placing him in jeopardy in the opening moments of the episode didn't add any tension to the mix, as I knew we'd flip back to that point later. So the "flashback" to roughly 36 hours later wasn't surprising or compelling in the least; the writers would have been better off having the ambush (which, by the way, no one else seemed to be anywhere near) come off as a shock when it unfolded in linear time.

Likewise, it was blatantly obvious as soon as we saw Janis in her karate class that we were about to meet her love interest. (I actually called it out loud, turning to my wife and saying, "Love interest in 3... 2... 1...") I understand, given her jarring flashforward, that Janis would be questioning how she got pregnant but the sudden intimacy between her and Navi Rawat's Maya was off-putting. Sure, you might wonder about the person you're on your first date with but I found it hard to swallow that she would actually bring up her thoughts and feelings about a future relationship with this person on a first date. It should have been a signal for Maya to run but because she saw she was wearing a wedding band in her flashforward, she's all for taking a leap of faith as well.

Janis is one of the few interesting elements of the series and I hate to see her getting caught up in a surface-level romantic subplot already, particularly one that doesn't really make much sense. So in the next six months, her relationship advances to the point where she gets pregnant (artificially inseminated?) and gets married to someone she's only just met? Huh? Really?

The most shocking moment of the entire forty-odd minutes was the attack on Janis simply because we hadn't seen that play out in the opening. Her stunning moves, learned clearly from the karate class, saved her life, though still resulted in her taking a bullet, after which she felled her attacker and then fell to the ground on a deserted street and began bleeding out as a bejeweled alarm clock rotated in the puddle of blood forming around her, telling her to wake up.

Are we to believe that the attack leads Janis to believe that life is too short and she needs to start living now? Perhaps. But it's a tiny footnote in the grand scheme of things on FlashForward, which is kicking up all sorts of global mysteries, tension-ridden Congressional hearings, personal revelations, and relationship crises (Olivia getting the mysterious text). Which could be a heady mix of compelling elements if they were being handled organically, which they're not.

As it is, FlashForward is teetering on the edge of falling off my watch list. If the writers can't plot some tighter episodes, improve their dialogue crafting, and make these characters more three-dimensional, it doesn't take a flashforward to see that I won't be sticking around for much longer.

Next week on FlashForward ("Scary Monsters and Super Creeps"), Mark, Demetri and Wedeck investigate the links between all the attacks involving themselves; Demetri and Gough find a clue that was missing from Mark's flashforward; Lloyd is heartbroken when his son goes missing from the hospital.