So, Caroline and I finally got around to watching Flashforward. We’d been TiVOing since ep. 2, but we missed the first episode. And ep. 1 disappeared from Hulu before either of us watched it. So we collected about 7 episodes before we actually started the season. Since then, we’ve watched almost all of them in short order. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that I’ve been watching it obsessively, and Caroline has agreed to come along for the ride. I’m going to toss out a few thoughts about the show below the fold, so if you’re trying to remain spoiler-free, you should go read something else now.

The show is actually pretty good. Keep in mind that I’m a bit of a sucker for anything even remotely SF-ish, and I’m even more of a sucker for a good time-travel story, so your mileage may vary. Still, it’s pretty well done. The basic plot is that the entire world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, during which period they all experience a 2:17 glimpse of their lives on April 29, 2010 (approximately 6 months after the event). The results of a worldwide blackout are, as you might expect, pretty alarming. Lots of crashes and a surprising number of things inexplicably on fire (many still smoking days later). The characters act in more-or-less believable fashion, ranging from denial to semi-religious belief in the inevitability of their visions, and running the gamut between hope and nihilism. In fact, I’d argue that the believability of people’s reactions to the event sets Flashforward apart from Lost and Fringe, whose characters display an unbelievable degree of credulity, a total lack of curiosity about the weird stuff going on around them, and an obsession with the petty that, I think, renders both unwatchable. (The fact that Lost’s Jack, Sawyer and Kate and Fringe’s Dunham are played by Really. Terrible. Actors. doesn’t help much, either. But I digress.)

At any rate, my main concern with Flashforward is that, while the characters may exhibit believable emotions, their brains appear mostly to have shut down. Now I know that I have spent more time thinking about time travel issues than the average American. (You didn’t think a philosophy degree was entirely about trees and forests, did you? No way. We talk about time travel, too.) Still I feel like if the whole world had just gotten what appeared to be a glimpse of the future, people might be inclined to do a bit of reading about the whole time paradox thing. At which point, They’d realize an important point:

My actions on April 29, 2010 are going to be based, at least in part, on my having known for the last six months exactly what I would be doing for two minutes and seventeen seconds on April 29, 2010.

Realizing this point might eliminate some of the odd circular logic going on. Consider the nihilist Blue Hand clubs, whose members all failed to have a flashforward vision. Having come to believe that their lack of a vision of the future means that they will not be alive on April 29, 2010, members of the Blue Hand clubs get together and off themselves. We’re led to believe that club members were not particularly suicidal before the flashforward event. It’s the event itself that leads to their despair. The reason people in the club don’t have a vision is that having not had a vision, they then decided to kill themselves. They’ve made their prophecy self-fulfilling.

More disturbing, however, is the FBI investigation into the cause of the flashforward. The entire investigation is premised on a single agent’s (alcohol-impaired) vision of the state of the investigation six months in the future. The FBI begins tracking down clues because they know that in the future, they have tracked down those clues. And yet no one stops to ask whether or not this might be some kind of closed causal loop. Their starting point is based on a vision of the future, yes. But the future is also based on having started from that particular point. Plenty of people object to basing an investigation on a dream. But no one at all ever even bothers to ask why anyone thinks that the future investigation is connected to the actual cause of the event, as opposed to being connected only to itself.

Finally, there’s the very weird twist that an FBI agent who had a vision still managed to kill himself before April 29, 2010. If the visions are falsifiable, then it’s really unclear why anyone would continue using them to guide an investigation. After all, even small changes will eventually ripple out. Agent Gough’s death doesn’t just change the future for the woman he would have inadvertently killed. It means that Fiona Banks (who was with Gough in her flashforward) and Gough’s lawyer (who phoned him during that period) have also had their flashes invalidated. So has the woman who Gough would have presumably killed. And, quite likely, her children. And anyone with whom she will be in contact during that 2:17 period on April 29, 2010.

So shouldn’t everyone now be asking whether or not their flashforward represents the future at all? Is it just one possible future? And if so, why continue to base your life choices on it?

All this, incidentally, leaves aside the philosophical question of what exactly people saw. If we’re to believe that their consciousness somehow shifted 6 months into the future, then that future must in some sense have already happened. If it hadn’t, there’d be no there to go to. But if it’s already happened, gonna be rather hard to change it. Since we know that it can be changed, however, it seems pretty clear that they couldn’t have actually glimpsed the future. So we’d seem to be talking about possible worlds, rather than time travel. That’d be cool, but also possibly a little bit of a Fringe ripoff. Only without Spock. Telling a coherent philosophical story about the time travel elements is an entirely different post. I’m sure y’all can hardly wait to read such a thing.