Doc Jensen geeks out on 'FlashForward': Follow the clues; crack the mystery! (maybe)

In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly now on newsstands, you’ll find a story written by yours truly in which I geek out on my new TV obsession, the ABC sci-fi drama FlashForward. If you’re new to the show, here’s what you need to know: On Oct. 6, the planet blacked out and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and everyone on earth saw a brief vision of their respective futures. The saga’s center is FBI agent Mark Benford (Shakespeare In Love’s Joseph Fiennes), who during his brief quantum leap saw himself investigating an elaborate conspiracy behind mankind’s perplexing power nap. The day glimpsed in all the flashes: Thursday, April 29, 2010. (Yep, the show will air that night.) Will Mark’s faithful wife Olivia (Lost’s Sonja Walger) find herself in bed with another man? Will vaguely sinister scientist Simon Campos (Dominic Monaghan, another ex-Lostie) strangle a dude to death? And will FBI agent Demetri Noh (Star Trek’s John Cho), who saw only darkness during his flash, be (gulp) dead? “The high concept pitch is simply this: if you were given a glimpse of your future, what would you do with it?” says FF’s exec producer David S. Goyer. “If you see something bad, can you change it? If it’s good, how do you make it come true?”

One of the things I love best about the series is the explicit and implicit references to science, literature, philosophy, and pop culture. When investigated, these references suggest all sorts of possibilities about what’s really going on in the saga, or at the very least add some cool or ironic shading to the story. For example: we’ve been told that that Agent Noh will be killed on March 15. That also happens to be the date of Julius Caesar’s murder. More on the nose with FlashForward: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which a seer tells the Roman leader to “beware the Ides of March,” i.e. March 15. Is that just the writers having some smarty-pants fun—or are they planting a cue that a Brutus-like colleague will betray Agent Noh?

Here’s another example—a little more tenuous, but if you follow my Doc Jensen work on Lost, you know that making pseudo-intellectual leaps are part of what I’m all about. In FlashForward’s third episode, Agent Benford traveled to Germany to interview a Nazi war criminal who claimed to know something about the true nature of the global blackout. The old Nazi was being held at Quale Prison, and as it happens, the word quale is directly linked to a philosophical term dealing with—in wikipedia’s words—“the subjective quality of conscious experience.” (The fact that FlashForward would name a prison after such a heady concept is pretty provocative. Is the show trying to suggest that objective reality is unknowable and mankind is fundamentally at odds with each other because we are locked into our unique, idiosyncratic perspectives of the external world?)

Are you with me?! I hope so, because in the weeks to come, I plan on doing even more obsessing about FlashForward here at EW.com, beginning with a complete TV Watch recap of the next episode, airing Dec. 3. Until then, here’s are some additional references (legit and perceived my crazy eyes) that FlashForward has made during its first nine episodes—and some theories about what they could mean.

Lost

Of course, Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) and Sonya Walger (Penelope) are living, breathing embodiments of Lost. Both actors played characters linked to Desmond Hume. During the show’s third season, the ex-Hatchman became super-charged with The Island’s electromagnetic energy and began having flash-forwards of Charlie’s death. He also went back in time and tried to change his destiny. David Goyer—a big Lost fan—slipped a billboard for Oceanic Airlines into the pilot, inspiring fans to wonder if both shows exist in the same universe. At the very least, they may share a similar philosophical idea: that no matter how much you try to change predestined events, fate will get what it wants.

“Across The Universe” by Rufus Wainwright

Like Lost, Cold Case and so many other shows, FF has a penchant for episode-ending slow-motion montages, set to rousing score or a thematically loaded pop song. One of my faves was Wainwright’s cover of this classic tune by The Beatles, heard in the Oct. 29 episode “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.” In the 1999 Robert J. Sawyer novel that inspired the series, the blackout/flash-forwards are caused, in part, by an anomaly in deep space—literally “across the universe.” Coincidence? Nay! I say: Synchronicity! As in…

“Ghost In The Machine” by The Police

Agent Benford is a fan of the band and wore a T-shirt featuring this album’s artwork to an undercover operation—infiltrating an underground club catering to “ghosts,” people in the FF universe who didn’t see anything in their flash forward and thus believe they are destined to die before that date. According to band lore, the album was inspired by Sting’s fixation with Arthur Koestler, an egghead who postulated that people, events, and time are psychically linked via the concept of Synchronicity described by Carl Jung. (The Police song “Synchronicity,” from the album of the same (also inspired by Koestler), is a FlashForward theory unto itself; check out the lyrics here.) Koestler’s books include The Ghost In The Machine, The Roots of Coincidence (a book that has had a big influence on sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book writers), and Janus: A Summing Up, an exploration of systems theory that says that a larger whole or “holarchy” is make up of individual components called “holons” that also contain systems within themselves, or something like that, or maybe nothing at all like that, and yes, I don’t have any clue what any of this means. Bookmark that Janus name—we’ll be coming back to it in a minute.

Jericho

In FlashForward, Jericho is a military contractor that provides private armies to the highest bidder. Their soldiers apparently played a role in the attempted killing of Aaron Stark’s daughter, Tracy, in Afghanistan. I also suspect they are providing goons to the conspiracy that perpetrated the global blackout. Of course, Jericho was also the title of the short-lived, intensely loved cult drama that imagined the aftermath of a cataclysmic nuclear attack on the United States.

David Baldacci

Trying to make sense of Jericho’s treacherous attack on his daughter, Aaron likened the situation to a “Baldacci novel.” David Baldacci is the best-selling author of hugely successful books like The Collectors and Absolute Power, political potboilers that usually involve elaborate government conspiracies. Application to FlashForward: I’m thinking President Segovia (played by Peter Coyote)—who is (or was) tight with Assistant Director Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance)—knows much more about the global blackout than he’s telling. And remember Senator Clemente (Barbara Williams), the congresswoman who was leading the subcommittee investigation into the flash-forward event? She was no friend to Segovia and Wedeck, yet the president made her his new vice president—presumably to stifle her persecution of Wedeck’s Mosaic team. No, it’s not very realistic that a president would appoint a hated political rival as his No. 2—unless, of course, Segovia and Clemente aren’t the bitter enemies they appeared to be. I’m thinking that yes, Senator Clemente is in on the conspiracy, too. So what’s the conspiracy? Here’s the clue that sketches the big picture:

“D. Gibbons”

The “bad man” from little Charlie Benford’s spooky vision and one of many cryptic clues gleaned from Agent Benford’s flash forward. The name undoubtedly refers to Dave Gibbons, co-author of the subversive superhero saga Watchmen, whose intricate mystery plot concerns (SPOILER ALERT!) a conspiracy to encourage world peace by staging a fake alien invasion. And like FF, Watchmen stuffed coded clues and tell-tale non-sequiturs in the margins of its story. I’m thinking that the power players behind the global blackout were attempting to do something similar—usher in a new era of world peace by staging a global cataclysm designed to cause everyone to rethink their lives, the way they live their lives and the political, religious, and philosophical barriers that divide us. The bipartisan union of President Segovia and Senator Clemente is symbolic and representative of the narrative the conspiracy was/is trying to promote throughout the world. The two-faced, double-edged nature of this scheme to engineer planetary rebirth via planetary catastrophe is reflected in our next clue…

Janice/Janus

Janice is the name of the FlashForward character who saw herself having a baby on April 29… even though she’s a lesbian who is currently not in relationship and had been deeply ambivalent about even having kids until recently. Janice sounds exactly like Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of open gates and closed doors, of beginnings and endings. Janus is a deeply ironic, very paradoxical dude—both hopeful and ominous. That’s very Janice. Speaking of double-sided clues…

Beilby Porteus

Mosaic’s search for “D. Gibbons” led him to Pigeon, Utah, where he encountered a mystery man, coined “The Chess Player” by fans, in an abandoned doll factory. Before escaping, the chess player said, “He who foresees calamities, suffers them twice over.” That’s a famous quote from Porteus, an 18th-century English clergyman and noted abolitionist. His other major claim to fame was introducing something called “The Sunday Observance Act,” a “blue law” that regulated the ways people in England could spend their recreational time on Sunday. This is could be a double-faced clue. On one hand, we have an ostensible bad guy, quoting a guy linked to a righteous cause (ending slavery) and famous for forcing a righteous way of life on society (the Sunday Observance Act)—another possible proof on the aforementioned world peace conspiracy. But is The Chess Player part of The Blackout Conspiracy—or working to subvert it? The Porteus quote is darkly ironic. And coming from The Chess Player, it sounds like a warning or threat. Possibilities: If The Chess Player is trying to promote the conspiracy, he might have been trying to tell Benford that trying to solve the mystery of the blackout calamity will only produce another calamity—the ruin of its peace-promoting effect. But if The Chess Player is trying to fight the conspiracy, he might have been trying to tell Benford that flash-forward event had backfired—or will backfire when it reaches its fulfillment on April 29. FYI: Porteus is associated with another ironic quote that could be applied to FlashForward and my “Conspiracy of Peace” conspiracy theory: “War its thousands slays; peace its ten thousands.”

White Queen

The Chess Player left behind some clues for Mosaic, including a chess piece—the white queen, which provocatively intersects with all sorts of fantasy and geek pop. The White Queen is a character from Through The Looking Glass—a scatter-brained figure that lives her life backwards and struggles to live in the present. (“Jam-yesterday or Jam-tomorrow, but never Jam-today.”) That’s fitting for a show whose people got mind-scrambled during the global blackout and are now playing out futures that may have already come to pass—who are constantly being reminded and challenged to bravely defy fate by “living in the now.” However, “White Queen” is the handle of several prominent characters in comic book land, including the morally ambiguous X-Men foil Emma Frost (who can see into other people’s heads) and another baddie, Sat-Yr-9, an unhinged femme fatale from an alternate reality Earth. Yes, it is unlikely FlashForward was deliberately trying to forge a connection to the latter character. But she does embody a high concept theory in quantum physics that was explicitly referenced by Dominic Monaghan’s Simon Campos character: the idea that all possible realities actually exist. (See: the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, used by Campos to seduce the blonde lady on the train.) I won’t beat this dead (Schrödinger’s) cat further by bringing this full circle and explicating the link between Alice In Wonderland and quantum mechanics, or how the whole notion of white and black chess pieces illustrate the binary either/or dynamics of alternate reality logic. However, and fittingly, I will ask you to entertain at least two possibilities: 1. That what everyone saw in their flash-forward was actually a peek into an alternate reality; and 2. That per the implications of Schrödinger’s Cat, which says that reality isn’t created until directly observed by the viewer, that the future sketched by the flash-forwards is now locked into place as a result of being directly observed by everyone in the past via the global blackout. Got that? Thought so. Also see: A Christmas Carol SPOILER ALERT! David Goyer says Charles Dickens’ classic novel—about a grinch who’s shown a vision of his (possible) future—looms large in the Dec. 3 episode.

Photo Credit: Bob D’Amico/ABC