Epistemology TV: FlashForward

“The truth is out there.” This is the famous motto of Special Agent Fox Mulder in the TV show, The X-Files. Mulder and his partner, Dana Scully, have become cultural icons: he the dogged believer, she the scientist skeptic. The relationship between them has been taken to represent the opposition between faith and reason. On the show, however, Mulder and Scully are not really all that far apart. She is no obstinate doubting Thomas, nor is he a mystical true believer. They are both empiricists. In fact, Mulder’s famous words, “the truth is out there,” are a sort of empiricist slogan: the answers to all of our questions can be demonstrated with hard evidence, as long as we know where and how to gather it. What separates Mulder and Scully is not the opposition between faith and reason, but what they each have faith in. Scully believes in Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest solution is usually the correct one—why assume there’s some vast alien conspiracy, when the answer could be much simpler? Mulder has faith in a very different principle, the idea that things are not always as simple as they seem (this is the faith he shares with your garden-variety conspiracy theorist).

“The truth is out there,” however, is not just Mulder’s motto, but the motto of the television show, The X-Files. The show’s promise (a promise eternally deferred) is to reveal the answers to the big questions: Why are we here? What does all this mean? And since the world of the show is essentially our world—this is not “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—these answers, we imagine, apply to our world as well. The X-Files is not alone in this—it is part of a genre that has existed for a long time. Shows like The Prisoner, in the late 60s, and more recently Lost, start out with a similar premise: there’s something going on in our world, beneath the surface, where us regular folk cannot see it—whether it be a vast political conspiracy (The Prisoner), aliens (The X-Files), or a mystical force (Lost). The heroes of these shows, whether by accident, fate, or sinister design, come face to face with this something. The problem, however, is that the shows promise something they cannot deliver. They string us along, revealing the answer to one mystery while simultaneously opening up another one, but in the end the game has to end. As we all know, however, there are really no answers to be had, at least not in our world. The shows are therefore faced with a dilemma: give us an inherently unsatisfying answer, one that can in no way be demonstrated to apply to our own world and not just the world of the show; or give us no answer at all. Or sometimes, as in the case of The X-Files, the wizard’s curtain is pulled back—the writers essentially admitted that they had no idea what the “something” was behind all the mysteries in the shows; they were just making it up as they went along.

The latest of these shows, capitalizing on the success of Lost on the same network, is ABC’s FlashForward, which has just been picked up for a whole season (it has been called Lost with the whole world as the magical, mysterious island). The first episode begins with a brilliant shot: upside down, we see pavement littered with smashed oranges; bits of glass rain down (or rather up) like hail. What has happened? Where are we? We are seeing the world through the eyes of FBI Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), who has just woken from a short blackout to find his car flipped over on the freeway. As he pulls himself from the wreckage, he sees a scene of utter chaos—it turns out he was not the only one who blacked out; the whole world has lost consciousness for 137 seconds, resulting in myriad catastrophes—cars, planes, and helicopters have crashed all over the globe. Like Lost, whose opening plane crash sequence was virtuoso television, FlashForward does these first few seconds right. Then it becomes conventional. The poetry of that first shot is replaced by a prosaic series of explosions—we get it: the results of such a seemingly minor thing, a blackout, on a global scale would be catastrophic, but do we really need to see every car and helicopter blow up in an orange ball of flame? Do we need to see a man on fire running down the street? Who do they think they are, Michael Bay? Even in the age of HD, after all, it’s not really the spectacle that moves us—far more impact has been achieved with far greater subtlety.

The show is not really about the catastrophe, though—after the first few minutes of disaster-movie CG destruction, we get another revelation: people did not just black out, they each had a vision of the future. For the span of the blackout, they all saw and felt where they would be for a couple of minutes six months in the future. Each of these visions turns out to be consistent with the others—if you were talking with someone in your vision, they were talking with you in theirs. In his vision, Agent Benford saw himself investigating the blackouts while armed masked men snuck up on him in his office. So, naturally, at the first opportunity, the FBI puts him in charge of the investigation. The mystery of the show is who or what is behind the blackouts—is it little green men, a global conspiracy, or a spiritual force? So far, the series has not tipped its hand, although it seems like they are throwing global conspiracy out there as at least a red herring. The difference between the show and Lost or the X-Files is in that six-month time frame. This raises some interesting technical questions: If people really saw what will or could happen in six months, will the show end when we get there? Since each episode seems to span a few days, this would mean it could only last a couple of seasons. Or will there be another blackout, or something else? I have some theories—and that, of course, is part of the fun of these shows, trying to guess what’s really going on, and where they’re going next (the series is based on a book, so I guess you could cheat by reading it).

So far, though, the show has been a bit of a mixed bag. The characters don’t seem as interesting as those in Lost, especially Agent Benford (could we please retire the recovering alcoholic driven cop archetype for a little while?), and the writers spend too much time trying to blow our minds with time travel paradoxes that have been old for decades—if you saw the future would you be able to prevent it, or would you just end up reinforcing it? If you saw Terminator 2 or 12 Monkeys you know the answer. (Of course, the more you think about it, the less sense this makes on a global scale—it would be almost impossible to get 6 billion people to behave exactly as they were predicted to. And what about people who work in industries based on risk and prediction? Wouldn’t stock brokers and insurance agents be able to game the system—is there such a thing as a future pre-existing condition?) The show does, at times, dip its toe into interesting psychological waters—if we believe that something is inevitable, do we behave in such a way as to bring it about? In psych circles, that’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the end, it’s the mystery that will keep us coming back, though. Without it, there’s not much drama there. It makes you long for the wit, humor, and, yes, the chemistry Mulder and Scully showed whenever they took a break from hunting down little green men. Still, I for one want to know what’s coming next. I have some theories....