*Spoiler Warning*

ABC’s remake of V has got to be one of the best pilots of the last few years. It’s not brilliant or anything– it’s your basic alien invasion premise with a few twists– but it’s extremely competent television storytelling. The trap most pilots fall in is contriving a cookie cutter plot in order to force character development for the main characters. V uses those characters in very effective ways to tell real story.

Aliens land on Earth and they look just like humans, except they’re all very attractive humans. They claim to be peaceful and try to start improving the world, sharing technology and curing people of various illnesses. But by the end of the episode, we find out that the aliens are actually reptillian creatures who clone human skin and wear it to hide their true appearence. We also find that this isn’t the first time they’ve come to Earth, and that they have infiltrated every facet of society– revealing themselves is the beginning of the final phase of their plan to destroy us. The mystery we’re left with is why exactly they want humanity dead, and why they’re keeping us alive for now.

A lot of really interesting questions and ideas are raised when the aliens show up. One scene toward the beginning shows two priests talking about whether it’s possible for God and aliens to exist in the same universe and what this means for Catholocism. The younger priest, despite the Church’s official viewpoint that the aliens are peaceful creatures sent by God, tells his congregation not to blindly trust the Vs (everyone calls them V’s, as it’s short for “visitor”). That’s good advice– another interesting subplot involves a TV reporter who is chosen by the Vs the interview Anna, their leader. The catch is, she won’t allow him to ask her any questions that paint the Vs in a negative light. He resists this, but finally agrees when she reminds him what this will do for his career– he ultimately agrees to be Anna’s voice to the people of Earth. And there’s an excellent reveal about a man who, though we’re told he has a dark past, when that past is finally revealed, I never saw it coming.

The show has a great cast of recognizable sci-fi alumn, including two Firefly crossovers, Morena Baccarin (Anara from Firefly, who plays the very creepy Anna here) and Alan Tudyk (Wash). The female lead is Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost, and one of the Vs is played by Laura Vandervoort, who was Supergirl in season 7 of Smallville.

After so many shows that string the audience on, just trying to stretch an arc for 22 episodes, it’s refreshing to see a pilot that gets so much done in one episode. It’s thought-provoking and entertaining without beating you over the head every few minutes with some overbearing message or constantly reminding you about things you’ve aleady been told, just in case you’re too stupid not to remember (as Flash Forward has a tendancy to do). The characters here feel like real people, and there’s also real intrigue and social commentary. I don’t know if it can keep up this level of story-telling, or if it will even be popular enough to stay on the air, but so far, I’m sold.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

ABC’s new show Flash Forward premiered last Thursday, and I know I’m a few days late, but I’m planning to post weekly reviews/speculations on it like I’ve done in the past with Lost.

The series is off to a good start and had one of the better pilots I’ve ever seen. A lot of first episodes suffer from what I like to call “pilot-itus,” where they’re too concerned with setting up the premise and the main characters than actually telling a story. Obviously, this pilot has to do those things too, but it’s more successful at integrating them because the show has only one place it can possibly begin, and the characters are all just as surprised by this event as the audience (or at least, had the audience not been inundated with advirtising from ABC all summer long). So we learn about the characters along with what’s going on rather than in spite of it, and it’s all fairly well interconnected.

The premise is simple: everyone on Earth blacks out for a couple of minutes simultaneously, and when they all come to, they find themelves in a world of chaos. All the terrible things happen you might associate with the Left Behind scenario– planes fall out of the sky, cars crash, etc– only a lot worse because it’s everyone that blanks out, not just a percentage. People quickly discover they now have memories of events that haven’t happened yet– apparently their consciousnesses were all transported exactly six months later, and they all experienced the same couple of moments in time. They all have one very small piece to what we’re to assume is a very big puzzle.

I was instantly impressed with the cinematic production value on this show, the sincere and realistic acting all around, and the calibre of the writing. It’s dramatic but not overly-brooding, and despite the global scope of the catastrophe, our main characters remain, for the most part, level-headed and not without moments of wit and humor. I really appreciated that when characters start realizing they’ve had a vision of the future, we don’t have to sit through a period of everyone else thinking they’re crazy– they’ve all had the same experience, and they all accept that it’s really happened. Another show might have some people driven insane by this, but I like that everyone, regardless of what they’ve seen, has an attitude of believing the impossible because it’s obviously happened.

Each character has distinctive character traits directly related to what they see in the future. One man was just about to commit suicide until he sees himself happy in the future, so he changes his mind to make sure that happens. A couple realize their marriage is over in the future because he apparently had a drinking problem and will start drinking again, and she sees herself happily together with another man. And my favorite is Demitri, played byJohn Cho from the new Star Trek movie, who sees nothing at all and realizes he’s going to be dead in six months. Everyone will put their futures together to try and figure out who’s behind this and whether it will happen again, and that should be the formula for each episode. I find myself wondering how much time will pass between episodes, because if it’s like a normal show, they’ll get to that day in the futue well before the season is over. If the writers want the show to only go up to that point, we could be in for a very slow-moving series.

The big question this premise brings up is how time travel works in this show, or at least, what kind of a time line we’re dealing with. It addresses a lot of the same issues Lost does. Can you change the future or not? Can you have time paradoxes? In last season’s Lost, a lot of the characters went back in time, and discovered they couldn’t change the future. However, they also didn’t have all the answers. They knew what was supposed to happen but not neccessarily how it happened. It seems to me like the characters in this series know enough to change at last some outcomes. For instance, Mark (the man who used to have a drinking problem) sees a friendship bracelet on a wall in the future, given to him by his daughter. Toward the end of the episode, she gives him that bracelet. No matter what that bracelet means or how it connects to anything, he could potentially change the future right there by setting it on fire, burrying it, throwing it away, etc. Of course, he keeps it. But my point is, some of these characters will want the future to happen how they saw it, and some will avoid that, and the ones who want to change it will have opportunities.  I don’t see how the future could possibly turn out exactly as they saw it with so many people knowing what they know and being able to affect at least little things. Whichever direction the show goes, I sure hope it makes sense.

The only major problem I have with it is how ABC is marketing it. They want to continue cashing in on Lost long after it’s off the air, and that’s why they green lit this show. They want a replacement for their big surprising mystery show. As a result, this show already has a lot of the same cast (including Dominic Monoghan starting this week, who I really think was too big a character on Lost to be in this one), a lot of the same themes, and utilizes too many of the same story techniques. I wish this show hadn’t started by showing the catastrophe at the beginning– it looked way too much like the plane crash at the beginning of Lost. But the Oceanic poster in the background was a nice nod– I just wish it had been the only one. Hopefully the show will find its own footing and the commercial advirtising will stop making a big deal out of the “mystery” of the show. We’re not stupid– just tell the story and let us draw conclusions like we have with Lost.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan