Bryce, back from Japan
This fall I was looking forward to three heavily hyped dramas - ABC's "V" and "FlashForward" and AMC's miniseries "The Prisoner."
All have been huge disappointments, but "FlashForward" has been the most frustrating, because at least "V" and "The Prisoner" had the decency to end - "V" until March, anyway.
If you have not seen "FlashForward" - first, good decision. It is about the consequences of a worldwide event in which virtually everyone blacks out for two and a half minutes and flashes forward to April 29. You would think a phenomena like this would be enough for plenty of drama - how did it happen? What are the ramifications of such an event? - but sadly, too often this show focuses on mundane daily events in the characters' lives in a maddening way, or takes stupifying leaps of logic.
"The Prisoner" and "V" suffered the same fate - one of having a wonderful premise (in the case of "The Prisoner" an excellent show had already been made) and botching it in mind-blowing ways. This column will focus on "FlashForward."
This plotline, from the Nov. 19 episode, is typical of this show's complete lack of continuity. A minor character from the show, Bryce (Zachary Knighton), was revealed to have cancer for the first time.
Never mind that the show has been airing for around two months now, and all everyone does is talk about what happened to them before and after their flashforwards, when they aren't whining about their relationships. The fact that millions died on that day and no one spends a second mourning any of them is only one of the many annoying things about this program that I now suspect is written by teenagers undergoing ADD treatment.
Anyway, back to Bryce. Though Bryce discussed his suicide attempt, which occurred during the blackout, extensively with his friend Olivia (Sofia Walger), he has never mentioned the cancer. Why? Who knows? Anyway, now it's all he talks about, so he suddenly becomes obsessed with finding this Japanese woman. We also see Japanese woman's story.
The Japanese woman's deal is basically this - she starts out as this brilliant engineer and her flashforward shows her with Bryce. He is obsessed with finding her because she is happy and pretty and it proves he is still alive on April 29 (the date of everyone's flashforwards). She doesn't care about finding him, only about getting away from her job, which turns out to be boring.
In one insufferable scene, he goes to Japan to find her because he finds out that her T-shirt reveals where she likes to eat, and it's a small restaurant, and meanwhile she decides to shake the dust off this Japanese life and flees to - wait for it - America.
Do these two idiots really deserve to find each other? This kind of stuff happens all the time on this show, where people seem to have lost all their sense during their blackouts.
By the end of the show we still haven't seen how they hook up in the flashforward. They haven't met. It would be typical of the show to just drop their storyline all together.
Another problem is the show has a wonderful cast - Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Sofia Walger and Dominic Monaghan from "Lost" - all charasmatic actors who are awful here. It's not their fault. They have nothing to work with almost all the time.
I bet you have figured out the most irritating thing of all. I am still watching.
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