Mosaic Task Force

Batman and Blade scripter David S. Goyer has a new TV show this fall. On Flash Forward, a global disaster causes everyone to see a vision of their lives on April 29. The premise is fantasy, but it was inspired by real life tragedy.


“I had this experience,” Goyer said. “I was in France immediately after 9/11. It's definitely baked into the DNA of this show. I never had this experience where there was this enormous outpouring of sympathy, A, for being American, which doesn't typically happen in Paris. I would be in these bistros, in these bars, and I would have complete strangers crying and coming up to me and hugging me and holding me and talking about where they were and what they were doing. What were they doing when 9/11 happened? I thought, obviously, it was horrendous, but it was also, for this one moment, for this brief period of time, this profoundly kind of connecting experience for a lot of the world. And so we were trying to also go in that direction with this. I mean, you will have people in our show, you could walk into a bar a total stranger. ‘What did you see?’ And these people might start talking to each other because everyone on this planet, 6.8 billion people, experienced it. And that's this, also, kind of wonderful thing that brings the whole world closer together.”

Some of the futures are not so pleasant. One man sees himself descend into alcoholism while his wife sees herself in love with another man. “Look, I think that one of the primary reasons why people come to drama is for conflict, and I think that lots of marriages in real life have lots of issues they deal with: responsibility, infidelity, A, B, and C. And to me, one of the interesting things about this is this show hopes to kind of traffic in the gamut of human experience.”

Once everybody realizes they all had visions of the same day, they get down to business right away of piecing together April 29. It doesn’t take even the entire first episode for the world to be on board with this high concept.

“I mean, look, that's the razor's edge that the show traffics in, but the thing that we say to the actors all the time, and we talk about this in episode 2, in episode 3, in episode 4, and onward. It's not like these characters were watching a movie. They had a sensory experience of what happened. So whatever they saw, if they were cold, if they were hot, whatever they heard, whatever they were emotionally feeling was real to them. So when Olivia comes back from that moment, she had genuine feelings of love for this other man, and yet she can't escape it. It was real. And the same for Joe when he's drinking. I mean, he's been sober for seven years, but he had that physiological feeling. I think that's the more interesting aspect of the show, honestly. I mean, I think that the kind of mayhem or the high jinks is cool, but what I'm hoping people will really tune in for is the kind of meat and potatoes of just how people are wrestling with all of these things and the gamut of human experience in John Cho.”

The big question week to week will be: can they change the future they saw? “That, again, is part of the heart and soul of the show and the debate and where I think a lot of the drama and suspense can be mined, is whether, if you saw your future, what would you do about it, and can you change it? And we've basically broken our series regulars down into three categories. A third of them fear the future, and they are trying to do everything they can to fight it. A third of them, their futures are aspirational, and they are trying to do everything they can to make it happen. And a third of them are kind of agnostic because they just don't understand what it means, and they are trying to figure it out. Now, maybe fighting it is what causes it to happen, or maybe trying to cause it is what causes it not to happen. I mean, that is sort of what the show is about.”

Source: CanMag