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The W - Movies & TV - Flashforward 1x07 "The Gift"
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emma
Cherries > Peaches








Since: 1.8.02
From: Phoenix-ish

Since last post: 436 days
Last activity: 158 days
#1 Posted on | Instant Rating: 8.43
"Who the hell are these guys? Those aren't Hadjis!"
"Back up! Back up! Those are Jericho! We gotta get out! Move! Go, go! We're gonna get whacked!"

Ooooh, maybe Chris Jericho had a FF of watching this episode before his comments (The W) at the Sacramento Film Festival. *rolls eyes*

I'd love to go through all the deatils in that scene the way that I go through Lost scenes. (Hey, I'm a geek. I like that stuff.) There are several oddities that I saw right off. But I'm just not convinced that that's fruitful for this show. I think those things are more likely writing sloppiness or errors than actual clues. What about the 3rd (& possible fourth) guy in the Hummer? Do Terrorists trucks in the middle east have license plates? The background looks more like California/Nevada/Arizona, & that road is awfully well maintained. Are those century plants off tot eh side of the road? The dismembered leg doesn't actually match up with the missing leg on the chick. And there's also a dismembered arm that our narrator steps over. And he's totally unscathed, with plenty of time to stroll around in the debris. Shouldn't we see his name on his uniform right there? But I just don't know how much of that to think is deliberate ...

"Godfather: This is Hitman 2 requesting backup. We're Oscar Mike pursuing Hadjis, heading north. About 2 clicks away from checkpoint Victor Tango. Over."
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StingArmy
Andouille








Since: 3.5.03
From: Georgia bred, you can tell by my Hawk jersey

Since last post: 2948 days
Last activity: 540 days
#2 Posted on | Instant Rating: 5.35
Al actually going through with the suicide completely blindsided me. Definitely throws a whole new line of thinking out there in terms of what will/may/has to happen in the future. Obviously this isn't like LOST's "what happened, happened." Then again, maybe Celia dies anyway, just not by his hands? Hmmmmmmm!

- StingArmy
The Goon
Banger
Moderator








Since: 2.1.02
From: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Since last post: 853 days
Last activity: 831 days
#3 Posted on | Instant Rating: 7.74
Even if Celia dies, Al (who I kept calling Cyborg) won't be having that meeting in London on the 29th. The lesson to his colleagues is that the future is not set in stone. He has changed the game.

EddieBurkett
Boudin blanc








Since: 3.1.02
From: GA in person, NJ in heart

Since last post: 54 days
Last activity: 7 hours
#4 Posted on | Instant Rating: 4.44
If Al's death gets Mark and Olivia to quit their angstiness and shut up about what they saw, his may have been the greatest gift ever.

I'm guessing overanalyzing the Iraq war flashback won't matter since Tracy's home now... (WTF!??!?! Aaron has to be hallucinating, right???)

It feels a bit early in the game to play the 'flashforwards can be changed' card, but at least everyone has time to move on. Demitri should be suitably happier for it, I imagine.

I didn't care for the logic that the MI6 lady said, about how the people didn't have a flashforward so they killed themselves. Didn't anyone (especially the victims) realize that they didn't have a flashforward BECAUSE they killed themselves?

I'm surprised there aren't more clubs of people doing crazy shit because they know that they will be alive in 6 months -- like play with tigers or go skydiving. If I knew I was going to die, I wouldn't torture myself as much as just end it.

Were they trying to make a point with the suicide/torture club resembling pictures from Abu Ghraib?



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Please believe what I just said...
emma
Cherries > Peaches








Since: 1.8.02
From: Phoenix-ish

Since last post: 436 days
Last activity: 158 days
#5 Posted on | Instant Rating: 8.43
[ rant ]
Another thing about the writing in this show that drives me totally crazy is that the very smart FBI agents don't appear to do the most obvious of things. So either the characters are intermittently clever & stupid, or the writers are holding out on us.

Take this example: The german guy clued them into the crow deaths, which led them to Somalia. First, newspapers & the internet would have been talking about piles of dead crows all over the place. Didn't take me any effort to stumble over a chatty article about crows at UC Davis (daviswiki.org) -- that being an aggie school, somebody there would have noticed the piles of crow corpses. And it being a University of California, I've got to think it would make at least a blurb in the LA news. And so would come up as a news story on any Google search on "crow deaths".

If I were an interested FBI agent, while sitting on that long flight from Germany back to LA, not drinking, I'd be doing some research. I might run some google searches. I might even take the bizarre leap to call a zoo director. Berlin's got a big-ass zoo, as does Los Angeles & San Diego. 'Hey, y'all got any security cameras there? Did y'all happen to notice your crows & ravens plummeting off their perches? And, was there anything else unusual that happened? Like, ooooh, did anything else fall over? How'd the chimps & ourangs do? Those are rife with possibilities of plummeting. Elephants? Wolves? Squirrels?" Did the sheep all wander off while the border collie was out?

"Were other primates affected?" is a pretty basic question.

But we haven't had any acknowledgement of anything odd with any other animals. A simple line like "I followed up on the animal thing, & only humans & corvids seem to have been affected." would have been reasonable. As a viewer, I have to assume that they did all that research, & that if there were any other interesting observations, we would have been told. That's just playing fair with the bleedin' obvious questions.

So if those 2 horizontal elephants (i31.photobucket.com) in the oddly-placed picture on Mark's board turn out to be having their own GBO naps, they'd better have some fancy footwork ready. (Several views around the :37 minute mark, just above/behind Noh's head, as Mark is pinning up the "Not Today" bullet &/or the Blue Hand matchbook -- there's a continuity error there, too..)
[ /rant ]

By the way, the graph of world crow population (devotedfansnetwork.com) has data points all the way out into December even though the date in plotline is pre-Halloween.

I'm disappointed that it isn't nearly as precise as Lost. And having trouble reconciling that with why I should care about the mystery. I really *want* to. I'm certainly not still showing up for most of the characters (Simon & Lloyd notwithstanding.)

(edited by emma on 7.11.09 1711)
emma
Cherries > Peaches








Since: 1.8.02
From: Phoenix-ish

Since last post: 436 days
Last activity: 158 days
#6 Posted on | Instant Rating: 8.43
    Originally posted by EddieBurkett
    I'm guessing overanalyzing the Iraq war flashback won't matter since Tracy's home now... (WTF!??!?! Aaron has to be hallucinating, right???)
Not at all. F'rinstance of the Day:
Her leg was blown off (clearly) & she was in shock, but she wasn't at all dead. Mike was scared & guilty at bailing out on her, & is desperately trying to convince himself that she was dead anyway. The Men in Black scooped her up, nursed her back to health & gave her a prosthetic leg. When backup showed up at the scene, the leg was still there, so they id'd that & figured the rest was incinerated. Meanwhile, the MIB convinced her that they're the good guys, & she can be helpful to the cause now that she's thought dead. (Different kind of "ghost".) She's been hangin' with them, doing whatever they do, wherever they are. She saw dad in her FF, & that prompted her to sneak by, even though she's "undercover". What we saw in Aaron's FF didn't have anything to do with her being hospitalised from getting her leg blown off with Mike -- she wouldn't still be in a field hospital setting 2 years later -- it was a completely different time & place.

Clearly, variations on that concept. Were she & Mike really in Afgahnistan -- maybe they were someplace else that the Army wanted to lie about. (We only got "Afghanistan" from Aaron's assumption that's what his vision looked like, & whatever the army told him about her death.) Maybe they were unknowingly guarding a tower site, or maybe they stumbled across one. The MIB guys are with the GBO-creators, or they're trying to counter them. Whole variety of options more palatable than a hallucination.


(edited by emma on 7.11.09 1557)
Psycho Penguin
Liverwurst








Since: 24.6.07
From: Greenacres FL

Since last post: 4909 days
Last activity: 4905 days
#7 Posted on | Instant Rating: 1.14
His daughter wasn't dead, Al's death changed things in the future, so now she's home and his flash forward won't happen. That's my guess.

The idea of vigilantes knowing they're going to die and causing mayhem is interesting and one I never considered.

I'm looking forward to the butterfly effect his jumping will cause.

My new favorite show on TV the moment Al jumped. Things about to get crazy now, son.



http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/recognition/9471.html

IT'S TRUE! IT'S DAMN TRUE!

dMr
Andouille








Since: 2.11.02
From: Edinburgh, Scotland

Since last post: 2843 days
Last activity: 1189 days
#8 Posted on | Instant Rating: 6.64
I really liked it. Al's suicide came totally out of left field. I was sure they'd go with Noh's death as the first major "can the future be changed?" moment.

And it may bring a (temporary) halt to the Mark/Olivia trauma. Huzzah I say!

    Originally posted by emma
    I'd love to go through all the deatils in that scene the way that I go through Lost scenes. (Hey, I'm a geek. I like that stuff.) There are several oddities that I saw right off. But I'm just not convinced that that's fruitful for this show. I think those things are more likely writing sloppiness or errors than actual clues.
I think you just might be looking for significance in things that have none.

The third and fourth guy in the hummer are probably dead, but they're not important to our main story, so who cares? If they are important we'll find out what happened to them in week 8. Terrorists' trucks probably have license plates if they came that way when they stole/bought them. Why bother taking them off?

They may have been in Afghanistan or not. I'm sure there are parts of Afghanistan that look similar to that, but it could have been somewhere closer to home. Or it could have been Somalia. We'll likely find out this week.

    Originally posted by emma
    Take this example: The german guy clued them into the crow deaths, which led them to Somalia. First, newspapers & the internet would have been talking about piles of dead crows all over the place.
Twenty million people died! The newspapers and internet would have been talking about nothing but twenty million people dying! And possibly who Paris Hilton's dating these days.

*We* know the crows are significant because of how the information was presented to us, but a few dead birds in amongst all the death and destruction wouldn't even register with people, never mind get picked up by the news outlets. I like the fact that it took a psycopath like a Nazi war criminal to notice the crows being dead as significant.

Of course, they should really try to find the nearest dead crow pile and a crow coroner to tell them what the cause of death is, but between arranging the release of a Nazi war criminal, trying to convince Washington they weren't a bunch of loons and chasing up the blue hand thing they've been pretty busy lately

    Originally posted by EddieBurkett
    Didn't anyone (especially the victims) realize that they didn't have a flashforward BECAUSE they killed themselves?
Not all the blue hand folks killed themselves, so the rest probably figured that. I don't have an issue with a few people who thought they were going to die anyway being messed up enought to want to end it on their own terms.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm amazed I don't hate characters saying "flashforward" the whole time. Bugged me at first, but now it just seems a fairly natural part of the vocab in that world.

(edited by dMr on 10.11.09 0901)
AWArulz
Scrapple








Since: 28.1.02
From: Louisville, KY

Since last post: 90 days
Last activity: 90 days
#9 Posted on | Instant Rating: 4.74
    Originally posted by dMr

    On a completely unrelated note, I'm amazed I don't hate characters saying "flashforward" the whole time. Bugged me at first, but now it just seems a fairly natural part of the vocab in that world.


I think new events cause new vocabulary - we all seem to know what we mean when we (at least here in the States)say 9/11. Or when we google something. Flashforward seems a normal vocabulary usage if everyone experienced it.

(edited by AWArulz on 10.11.09 0958)


We'll be back right after order has been restored here in the Omni Center.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy - Swift

2P4E
Boerewors








Since: 4.1.05
From: SE12, London, UK.

Since last post: 3011 days
Last activity: 643 days
#10 Posted on | Instant Rating: 5.13
    Originally posted by EddieBurkett

    It feels a bit early in the game to play the 'flashforwards can be changed' card, but at least everyone has time to move on. Demitri should be suitably happier for it, I imagine.


In terms of the limitations it puts on the narrative path, maybe, but in terms of "What real people would actually do", no fuckin way. It'd be as easy as getting a tattoo that wasn't there in your FF or redecorating the room that someone was in to prove that they're avoidable. The fact so many people assumed otherwise was the dumbest part of this show. Though I suppose if everyone just sat down and discussed the philosphy of predetermination and the physics of time travel it wouldn't be very interesting, so they have to go out and play with guns while ignoring all that stuff.
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According to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000A3DFV8/qid=1127865553/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2624127-4848054?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846 , there is a bonus uncensored audio track.
Related threads: Flashforward 1x06 "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" - Flashforward 1x05 "Gimme Some Truth" - FlashForward 1x04: Black Swan - More...
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