"You're worried your future is going to come true. I'm worried mine won't."

Everyone in the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. Only they don't all black out: they experience themselves six months in the future. When they wake up, chaos: drivers lost control of their cars, surgeons lost patients, helicopters lost their bearings and crashed into buildings.

There are two big questions that permeated this series premiere: what's going on? And what does it mean? A few characters saw something so wonderful that it seems impossible; others saw what seems like the end of their lives. And some people saw nothing at all, which might mean there's nothing to see.

FlashForward remains relatively faithful to the basic premise of the book (well, the FlashingForward part), but really seems to be taking things in a new and exciting direction. The characters, at this point, are defined by one or two quirks: Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes from Shakespeare in Love) is a recovering alcoholic who loves his wife; Bryce Varley (Zachery Knighton) was a suicidal doctor who now has hope for the future; Stan Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance from Law and Order: CI) is deadpan and doesn't take prisoners. The emotional core of this story is really how these characters are grappling with the incredible.

The genre/SF core of the story is precisely that incredible event. "What happened?" is still up in the air, and the mystery is made deeper by the last-act reveal that at least one person was awake during the FlashForward -- a pretty good sign that the answers to the questions will not be the same as they were in the book. And also a pretty good sign that this won't be a show of stand-alones and one-offs. Hooray for mythology!

But even as the impossible happens, life goes on. Mark and Demetri (the awesome John Cho, who did a lot with a little, performance-wise) shook off their confusion, saved people, and captured the criminal. Olivia (the luscious Sonya Walger -- Penny from Lost) went back to saving lives. This felt very emotionally honest to me, especially since FBI agents and doctors are exactly the people whom one would expect to shine in an emergency like this.

Obviously, quite a few shows are shot in LA (although not as many as local politicians would like). But this episode really felt like LA, from Mark and Olivia's Simi Valley home to the Venice Beach Pier and various recognizable street shots, including traffic gone horribly wrong on the 101/110 interchange downtown. Even though all these places are in the greater LA area, they're very far apart, which made the settings feel both universal and very personal. For this Angelino, at least.

Having said that, in places the cinematography was a bit too much like that movie Crash (or some Soderbergh films, as well as a number of other things) for me. There were the blue scenes, the yellow scenes, the warm scenes, and the washed-out scenes. LA is definitely a place with incredible light, and incredible variety in light, but the overuse of blue-scenes has always irked me, as that's actually rather rare in LA, and quite localized to the 20 minutes after dusk within 10 miles of the ocean in temperate weather. But there were other neat allusions, too: the opening shot was very Lost-ish with the whole in medias res thing, and very Godfather-ish with the oranges.

Flashes

• The big puddle of water that Mark walked through might have been a sinkhole. They've been popping up (or down, I guess) all over the place in LA this month.

• That was a very CGI kangaroo.

• There was a great Lost Easter Egg when Mark and Demetri were staking that guy out.

• The injured kid's dad's name is Lloyd Simcoe. Interesting...

• Courtney B. Vance's flashforward was hilarious. As was his version of it.

• The cast is incredibly British (and one guy is from Ireland). The American accents were of varying degrees of accuracy. Joseph Fiennes needs a bit of work.

• April 29, 2010. 04-29-2010. 137 seconds. Go to work, number crunchers. I've got nothin'. Except that it's a Thursday.

I really want this to be a wonderful show, and I didn't see anything in this premiere to indicate that it wouldn't be truly awesome. The previews for the rest of the season look tantalizing, and Dominic Monaghan, who was sadly missed in this episode, will appear soon. I'm definitely going to keep watching it, and I'm pretty sure I'll keep enjoying it.

Could be a four-kangaroo rating, could be a three to allow for future coolness. For now, 3.4 kangaroos.

(Originally published on billiedoux.com)