It's not often I become excited about a TV show. 24 did it, and so did The West Wing. And House occasionally panders to my occasional yearnings to become, well, House. But recently Flashforward (Mondays, 9pm, Channel 5) has given Mondays a new edge. And in no small part because it meshes the supernatural with run-of-the-mill events to raise lots of "what if" questions about the human mind.
The premise is simple. One day, everyone (on the whole planet) blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds exactly. Workers fall down at their desks, in the gym; surgeons stop operating, planes crash. Worldwide carnage ensues. But then as the cleanup begins, people start to realise that everyone had some kind of "flashforward" during the blackout, to a precise time 6 months from now. And this is where it starts to get interesting. Everyone is fairly sure that these blackouts provide them with a veridical window on the future. They have seen what is going to occur, but the intrigue in the show is how this knowledge affects the characters' behaviour.
The sociologist Robert Merton first coined the term "self-fulfilling prophecy" to define a set of circumstances where simply believing that something will occur leads it to become so. The characters in Flashforward are in the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy - they have seen what they think is the future, and their actions then become concordant with it. We saw echoes of this type of positive feedback loop in the recent banking collapses: if traders believe a bank is weak, then they tend to act in accordance with this belief, eventually selling the bank so short that it ends up collapsing anyway.
So, if you were offered a glimpse of your future in 6 months, would you take it?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment