Brace yourselves, for I am about to do something that has never been done before: I am going to point out a logical flaw in the concept of a science-fiction show.

ABC's FlashForward, which has been on hiatus for months, returns tonight. While it seems a bit less urgent than it did in the fall, when some of us were going through Lost withdrawal, FlashForward was never an especially good substitute anyway. It's too linear, too closed-ended — there may be as many different threads to tie together as there are characters (if not more), but for the most part, they'll have to be tied up fairly soon, for reasons we'll get into shortly.

The show's been fun for the most part, even though it lacks the Big Picture philosophizing of Lost. Heck, probably because it lacks Big Picture philosophizing; sometimes, a little bit of clever suspense is its own reward.

But there's one thing that's been bothering me all along, and it's this: the show's very conceit is based on the assumption that human beings would behave in a way that goes against any realistic human behavior.

It's another time-travel paradox! Discover it now! Remember it in the fuuuuuture! After the jump.

 

First, the conceit itself. On October 6, 2009, every person on the planet (save for the bad guys, maybe ... but don't worry too much about this) blacked out. In that time, they saw 137 seconds of their own futures, starting at 10:00 p.m. PDT on April 29, 2010. Because we can't all just go around blacking out all willy-nilly, it was a major worldwide catastrophe. And once it became known that everybody's flashforwards took place at exactly the same time, it became a gigantic, universal topic of conversation and speculation, with Internet sites and support groups devoted to the phenomenon.

In short, it didn't take long before a six-month global countdown was triggered. And yet — and I'm about to blow your mind here, so get ready — not one person's flashforward involved any awareness that this is their flashforward finally coming to pass. Nobody's vision involved the fact that, whee!, this is the precise moment on which the entire planet has been fixated for half a year.

Instead of treating it as the culmination of all that time, all that chatter, all that wondering how the central mystery of their immediate lives would be resolved, everybody's involved in more or less mundane (if shocking to their October-selves) activities. FBI Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) is at the office, working on the case (and drunk). Olivia Benford (Sonya Walger) is gazing lovingly on Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) from the top of the stairs. Simcoe is watching television. For crying out loud, FBI Agent Janis Hawk (Christine Woods) is having a sonogram (at 10:00 p.m., but whatever). And so on.

This is not how people behave. Shouldn't there be parties everywhere you look, on a scale that would be essentially a simultaneous planet-wide New Year's Eve celebration? At the very least, there would be widespread recognition of the moment: "This is our flashforwards finally happening!" Possibly with a "Woo!" thrown in on either side.

The problem, of course, is that it would make for a singularly uninteresting show if people looked into the future and saw them doing nothing but saying, "This is the future that I saw six months ago, when I saw the future." What's actually happening on FlashForward is a variation on the time-travel paradox wherein a thing happened, or an invention was created, because of the actions of a visitor from the future where that thing was already established fact.

And, as I've had to do when faced with time-circular paradoxes like the creation of Skynet in Terminator 2, I have to decide whether it's enough to ruin the story or simply something that I need to shout "Lalalalalalatime'sarrowlalala" over until it goes away. I've chosen the latter for FlashForward. But it's still odd to think that the way the writers have decided to have people behave might be the most science-fictiony aspect of the entire show.