About Time

Many TV shows, while praised by critics, fail to build enough of an audience to impress the networks’ producers and so are canceled after one season – sometimes two. The poster child for this is Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which failed to last even one season, but it has plenty of company:  another Whedon show, Dollhouse, among them. Nowadays, their brief lives can be revisited on DVD and streaming services. A recent WhatCulture video recommended ten such short-lived TV series in the scifi genre. A few on the list that I had overlooked while they were on the air looked interesting, and the current “stay at home” virus-control policies make this a good time to sample them. The first arrived in the mail last weekend: Flashforward, which lasted a single season on ABC in 2009. It’s about time.

Humans have puzzled over the nature of time since ancient... well… times. Is the universe deterministic? Does the future follow from the past in an unalterable cascade of cause and effect so that “choice” is an illusion? Do the future and the past in some way coexist so that it is merely human perception that is limited to a “present”? Kurt Vonnegut took this position in his scifi novel Slaughterhouse-Five in which the protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time”; he experiences parts of his life in nonlinear order but, while his consciousness relocates to earlier moments in his life (repeatedly) as often as it jumps forward, he is never able to change a single word or to act differently because “that is the way things are structured.” Others insist that Vonnegut was wrong and the future is not fixed but entirely random: the uncertainty principle writ large. Strangely enough, this idea long predates current physics. In his book De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius (c. 50 BCE) declares that matter consists of atoms in motion but that the motions have “swerves” that make the universe nondeterministic. Yet others argue that all possible outcomes occur simultaneously: the “many worlds” theory so beloved by scifi writers. Though unprovable, this has gotten surprising support from some eminent scientists including Stephen Hawking. Whether there is room for free will in any of those scenarios is another ancient debate.

In the first few minutes of the first episode of Flashforward, the entire population of earth simultaneously loses consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. You can imagine what happens on highways and airports among other places. In in a budget-busting sequence impressive for a TV show, we see the disaster unfold in Los Angeles. We learn later that 20,000,000 people worldwide died in the event. When everyone else wakes up, all but a small minority have had a vision of 2 minutes and 17 seconds of their own lives 6 months in the future. The minority who didn’t have a vision wonder if that means they will die before then. Is the future fixed? Are the visions accurate? At first they seem to be. In the months following the blackout events large and small seem to unfold inexorably toward creating the circumstances in the visions. Then one character, who had seen a future in which he will be very much alive but unhappy, commits suicide just to prove that human choices still matter – that the river of future events, despite a strong impetus to flow a particular way, can be diverted by determined canal-digging.

The show centers primarily on members of a special FBI task force designed to uncover the cause of the blackout, on their families, and on scientists who in fact were responsible. There is more than a little soap opera in the depiction of the lives of the characters, but not so much as to make the viewer’s eyes roll. There is also suspense, a dark conspiracy to be uncovered, and a looming risk of a second blackout/flashforward event. The final episode ends on the day of everyone’s flashforward, so the series does complete at least that much of the story. Not all questions are answered and many teasers are set up for a second season that never happened. Nonetheless the show has an interesting premise and good enough writing to justify a weekend binge-watch. Thumbs Up.

In an unplanned synchronous event (a real one: not one onscreen), a scifi novel that arrived from Amazon in the same package as Flashforward also has at its center questions about consciousness, time, and choice: Recursion by Blake Crouch. Perhaps my selection of the title from a list of book recommendations on the website was influenced (without much deliberate thought) by the DVD purchase. As that may be, the novel offers a different take on time.

In 2018 in NYC, detective Barry Sutton fails to talk Ann Voss Peters off a 41^st story ledge. She reveals before she jumps that she is suffering from False Memory Syndrome (FMS), a strange neurological disorder with an unknown cause that is increasing in frequency among the populace. People with FMS recall two entirely distinct life histories at the same time – including different children and spouses. They know which memories are “real” but the other set is also fully detailed and vivid. Sutton remembers his own real life all too accurately: his teenage daughter was killed in an auto accident, which precipitated the breakup of his marriage. He decides to follow up on the jumper case by interviewing a man Ann falsely remembered having married.

The setting jumps back to 2007. We meet scientist Helena Smith who is working on memory enhancement. She hopes her work will alleviate Alzheimer’s, a disease from which her mother suffers. Super-rich young tech wiz Marcus Slade offers to finance her work, but it develops that he has his own agenda. What if consciousness needn’t be fixed in time? What if you could (with technical assistance) evoke a memory and, like Billy Pilgrim, shift your present-day consciousness to that earlier time. What if, unlike Billy Pilgrim, you could then choose to act differently than the first time around? It is practical time travel. What if Helena Smith’s invention can do just that for you? As you might imagine, the technology would be dangerous in the wrong hands (are there right hands?) as it could wreak havoc with the timeline.

You probably see where this is going and the connection to FMS. The lives of Sutton, Slade, and Smith cross – in most futures anyway.

Thumbs Up on the book, too.

What is the true nature of time in reality? I don’t pretend to have the answer when Nobel Prize winners disagree about it. Nor do I know if free will “really” exists – if we really make choices. But, as I recently wrote in a blog on BF Skinner, as a practical matter we not only do have choices but we have no choice but to make choices. [Irony intended.] Whatever the ultimate underlying cosmic reality might be, we have to hold people (not the universe) accountable for the decisions they make, which means we have to assume people make them. The assumption, right or wrong, is a condition of existence. Existentialists need not yet retire. Choices matter, like it or not.

Trailer: Flashforward