Dec 23 2008
Untangling the flash fowards
This weekend, I rented the bonus features portion of the Season 4 DVD set. There’s a lot of great material — two discs worth (discs 5 and 6, which rent, at least in the place I got them, as one unit).
My favorite was a feature called “Course of the Future: The Definitive Flashforwards.” It takes the flash forwards which we had seen in bits and pieces, and puts them all together in chronological order. The result is a linear narrative of what happens to the Oceanic 6 and Ben after they leave the Island. Watching this cleared up many things that had confused me before. It was also a great lead-in to Season 5. It refreshed my memory, and it made me anticipate the new season even more. Highly recommended!
The same feature has the actors talking about what they were thinking when they learned about the flash forwards. It’s fun to see that the actors enjoy trying to figure out the mysteries as much as we do. They do have a bit more at stake though – when they see there are scenes written with their characters appearing in flash forwards, they know that their characters have survived, and that they will still have jobs on the show for at least a while longer.
Also in the same feature, Carlton Cuse, executive producer and writer, has some interesting commentary:
“We had the present on the island, and we had the flashbacks. Now we have flash forwards, and that kind of completed the mosaic, because now we can tell stories in any of these three realms. We sort of view the mission from here to the end of the series as fitting the tiles into the mosaic, and they’ll go in all over the place.”
P.S. Did you know that in his normal speaking voice, Naveen Andrews (Sayid) has a British accent?
