FlashForward The Complete Series   Starring (voice): Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Zachary Knighton, Peyton List and Dominic Monaghan Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment RRP: £39.99 BUA0152201 Certificate: 15 Available 27 September 2010

Chaos reigns in Los Angeles after a mysterious event causes everyone in the world to lose consciousness for precisely two minutes and seventeen seconds, at exactly the same moment in time. Was it an act of nature? Or something more sinister? Whatever it was, every person on Earth saw a series of events from their own future, taking place on 29 April 2010 at 10 pm. For some the future will be joyous and hopeful; for others, shockingly unexpected; and for a few, it simply doesn’t seem to exist. Knowing their fate will alter each person’s life in one way or another and poses the questions: can destiny be changed? And by changing just one destiny, what effect would that have on those of others...?

FlashForward is based on Robert J Sawyer’s original novel of the same name and follows various individuals who are coming to terms with events after a global blackout effects every person on the planet. When the world blacks out out for 2 minutes everyone's consciousness appeared to travel a few months into the future. For some the future looks bright, for others it's bad, for a percentage the vision seems to make little sense, and a few receive no vision at all.

It's hard to review this release without giving away too much about the series, but in amongst the many twists and turns are some pretty impressive characters and situations. The obvious nod to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments is interesting.

Why more people didn't just have normal visions is never really explained. Most people end up having very different experiences to their normal boring lives - which I assume is basically because they had the visions in the first place, leading them to make a dramatic change in the way they live their daily lives.

This six-disc collection features all 22 episodes of the show's first, and only, season - as it was cancelled leaving the show on a cliffhanger.

Extras include Architects of Destiny (19 min, 18 sec behind the scenes interviews with cast and crew on who some of the main characters were cast and what their feelings are about the series); FlashPoint on Set (5 x behind the scenes featurettes that look at various scenes); Creating Catastrophe: The Effects of a Global Blackout (6 min, 49 sec behind the scenes look at the filming of the motorway pile up scene that appeared in the first episode); Interviews from the Mosaic Collective (a handful of pretend interviews from different cities around the world that ask people what they think the blackout means); Kangaroo? (1 min, 53 sec look at the Kangaroo scenes that appear throughout the series); Deleted Scenes (10 x cut sequences) and Blooper Reel (3 min 05 sec).

What's really surprising is that this series was cancelled after just one season. It shows a lot more depth and intelligence than a great deal of other US shows that just keep on running and the production values are a lot higher too.

As a standalone series, this works well. It's just a shame the producers never got to explore the story any deeper in subsequent seasons.

9

Darren Rea