Who doesn’t love a good flash-forward mystery? It’s that moment when a TV show jumps to the future to show us something jarring, and then jumps back to the present to spend an entire season or half-season building back up to the future moment we glimpsed. It’s a surefire way of injecting energy back into a flailing TV show and jarring complacent audiences into compulsively eating up every little clue left behind like a trail of bread crumbs. It’s like we’ve glimpsed the final page of the book but couldn’t quite make out all of the words. So we think we know where the show is heading, but we’re not altogether sure about how it’s going to get there or even what will happen once it does.
In recent years, this particularly effective storytelling device has been used by prestige dramas like Breaking Bad and sitcom hybrids like How I Met Your Mother. However, this past year it has invaded geek genre shows like Arrow and Vampire Diaries. Agents of SHIELD just joined the trend last night.
Agents of SHIELD
Last we left SHIELD, Ward’s dead body was being possessed by the HIVE creature from the other dimension, and Coulson was coping with the dark places he went to while grieving the death of his kinda, sorta girlfriend. The season was nicely set up to transition into exploring the new Big Bad now that he’s on Earth. We didn’t necessarily need anything on top of that. However, co-showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen chose to return with a flash forward to three months from now when someone wearing a SHIELD-labeled astronaut suit will be in seriously dire straits in a space ship floating above Earth. It is but a brief glimpse before the episode returns to the present to sort out the fallout from the mid-season finale. However, now we know something bad goes down and ends up in outer space.
Why’d they go this route? To add some mystery, of course. As Tancharoen told THR, “We will be uncovering things from the midseason opener all the way to the finale. We will slowly be discovering what that image is.” Whedon followed with, “We will see how it unfolds and what it really means and if that flash-forward has meaning or if it’s just an ominous prediction for the future.”
It’s hard to make any kind of judgment since they’ve only just begun with this particular flash forward mystery, although Arrow and Vampire Diaries managed to make their mysteries more clear and personal, less like random imagery.
Arrow
Speaking to reporters after the premiere, producers Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle promised that whoever is in that grave is most definitely dead. Moreover, Mericle observed, “They will stay dead. We want to bring stakes back to the show. We don’t necessarily know who it is right now. We’re still planning out the whole season, but we want it, obviously, to have resonance, and if it doesn’t mean anything to the characters, it won’t to the audience either.”
We’ve re-visited that moment in the future only once or twice since the premiere, learning that Felicity is still alive in the future but she’s no longer wearing Oliver’s engagement ring (nor has it been replaced by a wedding ring).
Of course, also in the time since the initial flash forward Sara Lance and Ray Palmer have both returned from the dead and spun-off to Legends of Tomorrow. But, um, ignore that. Couldn’t be helped. The CW needed characters for a spin-off. Whoever is in that grave, though, will stay dead. Death will again have stakes on this show, and much crying shall ensue.
This has lent the season a new air of tragedy. We are being set up for Oliver’s triumphant birth as the bonafide hero Green Arrow as opposed to cold-blooded vigilante Arrow, and all of his consternation about it is offset by the guiding hand of love that Felicity has brought into is life. However, we know that he royally screws up and someone ends up dead, and the smiling, slightly higher-pitched version of Oliver we’ve witnessed throughout the season will at some point transition back to the stern killer of old.
Vampire Diaries
Vampire Diaries came into this season with ever diminishing ratings and a serious identity crisis after star Nina Dobrev exited after six seasons as Elena Gilbert (and so, so many dopplegangers). Their challenge was to return the show to a fraternal love story about two brothers instead of a romantic live triangle in which the girl has to choose between two great guys. Would Ian Somderhalder’s Damon revert to his evil ways without Elena? Could his brother Stefan (Paul Wesley) keep him in line and also navigate a new relationship with friend-turned-lover Caroline (Candice Accola)?
The answer, we learned at the end of the season 7 premiere, was a big fat no to all of that. Three years into the future Damon is essentially vampire-hibernating in a coffin, Stefan is on the run from a vampire hunter drawn to him by some kind of mark on his chest and Caroline is mother to two daughters and living with someone who’s not Stefan. What the what?
Little by little, more and more of this future was revealed through continual flash-forwards in subsequent episodes, and characters we never would have expected to end up together somehow emerged as romantic partners in the future. This “peek to the ending” approach offered extra intrigue to all of the present day storylines, effectively re-invigorating a show which drifted far from greatness and appeared repeatedly directionless in recent season.
The only downside in this example is that eventually the flash-forward sequences seemed more interesting than the present-day storylines. Luckily, the show has caught up to itself now and used its most recent episode to fully execute its time jump meaning everything is now happening in the three years from now timeline. We know how all the characters reached that point, and now we get to see how they handle the emotional wreckage of the three years of change.
Among the three, this is arguably the most effective because it was the most elaborate. SHIELD is just at the “mysterious imagery” stage while Arrow has barely returned to that grave in the future. Vampire Diaries, on the other hand, spend three-quarter of a season teasing this out, making sure to unleash yet another big reveal with each subsequent portion of the three-years-from-now period we glimpsed.
