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...Makes you stronger.

We've all heard that saying at one point in our lives, but have you ever stopped to actually think that it could be true. What if every decision you've ever made in your life, everything from what color underwear to wear or weather or not to go skydiving, were still being played out in different dimensions simultaneously.  Now, what if every life or death situation you've made plays out and has you either living or dying. What if every time one of those decisions you made that caused you to live in your current consciousness actually caused half of your other dimensional selves to die. Now what if all of those different dimensional beings of yourself were connected in some "higher" way. If you consider that they are all connected by some other worldly means, then when any one of those consciousnesses dies in another dimension, it should in turn make those still existing, that much stronger. The energy within each one of those beings cannot just disappear as we know from science class energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely transferred. So with that in mind, it would only make sense that the energy from the dying consciousness would be transferred into the remaining living beings therefore making each one of us just a little bit stronger, thus making the saying "Whatever doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger" actually true.

Now with the above in mind I believe I've figured out what ABC's new TV show, Flash Forward, is touching upon. If you haven't seen the show it revolves around an incident that caused the entire world to black out for ~2 minutes and while everyone was blacked out they had a vision of a future date, April 29th, 2010. Some people saw normal things, but our story revolves around the FBI agents and their families who saw some not so normal things and in one agent's case, nothing at all. So the basic premise behind the show is trying to use those future visions to figure out why the blackouts happened and if they could happen again.

The show reminds me a little bit of ABC's other show, LOST, in that it's trying to base science fiction theories in a reality based world. In other words the things that happen are pretty far fetched, but the way the show grounds things in a realistic world makes it seem as if these things could actually happen. So back to my theory regarding what is happening in the world of FlashForward. In the most recent episode, which is also the last episode before the winter hiatus, the people who believe they are responsible for the blackout come forward and explain that they were doing a science experiment that may be related to the cause, but they aren't 100% sure. It's this scientist, Lloyd Simcoe,  that has confided in the main character's wife, Olivia Benford, causing a lot of stress to everyone involved because in her Flash Forward she saw herself with this scientist guy and not her current husband, Mark. Based on this little notion and a theory that Lloyd told to Olivia about different universes and dimensions existing in the same plane (as I touched on in the first paragraph), I think I've figured out what is going on in the show.

While Lloyd is getting ready to transfer his son to another hospital he is talking to Olivia and the topic of Harvard comes up. Apparently Lloyd did his studies there in 1998, when he mentioned the corner that he lived on when going to school Olivia immediately knew where it was. It seems as though in 1998 Olivia was supposed to finish her schooling at Harvard and move into an apartment on the same corner, but when Mark got transferred she followed him instead. Now the weird thing is that, that apartment that Olivia was supposed to move into was the apartment where Lloyds wife moved into and it's how they first met. So Olivia mentions that had she gone to Harvard, the two probably would have met long before the incident that killed Lloyds wife and put his son in the hospital (the blackout). So with that in mind, Olivia's flash forward showed her looking over the railing over her home at Lloyd sitting on the couch below, leaning towards the fact that she leaves Mark and some how ends up with Lloyd in 6 months.

On the other side of the story Mark is a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for years and wouldn't dream of touching the stuff again as it almost destroyed his marriage, however in his flash forward he was in his office working on Mosaic (the investigation into the blackout) and he's drunk. His partner, Demetri, doesn't have a flash forward thus indicating that he is going to be dead before April 29th. Demetri's fiance see's his funeral and so forth. Everyone has a flash forward to April 29, 2010 that they think is their future, but what if it's not.

Another agent working at the FBI saw his future, he saw himself in London working on another case. He also saw himself getting a phone call saying that someone had died, but he wasn't sure who at the time. After figuring out who was going to die because of his future actions he decided he couldn't let things play out that way and wanted to show the world that you can change the future, so he committed suicide way before April 29th, 2010.

All of these things lead me to believe that what the people saw in their flash forwards weren't necessarily their future, but another dimension playing out in their head. Almost as if the energy created which caused the blackout was so strong that it caused 2 different dimensions to cross over for a brief period allowing for the current characters to get a glimpse into another dimension where their lives are playing out differently based on the decisions they've made. This would explain why the one agent was able to commit suicide and "change" his future, what he actually saw wasn't "his" future, but another future in a different dimension. And going back to Mark, Olivia and Lloyd, maybe what Olivia and Lloyd saw was their alternate dimension, a dimension where she did go to Harvard and ended up meeting Lloyd and getting married.

Now I know it's not a fool proof conclusion, there are some oddities that can't be explained by my theory above. For example, Lloyd has a son and Olivia and Mark have a daughter, in the kids' flash forwards they see each other, but it seems as if they don't know each other that well as Mark and Olivia's daughter tells Lloyd's son something along the lines of "it's your house too" when he goes to look for a cookie, meaning he can take whatever he wants in the house as he lives there too.  So the alternate dimension thing doesn't really hold up that well if those 2 kids aren't brother and sister and haven't been living together for a while.... but I still think that general idea has something to do with the overall background of the story.

Does anyone else watch this show and have any theories about what's going on with the blackouts and the flash forwards?