What would have happened in the second season of FlashForward?

Question

FlashForward was cancelled after the first season, though it ended on a cliffhanger. Is there any reliable information on what would have happened if it had returned for a second season?

Answer 1

I found a really interesting interview with the British actor who played the blond bad guy Hallenger in a few episodes. Here’s some comments he made after the show got cancelled: http://www.digitalspy.ca/british-tv/s56/flashforward/tubetalk/a316491/qa-a-chat-with-neil-jackson.html --

We've got to talk about FlashForward -lots of people were upset when that was canceled. How did you feel?

"I was pretty upset. I had a long chat with [David Goyer, the creator of the show], as we were coming to the end, talking about who was my character and what was he about. They were very cloak and dagger at the beginning about giving me information -they couldn't tell me who he was or where he came from. I wasn't allowed any backstory on the character, which was difficult, trying to create the character when you know nothing about them.”

“But the plan for the second season was we find out the reason that my character had been causing these blackouts was to cull large numbers of the population, because he'd had so many FlashForwards himself he'd ended up seeing the future. The world within the next 250 years, looking at all the statistics, is going to become way too overpopulated for our natural resources. Famine, pestilence, drought -all these things will become commonplace. So as a humanitarian he wanted to indiscriminately kill lots of members of the population to try to bring the human population down. He was actually in his own warped way a good guy for humanity, which was a fascinating way to go with the second season and would have made my character one of the main characters and would be a really interesting, nefarious story. But it didn't happen, unfortunately!"

Answer 2

Flashforward Showrunner Mark Gugenheim revealed how the show would have ended in this interview:

Basically, the bad guys of the series had experienced so many flashforwards that they had foreseen a global calamity, so they invented a way to "leapfrog" human consciousness to the future, so that humans wouldn't experience the calamity. Our heroes would have killed the bad guys, and then realized that the bad guys' plan was the only way to save the human race, and they would ultimately end up implementing the bad guys' plans

The author of the original novel, Robert J Sawyer, made a pitch for Season 2 that basically said the same thing:

Here's the proposed backstory and ultimate quest: The goal of the ‘bad guys’ we met in season one (Flosso's employers) was to find a way to jump the consciousness of the human race PAST the total global shutdown, reanimating everyone; they're out to save humanity (including themselves, as a subset of that humanity -- they're not altruists).

THIS could be the resonance for Charlie's ‘No More Good Days’ line -- she, and Flosso's employers, had seen that NO MATTER WHICH one of the many worlds that might exist comes to pass, in ALL OF THEM humanity is dead; no matter how you slice the future, there are no more good days -- unless our people find a way to leapfrog consciousness ahead, resurrecting the human race.

And thus, in our first-season finale, we see that Charlie is in fact quoting something she heard Lloyd say on April 29, 2010: in all the many worlds yet to come that branch off of THIS now, humanity is dead. Lloyd, in looking at the formula Dylan has written in lipstick on the mirror, realizes that a consequence of it is that a synchronized multi-accelerator event like Flosso's people are planning will not displace consciousness; it will destroy it.

Answer 3

No.

But as Egon pointed out in the comments to the question, there is a book: Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer, the novel that inspired the series.

The book is not a direct parallel of the series, and it is somewhat more grounded.

Answer 4

Robert Sawyer recently wrote about this topic on his Facebook page:

Why are the bad guys so desperate to perfect the replicating of flashforwards? Answer: they got TOO greedy, with disastrous consequences. They've been orchestrating miniature isolated flashforwards for years now (since 1991) in hopes, as I said in a previous memo, of gaining financial information from the future.

But they've also seen that the next flashforward (the one that will occur at the end of season one) will cause not just a global blackout (that is, not just a shutting down of the conscious part of the brain, leaving the autonomic part -- controlling heartbeat, breathing, etc. -- operating) but a TOTAL global brain-function shutdown: all seven billion people will die; their conscious, unconscious, and autonomic functioning stopping.

THAT could be our killer end-of-season-one moment: everyone (except for Simon and a few others wearing the QED rings) looking out at the Los Angeles landscape littered with collapsed bodies, and this dialog:

SIMON: "Another blackout. How long till they wake up this time?"

McDOW: "They don't. They're not unconscious. They're dead. All seven billion of them."

Off Simon to the end credits -- and onward to Season Two!

From there, you've got a great springboard for what could truly be the new LOST:

• a handful of characters who didn't die (those wearing the QED rings, plus, if we want, others who were protected some other way);

• disaster on a gigantic scale -- the entire world shut down, and no hope of food or electricity production, etc., coming back online, because there just aren't any people left operate the equipment, forcing our characters to fight to survive.

In other words, it's a story about a small band of characters struggling to survive without modern comforts -- just like LOST.