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Ask the Oracle: Will FLASH FORWARD Be Like the Book? What’s Lucy Lawless Like in Real Life? Was the Minotaur a Species?

Posted on 30 August 2009

Tags: Ask the Oracle, Flash Forward, Greek mythology, Greek Myths, Lucy Lawless, Minotaur, Robert Sawyer

Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Q: I’m a big fan of the Robert Sawyer novel Flash Forward (about how the whole world has a vision of their futures at the same time). You say it’s becoming a TV series this fall on ABC, and I’m curious if the explanation for the “flash forward” phenomenon will be the same as in the book, and also how they’re going to keep the show going if they answer the central mystery at the end of the first season, as you said they promised. — Yogi, Albuquerque, NM

A: The Oracle cautions you that I was told by the producers that they’ll answer most of the questions raised in the pilot by the end of the first season — but not all of them, and not the central mystery behind the flash-forwards.

“The over-arcing sort of cause of why the blackout happened, that’s kind of like our background radiation mystery of the whole series,” says co-creator David S. Goyer.

Will the explanation be the same as in the book? Truthfully, I can’t imagine what other explanation there could be for it.

“We had an amazing time figuring out how to adapt it from the book,” says executive producer Jessika Borsiczky Goyer. “The book — the flash-forwards are 21 years into the future. We’ve adapted it to, obviously, about six months. We took some other liberties, came up with new characters.”

But if the flash-forward is now only six months ahead, what happens when the series catches up to the would-be future? A second flash-forward?

This is pure speculation, but I’m thinking yes — if only because otherwise the title doesn’t make sense any more. But — and again, this is just speculation, based on comments from the producers and my reading of the book — I predict that any future flash-forwards will be experienced by individuals, not the entire world.

Anyway, as important as the phenomenon itself is to the story, I wouldn’t get too caught up in that. As in the book, I think most of the episode-by-episode action will be on the level of human drama.

Q: What’s Lucy Lawless really like? – Andrew, Hartford, CT

Q: Your question is, no doubt, prompted by the fact that the Oracle recently interviewed the Xena star (since it was mostly about her new show Spartacus: Blood and Sand, most of the interview with run closer to its January air-date).

Lucy is beautiful — and looks remarkably fit and youthful for 41 — but it is a very approachable beauty, not like some celebrities I’ve interviewed who are so flawless, almost godlike, that it seems a little creepy.

But what struck me the most is how she is nothing like Xena. Of course I knew that that’s just a character she played, but on some level, I guess I thought it couldn’t be too far from who she really is.

Unlike Xena, Lucy is the opposite of serious. She is smart and quick and light and very irreverent. The best word I can use is impish, almost seeming to take delight in saying provocative or quirky things.

Granted, I only spent 20 minutes with her one-on-one, but I can absolutely see how she would love doing the comedy Xena episodes — the more outrageous the better. I can also see how she could (reportedly) frustrate a method actor like Renee O’Connor a little bit, because I suspect she’s very loose and casual in her approach to most things in life.

Which isn’t to say she isn’t an absolute pro at what she does, both on-screen and off. The Oracle was a total fan before meeting, and is even more so one now.

Q: Okay, I know the Minotaur had the body of a man and the head of a bull. But was there one Minotaur — or was it a species of creatures, like centaurs? — Abby, Halifax, Nova Scotia

A: Thanks to the magical and capricious nature of the Greek gods, it’s somewhat difficult for the Oracle to say.

The Minotaur was the offspring of King Minos of Crete, who angered the god Poseidon by refusing to sacrifice a beautiful snow-white bull in the god’s honor. In response, Poseidon enchanted Minos’ wife to fall in love with a different white bull. She had sex with it — if you must know, she was disguised as a cow at the time, hiding in an exquisitely constructed wood decoy — and the result was the Minotaur, who grew into a monster so horrible that, upon the advice of my own close personal friend, The Oracle at Delphi, was imprisoned in a vast labyrinth.

But was the Minotaur a separate species? Since the mating of a human and a bull cannot usually result in conception, magic was necessarily involved in the creature’s creation. Did the magic merely create a human with the head of a bull? Did it allow the creation of some kind of human/bull hybrid, like a mule? Or did it actually re-write the creature’s genetic code to create a separate species?

No Minotaur DNA remains to test — there aren’t even any ruins of the labyrinth itself (though there was an actual King Minos, and some say his Palace of Knossos was also the fabled labyrinth).

There aren’t even any clues from the myth itself. Had the Minotaur had a female paramour, we might have learned the answer. Had the two of them sired human off-spring, we would have known that, in fact, the Minotaur was essentially human. Had the couple been infertile, it would have meant the Minotaur was most likely a hybrid. And had the Minotaur’s tracked down a Minotaur wife — after all, Poseidon wasn’t the only capricious god! — and given birth to baby minotaurs (ouch!), it seems likely it would have been a separate species after all.

Alas, the Minotaur was killed by Theseus before he had a chance to reproduce.

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Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)