Training Day Game on CTV.ca

Fans can play Training Day, a new Flashpoint video game on the CTV website. The game starts by allowing you to take a tour of the SRU facilities which is followed by a recruitment test. The test assesses your aptitude in the areas of memory, spatial awareness, reaction, and focus. Each exercise has a short set of instructions followed by a trial. Note that the recruitment test uses audio instructions, so you will need to set your speakers to a comfortable volume.

After passing the recruitment test, you can register an account with CTV or log in using Facebook Connect.

The Officer Records available in the Objectives menu include profiles of all the SRU team members. Weapons Training allows you to learn about the weapons used on the show through descriptive text and video demonstrations. Review all the weapons to pass.

In the first test for Sniper Training, you shoot 15 targets that randomly pop up in the field at a shooting range. Immediately following that, you must recall the icons displayed on the targets you shot. Next is the first round of selective targeting, where you must avoid shooting civilians. Again, this is followed by a quiz about the targets. Another round of selective targeting follows where you report suspicious targets.

In Tactical Training, you begin with a tactical review of various weapons and team members. When you're ready, you can start the tactical simulator. Choose the correct weapons and equipment for each team member and run the simulation to see the results.

In Negotiation Training, you begin by reviewing the stages of a successful negotiation and then proceed to a simulation to test what you've learned.

In Profile Training, you receive training on reading body language and interviewing skills. Again, a simulation tests what you've learned.

The first final test focuses on tactical and sniper training, the second on negotiation and profiling. The second test gives you the option to call in toll-free and use an access code. If you prefer not to call in, you can select the "don't call" option and take the test that way.

If you pass all the tests, you receive congratulations from Sam and Winnie. You also get promoted from Rookie to SRU Officer.


We definitely recommend trying out this game. It's challenging at times and gives some extra interactivity and background info for fans to enjoy.

Up Close & Comfortable with Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern

Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern can be seen in a new segment from CTV and TD Canada Trust called Up Close & Comfortable. During the short interview, the co-creators talk about what it's like to write for Flashpoint and how they approach season premieres and season finales differently from other episodes.

To watch the video, just visit the Up Close & Comfortable website and select Up Close with Flashpoint.

Flashbits from Banff!

The Banff World Television Festival was held from June 7-10th of this year! And among the many special guest speakers at the event were none other than the co-creators of Flashpoint, Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis. At the festival, they held a one our session talking about their craft, and answering such burning questions like:

What was their secret of breaking into the US market when so many others have tried before and failed?


How do you make a Canadian series airing worldwide not look like it was made in Canada?


How much influence does CTV and CBS have on creative decisions, such as direction and casting?

Their appearances and experiences with the show were written about in the press!

¤Before it all started, the New York Times talked with Mark and Stephanie, along with Anne Marie La Traverse (Producer), Bill Mustos (Producer), and Nina Tassler (President of CBS). They spoke of how the show came to be, how it doesn't look Canadian, and how the American entertainment industry has shifted to allow more international fare to be broadcast. Flashpoint was a pioneer in letting Canadian TV get on US airwaves!

¤Days after the festival, cartt.ca posted an article talking about how the show was shaped at the writing table - instead of having a show runner, all of the writers and freelancers collaborate as a team. However, we disagree with their comment about their lack of experience. Stephanie Morgenstern has acted on various TV shows and wrote for two critically acclaimed short films, Remembrance and Curtains. The former even has a movie in the works. Mark Ellis was also a writer on Remembrance. While this may not seem like a lot, the fact that these two productions won many awards speaks volumes that they had some pretty good skills to start with! Plus, the show spent four years in development (watch the W5 special for more). That's more than many shows on the air today can say!

¤Sometime after the festival , the Calgary Sun posted an article wherein Mark and Stephanie talked about some of the challenges to stay true to Canada within the episodes, despite limitations put on by CBS.

Flashpoint Ratings: Friday April 3rd, 2008

Hey Moonies - did anyone catch tonight's episode? Compared to last week's ("Aisle 13"), I thought it returned back to its old glory. I wasn't a fan of last week's episode, and it will probably top my list of worst episodes of Flashpoint - of which there is only one more on that list, "Backwards Day". I wasn't entirely convinced by Kristin Booth's performance. Tonight's episode, "The Perfect Family" had one of the saddest twists in the entire series, and in another twist, Donna (the team's newest member) chickens out when she is told to shoot. Not spoiling anymore, west coasters please watch this when it airs! Tonight's Dollhouse was the first good episode of the series' entire run so far. Perhaps because this episode's writer is the only writer so far to have written two episodes (every episode has had a different writer). There are only 3 episodes left, and two others which were made and will probably never come to air. It's our opinion, along with many other critics that the show will be canceled, and Flashpoint will likely be given a green light for another season. Variety is also calling that the show will survive another season since it is a co-production and cheaper for the network.

Last week's ratings weren't stellar, but they were still great enough to earn the top spot in its timeslot, and helped CBS win the night in the US, even though there were no winners since no show last week cracked a 2.0/6 rating with the 18-49 demo. The show scored 8.64 million viewers, and a 1.8/6. In Canada, the show was the 12th most watched show of the week, scoring 1.346 million viewers. Flashpoint was also a good luck charm for CTV's premiere of Spectacle: Elvis Costello With... which scored 861,000 viewers. Season 2 is expected to film throughout the summer until August 4th. Click here to read a fan's experience on the set, and among other spoilers, it appears a future episode will deal with high school bullying.

Flashpoint DVD Boxset Out in Two Weeks, Brits!

As we reported earlier, Flashpoint is being released on DVD in the UK - and based on the details given on Amazon UK, we don't think there are going to be any extras - at 520 minutes it looks like it's going to be an episodes-only release. We really love the cover though - especially the slogan "Who's got your back?" The slogan we usually see here in North America is "What would you do" in the CBS promos. To our readers in the UK - we would love to hear confirmation from you if there are any extras included on the DVD! Don't hesitate to send us an email! Pending announcements from CTV and/or CBS about a DVD release in North America, we may purchase a copy in May (these days, being an Otaku almost forces you to have a region-free DVD player because Japanese releases come with more bang for your buck). Some of us on staff are still "old school" and like watching our tv shows on a tv screen rather than our computers or (in some cases) non-existent portable media devices. Alas, CTV seems to have posted the wrong episode description this week on their site. The episode this week will be Aisle 13, which tells the story of a teenage boy who is sad over his best friend moving far away, because of financial difficulties. So, he decides to rob a local food store to give their family some money so they can stay here, but it all goes awry and he takes several people hostage. And for those of you wondering what it's like to write for Flashpoint, we found an old interview from almost a year ago!

Flashpoint News And Ratings!

So, today I found out that what I had read elsewhere was wrong, and that new episodes of Stephanie Morgenstern (Sailor Venus #1) and her husband Mark Ellis' Flashpoint begin tomorrow :O. Please tune in everyone! I thought I would have had another week to finish up the summaries, but I guess I'm going to fall behind. Sorry to you all! Tomorrow's episode is entitled Business As Usual, and is a plot that reflects these times that we are currently in. Three men take the CEO of a mortgage company hostage , and the SRU reluctantly looks for a replacement for Jules as she is still in the hospital recovering from her wounds in the last episode of Season 1. We're really looking forward to seeing this episode! And we can also bring you some behind the scenes information! This episode was shot last month at Toronto's MaRS Collaboration Centre, more specifically, its auditorium which had to undergo a quickie transformation into a stock exchange. Fans can click here to read the blog entry on MaRS's site, and here to check out some photos of the set!

And before we hit the ratings, we bet all our worldwide fans of Flashpoint just got a little more jealous of the UK! While Canada has the episodes available on iTunes, the UK will be the first market to have the show on DVD! Even we are a little confused by this , wondering why a North American show isn't getting a DVD release first on it's shores! It is currently listed on Amazon UK for around $35 USD, and ITV has posted a very tiny image of what we believe is the DVD cover. And we really love the way the SRU looks with the glittering blue skyscape of Toronto behind them. We can't wait to see this one on North American shelves!

Flashpoint Ratings:

The show, despite it's competition, held its ratings pretty steady. New episodes aired on January 9th, 16th, and 23rd, and February 13th. In between, repeats were shown, and they still pulled in significant ratings. On the 9th, Eagle Two aired, and scored 10.06 million viewers in the US, and a 2.2/6 rating with viewers between the ages of 18-49, winning it's timeslot and CBS the night. In Canada, the show scored 1.269 viewers, and was the 13th most watched show that week. On the 16th, Backwards Day aired, and scored 10.53 million viewers, and a 2.4/7 rating with 18-49ers, again winning its timeslot and CBS the night. In Canada, the show scored 1.741 million viewers, and was the 7th most popular show that week! On the 23rd, Haunting the Barn aired, and scored 10.21 million viewers in the US, and it's 18-49ers rating unchanged from the previous week (2.4/7). Once again, it won its timeslot and CBS the night! In Canada, the show scored 1.279 million viewers, and was the 16th most watched show that week. In the weeks in between, in Canada, the show managed to hold it's viewers over a million, and in the United States over 8 million, as reruns aired. On the 13th, Between Heartbeats aired, scoring 8.7 million viewers in the US, making it the top of the ratings by numbers, however it scored a 1.8/6 with the 18-49ers. That score put the show behind Fox's Dollhouse which had less viewers, but scored a 2.0/6 for the same demographic. Last week, Dollhouse tied with a rerun of Flashpoint at 1.7/5, but only had about half as many viewers. I have a feeling that the viewer gap between the two shows will become larger this week as last week's episode was so terribly convoluted. It left me more confused than the first episode, and I don't believe Dollhouse is as big a threat to Flashpoint as I feared. Don't get me wrong - as many Sailor Moon fans are fans of Joss Whedon's work, this one sure isn't winning any of us over. We'll have to see what tomorrow holds, however. We really loved the last four episodes of Flashpoint, and we hope the same quality carries the show through the second season! However, the ratings are taking a pretty steep dive in Canada, so those of us canuck otaku who are freezing in the Great White North, please turn your TV sets to Flashpoint tomorrow okay?

BIG BIG Flashpoint Roundup!

☃ ☾ Hey Lunarians! ☽ Expect updates to be sporadic for the next couple weeks, it's getting very busy behind the scenes! But we just had to update you all on Stephanie Morgenstern ♀ (Sailor Venus #1) ♀ and Mark Ellis' Flashpoint! Tangentially, I have discovered new ASCII codes and am having way too much fun with them tonight... you may want to increase your browser's text size to see full detail! ☃

BREAKING NEWS: Flashpoint Returns Much Earlier Than We Expected!

Many industry insiders since we wrote our last article had predicted that Flashpoint would return sometime in February occupying the slot once held by the now canceled The Ex-List (of which the latter we predicted not too long ago). Today, CBS announced that it would return on January 9th, on Fridays at 9 P.M. in that timeslot that we had predicted! Venusians will just have to wait until a little after Christmas to catch the new episodes. As of this writing, CTV has not announced an airdate, however we would not be surprised if a press release from CTV ended up in our inbox tomorrow morning. We predict that they will air it at the same time (yay for "Reverse Simulcast"!) We here behind the scenes have managed to see the unaired episodes and we loved them so much that we are going to tune in when they air on television - and we encourage all our readers to do the same and to please support the show just the same as you did this past Summer and Fall! We really love these next episodes - and we'll tease you a little bit. Ed Lane grips with balancing his work, old ghosts, and family life, OMG THERE ARE BOMBS COMING AND YOU GET TO SEE SPIKE WORK, and umm... Sam and Jules. Not saying any more about those two! Tune in to find out more! A VA will appear on the show in one of these episodes - Robert Bockstael (Prince Diamond from the R-Season). Stephanie also makes a brief appearance as well. We look forward to seeing more of these stories come to life, and hopefully more VAs appearing on the show! We've got our fingers crossed in the hopes that Terri Hawkes (Sailor Moon #2) might appear somewhere on the show.

A Spoiler and a Flashbit!

We ran across a couple items in the news in the past week!

☀ Series Writer and Co-executive Producer Tassie Cameron remarked at a recent conference, "Basically, they asked us to make 13 pilots." This explains why the cops on the show didn't have many arcs that carried on from episode to episode. There was a short bit with Greg Parker and his son, the last few episodes get heavy dealing with Ed Lane and his family, and Sam and Jules get a little more involved towards the end of the season. It seems that this season , there is going to be a lot more with the characters and their continuity beyond the length they had in the first season. We learned of a casting call for a female actress! The role of Donna Hewson calls for a character who "is a 'triple A' Alpha female -- strong, outspoken, funny, compelling, complicated." "In her first episode, we see this tornado of a woman blowing past most of her male competition -- nailing every physical, shooting and combat test, impressing Ed and the rest of the team in an intense recruitment drive." She will appear in the first 4-6 episodes of the season, and we are guessing this is to accommodate Amy Jo Johnson's maternity leave (and we haven't heard if she has had the baby yet, Power Ranger fans). We're excited to see where this goes this coming February! Again, we will not post our new episodessummaries until they air on North American televisions.

☀ And one of the most completely random articles we caught on our radar has to do with the supplier of the training and the non-lethal weapons used on the set! Lamperd Less Lethal, a company specializing in less-lethal weaponry announced a few days ago that they once again had an agreement providing training and less lethal weapons to Flashpoint Season 2! Jim Bremner is serving as a consultant on the show, and he has posted a few pics behind the scenes of Flashpoint along with some testimonials from the cast!

Quickie Flashpoint News

For anyone who wants more background on Flashpoint, it seems etalk is probably going to be doing a few special behind the scenes spots this week and next week. We encourage all our readers to watch the show - you may even see Stephanie Morgenstern (Sailor Venus #1)!