There's a whole lot of fast-forwarding and rewinding in the pilot episode of The Event, which aired last night, yanking the viewer from present to past, from now to then, from the nice young guy who's just trying to propose to his girlfriend to the same nice young guy a few months later, who's just trying to hijack a plane. Then there's Blair Underwood, aka President Elias Martinez: One minute -- in the past -- he's declaring in stentorian tones, "I am the president of the United States"; the next -- that would be in the present -- he's cowering in fear from the giant jet barreling right at him and his family.

Or was the runaway-plane part the prelude to the future, which is hinted at by Sophia, the beatific prisoner-detainee in a place that looks an awful lot like Gitmo -- except that it's in Alaska, not Cuba?

One gets whiplash.

With all this frantic back and forth between prologue and present, it's hard to tell if The Event, NBC's much-hyped answer to Lost, is any good. It is good at the setup, with the pilot episode serving as the hype man to the rest of the series, a P.T. Barnum enthusiastically showing us the goods in rings one, two and three.

In Ring No. 1, we've got the nice guy, Sean Walker (Jason Ritter), who's clearly the hero of the series, notwithstanding the whole terrorist-with-a-gun-on-a-plane bit. Back in the past, we learn that he's got a ring and he's planning to propose to his longtime girlfriend on a romantic cruise, but things keep happening -- like he has to save someone from drowning just as he's about to pop the question, and then the next time he tries, his girlfriend is too drunk, and, well, if you get the feeling that something's going to keep postponing this proposal for a long time, you would be right. The would-be fiancée disappears. Which may have something to do with Sean hijacking the plane that the missing girlfriend's pilot dad seems hell-bent on flying into the president.

In Ring No. 2, there's Martinez, billed in NBC's advertising as the "first Afro-Cuban president." (In the age of Obama, studio execs are apparently trying to up the ante.) We know he's Afro-Cuban rather than, say, a brother from Hawaii because they're playing salsa at his son's birthday party and he says, "Feliz cumpleaños, hijo," and because his sinister adviser tells him, just because "your family had it rough back in Cuba," he shouldn't "let them out."