A metaphor: do you remember the second “Jurassic Park” movie when the hunters banded together and captured a giant T-Rex from the island and brought it to San Diego? Well, it ran amok: it ate pets and knocked over cars and caused as much hysteria as it did stalking weaker dinosaurs and unlucky jeeps back in that ill-designed amusement park.

With “FlashForward,” ABC’s new drama/mystery/sci-fi adventure, you’re really dealing with the same animal as “LOST,” the network’s powerhouse five years running. Sure, “LOST” takes place on a beautiful island (Oahu, but not) and all of its characters look wonderful racing through the tropical foliage, and when you take similar disaster scenarios and bring them back to California (L.A. this time) it catches your attention pretty well.

The pilot introduces Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), an FBI agent who lives in a cookie-cutter house with a surgeon wife and cute daughter. After a three-week stakeout, Benford and his partner (John Cho, the Harold who loves White Castle) move in on a terrorist suspect when all of a sudden everyone on earth loses consciousness. They all collapse for exactly 137 seconds and when they wake up, buildings are on fire, people are gasping for help and all of a sudden, we have a plot.

As everyone soon discovers, it wasn’t a blackout but rather a glimpse into life six months in the future. Benford sees being hunted for digging too deeply into a case, his wife sees herself with another man and the stage is set for conflict as the absurdity of the flash-forward gradually becomes grounded in contextual clues.

At first glance, the supporting characters appear worthwhile and are endowed with interesting back stories: a recovering alcoholic sees a vision of his deceased veteran daughter, a doctor at the brink of suicide glimpses his long future, etc. But these characters, like the show itself, are more “LOST” throwbacks than original personas (think Michael and John Locke, respectively).

Not that I have a problem with that. “LOST” is on a six-month hiatus and even when it returns, it’s only for its concluding season. There must be someone up to the task of posing unanswerable questions, teasing at their answers and then pushing their revelation back to the season finale or later.

“FlashForward” seems to be the best candidate. The season preview at the end of the pilot even flaunts Dominic Monaghan, a.k.a. Charlie who was so cruelly taken from us in “LOST” season three, a.k.a. one of the hobbits from “The Lord of the Rings.”

By itself, “FlashForward” offers more intrigue than anything else in the fall prime time, which makes it a more than capable replacement for the looming void in ABC’s scheduling block. Their characters are familiar, but successfully so. Their motivations are apparent, but there’s still a lot of wiggle room for creative plot twists and philosophical contemplations on fate and time travel. It might be “LOST” lite, but, if you’re thirsty, you should still be watching it.

Catch “FlashForward” at 7p.m. on ABC on Thursday, or online.