Hey Eventeers, the few, the snarky, the morbidly curious. Joshua here, back to walk you through the not-terribly-interesting fall finale. Thanks so much to Simon Abrams for the terrific write-up of last week’s episode, a review I agreed with in its entirety. I couldn’t cover “Your World to Take” because I was on a vacation—on a cruise of all things. For once, I was really glad I watched this show. I was on the beach in Grand Cayman, and this guy runs up to me in a frenzy. “Please help me,” he says, “my niece lost one of her water wings, and she’s drowning!” I was all “Yeah, right, buddy. You think you’re about to plummet me into your perilous global conspiracy, don’t you? Well, you’ve got the wrong guy. Just because I’m cute doesn’t mean I’m naïve.” Aw man, if you guys could have seen his face.
Anyway, this is a make-or-break episode for The Event, as its ratings have gone from good to middling to Emily’s Reasons Why Not, and it’s now facing a massive hiatus (it returns Feb. 28th) that will finish whittling away what little momentum it had left. It’s conceivable, though unlikely, that a deft cliffhanger could stem the bleeding. Unfortunately, cliffhangers are among the things The Event does worst. In fact, I shudder just thinking about some of the depths of stupidity we’ve plumbed in the final moments of these episodes. The Leila escape fakeout, Dempsey’s morphing face, the old-lady children. These are not the sorts of reveals that whet your appetite enough to bring you back after a week’s break, let alone three months.
Even if I’d watched all 10 episodes of The Event and been moderately entertained, if occasionally a little annoyed with them, I don’t think I’d be clamoring for the show’s return after this cliffhanger. Mostly because time after time, some pivotal tonal moment is being hung on Sean and Leila, who I haven’t cared about since, what, episode two maybe? Granted, it was a pretty major reveal that Leila’s father is One of Them, which would make Leila and Sam Halves of Them. But the way it was executed was so protracted and sloppy. Instead of having the realization come from having found Abby’s father’s file, we had to endure minutes of build-up to what was already so obvious. But even executing it in a less bludgeony way wouldn’t change the fact that I just don’t care much about these people at this point. That kind of a reveal is only exhilarating if the person being revealed is someone we’ve gotten intimately familiar with or at least a character we’ve thought about when he isn’t on screen. In the case of Leila and Michael, I can’t get terribly excited about this revelation.
Not to mention, the path to Willow Brook was pretty painful. In order to get on board with it, we’d have to accept that, in mental facilities, lists of patients and the medications they’re on are readily available to anyone with the temerity to tip-toe into a slightly darkened but totally unsecured area. It also made no sense that Sean could just walk around using the young-then-old henchman’s RFID card which continued to work just fine, despite Dempsey’s knowledge that he’d been compromised. It’s too hard for Dempsey and Co. to deactivate a card? At the very least, you’d think they would use the points the card is being used to access to track and get the drop on Sean and Leila, considering the lengths to which they went to nab Leila.
As usual, there was much more interesting stuff going on within the Martinez administration, though I wasn’t clear that I understood it all. Mainly, I didn’t understand why Martinez would feel so threatened by Jarvis’ threat. Martinez is the only one who felt strongly about releasing Sophia and her people, despite how potentially damaging it could be politically. Suddenly, the threat of bad press and some Congressional heat and Martinez is running scared. It didn’t work for me, and neither did his military threats to the ambassador. It’s a tricky thing to portray a president as noble without making him a milquetoast, and they haven’t managed to do it here. I simply didn’t believe Martinez was capable of attacking anyone, and that’s a problem.
But we did get a fairly tense moment out of it as Thomas’ missile launched. Much like the final reveal, this story was paced for the lowest common denominator. Despite how obvious it was that the Heteros were responsible for the missile, everyone scurried around as though the show was trying to convince us that just maybe it was some random terrorist group. Still, it was a rare moment of suspense when the missile launched and flew up into the outer atmosphere to fire a message at the Heteros' home planet. That would have been the moment to end on, had it been my decision to make.
Stray observations:
- The elaborate ceremony of the let-bygones-be-bygones tea had a spiritual air about it, which lends to Simon’s BSG comparisons.
- I’m curious to see what they’ve got planned for the Kathleen Quinlan character.
- Was I the only one kind of upset on the behalf of Carolyn Jones, the helpless mental patient being used as a pawn by Sean and Leila?
- When Abby’s dad was telling Leila to leave the mystery alone, I could help but laugh, thinking of Fred Gwynne’s ominously intriguing character Jud Crandall in Pet Sematary.