‘La Brea’: RUN AWAY FROM THIS TAR PIT

by Therese Odell, posted in la brea

La Brea
“Day Two”
October 5, 2021

Last we left the unlucky folks who fell into a glowing green time warp, Eve, Dr. Sam, and Ty were being menaced by a terribly rendered CGI saber-toothed tiger while collecting medical supplies for Eve’s son who was chomped on by a terribly rendered CGI direwolf. The CGI saber-toothed tiger lunges at our heroes, Ty uses Chekhov’s gun to shoot wildly at it a few times, missing terribly … until he doesn’t. (Quick question: Why wasn’t the Navy Seal put in charge of the gun again?)

But apparently, saber-toothed tigers, at least CGI ones, hunt in packs, and soon they are being harassed by a second CGI saber-toothed tiger.

Running away from the CGI tiger, running away from the CGI tiger, running away from the CGI tiger.

Eventually, the trio takes shelter against a cliff wall where Ty wheezes dramatically so that we all know that he has some sort of medical condition. But they can’t sit there all day night, so they take their chances and begin trying to make their way back to camp again, only to have CGI saber-tooth tiger leap out at them from the bushes. This ends with Dr. Sam comically falling off the side of a cliff.

As for the CGI saber-toothed tiger, it chases Eve and Ty a bit until it falls into a hunting trap filled with spikes, and Eve and Ty are all, “OMG, SOMEONE MADE THAT AND IT PROBABLY WASN’T ONE OF US.”

Also, Eve quickly realizes that Dr. Sam has the backpack with all the medical supplies in it, so even if they wanted to leave him behind to be eaten by CGI saber-toothed tigers, they can’t. So she and Ty wander around in the dark looking for him.

Eventually, they find Dr. Sam who is not only alive — somehow — but also has not been paralyzed by his fall directly onto his back from 75 feet above.

Eve and Ty help him up and they begin hobbling their way back to camp until they have to stop because Dr. Sam is so ouchy and Ty’s … whatever he has … is acting up. After about 30 seconds of the men insisting that Eve take the medical supplies and leave them behind, she does just that. Hope there aren’t more saber-toothed tigers out there, boys!

Eve returns to camp to find that Josh’s wound is pretty badly infected. She injects him with antibiotics and apparently stitches him up. Meanwhile, Riley is like, “Hey, wait, where’s my dad?”

And now Riley’s all pissed that Eve left Dr. Sam behind, and Eve, for some reason, doesn’t point out that 1. her son was dying of an infection and time was of the essence and 2. she left Dr. Navy Seal with another dude with a gun, so maybe Riley should just calm the fuck down already.

Out in the woods, Dr. Sam notes that Ty is clearly sick with something, but before Ty can share his mystery condition, a dude emerges from the woods, and is all, “What’s up?”

In the B plot, Lady Cop discovers the car trunk full of heroin and makes an “OH NO” face. She then begins asking anyone and everyone if they’ve seen a guy in a green jacket and black hoodie, but everyone is like, “Nope, not ringing any bells.”

So, remember the dude who was actually eaten by the CGI direwolf? He wasn’t with his wife and daughter, like I assumed, but instead with his two daughters, and they’re SUPER BUMMED about dad being eaten by a poorly-rendered prehistoric CGI wolf. The older daughter is making a grave marker for him when Lady Cop approaches to ask if they’ve seen Green Jacket, but Older Sister is like, “NOPE. And don’t bother asking Younger Sister, Lilly, she doesn’t talk.” Older Sister then asks Lady Cop to watch Lilly for her while she goes to bury her father, and Lady Cop is like, “UGH. FINE, WHATEVER.”

Older Daughter then asks Scott if she can use his shovel … that he has … for some reason. He reveals that he knows a lot about CGI dire wolves … because he’s an anthropology student (???), and soon he’s helping her look for her father’s body.

(Do … do the writers know what anthropologists study?)

 

They find a trail of blood and maybe some footprints, and Scott offers her his weed vape, but Older Daughter’s like, “GET BEHIND ME, SATAN!”

At one point, Scott spies a herd of maybe-not-CGI prehistoric camels stupidly galloping headlong towards a tar pit into which they intend to fling themselves. Scott scares them away and then exposits to Older Daughter that he just saved the camels’ lives.

Older Daughter, however, has bigger things on her mind than a bunch of prehistoric camels and soon finds her father’s body. And strangely, it’s in the center of a rock formation that looks like that claw symbol on the rock and on the back of that Other’s pelt. OoooOooOooWeeeeOoooo MYSTERY!

Sobbing, Older Daughter buries her father’s body while Scott makes nervous noises nearby.

Meanwhile, back at camp, Lady Cop — whose name is Marybeth, apparently — dumps Lily on the gay couple, Tony and Billy, as soon as she can. Tony offers Lilly his phone onto which he’s loaded some YouTube videos. Lilly accepts the phone very suspiciously.

Older Daughter, whose name we have not yet learned (I don’t think?) is Veronica, she returns to find her younger sister watching videos and looks shocked, SHOCKED!

Veronica hands the phone back to Tony, explaining that they don’t watch videos in their home, and hustles Lilly away. Alone with Lilly, Veronica reminds her sister that “people won’t understand them,” to which Lilly responds, “I know,” because … SHE CAN TALK!

As for Scott, he returns and tells Riley about the eight maybe-not-CGI camels he saved and explains that scientists recently excavated the bones of eight camels from the La Brea tar pits. After they carbon-dated the bones, they discovered that they were 10,000 years old. Scott then explains that he thinks that’s where they are: Los Angeles, 10,000 years ago. Which he knows because, again, he’s an anthropology student.

 

But Riley is still worrying about her dad, so she doesn’t really give a shit about Scott’s stoner theories.

BUT I DO, BECAUSE LET ME JUST PAUSE RIGHT HERE TO SAY IF THIS IS GOING DOWN SOME GOD DAMNED BUTTERFLY EFFECT PATH, THE “OH NO, THE TIMELINE WAS CHANGED BECAUSE OF THESE EIGHT PREHISTORIC CAMELS BEING SAVED BY A STONER TIME TRAVELER,” BULLSHIT STORYLINE, I’M GOING TO BURN EVERYTHING DOWN.

I swear, I’ll do it.

Then Dr. Sam, Ty, and Mystery Guy who happens to be wearing a green jacket and black hoodie emerge from the woods, and Riley and Dr. Sam have a big emotional reunion that was not at all earned.

As for Green Jacket, he’s immediately confronted by Lady Cop Marybeth who informs him that someone gave her a tip that he would be in Los Angeles doing a deal. He hisses at her to stay away from him, and then Lady Cop reveals to Tony that he is, in fact, the guy she was looking for, and that he’s her son.

Then they load Dr. Sam into the hospital bus and Josh reveals he’s feeling a lot better, which is surprising because I thought for sure they were going to kill off the teenage son and the only doctor on the show in the first two episodes.

… And then there’s our C plot.

We begin with a flashback to the day Dad crashed his plane in the desert and began having his visions. In the hospital not looking in the least bit worse for wear, and certainly not like he had been in a PLANE CRASH, Gavin explains to Eve that right before he crashed, he saw flashes, and it felt like he was being hit in the head with a hammer. He couldn’t focus and lost control of the jet, crashing it. As for the flashes: they were incredibly realistic visions of the wilderness. When he asked his doctor about it, they claimed it was a result of his concussion from the crash — the problem is, he had the visions before the crash, soooo????

In the present, Gavin watches an interview with a UCLA professor who is like, “Yeah, those were definitely prehistoric birds who flew out of the sinkhole and that’s TOTALLY WEIRD AND WE SHOULD PROBABLY ALL BE WEIRDED OUT ABOUT IT.” Daughter Izzy enters, and Gavin insists to her that he is still having these visions of her mom and brother and that they are alive … somewhere. He just needs to convince the Department of Homeland Security to take him and his insanity seriously and send in a rescue mission.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Nathan can’t convince Washington D.C. to authorize a mission to see where the glowing green light goes, not until she has “something concrete” to go on. Because a giant sinkhole that takes out a square mile of the second-largest city in the country and thousands of people with it — which is the SECOND of such events to take place in the United States — is nothing for the government to get too worked up about.

Then someone hands her Gavin’s military file, and I’m not going to scream, I promise. But look at this:

Can you guess what’s wrong with this picture?

So, Gavin here was in the Air Force when this picture was supposed to have been taken. I’m an Air Force brat and I am here to tell you: they do not allow beards. Now, unless Gavin is a Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or Rastafarian, there is no way in hell he’d be allowed to have this facial hair no matter how long he served because the Air Force doesn’t think beards are cute.

Meanwhile, Gavin has A Plan: he and Izzy go to UCLA, happen to find the Bird Professor, explain to him that their family fell into the sinkhole and they think they are in prehistoric times, and ask him to carbon date Eve’s wedding ring to “prove” that she traveled through time. And Bird Professor is like, “Sure, why not?” DESPITE THE FACT THAT YOU CAN NOT CARBON DATE METAL BECAUSE IT IS INORGANIC AND HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A BIRD PROFESSOR WHO SHOULD KNOW THAT. WERE THE WRITERS JUST TOO BUSY RIPPING LOST OFF TO GOOGLE WHAT CARBON DATING IS?

And then government goons grab Gavin and throw him into an SUV and take him to Dr. Nathan and Agent Guy. They give him Eve’s wedding ring which they stole from Bird Professor and confirm that he’s right: it carbon-dated back 10,000 years.

NO, IT DID NOT.

~long exasperated scream~

Gavin is all, “I knew it!” before explaining that he is seeing his family in his visions, and that’s how he knew how to find the ring. Dr. Nathan is like, “Yeah, we think your visions have something to do with your crash in the Mojave desert because there was a sinkhole there, too.”

They then take Gavin to a hanger where they show him a plane prototype that had been developed over the past year that is “designed to fly into the sinkhole.”

And they finally have the go-ahead from Washington to do so thanks to him. They’re going to go into the sinkhole, and he’s going to help them do so.

I am not going to be suckered into spending too much of my energy or time thinking and writing about this VERY DUMB SHOW, but ohmygod it is so dumb. And lazy! So lazy!

This week in their attempt to rip off Lost verbatim, the show chose to move away from recreating Lost shot-for-shot, and instead focus more on stealing the characters and their backstories.

For instance, we have:

The dangerous (?) criminal who might be on the run from the law, only to be trapped in this strange place with the very person who has been chasing them across the country:

The pair of characters who think of themselves as outsiders and appear to not be able to speak to the rest of the group — EXCEPT ONE OF THEM ACTUALLY CAN:

And they also are siblings who may not be all that they appear to be:

There’s the guy with the mysterious health ailment:

Oh, and there’s also the guy who seems to be receiving visions from whatever this mysterious force is:

And we’re just getting started with the backstories, so who knows how many other Lost characters and storylines will be stripped for parts. You know, aside from the plots already mentioned, like the survivors being chased around by creatures that logically shouldn’t be there; the whole “others” thing; and the entire mystery being tied up with some sort of time wonkiness.

Aside from all that, this is a very novel and inventive show.

 This show is bad and dumb and lazy and I remain furious with all of you.

La Brea airs on NBC on Tuesdays at 8/9 p.m. It’s going to be the death of me.

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