La Brea
“Sierra”
January 9, 2024
Last we left this terrible show, our heroine, Eve, had been sucked into a time portal to go God Knows When, leaving her family behind to deal with a new threat: dinosaurs. In reality, while her fellow actors were being menaced in Australia by tennis balls on sticks pretending to be dinosaurs, the actress who plays Eve, Natalie Zea, was comfortably ensconced in present-day Los Angeles (possibly Chicago filming Justified: City Primeval), not worrying one bit about time travel paradoxes and T-Rexes.
Which is why when season three opens with a Gavin flashback to a happy day with the family in Los Angeles with Eve making breakfast, this is all we see of her:
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT THIS SHOW COULDN’T BE ANY CHEAPER OR MORE UNINTENTIONALLY HILARIOUS
It’s only six episodes, but … y’all… I’m not sure I’m going to make it.
Right. So. The dinosaurs have fallen through the portals thanks to a cave time machine malfunction, and they are creating havoc. As a result, Lucas, who improbably has been elected the leader of the community over a doctor and former Navy SEAL, has a plan to protect the clearing: spikes and fires. He also reveals that Veronica is 6 minutes pregnant with his baby and everyone cheers, hooray.
Later, Veronica and Lucas are just … wandering around in the woods, as one does when the woods is filled with saber-toothed tigers, giant toxic ground-dwelling yellowjackets, cave bears, wooly mammoths, and now T-Rexes, especially when one of you is pregnant. Lucas announces that he has something to show Veronica, and leads her to a bright orange package of some sort, which he cuts open to reveal a comfortable mattress that fell through one of the portals. He intends to take it back to the bus which the group has decided should be where he and Veronica will live now, because baby.
AND I HAVE A LOT OF QUESTIONS.
First of all, please tell me — PLEASE TELL ME — that the arrival of all these portals in the last episode is not going to be the deus ex machina that explains how these assholes find the perfect item at the perfect moment. PLEASE TELL ME THAT.
Second, and more infuriatingly for me personally, please explain to me the logic of opening up a neatly and conveniently wrapped mattress out in the middle of the woods which you will now have to awkwardly carry completely opened up God knows how far? I understand that TV is a visual medium and that you would want to show that it’s a mattress, BUT COME ON, THIS MAKES NO SENSE. (She says about a show that takes place in 10,000 B.C.)
Oh, and Veronica has morning sickness which apparently strikes her every 8 hours on the dot because, again, men are writing this mess and have no idea how pregnancy works.
Gavin, meanwhile, has a laptop? from his Dad’s time travel company? that he’s trying to power with a solar panel? TO WHAT END, GAVIN? WHAT IS THIS LAPTOP GOING TO CONNECT TO IN 10,000 B.C., ESPECIALLY NOW THAT WE KNOW THE LAZARUS COMPLEX HAS DONE BLOWN UP? EVEN IF YOU COULD GET IT UP AND WORKING, WHAT IS YOUR PLAN, SIR?
Scott has a plan, though: potatoes. As any viewer of Bill Nye could tell you, potatoes can be a source of energy when connected to zinc and copper wire. Which, OK, fine. But again, your blogger has questions:
1. Where is the zinc going to come from?
2. Where are the copper wires going to come from?
3. WHERE ARE THE POTATOES GOING TO COME FROM BECAUSE THE EARLIEST RECORDED POTATO WAS FROM 2,500 B.C. IN PERU WHICH HAPPENS TO BE NOWHERE NEAR IN EITHER TIME OR PLACE TO PREHISTORIC LOS ANGELES. In fact, potatoes traveled from the Andes to Europe before being taken back to the rest of the Americas SO WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THESE POTATOES, SCOTT?
I hate this show.
Anyway. As Scott is reminding us that he met this Petra girl who claims she came from a military base with her mother who also happened to be a woman who was going to interview Scott for a job the day the sinkhole happened, there is a roar from the direction of the clearing. Soon, a few characters we recognize and a bunch of red shirts begin running toward Gavin and Scott, yelling about dinosaurs.
Gavin heads towards the clearing to look for his kids, where he finds Ty and Izzy watching a pair of dinosaurs fighting, destroying their camp in the process. Guess the fires and spikes didn’t work out. Everyone runs into the woods.
After the chaos, a few things are determined: the computer has been left behind in the dinozone; Riley and Josh are out “picking berries” which somehow is not a euphemism; Levi offers to go get them but Gavin is all “GRRR, STILL MAD AT YOU, NO, MY KID” so Dr. Sam tasks Levi with leading the survivors to Paara’s village, while he, Gavin, Izzy, and Lucas and Veronica, for some dumb reason, go search for Josh and Riley. SHE’S PREGNANT. GO PUT HER IN A HUT. Oh, and Lucas has a head wound that he’s not paying attention to because he doesn’t want to worry Veronica and I’m certain this won’t be a plot point later on.
Wait, it is. Later, Lucas and Veronica are in a village hut when Lucas suddenly passes out, but then he’s fine, and they talk about being scared to become parents, the end.
Whatever, the point is, Josh and Riley are out in the woods, collecting berries and telling each other that they love one another when out of nowhere a velociraptor ruins the moment. Soon, Josh is running through the woods with an unconscious Riley in his arms, where he is fortunately and inexplicably found by Dr. Sam and the rest. Riley doesn’t look great.
Oh, and Josh got a haircut? Josh got a haircut.
Back at the village, Dr. Sam treats an unconscious Riley, but is worried because infection? maybe? Dr. Sam also reassures Josh that none of this is his fault because as a member of the central family on the show, that’s important to make clear lest you start asking a lot of questions like, “Why were you dummies out picking berries when a bunch of Utahraptors and Allosauruses are running around?” or “Why didn’t you put yourself between the velociraptor and Riley, big man?”
Later, Riley wakes up long enough to tell her dad that she has internal injuries and an infection and he’s all OH NOOOOOO before she passes out again.
Elsewhere, Levi returns the computer to Gavin, having ventured into dinozone to retrieve it for him.
So Scott hooks the computer up to like 15 Andian potatoes that they would have no access to, with copper wires and zinc probes that they also would have no access to, UNLESS ALL OF THESE THINGS FELL THROUGH A PORTAL LIKE THE MATTRESS, I SUPPOSE, and he gets the computer up and running.
Once turned on, the computer picks up on a signal coming from … somewhere, and soon, Gavin is in a chat room with some stranger. Stranger tells Gavin that they know where Eve is, and that if he wants her back, he has to “find Sierra.” The connection immediately goes dark and Gavin and the rest of the dummies are like “OMG WHAT IS SIERRAAAAAA?”
Gavin goes outside for a think where he tells Ty about his hilariously bad visions of breakfast with faceless Eve, the kids, and Levi, and how he feels, for no good Godamned reason, that this memory has something to do with this “Sierra.” Ty suggests Gavin ask Levi about it, and Gavin is all, “UGH, GAH, WHY?”
And then Scott arrives to tell them that he kept fucking around with the computer and discovered that something is transmitting to it nearby. Fortunately, the computer came with Google Maps, and thus he has a general idea where the signal was coming from.
And so, a group heads out to find this transmitter: Gavin, Levi, Scott, Ty, and that Petra child because no one on this show has ANY COMMON SENSE. Ty decides that it would be a good idea for the group to split up because when has that ever gone wrong on this show?
This gives Levi and Gavin a chance to talk privately, where Gavin tells Levi about the breakfast vision and wonders if it means anything to Levi. Levi is like, “Yeah, it was Izzy’s birthday, and I brought her a present.” Gavin is all confused: he doesn’t remember that detail, but then suddenly it comes flooding back to him: Levi hands Izzy a present, Gavin takes the trash out, he’s confronted in the driveway by some woman — a woman he calls “Sierra.” Gavin tells her forcefully that he is done with “the program,” but she counters that “the program” isn’t done with him. “Sierra” then tells him that he deserves to know her real name: it’s Maya Schmidt, which GASP! SHOCK! SURPRISE! is the same name as the woman who was going to interview Scott and the name of Petra’s mother.
When Gavin and Scott make this connection, they realize they need to find Petra who at this point has just wandered off by herself because everyone on this show is a Supergenius.
Levi finds Petra, but before they can rejoin the group, they are both shot in the neck with some sort of tranquilizing dart and dragged away by military dudes.
Scott, Ty, and Gavin eventually find the spot where they were taken, because Petra’s locket somehow fell off of her neck in the kerfuffle. YES, IT’S UNLIKELY BUT SO IS EVERYTHING ON THIS TERRIBLE TERRIBLE SHOW. And then a Huey helicopter flies overhead.
But instead of following it, they go to where the transmission signal was coming from: a dual aurora, glowing both blue and red because they go to two different places. And we know this because at some point off-camera, Gavin’s mom told him about them.
Oh, and as if that wasn’t terrible enough, here come Dr. Sam, Josh, and an unconscious Riley. It seems that Ty radioed them about the dual aurora? and not only did they manage to find the exact location of it, they did so while carrying a full adult human, and still made it in just the right moment to run into everyone else.
Josh wants to take Riley through the aurora to get her help; Gavin is all, “Nooooo”; Josh is like, “DON’T CARE, DOING IT,” and he and Riley disappear into one of the auroras. And then just for funsies, Ty gets sucked into the other one.
HEY, HERE’S AN IDEA, GUYS: HOW ABOUT ALL Y’ALL JUMP IN AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS? Instead, they just stand around moping, and the auroras close up.
When Ty lands, he’s in the middle of the street, about to get smooshed by a truck. The driver stops in time, and Ty is able to ask him for the date: it’s September 12, 2021, 16 days before the La Brea sinkhole.
This is the place where I usually am like, “Welp, I’ve run out of obvious Lost comparisons, so I’m going to grasp at straws for a couple of paragraphs because not even Lost was this completely ridiculous.” BUT GUESS WHAT?? This time I have THREE Lost references! They’re just ripping it off left and right, and I bet if I were willing to spend even five minutes thinking about it, I could come up with more!
But I’m not, so I won’t.
First of all, the whole military presence in 10,000 B.C. thing. I mentioned the barracks in the previous recap, but it’s worth remembering that there was a military presence on the Island, there to perform tests on the hydrogen bomb Jughead. Whatever military was on the Island was completely wiped out by the Others, however, and we never see any actual soldiers.
I’m not sure what the military is doing in 10,000 B.C., but it’s worth noting that it’s possible it’s not the U.S. military at all, but some rouge group who is impersonating them or using their site and equipment.
And then there is the expedition to find the transmitter.
This actually is reminiscent of two different scenes (off of the top of my head) from two different seasons of Lost:
In “Pilot, Part 2,” when a group goes on a search to find where the radio transmission they have picked up is coming from:
And in “Through the Looking Glass, Parts 1 & 2” in which a group goes in search of the radio tower, again, this time to send out a transmission.
Finally, there’s the whole computer thing, where Gavin, who is desperate to reunite with his wife, communicates with some mysterious person via a computer (in a place where a computer most certainly should not be functioning).
On Lost, here are a number of computers in a place where computers should not be functioning — on the Island. Most famously, there is the computer in the Swan hatch that Desmond must enter “the numbers” into every 108 minutes, lest some great catastrophe occur.
In “What Kate Did” halfway through season two, Michael, who is desperate to reunite with his son, Walt, uses that same Swan hatch computer to communicate with some mysterious person.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the scripts for this show are clearly being written by a group of third graders who have been told the plot of Lost via a game of telephone. With the images above, I rest my case.
La Brea airs on NBC on Tuesdays at 8/9 p.m. and streams on Peacock.