La Brea
“Don’t Look Up”
January 16, 2024
Oh, hi! Did you think I had given up on this garbage show with only five episodes left to go just because I routinely give up on TV shows when I get overwhelmed and/or bored with them? (Sorry about that, House of Dragon. Who knows, maybe one day?)
WELL, YOU WERE WRONG. I’m back and we are going to finish this shit pile, I PROMISE.
…
YOU KNOW WHAT? I CAN HEAR YOUR SKEPTICISM THROUGH THIS COMPUTER SCREEN. But here’s the thing: I can make that promise because I’ve already recapped all five remaining unbelievably stupid episodes, so put THAT in your prehistoric pipe and smoke it. I’ll be releasing a recap a day for the rest of the week and we can finally, once and for all, be done with this half-baked, illogical, poorly conceived, written, directed, and acted series once and for all, thank the TV Gods.
Last we checked in with these chuckleheads, Josh and Riley got sucked into a time portal, AGAIN, and no one has any idea when they disappeared to. In the village, Dr. Sam is SO MAD that his daughter, who was in the process of dying of a horrible infection, is no longer in 10,000 B.C. where she would have no access to antibiotics or adequate medical care. Instead of being hopeful that she is somewhere resting in a sterile medical facility with proper hydration, Dr. Sam is packing a bag to go … somewhere … to try to find her while Gavin is all, “Well that’s stupid.”
Meanwhile, there’s DRAMAZ in the village. Paara along with Natalie Zea refused to return to Australia for this season left to negotiate with some tribes or something? and put a woman named Ruth in her stead. Problem is Ruth is a hardass who no one actually likes, and Lucas, as the group’s “leader” is forced to try to smooth things out between Ruth and the villagers and his people.
This is made more difficult when one of the villagers, a warrior, is found outside of the gates very much dead, having fallen from very much height. Ruth becomes immediately suspicious of the village’s newest guests because: MANUFACTURED TENSION.
Our smooshed warrior’s weapons are missing, and on a search for said weapons, Scott and Veronica come across a bow and arrow next to a giant sand spiral.
Back in the village, Scott channels his inner Lost blog and starts suggesting that it’s a symbol of the ouroboros, the eternal return, maybe the mark of a killer, or a message about a winding journey, or the start of a game or contest.
Dr. Sam is as irritated by this quasi-high-minded conjecture as the rest of us, and is like, “OH RIGHT, I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF LEAVING ON A POINTLESS QUEST TO FIND MY DAUGHTER WHO IS NO LONGER IN THIS PARTICULAR TIME ERA, BYE.” Dr. Sam heads for the gate, but is stopped by the guards who are like, “Yeah, no one is leaving until we figure out who dropped our friend from a tree or whatever.” When Dr. Sam becomes feisty with them, and Gavin tries to pull him away, Ruth gets fed up and throws them both into the prison hut.
Lucas tries to convince Ruth to let his buddies out of prison hut, but just then a body literally falls from the sky into the center of the village. And when they look up, they discover they are being circled by pterodactyls.
Screaming, freaking out, running around.
Scott, Izzy, and some random village child hide in a hut that is promptly attacked by a pterodactyl. Fortunately, some warriors shoot some arrows at the pterodactyls, scaring them off, and saving our heroes in the nick of time.
Ruth, however, is not amused by any of this, and orders all of our time travelers to be detained in something called the “longhouse.”
But before everyone is put under longhouse arrest, they discover another one of those spirals right outside the village, and Scott declares that it’s a pterodactyl nest — he recognizes it from all the books he read about dinosaurs as a child (never mind that no one knows exactly what pterodactyl nests looked like). Scott goes on to add the spirals looked familiar, like the leatherback turtle nests he saw once, so obviously it must be the work of the flying dinosaurs pterosaurs. This led your trusty blogger down a weird pointless path searching Google images for sea turtle nests but I can conclusively say that yes, sometimes their nests do look similar to the image above. I can never get that time back.
Meanwhile, in prisonhut, Dr. Sam is lamenting to Gavin about being too busy to take Riley fishing, before breaking into “Cat’s in the Cradle.”
I hate this show.
As for Lucas, he has a plan for Ruth: if she lets Gavin and Dr. Sam out of prisonhut, they’ll deal with her little pterodactyl problem. Ruth agrees because what other choice does she have … I mean besides kicking all of these moochers and problem makers out of her village to fend for their damn selves against the T-Rexes and pterosaurs THAT THEY BROUGHT THROUGH THE PORTALS.
So Sam and Veronica build a new pterodactyl nest far from the village, while Scott, Lucas, and Gavin retrieve an egg from the original nest with the intention of moving it to the new one. How the pterodactyls will know the egg has been moved, much less how to find where it has been moved to is never explained, so please do not ask me, I do not write this nonsense.
However, the pterodactyls find Team Move Egg while they are on their way to the new nest, and Gavin, Scott, and Lucas are forced to take shelter in the military helicopter that is conveniently plopped down in the middle of the forest. Though there are no usable weapons, the guys are able to set off a box of flares to scare the pterodactyls away.
And then they bury the egg in the new nest and then the pterodactyls find the new nest and everyone is happy.
Back in the village, the “Sky People” are released from the longhouse and everyone has dinner together, albeit at different tables. As a token of her appreciation, Ruth gives Lucas a toy rocket, explaining that it was her grandfather’s who was a “sky person” like them from the 1960s. In fact, he was one of the first outsiders to be accepted into the community. OK, BUT WHO WAS THIS IN THIS COMMUNITY BEFORE THE SKY PEOPLE AND WHY DID THEY ALL LEARN ENGLISH INSTEAD OF TEACHING THE NEWCOMERS THEIR LANGUAGE? Ugh. So dumb.
Also, mild spoiler, but don’t expect this revelation about Grandad to have any future significance at all, just like most of this stupid show.
As for Dr. Sam, he’s still hung up on his “Wander Aimlessly Around the Prehistoric Jungle Looking for My Daughter Who is in Some Other Time and Space” plan, and is about to leave when Gavin stops him. Apparently, the helicopter they found came from Ladera Air Force Base in Los Angeles. If the 10,000 B.C. base is in the same place that it is in 2021 — which there is literally no reason why it should or would be — Gavin should be able to find it, and along with it, this Maya Schmidt woman who might have answers for them.
Oh and there is a dumb subplot where Izzy wants to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow and is a real shitbird to Ruth’s daughter who is roughly her age. They bicker and hiss at each other until Ruth tells her daughter she has to teach Izzy how to use a bow and arrow.
And then they decide to kiss they respect one another or some shit. The point is, Izzy is an asshole. But we already knew that.
Finally, in 2021, Ty is all despondent about being separated from his wife and friends until he gets an idea. Ty goes to Dr. Sam’s hospital and is like, “I know you don’t know me, but I know you and you’re not going to believe me when I tell you how we know each other — trust me — but here is a list of things that will happen in the next 24 hours that haven’t happened yet. After these things happen, come meet me at this bar and we’ll talk.” The things he tells him about are: a mudslide; an assassination in the Middle East; and an Arsenal score.
OK, and here’s the thing about this: how does Ty remember that these specific things happened on this specific day, much less the score of this game? I mean, I’m married to a Tottenham fan and I guess I can see remembering an exact score of a specific game, particularly if it was traumatic — and all Tottenham games are pretty traumatic. But I certainly couldn’t tell you when a specific mudslide or event in the Middle East took place, and I ESPECIALLY wouldn’t be able to tell you if I had lived an ENTIRE DAMN LIFE in 10,000 B.C. in the intervening months. But if you were to have an incredible memory, it’s time to use those sports score memorization techniques to GO PLACE SOME BETS, TY.
But we’ve got to use this time travel schtick for something that apparently isn’t betting that the Rams will beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. So after the events are confirmed, Dr. Sam shows up to the bar and is like, “Alright, what’s the scam?” Ty tells him about the sinkhole and how their friends are still stuck there, and he wants Dr. Sam to help him bring them back. When Dr. Sam is like, “Nope, don’t believe you,” Ty tells him that he knows his wife just served him with divorce papers and his daughter Riley has dropped out of her premed classes. Sooooo … why not lead with that, then?
This has the opposite of the intended effect on Dr. Sam and he leaves, thoroughly freaked out.
But he comes back later, having spoken to Riley and confirmed that she’s no longer premed (and thereby doing so changing the timeline — but we can talk about that in a minute), and confirming through a military friend that this Maya Schmidt woman he wants to find runs a “top-secret military program on quantum physics being run out of Ladera Air Force Base.”
So, not that top-secret, then.
Dr. Sam asks what’s next, and Ty is like, “We have someone else we need to talk to.”
And cut to: Dr. Sam and Ty waiting outside LAPD to pick up a hungover Gavin whom they’ve just bailed out of jail.
First off, let me just note that I am writing this in April 2024, months after the finale — which I have not yet watched — has aired. So I am assuming, but have not confirmed yet, that we are really going to do something that results in preventing the sinkhole or preventing the people who fall into the sinkhole to fall into it or some other timeline-changing bullshit that will fill me with inordinate rage. But since we’re already fucking with the timeline — namely by telling Dr. Sam that Riley has dropped out of her premed program before Riley can tell him herself and placing Ty in Dr. Sam’s and Gavin’s memories before he would meet them in 10,000 B.C., it seems like that ending has been predetermined. Ty has already changed the future in the past and I hate this show. (Actually, having seen the finale, I guess we should stick a pin in this conversation and circle back around to it then.)
As for your Lost comparison, contrary to what a lot of people speculated, particularly in the early seasons, there were no pterodactyls on the Island. However, in the later seasons, a number of survivors — the Oceanic Six — were able to escape the Island, leaving their fellow survivors behind. One of the Oceanic Six, Jack, realizes that it was a mistake to leave the Island, and that they must go back and save the others. To do so, he attempts to reunite the rest of the Oceanic Six and convince them that they have to “go back.”
GET SOME NEW IDEAS. DAMN.
La Brea streams on Peacock.