La Brea
“Fire Storm”
January 30, 2024
I CAN GET THROUGH THIS.
Gavin wakes up from his little mushroom tea-induced nap, but he’s not 100% yet. And that’s when the dumb potato computer starts beeping at them, demanding to know if Gavin has found “Sierra.” Gavin responds that he knows that this “Sierra” is Maya Schmidt, but he wants to know who is communicating with him via Potato Computer. Potato Computer responds that they are the person who has his wife, and proceeds to provide this hilarious photo of someone who is definitely not Natalie Zea.
And I was angry about the whole potato thing in the earlier post when they introduced this computer that I neglected to ask HOW THE HELL IS THIS COMPUTER CONNECTING TO ANOTHER COMPUTER? Does the fort have wi-fi? Or does one of the villagers have a hot spot? All I’m saying is that right now in the year 2024, on occasion, if I am not sitting directly in front of my wi-fi modem and less than 10 feet away from it, it can take A WHILE to download something off the internet, but we’re supposed to believe that a computer that is not connected to any sort of data source AND POWERED BY SIX POTATOES is just going to zippily upload a full 1 MB image with absolutely no buffering?
Anyway, our anonymous kidnapper asks Gavin if Maya helped him remember what he stole, and when Gavin mentions a microchip, Potato Computer tells him that Eve’s life depends on it.
Maya enters the hut to remind everyone that she and Gavin had been working on a secret military program to weaponize time travel by turning fighter jets into flying time machines, and explains that this microchip contains the prototype of the program. Gavin notes that he doesn’t remember where he put it, but that if he stole it in his past, it’s likely back there at home (which is of course the future) and he has no way of getting it to save Eve.
But Dr. Sam has an idea … a very very dumb idea which by the sheer weight of probability should not work but when has that ever stopped this show? They put a message into the tar pits which are constantly being excavated and hope that someone they know from the futurepast will find it and help.
And then Izzy shows up to reveal this week’s crisis: a wildfire is bearing down on the fort village.
Everyone evacuates from the fort village and everyone immediately splits up. Twice. First, Gavin, Izzy, Scott, and Maya head to the tar pits to send 2021 Scott a message (how they know that the message is going to go to 2021 and not, say, 1879 or 4 B.C. or 3200, is never made clear because this show is stupid and bad), and Scott is concerned that Past Scott is a big part of this plan because he might not be very trustworthy.
And everyone else goes to some safe mountain ridge. Along the way, Lucas finds a wolf puppy that he adopts because now we’re just ripping off Game of Thrones and why not, you know? WHY THE HELL NOT. Go ahead and name him “Ghost,” Lucas, IT’S NOT LIKE ANYTHING MATTERS.
Dr. Sam is irritated by this decision and worried that the puppy is going to slow them down before telling Lucas about this one time his family was threatened by a wildfire but he got everyone out safely.
Oh but did he?
Halfway to the safe place, a group of the villagers decides that the fort village is being threatened by the fire (which, yeah, that’s why they’re evacuating) and they need to go back to open some dam they built to try to extinguish it. Which, OK, but WHY DIDN’T YOU START WITH THAT PLAN?
The point is, a small group heads back to bust this dam that includes some villagers, that Ruth woman? Maybe? Who is standing in for Paara who couldn’t be fucked to fly down to Australia for this season? Veronica, Lucas, the puppy, and Dr. Sam.
The group arrives at the dam, but their pulley system isn’t working, so Veronica suggests that they use gunpowder to build a small explosive and shoot it to loosen a support beam and release the water. Everyone agrees that this is a good idea. But then the puppy runs away and Dr. Sam goes chasing after it despite being all pissed off about the puppy not 10 minutes ago, and Lucas goes chasing after Dr. Sam because that is more important than making sure his pregnant girlfriend who is going to be shooting at a bomb strapped to a dam remains safe.
Veronica shoots the bomb, the dam breaks, and the wildfire is extinguished.
You know, wildfire season is coming up: maybe California should look into this gunpowder bomb solution because it seems pretty effective.
But before the wildfire is put out, Dr. Sam is chasing this puppy through the increasingly smoky woods, catching him in a small cave. When Lucas catches up with him, Dr. Sam explains that he “can’t lose someone else” before explaining that he forgot the family dog in that last wildfire experience, and Riley was real sad about it.
And then the fire catches up with them, surrounding them. Oh no, I hope they don’t die in the third to last episode.
BUT DON’T WORRY: after Veronica saves the day, she goes looking for Lucas and Dr. Sam and finds them cuddled up in the cave with the puppy, smokey but alive. WHEW, I WAS SO WORRIED THAT THESE WRITERS WERE GOING TO KILL OFF TWO MAJOR CHARACTERS AND A DOG RIGHT BEFORE THE FINALE AND NOT JUST PUT THEM IN DANGER FOR MANUFACTURED DRAMA ONLY TO SAVE THEM IMPROBABLY.
As for that tar pit mission, Gavin and his group find the tar pit pretty quickly and drop a Jarritos bottle with a message into it. Meanwhile, Scott and Maya have a conversation where he tells her that her daughter is awesome but wonders why Maya had tried to recruit him; how would his field of anthropology be helpful with her time travel program? But Maya claims to not have any idea — the decision to reach out to him was made by her superiors.
Gavin is still feeling woozy from his mushroom tea experience + smoke, and while he takes a break, Maya and Scott head down to a river to soak some T-shirts in water as makeshift air filters.
But Gavin has another of his convenient visions: this time of an arm with three scars on it; a photograph of Scott; and a paper written by Scott, “Universal Flora.”
Scott is somehow back up from the river, leaving Maya down by it, and Gavin is able to ask him about this paper. Scott is surprised he knows about it, but doesn’t understand what it has to do with time travel as it is just about a bunch of extinct plants.
And I don’t know where this is going but COME THE FUCK ON, SCOTT. Extinct plants from when, Scott? FROM WHEN? Boy, this whole plant plot better be going somewhere.
Narrator: It wasn’t.
Anyway, the only other information that Gavin can give Scott is that the person who showed him this paper and his photo had three scars on their arm but he doesn’t remember anything else.
They decide to get a move on, and Scott encourages Gavin and Izzy to get out of the smoke: he’ll go collect Maya and meet up with them later.
Upon rejoining Maya, Scott sees the three scars on her arm —
— and when he threatens to tell Gavin that she’s been lying to him, she hisses that he’s not going anywhere.
Maya then rejoins Gavin and Izzy, alone, and informs them that the people from the base took Scott.
OH NO THIS STRANGE WOMAN INTRODUCED IN THE FINAL FIVE MINUTES OF THE SERIES IS A BAD GUY? WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED SUCH A TWIST?
As for the 2021 plot, buckle up because it is so dumb.
Gavin is in a diner waiting to meet up with his contact who is going to sneak Ty and Dr. Sam onto this Air Force base, while Ty and Dr. Sam watch from a car in the parking lot. Except, OH NO, that blonde lady with the gun in the last moments of the previous episode shows up instead and hustles Gavin out of the restaurant through the back into a waiting car and drives off.
Dr. Sam asks a friend in the LAPD to put a BOLO on the woman’s car, because that is definitely how that works. Ty finds Gavin’s phone, but can’t figure out how to open it and has an existential crisis, worried that he is failing at his mission to … I don’t even know what his mission is … prevent the sinkhole? get back to 10,000 B.C.? somehow both? … and he begins to worry that he’ll never see his wife Paara again, who he just now appears to remember exists. Dr. Sam asks Ty if he’s a good father to Riley in the futurepast, and Ty is like, “Yeah, y’all are cool.”
The phone rings and it’s pastfuture Scott, who is looking for a “Gavin.”
(No, I don’t know how they answered the phone if they weren’t able to open it earlier, stop asking perfectly reasonable questions.)
As for Gavin, his kidnapper tells him her name is Helena, they were working from the inside together to stop this military time travel program, and that he and she are the “good guys.” Gavin glowers and says he doesn’t believe her.
So she takes him to a bank to retrieve a safety deposit box that requires both of their fingerprints, and whaddya know, but this microchip is inside.
Meanwhile, Ty and Dr. Sam go to Scott’s apartment and meet a much more grumpy, depressed-seeming Scott than the one we know in 10,000 B.C. Being the voice of the audience, Scott demands to know which time travel rules we are using here: Terminator or Back to the Future rules (there’s only one right answer, and it’s not Back to the Future)? But Ty and Dr. Sam can’t answer that because the writers can’t answer that, and instead they demand to know what this message Gavin sent Scott says. But Scott refuses to tell them because who the hell are they anyway?
So to gain Scott’s trust, Ty offers to make him lunch: a cheddar, brie, chaat masala sandwich like his mother made him when he needed comforting. And Ty knows that because he told him when they were in 10,000 B.C. together.
Scott mopes about a breakup (MY GOD, WHO CARES) and then agrees to share the message:
“To Scott Israni, call an Air Force pilot named Gavin Harris. His phone number is 951-555-0196.
“Tell him he hid an important microchip and that finding it is the only way to save his wife. At all costs, he must find a way to get that chip to 10,000 B.C. Good luck, Scott, and thank you. Gavin Harris.”
And just then, Dr. Sam receives a call from his LAPD friend: they’ve found the car.
YEP. BECAUSE THAT IS DEFINITELY HOW ALL THAT WORKS: You call your cop friend, and tell them either: 1. you need them to put a BOLO on a license plate, no, don’t worry what it’s for, just please call me and let me know where the car is when you find it, and please don’t get involved. Or 2. you need them to put a BOLO on the license plate of a car that just abducted your friend but they don’t need to get involved, just let me know when you find the car with a kidnap victim, I’ll take care of it from there. DEFINITELY HOW THE COPS WORK.
This Helena woman has driven Gavin to what appears to be the Atchafalaya Basin:
I mean, I know it’s filmed in Australia, but genuinely, have the set scouts never been to California?
So, Helena drives Gavin to this swamp in Southeast Louisiana and makes a huge revelation: she’s his sister (half-sister), and their father sucks. He built his whole time travel thing off of this military project, which is why she and Gavin were determined to destroy it. She still has access to the program’s network and they can still stop all of this.
Helena then leads him to a double aurora: the red one leading into 1965 for some reason, the blue leading back to 10,000 B.C. They are headed to 1965 to shut down the program where it began … but before they can do so, Ty and Dr. Sam show up and tell Gavin that they need to get the microchip back to 10,000 B.C. because Eve’s life depends on it. Helena is like, “SCREW YOUR WIFE!” and pulls a gun, but Dr. Sam tackles her, and Ty grabs the microchip and fucks right off back into 10,000 B.C., supply-less ONCE AGAIN.
So then in 10,000 B.C., Ty comes waltzing into the fort village with the microchip and information about the double aurora leading to 1965 which is where Riley and Josh probably are. Meanwhile, Maya looks on maliciously.
In the last recap, I bitched that the writers seemed to have completely forgotten the whole family element to the origins of time travel, but these assholes were like, “IN FACT, WE HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, AND WE’RE JUST GOING TO CREATE A WHOLE-ASS SISTER IN THE THIRD TO LAST EPISODE! HOW ‘BOUT THAT SHIT?!”
I mean, I don’t know why I am making such an effort with this show WHEN THE FUCKING WRITERS CAN’T BE BOTHERED, but here we all are.
Leaving aside the whole thing that they stole from Game of Thrones in which a character adopts an orphaned dire wolf puppy …
and leaving aside the whole thing they stole from Game of Thrones where the writers completely lost interest in the last few episodes and just threw a bunch of shit at the wall …
You could argue that the thing they stole from Lost in this episode was the surprise half-sister. On Lost, Jack and Claire are both survivors of the airplane crash but complete strangers to one another, co-existing on the island never knowing that they are half-siblings, with the same father in common. However, unlike La Brea, Lost set up the whole half-sister reveal halfway through the series, NOT IN THE THIRD TO LAST EPISODE, BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY GAVE A FUCK.
I hate this show.
La Brea streams on Peacock.