May 2, 2011 Episode Recap

In all fairness, I'll tell you up front. I don't like "The Event", and I watched it mainly so I could write this article because I enjoy not liking it and sharing that with other people. In case it comes up later, while I was taking these notes my DVR was taping "Stargate Universe" while I watched "The Event", during the commercials for which I watched an Eccleston era "Doctor Who" on Netflix. I was also tickling someone’s feet, which in all fairness, could only improve my mood as a critic.

To be fair, I like the actors on "The Event", and I want to go on record saying its not their fault that all the advances in television production have yet to replace that outdated technology called a television producer. "The Event" is messy, melodramatic nonsense, the sort that gives Science Fiction, with the big letters, a bad name. If you're a fan, I hope you enjoy disagreeing with me as much as I enjoyed writing this, and I want you to know how lucky you are, because there are better shows whose fans lose their show, and it’s a wonder this one is still on.

The Event fails because it misses the difference between story and plot device. Here’s a few years of film school for anyone who needs them: a plot device causes things to happen on screen. A story causes people to imagine that those things aren’t random nonsense.

The hook of this episode, delivered after a few masterfully hyperactive barbs of Presidential hospitalization, is the Vice President who just poisoned him smiling at us while being sworn in. This evil-mastermind moment might be more effective if the character of Jarvis weren't a complete pawn who couldn’t organize a beer run without a phone call from his handlers.

When next we see Jarvis after the break, he eulogizes the President who isn't dead yet just long enough to promise to carry on his legacy by completely reversing all of his policies. At this point, its difficult to believe that the government muckety-mucks around the table don't all call shenanigans. He refers to the President, who still hasn’t died, as having served "his term", meaning he assumes the man is going to die – which nobody calls him on. There are a few perfunctory complaints when he starts preaching that version of total surrender called negotiating with terrorists, but if the President just fell over in the middle of arguably the most important crisis the country may ever face, and the guy that replaces him tells everyone we’re going to stop fighting the evil aliens now – I would stand up and shoot that guy in the head just to see if the green goo came out.

The next bit of goofiness finds our interpid heroes, Sean and the girl who tried to kill him so many times all those episodes ago, getting on a plane just in time to keep pace with the bad guy with the bad thing in the bad box - but since they don't know what "Alex" looks like, they really don’t even know they’re on the right plane, a fact it doesn’t help to have the character speak aloud while they are assuming they know the bad guy is that twitchy fellow over there. It’s a nice set up - an effective ticking clock in the form of a deadly virus they can’t let off the plane and can’t risk letting loose inside the plane, but we never actually use that plot, so, weeeee.

Aaaaand we continue with the most interesting character in the show: beltway battleaxe Sterling played by the peerless Mr. Ivanek – who is totally wasted playing one of those geniuses who keeps doing really stupid things because the writers aren’t smart enough to know what a smart person would do. His plot this episode is letting the wife figure out there’s been an assassination attempt from his ham-handed consolation and playing all his cards in the prove-the-vice-president-is-an-assassin game far too early.

In the land of those who condone genocide for elbow room, Sophia attempts to convince Michael to dispose of a traitor in their midst by appealing to all of his moral failings. Somehow, in crazy evil mastermind world, reminding someone that they’ve never cared for their family or right and wrong before is the best argument for making sure someone continues on that path, when, for those playing the home game of global domination, it is, in fact, the surest way to cause them to question their loyalty to you. Short of trying to kill your daughter.

On the plane, the heroes take the suitcase from the suspected bioterrorist – but by dint of the fact that we are only halfway through the episode, its not the right guy. He’s just an innocent coke runner; it is more than likely, at this point, that Alex is one of the two flight attendants who’re getting a trifle too much screen time. Meanwhile, its funny that nobody cares two pretty people just beat up a less pretty person in the airplane galley, which would cause me to be more suspicious of the male flight attendant who catches them at it, but that’s me being more sensitive about violence on airplanes than the characters on the airplane in the story, and that’s just not fair of me.

Next up, our requisite minutes of female righteousness, where young women get to be right because they’re pretty when they stare at us like that. Our man-hero mucks up his apologies to the murderous girl hero, who for some reason gets to be angry about the fact that someone survived her being murderous long enough to call her on it - and the blonde girl gets to lecture her father with the story from when she was a little girl.

For laughs, we have the doctor explaining to Blake that he has detected some mysterious compound he knows human technology can't manufacture (presumably because the detection equipment he also couldn’t have manufactured, but used to find this thing he couldn’t possibility know he was looking for, was delivered by benevolent aliens in one of the deleted scenes saved for the DVD release). After receiving this crucial piece of information, Sterling wastes his upper hand by going to Jarvis and telling him he knows he poisoned the President, so that he can get fired and kicked out of his position of power, which is, you know, I hope, all part of his master plan.

Back on the plane, our heroes have no plan except hoping that their target is smart enough to over-react to the approaching jet escort they called the CIA to send, which, surprisingly doesn’t work. I was totally with them in thinking the evil alien whose life and mission depend on taking a nap and ignoring everything that happens so they can pretend to be just another normal person – I figured they would jump up and shout about being the bad guy, too.

In the white-house, Evil Veep continues on his crusade to skeevily prove to everybody that he must be the traitor by delivering speeches usually reserved for humpbacks and moustache twirlers, and then we skip ahead in time to our heroes complete failure to stop the weapon of mass virus dispersal getting off the plane. I’m glad we skipped all that part where they didn’t come up with a plan and didn’t do anything smart, because what matters is that in a huge airport full of people and noise, they manage to overhear the stewardess being called Alexandre – which couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. So if customs was any quicker, or say, if a super-secret organization of aliens that has operated unknown from the public for generations was smart enough to use, um, code-names, our heroes wouldn't know who to get in a fight with next scene.

We come back from commercial to see Smitrovich wondering if all the assassination has been worth it, poor guy. Michael arrives to kill our favorite alien sleeper agent. Then he shoots over his head - presumably so that the dude in the hallway thinks he's really shot him - which looks dramatic - but generally hurts the ears more than firing in a less dramatic direction and it puts a hole in the wall with no blood in it that proves he didn't really shoot the guy… but that’s me just nitpicking, because then he unties him and they go knock that guy in the hallway out, just to make sure he knows Michael is betraying everyone and letting Simon go. Has no one read the Count of Monte Cristo? All he had to do was fake his death and put him in a body bag to avoid getting chased in the next scene, but you know, chase scene: check.

So, action-action-action, the murderous girl lets the bad guys get away because she doesn’t want to hurt people, I guess, then the bad guys don't shoot the hero because I guess its just a waste if the virus is going to kill all humans anyway. Simon's escape is noticed because no one was smart enough to think about not getting killed letting him go. Simon and Michael and the golden compass of morality make a run for it, and there's a fire fight just outside alien suburbia – Michael gets shot by people chasing him on foot, but then there’s somehow time to have a heartfelt father-daughter scene where Simon jumps the perimeter with the President’s antidote. The perimeter, by the way, is a simple iron fence that’s really easy to shoot people through – and Simon, whose extremely nimble for a guy whose been tied to bed for endless episodes gets away. Then the bad guys are allowed to arrive just in time to decide not to shoot blondie, who they were shooting at before it was time to stop and have the heartfelt scene. Ah, nevermind.

Then there's that wonderful tagline: “Whatever you think you know about The Event, think again.” Which is advice I think the writers should take.

Comments (2)

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Darn said:

	... This is typical rubbish now turned out by the commercial networks ! The hollywoodness and action is the new throwaway morality ! What it really is , is the tighter budgeting formula !
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May 10, 2011
Votes: +1

JQ 117 said:

... I'd have to agree, maybe not SGU, I'm not a big viewer of it, at least not how they did the first season which gave me a facepalm injury with all the stargate physics and timeline dates they kept messing up. SG1 or SGA I'd like more. But ya we need something worth watching, the event seems more like a .... well waste of air time haha. And since this is MyOuterSpace, I might as well share my project, which is a sci-fi series, I create the website and CGI images myself, with one of the tools used in Pirates2, Kung Fu Panda, Avatar and others. My dad writes the stories, incredibly smoothly. I hope someone out there likes it, haven’t gotten any responses yet. http://EarthQuadra.com I also got accepted into a win a grant for your project, but we need votes daily to win, any help would be awesome. We also have another story completely diff then this, that we'll put up eventually, and I to have slowly been creating a mini movie series, I'll get that up too someday. Anywho, enjoy my work. Support it if you want. Jeffrey

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May 05, 2011
Votes: +1

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