"The Event" - a show that wants desperately to be riveting and intriguing

I was hoping the second episode would hook me, or at least get me more excited about "The Event." Alas, I'm still lukewarm on this show. But lukewarm is better than cold hatred, so I'm sticking with it for now.

I was really surprised that they decided to break out "not of terrestrial origin" in the second episode. So much for not embracing SciFi. That said, I'm still not intrigued by their human-looking aliens, why these aliens are here, what they're doing, are they good or bad, etc. I just suddenly feel like I'm watching the less promising bastard offspring of "V" and "Flashforward." There are aliens infiltrating our society for some unknown reason, there's a mysterious event that happened, and meanwhile Jason Ritter is off running around in the desert. The plane crash victims' untimely end surprised me, but I still feel like this show is incredibly scatter-brained. We know that Jason Ritter's missing girlfriend/plane crash storyline is somehow connected to the alien prisoners, but I just don't care because they're going to have to take some giant leaps to connect the conspiracies. I don't know what the plane stunt was for, but I highly doubt the answer is going to be anywhere close to satisfying. These days, shows write giant mysteries to hook viewers then write themselves into corners because they didn't think to develop an eventual conclusion to their narrative. The result is unhappy, bitter viewers who are less willing to trust the Next Big Show. After "Invasion," "Flashforward," "Heroes", and "The Nine," we're just less willing to commit and put our faith in the showrunners. Additionally, the fractured timeline is needlessly confusing and isn't adding much of anything to the show. There are bits and pieces of character development, (Jason Ritter meeting his girlfriend, the CIA agent who is an undercover alien) but not enough at any one time to make us care especially about any one character.

I will say this for the show: I can't help but like Jason Ritter as the sort-of protagonist. Yeah, he hasn't done anything really spectacular or heroic yet, but he does have that Everyman quality every critic has been mentioning. But I could just be getting that impression because I haven't seen him in many things. I think the show needs to stick with him for a little bit as the main protagonist to get us invested in at least one person's business, then they can add on all the other characters they want in more depth. If they narrow the focus from this epic scale a la "Flashforward" and give us a more intimate look at one man's struggle to find the woman he loves while being wrongfully accused of murder, they could just make viewers care about the vast conspiracy. I really think they should take some tips from an older, semi under-the-radar SciFi show, "The 4400." They managed a big mysterious event that changed the entire world while focusing on fascinating characters. That show made you care about what happened to their fictional world because you cared about the people in it. If "The Event" can focus more on its characters and less on its EVENT, then it will turn out to be a much better show. Oh, and if they could get someone to write dialogue that doesn't sound like it was written by a high schooler, it would be greatly appreciated.

"The Event" - It's the next 'Lost'!

I had to title it that because you know it's what they wanted to market it as, but after the abysmal failures of "The Nine" and "Flashforward," they didn't want to go that far. But the "Lost" vibe is what it's going for, and it's no surprise that it's no "Lost."
Take the crazy crisis situations, minority President and Jack Bauer tactics of "24," add in elements of the first, second, and fourth "Die Hard" movies, multiply it by "Lost" with all its vague mysteries, throw in a little "Independence Day" action hero and "need to know" dialogue, add a whole lot of "Flashforward"'s ambitions, and "Flashforward"'s, "The Nine"'s and "The 4400"'s emphasis on a big occurrence, and you've got NBC's "The Event." I was struggling to find something, anything, that was original or at least a fresh spin on tried and true elements of the mystery/SciFi genres, but I don't recall finding any. So many elements just felt lifted from other projects with recognized, recently free actors thrown in. The dialogue was nothing special and downright irritating in the scenes with the politicians, where they talked in broad, noble rhetoric without any real arguments on the situation they were discussing. No one character had any distinct personality which made it hard to care about any of them in particular. "Lost"'s main strength was their characters and I give them all due respect for creating realistic, distinctive, multi-dimensional, morally ambiguous characters.


I'm suspecting I've become jaded after being let down by "Heroes," "Flashforward," and "Lost." Again and again, I've learned that the payoff is hardly worth the investment so you have to be content with the journey. The problem is when you get shows like this that so emphasize the mystery primarily, (it's called "The Event" after all. And no matter what fans say, "Lost" was unique and lit up the fanbase because of its mysteries) you have to hope they have a good plan for the mystery and they aren't just stringing you along.

"Flashforward," "Lost," and it looks like "The Event" as well all had the same problem for me. I feel like they were terrified of outright embracing their SciFi side. Executives still think SciFi could never be mainstream, so I get this feeling that these shows skirt SciFi, insisting on bizarre mysteries to draw in viewers but not going deep enough into the SciFi realm to give satisfying payoff to their mysteries. Everything stays in this vague middle-ground where they try to please everyone.

Regarding the event itself, I hate the whole "too soon to reference real-life terrorism in pop culture" argument, but it still bothers me a little to see a hijacked plane getting flown into a building in a fictional setting. It wasn't fun watching Clark Kent burn down twin towers on "Smallville" and it wasn't fun watching a plane plummeting to the ground on "The Event." I guess using planes gives you an automatic, built-in anxiety about the situation due to real-life plane crashes/hijackings and fictional ones. Still, when you name a show "The Event," I expect a little something bigger than a strange occurrence during a plane hijacking. This just felt like an old episode of "The Twilight Zone." So did they go through a wormhole? Was is some weird, man-made technology like on "Flashforward?" Were they transported through time like in "The Twilight Zone" or "The 4400?" Is everyone on the plane dead and now in purgatory, getting prepped for their journey to heaven? (I couldn't resist.) Did they just get transported somewhere else on Earth? That seems unlikely since the plane still would have crashed, just somewhere else. All in all, I'm not so sure I care. Maybe they'll do something interesting with the concept, but I'm not holding out hope.

There were so many moments in the pilot that took me out of the show. As a frequent flyer who gained all her flight experience in the post 9/11 world, a lot of security issues took me out of the episode. How did Jason Ritter get a gun on the plane? I saw that he ditched some clothes or something in the bathroom after boarding the plane, but didn't notice what they were. If they were a uniform for airplane personnel, wouldn't the other airplane personnel have noticed him? And if it wasn't a uniform, then still how did he get the gun on the plane? How did that guy in the car just drive onto the tarmac? Why were there no people on the tarmac at all? I was incredibly relieved they didn't ignore the existence of Air Marshals, though, so they gained a couple points back for that.

Stray other thoughts:

• So I figure some conspiracy group took Scott Patterson aka Michael Buchanan's daughters hostage after shooting his wife, then forced him to crash the plane. That was quite an elaborate plan then since they bothered to disappear the older daughter, going so far as to take out her cell phone.


• Couldn't Jason Ritter have just asked the guard or the hotel manager to look at the security footage to show he and his girlfriend were there? The footage would probably be gone since the kidnappers went through so much trouble to make it look like they were never there, but it didn't even occur to Jason's character to try?


• "I'll explain everything once we're on the ground." You can't at least say something, like someone is hijacking the plane as the pilot? Or just something?


• I'll be honest, it took me some time to realize that the names before certain scenes were the characters' names, not the credits. I was thinking the credits were taking a long time to come up, but then I realized that I wasn't recognizing any of the names. Yes, it was a dumb moment.


• Once they're on the ground, "you can arrest me all you want." Lol.
  
  
• Why didn't ANYONE try to drive the President away from a plane rushing towards him? Where was his Secret Service detail? He was already in the car with his family, and they all just sat there.


• That whole post-drowning scene where the couples are hanging out and drinking felt exactly like the setup for a horror movie. The young lovers on vacation, the exotic locale, the mysterious strangers forcing their way into your life, the odd way they met...


• Without distinctive characters, I still have to resort to saying "hey, now we're talking with Dr Kerry Weaver, and now we're talking with Luke Danes, and now we're talking to that "Joan of Arcadia" guy, and is Zeljko Ivanek on every single damn show?"
  

I'll tune in for the next few episodes. If it's going somewhere interesting or there's actually some character development, I'll stick with it. If the dialogue and cast are still bland as all get-out and they drag out the mystery forever like it's the most fascinating question to plague mankind, I'll drop it.