Well, that was special. The Event has concluded its "fall season," to return to us in February. And while stuff happened this episode, I'm not sure I can actually call it eventful.
Let's begin.
PLOT A: Lovebirds in a Cornfield, or Leila and Sean and Fun with Needles:
We pick up where we left off last episode, with Sean realizing that Scary Agent Man is after Leila, not weird hobbit-child Abby. Sean threatens him with his gun for clues on where Samantha might be, but that doesn't work...so he grabs his scary syringe and INJECTS IT INTO HIS JUGULAR in an effort to get him to cooperate. Sean, there's good cop, there's badcop, and there's batpoop crazypants cop. Guess which one you are?
Anyway, Agent Man runs off into the cornfield screaming NOOOOOOooooOOOOOOO and Sean and Leila look on blankly. Abby's dad eventually catches up to them, despite being SHOT IN THE RIGHT KNEECAP at the end of last episode, and tells them to go home, they don't know what they're getting into, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Agent Man rapidly ages in front of their eyes and dies, but not before begging to be taken to a nearby medical facility. Sean and Leila do a little sleuthing, and realize the facility is a mental health clinic in the nearby city. So, naturally, the two of them break into the clinic, by pretending to be a patient's relatives (Leila spies a patient roster and gives the nurse a name). While Leila stalls with the mentally ill woman they've conned into thinking they're visiting, Sean goes snooping. While Leila ends up having a painfully unfunny conversation about her made-up dad's "terminal ball cancer" (not making this up...), Sean hunts down clues...and gets caught by security, who throws them out. But luckily, a friendly crazy man yells at them from the balcony that there are children hidden in the basement. A little creative sneaking around later, and they're in the sub-basements...which are empty and trashed, but Leila finds her name scrawled on a wall.
Oh yes, in a flashback, we see Sam plaintively scrawling the name into the wall while her "handler" looks on and calls Dempsey, saying the "new patient" is progressing nicely. Dempsey also bemoans that the new acquisition attempt (Leila?) was a failure. But that's all that happens there. Back to the messy basement: Sean finds a bunch of files, in which we see photos of Abby's dad...from the 50s. Looking exactly like he does now. Then...we see photos of Michael, Leila and Sam's dad, from a similar set of time periods. Well, that explains a lot. Leila, you're half-space alien. Congratulations.
PLOT B: Politicians v. Aliens, or Is That a Nuke in Your Silo or Are You Just Happy to See Me?:
President Martinez chews out the traitorous VP, with no results. Meanwhile, Sophia thinks that everything's kosher with her son Thomas...until he and his lover Isabel go on the lam. Remember when she shot herself in the right kneecap last episode? Is there something biologically interesting about the right kneecap that I'm not aware of? Because I feel like doing that twice, to two different villainous characters, in the same episode is supposed to be significant. Or just lazy writing. Whatever. Anyway, Thomas and Isabel begin a launch sequence, that preps a missile silo in Afghanistan for launch. Through some entirely boring sleuthing of their own, the President's room fully of helpless government officials deduce the same. Martinez verbally smacks around the Afghan ambassador before being told there's nothing he can do about the installation; the missile is going to launch, it's probably got a nuclear payload, and it's going to hit the US. Anyway, we watch the missile launch...and it flies into space instead, and deploys a satellite, which points away from Earth. And then, it broadcasts a message home. And that's about it.
Okay, so we got two big unexpected swerves this episode, in that 1) Thomas doesn't want to kill a lot of people, he just wants to do his best ET and phone home, and 2) the sleeper aliens are being harvested by Dempsey and his shadow-conspiracy for an eternal youth formula...or at least their kids are. Also, the aliens can breed with humans. Huh. Okay.
We also conclusively learn that the aliens are actually just that--aliens. Not, as speculated, an alternate evolutionary track, or humans from the future, or angels, or whatever--straight-up aliens. Which is sort of boring, given the coy little twists the writers have been tossing out.
And there's that word again: "boring." A lot of stuff happened this episode, but with the exception of Simon (SIMON, of all people!), I feel like we haven't spent any character-development time with these people. We haven't seen them change or grow, or how their interactions pull them forward in their journey in the present. THAT was what made LOST so addictive--it wasn't the mysteries of Craphole Island, but instead the captivating, nuanced and subtly changing behaviors of these people in an extreme situation. How am I supposed to care about Sean if all he's done is go all doe-eyed and wave a gun around? And Leila...I don't know a thing about Leila, other than that her family is in jeopardy and she has amazing hair.
C'mon. guys. You've got until February 28 to get things right. I'm not writing you off just yet...but you can do better. And I'll be back in three months, rooting for you.
