The Event – S1 E01 – “I Haven’t Told You Everything”

Let’s recap chronologically: 13 months before the present Simon Lee (Ian Anthony Dale) meets with Sophia Maguire (Laura Innes) in some kind of prison in Alaska. Simon tells her there is a new president and he will try to get in touch with him so that maybe he can free her. Some time later he manages this and President Elias Martinez (Blair Underwood) tells his advisors that he wants to meet with the prisoners and he wants them released. The President then meets with Sophia, and we do not know what she tells him or who they are or why they are being kept there, only that there are 97 prisoners. Eleven days before the present, Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) and Leila Buchanan (Sarah Roemer) are leaving from her parents place to go on a cruise where Sean will ask her to marry him. A few days before the present, presumably Leila’s mother and sister are killed, while Leila goes missing and is stricken from the cruise record along with Sean. In the present, Michael Buchanan (Scott Patterson) is distraught and attempts to fly a plane into the President whom he blames for these events, and Sean is on the plane attempting to talk him down. Meanwhile, the President was about to give a speech to reporters outing the secret prison in Alaska. Right before the plane is going to crash into the house the President was in for the moment, it disappears into a blue-ish white light that reminds one of a black hole or some sort of warp drive. Then Sophia says the title of the episode to President Martinez.

I started this review with a plain summary probably because I really have little to say about the episode. Nothing really happened. That is a long paragraph above, but largely it does not mean anything. We do not know the characters and we do not know what happened. Nothing at all is told to us except that a prison facility exists, the people manipulating events have computer access (how they can remove Sean and Leila from the cruise ship records) and that we are dealing with technology that is more advanced than whatever mainstream technology the audience knows (and probably fictional). That still sounds like a lot of knowledge, but it does not feel like it watching the episode.

The problem I think is that there are not really any quiet moments. During the cruise, when Sean is about to propose to Leila, they hear a scream and he rescues a girl about to drown. That part, although indicative of Sean’s heroism, just felt rather unnecessary. Not unrealistic, since that could easily happen, but I did not really need tension in that part of the episode. We already know something crazy is going to happen since we are treated to people looking up and yelling and running around in the first 1 minute of the episode. There is too much urgency in this episode, and the urgency is not done properly. Everyone is agitated, but we do not know why they are agitated.

This show is already being compared to Lost and 24. I have seen Lost and I get the comparison because it has to do with planes and strange happenings and an overabundance of flashbacks. I have not seen 24 but I understand that the use of time is iconic, and from brief clips I have seen, the actions shots seem similarly shot as well. What I would like to invoke instead though is the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. Although some people had already seen the miniseries before this first episode and thus had an emotional attachment to the characters, even without the miniseries I think that episode does a better job of building tension because the audience knows what is going on. There is an enemy, they are going to kill you, and you cannot escape. And every time they try to kill you, you get a little more tired. The whole episode then is watching them get more and more fatigued and the tension builds naturally, not because of people shouting and yelling (although that occurs as well) but because you yourself can imagine exactly what they are going through just by understanding how they cannot let themselves sleep.

If we are comparing to Lost again, Lost built tension in different ways. Although the mysteries were often the focus of the show, tension was not built on mysteries but on inevitable clashes. The first season we are introduced to two of the big clashes, Jack and Sawyer and Jack and Locke. The first happens almost right away, while the second proves to be more divisive and builds more slowly. In either case, these are people that we get to know and people that clash. The monster is there in the first season as well, and we do await the inevitable clash with the monster, but my favorite episode of Lost is in the second season, “Man of Science, Man of Faith”, because it dealt with the Jack and Locke struggle so well, and because they clashed and nothing was resolved (as often happens in real life).

All this means is that the Event is not doing it for me. Maybe it will, and I will get interested in it along the way (as happened with Fringe). But to do that it means that at some point they will have to introduce character clashes, not just crazy physics happenings. As I have said in other reviews, this is just the pilot and is not indicative of the season as a whole, but I cannot say that anything in the episode really drew me in so I am not very hopeful.