The Event – S1 E04 – “A Matter of Life and Death”

Ratcheting up the darkness in the newest The Event episode. On the presidential side we finally see Martinez interacting with his wife Christina while also talking to Sophia, and we get a snazzy refugee metaphor for the situation (this dinner meeting happening a year ago). In the present, the president finally gets Sophia to tell him something about the inhuman on the outside. She tells Martinez his name, Thomas, and that he is a man who will do whatever it takes, which in this case has the woken up and amnesia induced passengers to start bleeding out of their noses.

On Sean’s side of the story, he and Agent Collier flee and take down the fake agent pursuing them. They think they have tracked down Vichy in Texas. Instead they find her mom and her son. The mom spills that Vichy might be in Colorado, so the duo head there. At the same time Leila gets tricked into thinking she has escaped her captors through the use of blanks and a conveniently placed piece of broken glass. She calls Sean to get him to pick her up, which was what the villains had in mind so that they could lure him in and kill him. Also, we see a flashback of Sean and Leila having thanksgiving for the first time with the Buchanan family (5 years prior) and get a story from Sean about his alcoholic father which may or may not be true.

This was great. I like that the fake FBI villain has no problems killing people like the guy in the first two minutes in the garage (although on the other hand, why was that guy even there? He couldn’t hear the gun shots?). Still, I like that they are continuing portraying these people as ruthless. I still think the entire thing is kind of ridiculous. I mean if they have infiltrated the government to the extent that they have these agents everywhere, or if they can just create really good fakes, then one would think they could be a little more patient and not have to shoot up an entire FBI office just to get Sean Walker. After all, they went through that ridiculous plan to fake Vichy being shot just so that Leila would call Sean (even though they could have had her call him from the beginning). Really, the plan is not bad, it just seems ridiculous in so far as they have time and money to waste and being patient would probably just make killing him easier.

Relating to the villains, this episode we are more in depth introduced to Vice President Jarvis who seems to be a sketchy figure. And with the conjecture from last episode that Vichy might be working for the NSA, it is perfectly plausible that he might be leading some sort of secret task force that she is a part of. I cannot say I recognized the other voice on the line that Vichy was talking with, but it sounded old enough that it just might have been the VP. It might not, but I do not think anyone should be surprised if it does happen to be him. If it turns out to be Sterling though, I have to say I will be shocked, if only because so far he has played the good if morally ambiguous advisor so well.

As far as the inhumans go this week, all we get is what happens to the passengers. All of them bleeding at the exact same time makes me think even more that we are either dealing with trans-dimensional travelers or people from the future since the bleeding implies either a biological or nano machine attack, possible both (biomechanical in nature). I guess there are other possibilities that are unknown to us, some sort of alien technology, but the mitochondrial reference that the doctor was talking about implied a biological attack of some sort, and the timing was too good for it not to be. The only thing that threw me off was Sophia talking about her people and the people in our country. It really made me think that they cannot be from the future, but must be inter-dimensional travelers, somewhere along the lines of Fringe, but really I am just guessing at this point.

Finally, let’s talk about what did not work. The real problem with this show is that for the moment (and for the foreseeable future) all of these people are caricatures not characters. The scene with the agent crying was fine in the sense that that might be a realistic reaction from someone seeing their coworkers gunned down, but we don’t actually know her nor really care about her yet. This is because she is still a caricature of an enforcement official. The same thing is true for Vichy and the president and everyone really except Sean. Finding out Vichy has a child still does not explain her motivations and so I cannot really care about her. The president has not done anything really individual yet, so finding out how he met his wife does not really interest me. I have to say that I think this is because the show moves too fast for me to care. Having action sequences is great in so far as I actually like this show despite its poor plot, but it also means that I cannot get myself to care about the characters. Lost did this well by having quiet moments in its flashbacks and in its present day. Lost had plenty of action, but the reason we got to know and care about the characters were because of those quiet moments of dialogue or inaction.

Sean has become a character, but only because we have spent the most time with him, and he is important for the villains to kill for some reason, and we also know he is a smart hacker. He is not really a caricature because he does not fall into any one stereotype or model very neatly, but he is not really a character yet either because I honestly do not care about him either. He is at least interesting though, unlike most of the rest of the cast.