The Event – S1 E05 – “Casualties of War"

Let’s discuss the Sean story first. Leila realizes she is being played and Sean also realizes that he is walking into a trap. He manages to convince Vichy to help him (the logic of which I will discuss below), and so almost everyone at the police station is dead. Vichy lies to her superiors, and her partner is captured by Sean’s team which now includes Leila.

Meanwhile, the President decides to renegotiate the terms and threatens to kill all of the prisoners if Thomas does not give them the antidote for the passengers. We find out Thomas was part of the Manhattan project through a flashback, and despite his resolve when talking about it with Simon, he does give up the antidote. The only condition was that Sophia be freed, and she is with the President having the intention of using her to track down Thomas.

A lot of good signs and a lot of bad tendencies were displayed in this episode. Let’s discuss the good first. For once, I was happy that the President acted like what I imagine a real President would act like. He did not give in to the terrorist and he made a morally odious decision and then stuck with it, despite perhaps having a crisis of conscious. Vichy as our villain representative killed some more people as well. Why are these good signs? Well it means the show is not taking the easy way out. Again, I have not seen 24 so it is difficult to compare, but I am satisfied in terms of action, even if it is all pretty illogical. If I am going to be consuming less than ideal television, I would at least like it to be consistently hardcore, instead of moralizing to me all the time.

Now let us discuss the bad. I never want to hear “you listen to me you son of a bitch” ever again. I do not know if this is a common thing for people to say in real life or not, but it is the go to phrase for phone conversations in TV and movies. It has gotten to the point where there was actually a look of disgust on my face as I was watching this when I heard that line. Luckily, Thomas kept right on talking over the Martinez’s line, probably because he was so bored of it too. It’s just a symptom of lazy writing, of which there is a lot.

See, they could not Leila escape for real last episode because it seems to easy, and because the villains have to actually seem capable. Which means they put themselves in a pickle this episode by having an impossible situation before Sean and female FBI. What is their solution? Sean threatens Vichy into helping him by using her son for…something. He threatens to release pictures of him on the net, which is absolutely possible, but accomplishes nothing. I highly doubt in the 5 years that Vichy has worked with whatever branch of the government she works for that they have not checked out her family more than once and noticed that she suddenly had a child living there. But even if they did not, why the hell would she care about the child at this point? The boy’s family is dead so no one is looking for him, and Vichy’s superiors have a lot more pressing issues to worry about at the moment, and hell they might even think the kid is her mom’s. Really, there was no reason for Vichy not to shoot Sean except for the fact that it served the plot.

The other Vichy correlation here is about her saving the baby and whether that makes her a good character or not. Please do not make her a good character. This is a request, a request which will go unheard, but still, I just want some consistency. Her saving a baby does not make her into a morally ambiguous characters. Many, many evil people do not want to kill babies because they are adorable. Please keep her evil. That is all I have to say about that.

For the most part I was okay with the inhuman storyline this episode. I did not find it crazy that Thomas would give in since the prisoners are fewer and more important to him than 200 or so random passengers are to the President (now if Thomas had infected Martinez’s son…). That was all fine. What was not fine was the First Lady. First of all, I was more curious that criticizing, but does the First Lady have as much security clearance as the President? Because she found out about these things awfully fast, and I find it odd that something which was not shared with past Presidents would be so quickly shared with his wife. I am not that familiar with this in real life though, so I will let that slide. What I really hated was the moralizing. When she accused him of turning into Blake Sterling I thought to myself, “the only logical and politically realistic character on the show? Sounds good to me.” The executions made perfect sense to me. It was absolutely the right move, and we absolutely have to maintain the notion of not negotiating with terrorists, which is what Thomas is. Whether or not the prisoners deserve to be freed is a separate issue (and they do not, if only because they do represent a security risk). I understand that perhaps to show how important of a decision this is, we need someone like his wife there to question it, but it still felt pretty stupid to me. Could she really not understand his thought process there?

Regardless, the illogic of the episode was not that bad, and I was distracted positively by the questions that arose from the idea of the inhumans. They seem to speak our language (unless it is done for our benefit), the use the concept of years fairly familiarly (although this could be because of living on Earth for so long), they recognize our old and new technology, they wear similar clothes, and they look like us. More and more I think they must be extra-dimensional. Nothing else really explains it. Essentially, their side has advanced farther than our side. It is as simple as that, and they conducted some sort of experiment and got stuck on our side. I imagine their “ship”, however it looks like, has the ability to travel between worlds, and all the uses of “extra-terrestrial” are there to throw us off and think of aliens.

The other interesting line was Thomas’s “they’re all gonna die anyway.” This could mean any number of things, such as short human life span (relatively), a future we do not know about, a general pronouncement on mortality, or an after effect of the warp hole. The last provides the best basis for why Thomas cannot just take the prisoners out of the jail, since doing so will probably kill them in the process. Of course, that being a logical reason for the mess they are in means it is probably not the reason. But I will give them the benefit of the doubt.