The Event S1E5: Casualties of War

We're on Team Vicki.

Well, okay then.

That was at least a marginally encouraging move in the right direction. We're gonna keep bringing up Lost but we don't feel a bit guilty about that since everything from the fictional airline to the separated lovers to the trombone slides are lifted straight from it. Here's the thing about Lost: in the months since the finale, everyone's been coming out of the woodwork to opine that "It was about the mysteries," "No, it was about the characters." Both of those statements are true, but neither of them really get the point. Lost was a brilliant combination of plot, character, and some of the best action scenes ever filmed for network television. There's still a lot not working with this show, but give us a good shootout and rescue scene and we'll stop our bitching for ten minutes.

Okay, ten minutes are up.

We're sorry to be so repetitive, but it's time to close the book on President Fauxbama and his Crime Bustin' Justiceteers. Forget the fact that the very concept is painfully stupid to anyone who's had a fifth grade civics class, the bottom line is, it's boring. We feel bad for Blair Underwood and Zeljko Ivanek, who are doing decent work here, but scenes set around a conference table discussing the powers of the Presidency, while timely as hell, don't do a damn thing to keep the story moving. And how is it that Agent Lee can have private meetings with Sophia and no one on the President's cabinet seems to know or care? How is it that a national security risk isn't having all her conversations with a Federal Agent taped or monitored? Come on now, people. Drop the Action President part of the story. All it manages to do is take a simple mystery/action show and turn it into something stupid by repeatedly insulting the intelligence of the audience.

Thankfully, the annoying flashbacks have been greatly reduced and the ones we get were at least a little illuminating. Yes, we're getting a little tired of that 1944 crash site scene, but at least we get a tiny little bit more information about these people. Thomas is distressed to find out that the then-current technological advancement of the human race was pre-nuclear fission. Sophia chose Thomas for the task of getting them "home." We're telling you, these people are time travelers, not aliens. They're keeping it pretty ambiguous, but every scene with them only confirms it to us.

Vicki continues to make this show. We find out in flashback that not only is she not entirely the vicious bitch we've been assuming, but that her son is someone she saved from a mission. A little souvenir, after killing his entire family and burning his house down. See? She's not so bad. She's got a Morena Baccarin-like quality of delicious evil wrapped up in a beautiful package, making it virtually impossible to take your eyes off her in any scene. More Vicki, please. We knew that picture was going to come back to haunt her and we admit, Sean's threat to make it "go viral" was pretty ingenious - and made sense coming from a tech nerd like him.

Sean remains our favorite character, even if he is saying things like "Wait! I've got an idea," just a little too much. We realize they have to straddle the line between everyman-in-over-his-head and action hero with a character like Sean, but he's far more appealing when he doesn't have the answers to everything. Agent Collier is a good character played by a strong actress and she's been relegated to Sean's sidekick, which is a shame. She deserves better than to be Sean's driver and gun supplier. Sure, they gave her a little to do in the shootout at the police station, but...oh wait. That shootout. We forgot about the problem we had with it until just now.

Like we said, we love a good little action sequence and it was about time the good guys got the upper hand in something, but we were taken right out of the scene when we realized the police station sits on a residential block of houses and no one came out or even turned on their lights when a 5-minute shootout occurred. Which then made us wonder how the hell the bad guys managed to take over such a police station and remain there for hours without anyone finding out. Come on now, writers.

Leila's getting a little less passive and stupid with each episode, which is a good sign. Although, granted, it sure did take her an awfully long time to figure out that no one in that police station was acting normally. And the escape attempt on her part was so bad it was LOL-funny. The only thing that could have made that worse was if she actually escaped.

The bottom line is, there's just too many things being thrown at us too early in the game. It's as if the Others, the DHARMA Initiative, and Widmore Industries had all been introduced in the first 3 episodes of Lost. Still, we didn't find this one as annoyingly bad as the previous episode. Things actually happened this time, instead of things just being talked about. Sean and Leila are reunited, which surprised us, because we figured they'd be kept apart indefinitely. Sophia's been released onto a magic subway or something. And Smichelle Fauxbama wanders the White House in a nightgown, wringing her hands over her tough-as-nails Action Prez husband.

Okay, maybe that last part wasn't such a riveting development.


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[Photo credit: NBC TV]