La Brea Review: The Fort (Season 1 Episode 5)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 5, “The Fort,” finally has some sort of forward momentum to it but this engine has molasses in it, not gasoline.
We’ve asked this before on these reviews but it bears repeating here: What is La Brea and what is it trying to do? What is it setting out to accomplish? It’s not a character drama because no one, after five episodes, feels lived in or fleshed out to any particular degree.
It’s only tangentially sci-fi in the sense that there are time travel aspects and the foundation for a revisionist history of some sort. The show itself doesn’t seem all too interested in that, though. So it’s not even a really genre series. Quite honestly, there’d have to be a lot more CGI animals for that to be possible, something that Zoo and Terra Nova has over this.
It’s also not an acting showcase on any level because everyone seems to be putting in as little effort as possible. You can practically see someone off-screen waving a check during any given scene. No one’s doing really anything of note and that’s not on the actors because they can only do so much with bad writing and dialogue.
The fact is that La Brea doesn’t want to be any of those things and that becomes more and more clear with every passing episode. Instead, it would like to be every other show that has ever existed and, at this point, it really wants you to know that.
The thing that no one has been prepared for is that not only does it want to be Lost, but it also has its sights set on The 100, for some bizarre and unknown reason. It hadn’t been super clear up until this episode — aside from all of the obvious ways that La Brea is similar to it — but the utter sledgehammer that is referring to the main characters as “Sky People” is just galling.
At this point, we can just say that the show is a blatant plagiarization of other shows and the brazenness of it all is almost admirable if it weren’t so incredibly embarrassing. Ripping off The 100 is quite honestly one of the weirdest things we’ve ever seen a show do. There’s almost no words to describe but we have to wonder why anyone would ever willingly do that.
There’s not a huge contingent of people who still think all that fondly of The 100, so the question becomes who is this actually for? That’s what we keep coming back to here. Who is actually supposed to be enjoying this? Who is the target audience meant to be for this show?
In an odd way, it reminds us of Wrecked, which was this satire of Lost that knew exactly what it was and eventually moved past that and became more like a parody of deserted island tropes. It had such a clear vision of what it wanted to be and the kind of jokes it wanted to tell that allowed it to stretch out into telling a lot of different stories within that genre.
That’s a bit what it feels like La Brea is meaning to aim for. It wants to do these plotlines that you might recognize from other shows but it also wants us to know that it’s doing that. The problem there would be that this show is doing this all completely straight and Wrecked was an absolute farce.
The difference is all the difference between a good show and a bad one.
What did you think of this episode of La Brea? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
La Brea airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.