La Brea Review: The New Arrival (Season 1 Episode 4)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 4, “The New arrival,” is one that should work on paper but, in practice, just ends up feeling completely hollow and dull.
The problem here isn’t necessarily anything in the text but instead that we have been given no reason over the last three episodes to really care about anything that’s going on or anyone that it’s happening to. It’s forward momentum but there’s no feeling that we’re actually going anywhere.
A show can have the best, most engaging plot but if the audience isn’t invested or have any interest in the characters, then it’s really all for nothing. What’s the point in getting wrapped up in an episode that’s setting things up when we can barely remember anyone’s name half of the time?
The other, arguably larger, problem happening on this episode is that it’s too overstuffed with things that are obviously building to a climax for the next episode. This has been an overarching issue with the series in that it can’t truly discern where its focus lies. It simultaneously wants to be a stranded survivor story but it keeps shoving in government coverups and secret plans.
It needs to pick a lane but it’s profoundly incapable of doing so. Everything that is happening in the before times is more than enough to satisfy a full episode but the show clearly needs to drag itself out for another installment and it leaves all of it in this nebulous space where it can’t even come close to resolving anything.
Instead, we’re left with hooks at the end of the episode that should be somewhat enticing, if it weren’t for the fact that no one cares. The trouble with La Brea is that it’s phenomenally dumb and that would be fine if that’s all it were. Dumb can be great; just go look at Zoo for further proof.
This show doesn’t seem to recognize how dumb it is, though — or, if it does, thinks it’s far less so than it actually is. Everything is played so seriously and matter-of-fact that it doesn’t realize that this is the worst kind of nonsense. Twenty years ago, this might have been fine. Now, we’ve seen everything this show could possibly have to offer.
Landing in a new place and having the native inhabitants attack the survivors is just the Others and the Grounders all over again. There’s nothing new to that, it’s just treading old ground that is well worn to begin with.
To that end, it’s not even clear what the purpose of this show even is. Four episodes in, the writers have a somewhat clear sense of what they’re doing and what they plan to do and that’s not apparent to us. At the beginning, Lost was a character drama with supernatural trappings to keep us invested.
La Brea doesn’t really have either of those things. The characters are written so broadly that it has to be on purpose, so that leaves us with the plot, which is also as broad as it comes. What’s the point of any of this then? The show obviously doesn’t know at this point and there’s practically no hope that it’ll ever come up with any.
What did you think of this episode of La Brea? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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La Brea airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.
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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.