La Brea Review: Father and Son (Season 1 Episode 9)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 9, “Father and Son,” starts the preamble for the conclusion of this season with answers that none of us really asked for.
Here’s the problem with the episode: the twist from the previous one is deeply dumb and now we (and the show) have to engage with that at face value. It’s introduced the idiotic notion that Isiah has been child Gavin all along and now has to do what it can with that.
Granted, this is a problem that it created that it now has to solve but there is a nugget of a good episode here. It’s not much of one and it races past us all in a rocket but it’s there. Have any of the other episodes been able to say that? No, not really.
This is all so blatantly stupid and should have been thrown into a flaming trash can but where you have to give points is that, if nothing else, this feels like it is wholly a product of La Brea. It’s the most asinine possible version of it but it’s theirs. This doesn’t feel like crass rip of Lost, The 100, or a hundred other shows we could mention.
It’s a trope, without a doubt, but there is an air of originality to it. They reached into their Cabinet of Stupid and pulled this particular idea out. It’s not very good or passes any kind of muster but what cannot be said is that it is a product of another series. Of course, there’s probably a good reason for that but credit where credit’s due.
That being said, this is an idea that almost breaks the show, more so than it already has been. La Brea has introduced the notion now by saying that both Isiah and Lily are child versions of adults that we’ve already met in the present, that any child or older person that appears could be someone we’ve already met.
That presents a number of problems that this show is not at all equipped to deal with. This requires a kind of foresight and narrative planning that La Brea has in no way demonstrated that it is incompetent enough to execute. It has brought time travel into the chat and that’s a whole other set of equations for a show to deal with.
For example, when Lost did time travel there was a very specific function to it. It was brought in for a season to be implemented expeditiously and then discarded come the next season. The way that La Brea has used time travel is more one of permanence. There could be an endless stream of displaced people from any different time.
That is a plotting power that could very easily go awry, even for a good show. It’s incredibly encouraging when the show is still grappling with basic changes to the timeline, like a cow or white people thousands of years before they should be there, and it still doesn’t have a clue how to address their dead man in the woods.
There’s nothing to say that these things spell good tidings for La Brea going forward. It is, almost assuredly, a death sentence for the show.
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.
3 comments
How are there an adult Lily and and a young Lily at 2021 before the fall in the LA sinkhole?
You gotta love how utterly stupid the writers were to suggest that newcomers would be best suited for a search party to go traipsing off into totally unfamiliar territory in an extremely hostile environment to look for someone that has lived there for years and is familiar with both the environment and area, as opposed to letting the knowledgeable, period experienced native villagers go looking for the old man and kid.
I also have to wonder, why does it seem so difficult for any of the newcomers (sky people), to engage in dialog with the natives? Everything has to revolve around suspicion and distrust of everyone they meet. How difficult would it be to ask a question or 12 about how someone potentially died without accusing them of murder in the process? Instead Gavin had to invade someone’s home and show how inconsiderate and un-trustworthy the newcomers really are as a whole.
I could write a novel on every asinine thing that comes up with each scene in this series but I don’t think it would be fair for me to spend more time critiquing each 15 to 30 second scene than the writers spent creating or stealing them.
I have the samecquestion!
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