La Brea Review: Origins (Season 1 Episode 8)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 8, “Origins,” sees the group going off to make peace with the indigenous village.
“Origins” is an episode that, by all rights, should work. It’s working off of a trope but a good one. The main characters go on a diplomatic mission that’ll probably end up failing and making everything worse but the effort has to be made. It’s a plotline pulled directly from the first season of The 100.
Normally, that blatant copying would be annoying but sometimes you have to take what you can get. Take the bar you have for a show and just knock it to the ground. If disappointment is inevitable, hope to minimize it as much as possible.
That being said, this is still not a good episode — and that’s without even taking into account its final moments, which is something we’ll get to later. It’s not hard to imagine how this could’ve been a good episode, or at the least a passable one. It feels like looking at something through stained glass: are you even looking at anything at all?
An episode like this can only be pulled off if the audience has an investment in the characters and what’s going on. That’s just not the case with La Brea. There’s never really been anything to see us through on this show and now that we’re getting to the meat of the series, it somehow feels even more hollow than it was before.
If La Brea is a cake, it is a shell of icing with nothing inside of it and the most impressive thing is that it doesn’t buckle under the weight of itself.
This is an episode that relies on the strengths of its characters but it doesn’t have any. It has cardboard cutouts in the shape of characters, hoping that it can fool you. La Brea has always hoped that archetypes can make up for actual complexity or depth and this is as much of a self-own in that sense as one could possibly imagine.
When a plotline revolves entirely around a character and his reliance on medication, there needs to be something of a buildup to that point. This is basic character work; you can’t do an arc like this without any setup. That isn’t possible because they haven’t done any work into any of these characters.
The show can’t even remember that just a day earlier that character was walking around with a cane and a limp and now he’s just magically not. Of course it doesn’t, why would it? There’s no reason to expect that a show like this would be able to think back to an episode earlier.
Lost could get away with something like that because it was an integral part of its show. La Brea does it because it’s lazy and careless.
Finally, let’s address the cherry on top of this episode. The culmination of Eve and Gavin’s plots intersecting here is one of the single things we’ve ever seen possibly ever. The fact that no one in the writer’s room immediately shot down this twist is an abhorrent crime against nature and legal recourse should be sought.
It is so beyond the pale that a boy that Eve meets is also her husband and father of her children. It’s the most asinine thing you can possible imagine and it’s a transparent effort to make Gavin a relevant part of this show. What’s even more galling is that this feels like La Brea‘s big idea unfolding and that’s probably the worst thing about all of this.
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.