La Brea Review: The Way Home (Season 1 Episode 6)

La Brea Season 1 Episode 6, “The Way Home,” is an incoherent mass of nonsense. 

It can take a little while for a show to reveal itself for what it is or what it’s trying to do. After six episodes, we can say with some assuredness that La Brea is simply a bad show, full stop. You can only give a show the benefit of the doubt for so long — and that’s not to say that we ever did — but this is really the point that we can say there’s really nothing redemptive here. 

The inescapable fact is that this is a lazy show from top to bottom. There is no care given to any aspect of this series. The writing is shoddy as can be and it is clear on every moment of La Brea. We’ve said this before but it’s writing that’s so bad that it feels like it has to be on purpose. 

That would require a level of self-awareness, though, that La Brea has not once ever shown any sign of possessing. That feels almost at odds with itself when previous episodes are pulling almost directly from Lost and The 100, which implies that the writers have not only seen those shows but many others as well. 

They’ve seen what to do and what not to do from television and have seemingly learned no lessons from it. It’s as if this is a show written by children who haven’t developed any kind of sophistication or nuance. They don’t even have the sense not to kill the explicitly queer female character. 

The death of Diana, a character that we had not met before this is episode, is perfectly emblematic of everything that this show is. It is simultaneously a profoundly safe and lazy show. It doesn’t put any thought into anything it does; it just leaps and hopes there’s something there to break its fall. 

It should know better than to not do something like this but, again, that would require it to have an ounce of self-awareness, which it clearly doesn’t have. If it did, then it would know not to just haphazardly kill off queer character when there are so many other things that it could do instead of that. 

La Brea didn’t need to kill Diana but it did it anyway for seemingly no reason. The only narrative purpose is so that Eve and Marybeth can be exiled from the camp. You still get to that same point if they accidentally blow up the plane, which is what happens already. 

It’s a death only for the sake of being shocking and it doesn’t serve any kind of real purpose. The show’s definitely not about to have the conversation of a cop killing a marginalized person because they don’t know how to deescalate a situation. 

On a similar level, the episode wants to have its cake and eat too with this weird causal loop but doesn’t come to any satisfying point with it. The show just wants to have time travel in it but isn’t interested in having any kind of discussion about it. It’s made out to be significant that the wreckage remains disappears at the end but what does that even mean? 

La Brea doesn’t know and honestly it doesn’t care. 

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!

20 TV Characters Who Really Need a Hug