Author: jclawver

Both Tony Kornheiser, who is my favorite faux-curmudgeon, and a real-life friend said how great The Event was, so I decided to check out the second episode.

Things I learned from the previouslies and Kevin, proving that I didn’t pay attention well to the pilot:\
Aliens! The big secret is aliens. Except, if the show told us that in the pilot, obviously that is not the big secret. What is bigger than aliens? I am annoyed at the show for presuming there is anything bigger than aliens.

The mean grandmother was killed immediately following the kidnapping of her granddaughter. The lesson here is don’t be mean to children in your care or you will be shot by terrorists. True story.\
Here are my random thoughts of the second episode:

The show continued with its assery of “13 months previous,” “4 days previous,” and “5 years previous.” Ugh! Who cares about when Joan of Arcadia‘s brother met his girlfriend when she is currently being held prisoner?? Get on with the freaking story! I know the back story supposed to endear us the characters and make us sympathize with their potential loss, but I am pretty sure I could’ve done that anyway since I am a real live human being.

Vampire Sheriff is actually a bad guy here. Given that he is playing a politician, that should have been immediately apparent.

Another of the bad guys is played by a tv-version of Megan Fox, without the thumb issues. This woman is way too hot to be on tv. TV is for attractive people but not the super hot. She has quite the tv resume though. I mostly know her as Sam’s first love interest, besides Dean of course (yes, I totally just went there. Rim-shot!) and various CSI’s. She was also on Summerland a million years ago where her character hooked up with pre-Bieber (who later dated Ruby 1.0 in real life! Let’s play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon!). Have I mentioned how she is too good looking for tv? Somebody should get her some movie scripts. Maybe she looks too much like Megan Fox though; the public would suddenly wonder when Megan learned to act. Looks aside, I totally fastforwarded through her scenes cuz they were all, “blah, blah, I’m pretending to be your friend” and “blah, blah, do what I say or I’ll pull your hair harder.”

Interestingly, douche #1, the guy with a cast who wouldn’t save his drowning girlfriend because the dr told him not to get his cast wet, wasn’t a “bad” bad guy, but just a douchey, cheating, run-of-the-mill creep. Seriously, it was the most interesting two minutes of the whole show so far. He ended up being stabbed to death. The lesson here, of course, is don’t be a creepy, cheater-dude or the terrorists will gut you like a fish.

Guess who else is on the show? Mr Toe Pick! I don’t really have anything to say about him since I fastforwarded through most of his scenes too. He mostly just looked menacing and acted out really obvious scenes, like threatening the girlfriend’s life so the pilot dad would be coerced into attempting to crash into the special building where the President was. I am sure I didn’t miss much. I admit to squealing when I first saw him though.

Plotwise not much happened. Joan of Arcadia’s brother ran from the plane that didn’t crash into the president but somehow ended up in a desert where it had a hard landing. All of the passengers were killed by the government, to cover-up whatever the giant white light was.

Aaaaaand, I can’t care enough to talk about this anymore, though there was an annoying scene where Joan of Arcadia’s brother woke up in a hospital and asked to speak to the police, but the nurse, who is another pretty recognizable actress, kept repeating “calm down, sir.” How hard would it to have been to say, “Ok, I will see what I can do about that”?

Have I sufficiently explained how bad this show is, how bad the editing is, how bad the writing is, but has an exceptionally well-recognizable cast?

I forced myself to watch The Event, Mondays on NBC, because Kevin said it might have potential. We tried watching it a few days ago, but the time-line jumpiness was annoying me so much I couldn’t stand to watch it. The episode should be recut in chronological order, like someone did with Memento. It’s not that I couldn’t follow along, it’s that I didn’t want to. Kevin thinks shows employ this cliche when the storyline isn’t strong enough to hold up to traditional storytelling. In this case, he’s right! He suffered from severe insomnia one night (too much Dexter) and ended up finishing the pilot.

Here is what happened, without the “8 days before” “23 minutes before” “2 days before” stuff. Beware of spoilers, duh.\
Joan of Arcadia‘s older, wheelchair-bound brother, also known as the cute teacher who macked on Lorelai Gilmore on Parenthood, takes his girlfriend on a cruise. She is kidnapped, and all traces of their stuff and information is erased, her cell phone disconnected. Security is set to hold him for something (probably on suspicion of being a stow-away), but he runs away from them. He ends up on an airplane and tries to force his way into the cockpit. He is stopped by an air marshal.\
An attractive Asian man who isn’t John Cho meets with Kerry, the polio-surviving, lesbian, doctor from ER, and they talk about stuff that I don’t recall. Later, attractive Asian man tries to prevent the plane holding the boyfriend from taking off, but he isn’t successful.

The President of the United States, played by Blair Underwood, who hasn’t made enough of a splash as a single character for me to refer to him as anything other than his given name, meets with some advisers and demands to be taken to some secret, special place. The advisers try to talk him out of going, to no avail.

Meanwhile, the girlfriend’s parents, played by Luke from Gilmore Girls (think he and Joan of Arcadia brother bonded off-screen about smooching Lauren Graham on-screen?) and some lady I recognize but don’t know from where, are taking care of the girlfriend’s daughter from a previous relationship while the girlfriend is on the cruise. The child is also kidnapped, through no fault of the grandmother though she was really mean to the girl. This forces the grandfather, who happens to be an airline pilot, to hijack an airplane, and apparently kill the other pilot, to try to crash the plane into the secret, special building where the President of the United States is. This is the same airplane that the boyfriend is on. The boyfriend pleads with the girlfriend’s dad through the intercom to not “do this… We’ll find her. She wouldn’t want this.”

People at the important building notice a giant jumbo jet coming toward them and they flail around a bit. Suddenly a bright light erupts and the plane didn’t crash into the building. Kerry-from-ER, says, “They saved us.”\
The End.

I sort of want to rewatch it just to make sure my details are right, but no. That would be too much torture.