The Event Review: “To Keep Us Safe”

I’ve decided after two episodes that The Event is worthy of a weekly review. Previously, I’ve covered Lost and V on a weekly basis, and this new show has ties to both, more so than I initially imagined.

Yeah, so that was quick. There was rampant speculation about the end of the last episode which involved a disappearing hijacked plane and a secret prison full of mysterious individuals, and the talk all centered on one guess. Aliens. It has to be aliens.

And five minutes into the show, I turned to my friend and said, “If it is aliens, I really hope they don’t wait a real long time to reveal that. If they wait until the end of the season or something, and are like, ‘surprise!’ we’re all going to be like, yeah, we know.” And just as I finished that thought, the CIA chief started talking about a crashed ship and survivors not of “terrestrial origin.” Well, that was fast.

Let’s harvest their blood for anti-aging cream!

It was quite a shock to hear the truth stated so openly and so quickly, after six years of Lost postponing even the smallest of answers. Such a revelation might have lasted the entire series on that show, and even until the very end, some thought the Island might turn out to be some sort organic alien mothership.

But now that the secret’s out, it changes the show drastically, and makes it much more like V, which now has an unexpected competitor and was barely struggling to survive as is. There are two central questions that accompany both shows, who are the secret sleeper aliens lurking in the general population, and what is their end game?

David Palmer would never sit in a chair like that.

Already, I like The Event‘s aliens far better than V‘s, the absence of superhotties Morena Baccarin and Laura Vandervoort aside. V is based on a cheesy miniseries from decades ago, and stuck with the idea that aliens were lizards wearing human suits. Rather dumb, and their giant, terribly CGI-ed spaceships weren’t doing them any favors either.

The Event‘s mysterious beings are a far different breed. They’re almost biologically indistinguishable from humans (a character notes that they might share a common ancestor, which could make for some really interesting revelations), and their only biological super power known to date is that they don’t age. At least not very quickly, hence why they’ve been hanging out in secret jail for six decades and don’t look a day older.

Man, Clifton Collins Jr. looks creepy with no facial hair.

We learn that the plane hasn’t vanished, and instead has been teleported to Arizona. Sean Walker and the rest of the passengers stumble out, and as what appears to be Black Hawk helicopters approach, his father-in-law tells him how he was forced to undertake the suicide mission, and Sean must go find the truth and save his girlfriend and her sister.

Wellll, Sean isn’t exactly Mr. Genius Conspiracy Expert at this point, and upon being hospitalized, his first instinct is to call the local police. Really, the fact that your girlfriend was kidnapped, all record of you being aboard a cruise was erased and the fact that you were just in a plane that got teleported across the country didn’t clue you in that this might be bigger than the Yuma Police Department?

At the hospital it’s  revealed from one of the shows now trademark _____ hours/days/years earlier flashbacks that Gray, the surfer dude with the broken arm, tried to seduce/knock out Leila after he went out scuba diving. But when that fails, a more seasoned agent steps in, and knifes him in the gut in the process. This part didn’t quite sit right. If Sean is framed for a murder, why bother with the whole cleansing of his room and erasing him from the ship, shouldn’t they have busted in there with the bloody body on the bed and arrested him when he got back? What was the point of the whole erasing episode then if they were just going to try to coral him on that warrant later, issued for a body no one ever actually found?

“Uh, so like, why are all these dudes chasing me?”

Another scene out of nowhere was a completely random aside where Sean meets Leila for the first time in a pool and he gives her an impromptu swim lesson. As touched as I may have been by their affection in the first episode, the entire time here I was just wondering, “who the hell just goes to a pool by themselves to flounder around if they don’t know how to swim?” I just didn’t understand how that scene tied into anything else in the episode, and seemed like pretty forced character development.

The big twist in this episode was that Agent Lee is actually an alien, something we could have pieced together from the fact that he was Sophia’s “outside contact” and he appeared to call in the teleportation event at the end of the last episode.

When he arrives on the scene of the plane crash with his fellow government cronies, they find Leila’s father-in-law along with all the other passengers strewn out dead outside the plane. This raises any number of questions ranging from the simple (“Why?”) to the more complex (“What were those helicopter looking things coming at them, and how exactly did all these people with no visible wounds die?”). I have a few bonus questions of my own, such as over the last sixty years, have the aliens on the outside reproduced, and if so, do their kids stay babies forever, or can they grow up until they reach a “max level” and are enlisted as soldiers in the fight. I didn’t see Lee in that original 1944 group after all…

How many aliens split off here? What happened to their ship?

I’m still interested, and though I think a lot of people will go “puh, whatever, aliens” after this and tune out, I think it was good to get that out of the way. Despite that big question being answered, there’s still plenty to wonder about, and I daresay I’m quite hopeful for the future of this show.

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7 Comments

  1. You are very correct in saying this is worthy of a weekly review. Put simply… this is the first legit Lost replacement since Invasion came out during season 2. The mysteries are just going to keep piling on and I am already convinced that the big reveal in the finale will be that the aliens here are not really enemies, but true allies against a bigger enemy.

  2. I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re from the future. I’d say a couple thousand years. How can a civilization evolve with us from a common ancestor but they age slower than us? They’re here to right some wrong or escape armageddon in the future.

    SIDE NOTE: How can a surfer dude with no military or special training, sneak a gun onboard a plane post-911?

  3. They had to remove gregs body from the room because if he was an alien an autopsy would have been done and all their attempts to remain under the radar would have been foiled. And i do agree, i think they are a future us. That crap about similar evolutionary patterns is a placeholder. Plus they know english in 1944, unlike V where they made up some bull about their technology. Another thing, i think they are from the future and they go back in time to WWII to stop the holucaust. But once they are captured for 66 years, their plans to rewirte history are foiled, so more sinister plans develop in captivity and whatever niceness they had vanished in half a century of waiting

  4. I dont have much to add to the discussion, except I will continue to watch it and hope it gets better each episode. I also wanted to say like the site! Read it almost everyday.

  5. Interesting. Reminds me of a show from several years past that lasted all of 1/2 season about how humans were developing into a new species. Forget the name. The new species was smarter, faster, etc etc, and were trying to keep secret because they knew they would be killed off if regular homo sapiens found out. No advanced tech, though, just better than us.

    Would be cool if they were not foes, but needing allies against some other aliens. Could run that theme out forever. Too good to last. Nothing I like lasts anymore. Still can’t believe Lost lasted so long.

    /end rant

  6. hbcupride.deco-printing.com:

    As to how he got the gun on the plane, remember that our introduction to him is in the airplane bathroom looking at a blue bag sticking out of the trash. My theory is that he didn’t smuggle the gun on the plan, someone else with “access” did and left it for him.

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