“What is the Event?” is the general tagline for this hour long drama, and up until the last 30 seconds of the episode, I generally didn’t care what the event was.
The Event employs a style that tries to build suspense and purposely causes confusing among it’s viewers. Constantly, the show is jumping back and forward in various flash backs in the same vein as Lost, but in this incarnation, the flashbacks jump back and forward in a relatively small frame of time, with the furthest going back thirteen months and the closest going back a few mere minutes. It’s almost as if they wanted to do a near real time pacing similar to 24 but without the split screen style, making it very confusing to understand the continuity without thinking about it. I think it takes every annoying thing about both those shows and puts them into one show all at once. I probably wouldn’t have mind so much if they left some type of frame of reference going, but often times, footage would repeat over and over from different perspectives without telling the viewer that they’ve just rewound the timeline slightly.
The characters so far have not grabbed me in any significant way. From the very start, we have a Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) on a plane in the bathroom looking very nervous, a la Charlie in Lost. I’d love to know how he got a gun onto the plane in the first place. President Martinez seems to be another strong willed mixed heritage president to appeal to the idea America has grown to the idea that America has grown as a country to elect a minority into office.
Overall, the show feels very scattered and they spend quite a lot of time on buildup to start. The one saving grace that makes me want to keep watching it is the the small desire to know what happened to that plane, and how it was seemingly teleported.
Other thoughts
- Who is the organization that is forcing Michael Buchanan to suicide his plane to save his daughter?
- What happened to Lella? What about the other couple they hung out with all night? Are they part of this organization?
- It’s nice to see Laura Innes (ER) and Zeljko Ivanek (Heroes, True BLood, Damages) back again
- It’s implied in the flashbacks that the Event happened some time ago. In an 13 months ago flashback, they mention it was the reason the Alaska complex exists.
Event Theories
- Aliens (They have a leader, and there are research labs for experimentation)
- Mutants (Same as Aliens)
- Russians (Well, it is in Alaska)
