La Brea 2.1: Woolly Rhinos and Apple

La Brea was back with the beginning of its second season on NBC this past Tuesday.  Look, it suffers from the inevitable limitations of any network series, ranging from commercial interruptions to too many entangled plots.  But as I said in my reviews of the first season (see below), it's still pretty good and worth watching as a time-travel series.

Here's what I like most [spoilers ahead]:

• The interaction with the fauna and flora back then in 10,000 BC.  Episode 2.1 featured the woolly rhino.
• Josh and Riley in 1988.  Lots of nice touches there, including Josh's note to the owners of the house he and Riley are camping in: buy Apple (stock).
• The iconic Hollywood sign coming down in the latest sinkhole eruption.  I liked not only what that looked like, but as a shot against Hollywood culture.
• I'm still getting Lost-like vibrations from La Brea, which is all to the good,

  Here's what I like mezza-mezza (so-so):

• That big futuristic building in 10,000 BC.  It has all kinds of exciting possibilities, which I'd like to see more of, sooner than later.
• No doubt in some important way related to that building is what our government and scientists in 2022 know about what is going on, including to what extent they may have caused this.  Those plot threads were already dangling most of the first season, and I'd like to see at least some of them eliminated or explicated soon.
• Speaking of eliminated, I think there are too many characters swirling around in 10,000 BC.  Certainly Eve, Gavin, and Levi are essential, and Josh and Riley are pretty crucial now in 1988, too.  Otherwise, there are a bit too many stories going on, certainly for viewing just once a week.

Here's what I don't much like: the government people are the main or only villains in the present.  They actually weren't in evidence in episode 2.1, and I didn't miss them.  They're trite, and they don't seem up to the profundity of whatever caused the sinkholes, and why.

See you back here next week with my review of the next episode.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance ... La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication ... La Brea 1.7: Time Sinkholes Not Only in Different Places but from Different Times ... La Brea 1.8: Clearer Visions ... La Brea 1.9: Lilly and the Cow ... La Brea 1.10: A Fine Set of Time-Travelling Chess Pieces in Place

 

Outer Range 1.3-4: Twin Peaks Out West

So it occurred to me, as I was watching the enthralling third and fourth episodes of Outer Range, that this new series on Amazon Prime has a lot of Twin Peaks in it.   I mean, an investigation of a murder against a backdrop that has a Philip K. Dickian mind-bending vibe is a rare thing, with a pulsing potential to be memorable if it's done up right.  If Deputy Sheriff Joy, one of my favorite characters  (and being played really well by Tamara Podemski) expresses a joy in cherry pie, I may be on to something.

Outer Range is one strange bird, if I may mix metaphors, and getting stranger by the episode.  In the third and fourth episodes, and linguistically evocative also of Twin Peaks, we have a mountain disappearing.  This gives the time shifting or time traveling or whatever exactly is going on a much longer timeline.  If we're talking about mountains coming and going, we're entering the NBC series La Brea territory, and even further back than that.

Autumn probably has the most knowledge of what's going on at this point, and she's not saying too much, despite her seeming willingness to answer every question.  On the other side of the being informative curve, it's not clear how much of what happened to Royal (good portrayal Josh Brolin), when he spent the better (or worse) part of the dead of night in that waterhole, is something he either doesn't really remember or doesn't want to talk about.  I hope his wife Cecilia keeps pushing him for a briefing, and he does more than looked pained when she walks away, frustrated, because he's not talking.

He does have a lot on his mind.  A dead body is bad news in the most normal of times, and Outer Range is most assuredly not normal.  Wayne (well played by Will Patton) knows a little more than what he's saying, too, and the fact that he's more focused on that west pasture than who killed his son, says a lot, too.

But back to that in-and-out mountain:  You can't beat Burl Ives singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain," and with Juice Newton's "Angel of the Morning" also playing in episode 1.4, we've got some timeless music in this time warping narrative.

See you back here with my review of the next two episodes next week.

See also Outer Range 1.1-2: Elusive Hybrid

 

Beforeigners seasons 1 and 2: "Time, Time, Time -- See What's Become of Me"

I just binged  the first two seasons -- twelve episodes -- of Beforeigners on HBO Max over the past few nights.  On Jackie Reich's suggestion.  She was Chair of my Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and is now Dean of the School of Communication and the Arts at Marist College.  She told me on Twitter, "I think about you when I watch it — all that time travel!" She has my number. As Ricky Nelson almost said, "I am a [time-] travelin man."

And, in addition to having a clever title -- the series is mostly about people who travel to the present from earlier times, i.e, before -- there's indeed plenty of time travel in this Norwegian series.  And it's served up in a refreshing, unique way, with lots of humor along with the lethal breakneck situations.

[Some mild, general, situational spoilers ahead.]

The first season starts much like La Brea -- no explanation of why people from the past (in Beforeigners) -- two pasts, Viking times a thousand years ago, and Victorian times some hundred and thirty-five years back -- start popping up, thrashing around, in today's waters off Oslo.  In La Brea, people from the present travel back to the past, and I'd also say that that very popular network series in the U. S., which I liked a lot, doesn't hold a candle to Beforeigners.  Which means I really liked the first season of Beforeigners a big lot. And I liked the second season even more.

Both seasons are not only refreshing, but fresh, in both the common and romantic/erotic senses of the word, with all kinds of nudity on the screen.  Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir (the last name translates as "no one's daughter") comes from the Viking past, and has almost no inhibitions in what she says, does, and is willing to do in the present.  She is partnered with Lars Haaland, a detective with the Oslo police.  So what we have in Beforeigners is a science fiction/police procedural hybrid, also one of my favorite genres, as a reader/viewer as well as an author (for example, The Silk Code).

In the second season, things get even more complex and interesting.  It turns out that travel from the present to the past is also possible, with disastrous consequences in some cases, including the appearance of one of the all-time infamous serial killers in our reality, and the possibility of alternate realities springing forth before our very eyes ...

But I'll say no more, other than excellent acting by Krista Kosonen and Nicolai Cleve Broch in the lead roles, great theme song "Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City" (sung by the late Bobby "Blue" Bland, written by Dan Walsh and Michael Price), kudos to creators Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin, and if you have any time at all and are even the slightest bit like me regarding time travel, see Beforeigners as soon as you can.

 

La Brea Season One Finale: A Fine Set of Time Travelling Chess Pieces in Place

An excellent season one finale of La Brea just on NBC tonight, confirming my view that La Brea is the best new science fiction series on network television in years.

Several crucial questions were answered, at least partially.  The sinkholes are not a natural occurrence.  They were created by a group of scientists, including Rebecca and Isaiah/Gavin's grandfather.  This means La Brea is even much more of a classic time travel story than it may have appeared at first.  Scientists building time machines, in which the machines are sinkholes to the past which also can be climbed back up to the present -- all that is catnip in time travel storytelling for me.

We still don't know who Isaiah's grandfather is, and why he was so determined not to let Isaiah go back to the present and become Gavin.  In a related development, we saw the outside of the facility that Rebecca built 12,000 years ago, but we don't what's in it.  All of that is grist for Season Two.

And also up for Season Two are Gavin, Izzy, and adult Lilly getting back to prehistoric Seattle, presumably to the same exact time 12,000 years in the past as Eve and company.  It'll be quite a trip to see the family reunited.  My vote is for a boat that travels down south not too far from the shore.

La Brea took its time in getting all of these pieces in place.  The first season probably focused too long on the initial impact of the sinkhole in Los Angeles, and the stories of people on both sides of the time divide.  But now that almost everyone is where they should be -- if not in terms of what they want, but as players in a superior time travel drama -- I'm happy and all set for what the next season delivers to us.  The mammoth on the beach with those tusks is a good start.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance ... La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication ... La Brea 1.7: Time Sinkholes Not Only in Different Places but from Different Times ... La Brea 1.8: Clearer Visions ... La Brea 1.9: Lilly and the Cow

 

La Brea 1.9: Lilly and the Cow

La Brea moved along at a fine pace tonight with episode 1.9 and a combination of progress in understanding and new revelations.

Isaiah is not the only one we know who came to our present via a time sink upflow fountain from 12,000 years in the past to 1988.  Lilly did, too. And our people in the prehistoric past are beginning to grasp the possibilities.  If they went to 1988, they could see Die Hard in the movie theater and get some pizza.  I saw Die Hard on a VHS tape and that was good enough for me.  But yeah, I'd go up a mountain and go through time in the sky to get to a time where I could get a decent slice.  Probaby.

And Scott -- who made the point in 10,000 BC about Die Hard -- also discovered a cow.  With some kind of brand on its neck.  Which is proof positive that it couldn't have come from 12,000 years ago, even if we didn't believe the historical fact that Europeans were the ones who introduced cattle to America (we had buffalo before then).  I froze the screen and tried to make out what the brand on the cow said.  Just a bunch of numbers, at least to me.

But the plot is thickening as the action is quickening.  A new time sink is going to open in Seattle tomorrow -- well, next Tuesday, in our real time off the screen.  But we don't know how far in the past it's going to go.  Or maybe to the future?  

The season one finale should tell us a little more next week, as La Brea takes its place as a time travel series on an old fashioned network that's well worth seeing.  And I'll see you here next week, with my review of how some of that comes down -- or turns up.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance ... La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication ... La Brea 1.7: Time Sinkholes Not Only in Different Places but from Different Times ... La Brea 1.8: Clearer Visions

 

La Brea 1.8: Clearer Visions

Well, we learned some crucially enlightening things in La Brea 1.8 tonight, and they were a pleasure for my time-traveling eyes to behold.

[Spoilers follow]

The big reveal is Isaiah, the blond boy who has been spying on our 2021 friends back in prehistoric La Brea, circa 10, 000 BC, is none other than Gavin, who in our present has been having all-too-accurate visions of that past.  The reason those visions are accurate is they are memories of what Isaiah actually saw -- before he took that time sink in reverse (what can we call that -- a time fountain?) and wound up as a boy in the 1980s, whose name at some point changed to Gavin.

This a nice bit of time travel twistery, and it will be fun to see how it all plays out.

Rebecca, seriously wounded in the past, of course tells Eve that she has to save Isaiah, wrest him from the dangerous control of that old guy who stabbed Rebecca to get control of Isaiah, presumably to keep the boy from taking that sink hole fountain back up to our much more recent past in the 1980s.  Why he wants to do that is not yet clear.  Applying the metaphysics of time travel, we could say, no problem, of course he can't succeed, Isaiah who becomes Gavin is in our present right now, right?

But the makers of La Brea could choose to ignore those metaphysics, and have Isaiah kept in the prehistoric past anyway. Though I doubt that will happen, it could lead to a daring move in which what we've seen in the past eight episodes didn't happen -- as Rebecca warns Eve, she has no children with Gavin, because he never made it to our present, etc.  This, then, could be the beginning of a whole new narrative we see in a whole new season, which we'll see next year (La Brea, by the way, has just been renewed -- good!)

But, as I say, that's unlikely to happen, and I'll settle for seeing what happens to Gavin and Eve, separated now by 12, 000 years.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance ... La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication ... La Brea 1.7: Time Sinkholes Not Only in Different Places but from Different Times

 

La Brea 1.7: Time Sinkholes Not Only in Different Places, But From Different Times

Well, the most important thing that happened in La Brea 1.7 happened at the very beginning: we heard again that the sinkholes not only exist in different places but different times.  There was one back in the Civil War, which lead to the chest of gold going back 12,000 years.   We already knew that some people from a few years ago went back to that past.  But the Civil War origin shows that these gateways to the past exist throughout history.

This opens up all kinds of time travel possibilities.  In addition to gold, people from the Civil War could join our friends from La Brea in the past.   Who knows, maybe they're already there.  And if our crew finds another sinkhole, who knows to when it might take them.  Maybe even further back than the Civil War. Maybe to sometime in our future.

It's becoming clear that two characters we've already met come from a time not exactly our own. Paara speaks perfect English, with an American accent.   She clearly came from sometime close to ours, certainly closer than even the Civil War.  As I said in my review of La Brea 1.5, she looks a lot like Rebecca.  I'd say there's a chance the two are related, if not somehow the same person.

And then there's Gavin.  Tonight's episode strongly implied that he's not from our time.  That leaves either the past or the future as his time of origin.   I'm thinking he comes from the future, though we have no indication as yet of any time travel from the future to our present or to 12,000 years ago.

La Brea is deepening in time travel metaphysics in every episode.  In my book, that's a very good thing.  See you back here next week.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance ... La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication

 

La Brea 1.6: Cross-Temporal Communication

One of my favorite parts of La Brea is the cross-temporal communication between the people 12,000 years in the past and in present Los Angeles.  Last week, Eve in the past sent a message in a bottle to Gavin in the present.  This week, Gavin in the present returns the favor and sends a message in a video back to Eve in the past.

And the result in tonight's episode 1.6 is the best episode of La Brea so far, which is to say, excellent indeed, because Gavin's message to the past sets in motion a sharply drawn temporal paradox (and temporal paradoxes are the main reason I'm such a devotee of time travel narratives, as both a reader/viewer and an author).  Gavin in the present is told that the remains of a plane have suddenly appeared in the pit in the present, and everyone onboard was dead.  His urgent message to Eve 12,000 years ago is don't get on that plane, don't let anyone get on board.

 

Most of the people back then are not devotees of time travel, and they can't accept Eve's dire advice not to get on the plane.  So what will happen?  Since the plane with the deceased has in fact shown up in the present, doesn't that mean that Eve will not be able to stop the plane with Levi and, even worse for Eve, her son Josh from getting on that doomed flight?

In our real world, yes.  But then again, there is no time travel that we know about in our real life.  But in the fiction that is a time travel story, anything is possible.  Once it is posited that it's possible to mess around with time, nothing is foreordained.  And La Brea 1.6 does a good, taut job of playing this out.

As a bonus, a couple of different parts of the series narrative (but related, everything is related in time travel stories) are further developed before the episode ends.  My favorite is the advice to Gavin to think about what happened to him back in "the beginning ... November 16, 1988."  (Well, far better that, I guess, than what happened 12,000 years ago.)

And I'll be back here next week with a review of La Brea 1.7.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons ... La Brea 1.5: The Letter and the Resemblance

 

La Brea 1.5: The Letter and The Resemblance

A good La Brea 1.5 tonight, with the best at the end with the letter.  (Queue up the Box Tops.)

The letter -- from Eve -- traveled from the past to the present the hard way, second by second, in a bottle, which could also be considered the natural way.  And it (of course) arrived at a most propitious time: the tear in the sky (as in rip, but it's emotionally also a teardrop from an eye) is closing.  Dr. Rebecca Aldridge carefully explains to Gavin that this could be his last chance to rescue his family from the past.

By the way, speaking of Rebecca, I noticed a resemblance between her, and the woman leading the band of people (presumably at least some are from our present) who confront our heroes back there/then.  Her name is Paara.  Their pictures are on either side of this paragraph.  The are played by two different actors (Rebecca by Ming-Zhu Hii, Paara by Tonantzin Carmelo), and clearly are not the same person.  But they resemble each other.  Coincidence, or are they related?

La Brea continues to be an intriguing series.  At times it almost seems soap opera-ish.  It has its share of trite stories, like the drug dealer waving his gun around in the past.  But the series has a profundity glinting below the surface, and I'm enjoying the ride.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom ... La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons

 

La Brea 1.4: Expanding Horizons

Well, I predicted last week that there was more than one sinkhole than just the one in La Brea and Gavin's special vision would show him that Levi was alive after his plane seemed to burn up in the La Brea sinkhole, and I was right.  I was also figuring that La Brea would continue to be a series worth watching, and I was right about that, too.

We indeed learned in La Brea 1.4. that there was more than one sink hole, including one in Mojave.  Sophia's associate, a new character, knows all about it, and she's ready to have her special plane take a trip back 12,000 years, despite Sophia's reservations.  I hope she takes Gavin along -- on the other hand, if Gavin goes, who can tell the people in our present what's happening back then?

Not much in the prehistoric monster catalog in this episode, though some kind of big, underwater snake did do its best to pull Riley under.  Fortunately, Levi dove in and shot the snake, freeing Riley.  Must have been one effective shot, underwater, a feat we alas didn't get to see.

The drug story in the past is trite, and doesn't add much to the narrative.  But the expanding number of sinkholes has real possibilities.  How many of them are there?  How long have they been there?  How long have we known about them?  Who is the "we" -- are the sinkholes just in California, all across America, all across the world?

La Brea clearly has the makings of a rich science fiction series, and I look forward to cashing in as a viewer.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons ... La Brea 1.3: Descending Into the Maelstrom

 

La Brea 1.3: Descending into the Maelstrom

A good solid third episode of La Brea on NBC tonight, in which Levi, an accomplished pilot and old friend of Gavin, with a real relationship to the family, flies into the sinkhole.   The plane is engulfed in flames and [spoilers ahead ...]

Levi survives!  This in itself changes everything.  The people stranded in 10,000 BC have a way out.  The only problem is how can the people in their future and our present know about this -- know that Levi survived and therefore there's a way out?

Gavin's visions, or course.  But the question remains: will Dr. Sophia Nathan believe him?  Well, she already believes in Gavin's visions enough to take him and them seriously. But will she risk another mission and another pilot sent to the past?  My prediction, she might if the pilot is Gavin.  And if she doesn't, Gavin will somehow get a hold of a plane.

Meanwhile, the most interesting thing that happened in the past is discovering the dead guy with a modern shirt or sweatshirt in the cave.  This flat-out means that our cast of characters were not the first to be sucked into the sinkhole.  Or, if they are, maybe there's another sinkhole not too far away.  The shadowy figure we saw in an earlier episode is not an extra-terrestrial, but someone in or close to our present who traveled to the past.

The past itself, by the way, continues to be fun.  I especially liked the giant sloth at the beginning of the episode -- it did take the candy bar and the food that the cop in the past assembled, but it didn't cause any big harm, and thanks to Eve everyone enjoyed some mushrooms known as chicken of the forest for dinner.  Of course mushrooms have none of the protein of chicken, but they're probably a lot better for you then a candy bar.

Anyway, I would have put the sloth in the title of this review, but it didn't really work with the Poe reference.  I'll keep it in mind, though, for future reviews, and  I'll be back with one next week.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past ... La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons

 

La Brea 1.2: Deepening Horizons

A strong second episode of La Brea on NBC last night, in which the situation of the narrative -- x number of people suddenly sucked 12,000+ years into the past, and x number of people in the present knowing something about this and trying to do something about it -- is clarified, deepened, and fleshed out with characters who are beginning to come into sharper focus.

In the present, Dr. Sophia Nathan and her DHS Associate know a lot more about the time-bending sinkhole than we realized in the pilot episode.  She takes Gavin and his visions of prehistoric La Brea very seriously, and I thought there was even an implication that the sinkhole was not a natural occurrence, but caused by something the government did, or perhaps by some other deliberate act that the government knows about.   Those actors could be humans from the future, extra-terrestrials, who knows, but all of this is good grist for the future of the series.

Meanwhile, back in the past, the episode begins with a saber-tooth tiger attack, and concludes with Scott saving a bunch of camels from a tarpit, which, as he says, may change the future, and that's always a nice provocative touch in a time travel story, too.  There is also evidence of human habitation back then -- people were definitely here 12,000 years ago -- and I have a feeling that they may have some powers we don't yet know about.  Again, all kinds of intriguing possibilities emerge.  Did they -- the prehistoric humans or who knows what kind of sentient beings -- have a role in opening up the sinkhole?  Are the government officials in the present, and maybe Gavin (though his visions) in touch with them?  Are they the source of Gavin's visions?

All of this makes for a science fictionally promising season, which I'm looking forward to seeing and reviewing.

See also La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling Into the Past

 

La Brea 1.1: Pros and Cons of Falling into the Past

Well, I thought I'd take a look at La Brea, which debuted a few hours ago on NBC.  One on the one hand, a time-travel sinkhole story is right up my alley.  On the other hand, science fiction on network television all too often turns out to be annoying.  Or, if not -- like Debris, which was pretty good -- it's cancelled after one season.  Gone are the days of Star Trek the original series on NBC, or Lost on ABC.  But it's time travel.  I won't say no to at least giving a time travel series on network television a chance.

And the good news is there's what to like in La Brea.  The premise is sound: a sinkhole opens in the La Brea tar pits of Los Angeles.  Humans who fall in end up in the prehistoric past.  Prehistoric birds fly out into our present.  The set-up definitely has possibilities.

The characters who fall into the past also have possibilities.  As one of them notes, their plight is indeed reminiscent of those people on the island in Lost.   They're a good assortment of people of various ages, relationships, professions, talents, and situations.

Not quite as promising are the people left in our present.  The government officials are trite, almost ridiculous cutouts.  The husband (Josh) whose wife (Eve) and son (Jack) fell into the past has a not very believable story of somehow having true visions of his wife and son and other people in the past.  At this point at least, his story is sheer fantasy, which doesn't jibe well with the science fiction of a wormhole in present La Brea to the past.

But there are some good actors in this show.  Jon Seda who plays an MD in prehistoric La Brea is always welcome on screen, as is Natalie Zea as Eve.  So, yeah, I'll give this series a chance, for now.  It's time travel.