La Brea
“The Road Home, Part 2”, Season 3 Episode 6
What do I know about this series going into it?
Some people go back in time to dinosaur times. The finale’s title implies they have been stranded in the past throughout the series, and that they will now finally return to the present.
The season 2 image on JustWatch showed a woolly mammoth, which makes me worry for the series’s scientific accuracy, unless the characters regularly time travel to a variety of time periods.
Previously On
A couple is getting married. “Every day here has been a struggle”, says the new husband. Somebody misses his wife who he left behind in modern times. Somebody else is pregnant. “We were attacked by raptors.” Somebody goes through a red and blue portal called an Aurora. Airplanes with time travel capabilities. A secret government project. They keep mentioning 1965, and go through a portal, I assume to 1965.
Whenever the Previously gets this rapid-fire I lose track of what’s happening near the end of it.
Recap
A couple are standing on a hilltop discussing the view, and that they were previously here on their third date. I can see a blurry building or antenna off in the distance, so this is modern times. The man seems not to remember things properly, which is suspicious: he might be an imposter, or maybe there were changes to the timeline so he doesn’t remember things correctly. The woman surprises the man with a sonogram tied to a tree: she’s pregnant. He asks her to promise to break the news for all future pregnancies in the exact same way.
Flash of white. The opening scene was actually a memory; the man is currently in 1965 with his adult daughter. They’re looking for some government organization called “Reisander” in Pasadena, and for someone named Eve who works there or is being held hostage there, it’s not clear yet. The daughter has an EMP, which she’s planning on using to wipe out the Reisander computer servers.
There are two more people with them: Man #2 and a teenage girl. They decide to split up: Man #2 will look for “Riley” and “Josh”, while Hilltop Man, his daughter, and the teenage girl go to Reisander to look for Eve. But they have to hurry: the “Auroras” that enable time travel only last 3-4 hours.
Los Angeles, 10000 BC. A group of seemingly-main characters are standing near two Auroras, red and blue. One of them might lead to “the present”, which for them is 2021. But first they need to find “Petra, Maya’s daughter”. Well, we’re keeping these two army officers hostage – maybe they know where Petra is. The main character, Ty, searches the army vehicle and finds a ring he had given his wife (Petra?). He confronts the soldiers, who confess they found the ring at a village whose occupants were killed in a dinosaur attack. (Dinosaurs in 10000 BC? Did dinosaurs come forward in time through an Aurora?) Ty is furious.
Pasadena, 1965: Hilltop Man and his kids break into the Pasadena facility. It’s suspiciously easy. But they find the jail cells… empty. DUN DUN DUN.
Opening credits, this far into the episode?
1965: There is general despair that Eve isn’t here. Adult Daughter, blatantly talking to the audience rather than to Hilltop Man and Teenager, finds a prisoner transfer manifest. I learn a bit more about the plot: they’re looking for some kind of microchip, and to get it they either need to hold a gun to Eve’s head or rescue her (I’m still not clear on which).
Based on the conversation, I’m starting to suspect the adult woman isn’t Hilltop Man’s daughter; only the teenager is.
Meanwhile, Man #2 has found Riley at a hospital. She has a torn diaphragm from a dinosaur attack. She also has an infection, and a fever, and the doctors didn’t give her antibiotics.
10000 BC: Ty and the other main characters find dinosaur tracks and lots of dead people from the dinosaur attack, but not Ty’s wife “Paara”. One character spots an abandoned village in the distance: maybe Paara is hiding there?
1965: I learn that Man #2 is a doctor, and Riley is his daughter. He’s going to do an “exploratory laparotomy” on Riley. (I think the word “exploratory” is wrong there.) She wants to tell him important things first, but he interrupts: You can tell me later! Besides, I’m upset that I failed you as a father!
I’m starting to notice a pattern in these series finales.
Elsewhere, Hilltop Man and Teenager, having left the adult woman behind, have tracked down an army vehicle and deliberately crash their stolen car into it, killing its two drivers. They rush to the back of the vehicle and find the soldiers’ prisoner: not Eve but Josh, who does not appear to be tied up or restrained in any way and clearly could have just climbed out the back of the vehicle and escaped.
Ah, I stand corrected. Josh has a plastic ziptie on his wrists – but not on his legs, so my point stands. Hilltop Man cuts the ziptie open, and Josh explains that the soldiers had grabbed him from Riley’s hospital room and threw him in a cell with his mom.
I’m finally getting a picture of the family tree here: Teenager is “Izzy”, Josh is her brother, and their parents are Hilltop Man and Hilltop Woman (“Eve”). The kids also have an “Aunt Helena”, who I think is the bad guy holding Eve hostage.
Man #2 (“Sam”) arrives in a car with Riley unconscious in the back seat. He says the emergency laparotomy was successful but Riley needs modern antibiotics. (Strange. If the infection was from 10000 BC bacteria or 1960s bacteria, 1960s antibiotics should work fine. Did the dinosaur attack her in 2021?). Hilltop Man tells Sam to take the Aurora to 2021 and save Riley.
It’s amazing we’re this far in and I still don’t know Hilltop Man’s name. Since everyone else is calling him Dad I’ll do that too.
10000 BC: A girl with Zendaya hair and a guy with a gun are in a car. She’s not happy he has a gun, and is afraid he’ll go back to “the guy he used to be” when they return to the present. Zendaya – ah, her name is Veronica – is pregnant and regrets not returning to the present when she had the chance.
Meanwhile, in the village, Ty finds Paara, who is pinned under fallen logs. She’s wearing 10000 BC-era clothes that she bought at Party City. Which makes me wonder why Ty and Scott are wearing modern clothes. Had she been stuck in the past for longer than they were? Aha, I see, Paara is native to this time, yet somehow speaks English. Ty promises to stay in the past with her. Scott and Ty pull the logs off her, but a dinosaur shows up.
Scott says to stay still: “According to Jurassic Park, these guys have terrible vision.”
The dinosaur sees them anyway. They run.
1965: The woman who had the EMP rejoins Dad’s group. I learn that this is Aunt Helena – a good guy – and that the bad guy is “Maya”. Helena reports that on her way to install the EMP she ran into Eve, and they got surrounded by guards. So Eve volunteered to go on and install the EMP herself, telling Helena to leave and go help Dad.
Which raises all sorts of questions, like “How did Helena leave if they were surrounded by guards?”, “How will Eve install the EMP if she’s surrounded by guards?”, and “How will Eve escape after installing the EMP if she’s surrounded by guards?”.
Deciding to just accept this nonsense at face value, Helena and Dad and the kids will now head to 10000 BC to get some kind of microchip that will “end it”.
10000 BC: All of the main and side characters, the majority of whom I haven’t met yet, are lined up dramatically opposite the Aurora. I feel like I somehow skipped ten minutes of the episode, because both Ty’s group (having offscreen escaped from the T-Rex) and Dad’s group (having offscreen gone back in time and joined them) are here. Lots of unknown side and minor characters use the Aurora to return to the present, but the main characters are staying behind to break into the ancient army base and steal the microchip. But we need to come up with a plan!
Before they come up with a plan, the T-Rex roars in the distance. Oh, right, we forgot we’re supposed to actually resolve plotlines when writing television episodes.
The good guys deliberately attract the T-Rex and lead it towards the army base. The bad guys are in a cooperative mood, shooting at the T-Rex and drawing its attention to ensure they’ll be as distracted as possible and not notice the good guys sneaking in.
On the way to the microchip, Scott spots a soldier who is dragging a teenage boy away. The teenager is “Petra”, and Scott splits off from the group to save her. The rest of the group enters a conveniently unguarded warehouse, and Dad grabs the microchip.
So, to summarize, the priorities of the bad guys are:
Fight the T-Rex
Deal with a teenage prisoner
???
Eh, if we can spare someone we might guard the really important microchip from theft or sabotage.
Scott returns, his rescue of Petra having delayed him by all of thirty seconds.
As they leave the warehouse, they are ambushed by Maya and her soldiers. There is no sign of the T-Rex. Maya demands Dad hand over the chip. Suddenly, the soldiers are themselves ambushed by a massive group of heretofore-unseen good guys, led by Ty, and who have bows and arrows and spears. The highly-trained American soldiers are handily defeated by these lesser-armed, lesser-numbered civilians.
The victory is short-lived: there’s a burst of electricity in the distance, showing the Aurora has closed. They now have no way back to 2021, and their mom. (I don’t get it. If their mom is Eve – and I admit I’ve lost track – isn’t she in 1965, surrounded by bad guys who are planning to take her back here, to 10000 BC?) No wait, we do have a way back to 2021: we’ll take the time-traveling fighter plane!
Maya, who is the Big Boss and therefore the only bad guy to survive the ambush, surprises them from behind and takes one of the kids hostage. “Give me the chip, Gavin,” she demands, through which I finally learn Dad’s name. Gavin tosses the chip to her, and as Maya takes her gun off the hostage in response, Helena shoots her.
The good guys get in the fighter plane: Gavin will pilot, Helena will navigate, and the others will sit in the unheated cargo hold and pray they don’t fly high enough to freeze to death. But the T-Rex is on the runway, blocking the way. They play a game of chicken but take off just in time.
The microchip that controls time travel was apparently unharmed by being tossed onto the ground, so the good guys plug it into the plane, which creates a rift in the sky, through which they fly back to 2021. Gavin screams for no reason.
Los Angeles, 2021: The fighter plane has landed in a field somewhere. Gavin and Helena say goodbye to each other. Josh and Izzy ask about their mom. Where do we look for her? In our house, is the obvious response, but they also seem unusually certain that she managed to make it here and isn’t stranded back in 1965 or 10000 BC.
But Gavin’s family are in no rush to go check the house. Instead they go to the hospital, where:
Josh confesses his love to a woman there, who might be Riley, I can’t tell. They kiss.
Veronica and Gun Guy verify their baby is okay using an ultrasound.
Gavin meets with Sam.
Izzy says she called the neighbors and they haven’t seen Eve at home.
Having assumed that the neighbors either have a key or broke into the house to look for Eve in all the bedrooms and bathrooms, Gavin decides not to wait for her at their house but rather at the tree we saw in the opening.
We also get two other bits of closure: Ty has stayed with the village in 10000 BC, and Scott meets up with “Emily”, who thought he died in the sinkhole that took him backwards in time (so how long have they been gone?).
Gavin is still waiting at the tree. It’s been hours. Gavin is 100% certain Eve will show up, despite having not seen her at any point in this episode, despite having no idea whether she’s even in the same time period, despite knowing where she lives, and despite the likelihood that after being in prison in 1965 she might want to take a shower or something.
But of course Eve shows up. She says nothing about what she did the whole episode, but reveals that when she thought she was trapped in 1965 (I’m guessing in previous episodes) she wrote letters to the rest of the family and buried them under the tree.
They dig up the letters and go home.
Unresolved questions
Where was Eve this whole time? She was in the Pasadena facility in 1965, but when Gavin and Helena arrived the bad guys were going to transfer her to the base in 10000 BC, and had taken her out of the cell but not all the way out of the building yet? And Helena found her alive and well and not in custody? And they got surrounded by guards but not surrounded enough to prevent Helena from escaping? And Eve installed the EMP on her own (or failed to do so - they never revisit that plot point), escaped the guards on her own, and only then left for the Aurora, which was somehow still open? None of that makes any sense whatsoever.
Will Gavin destroy the microchip? Why was it so important to get it, and why is he against time travel?
Only after rereading my notes did I realize that Petra, the teenager Scott saved offscreen, was Maya’s daughter. Why was Maya holding her own daughter hostage, and what is Scott planning on doing with her?
Is time a stable loop, or will Ty’s decision to stay in the past create a new timeline in which every single human has been replaced thanks to the introduction of another ancestor? Is this why Gavin couldn’t remember things properly in the opening scene?
Will Gun Guy stay his new, better self as he promised Veronica, or revert to how evil he was before he went back in time?
Ratings
Story: 3/10. I had no idea what story the writers were trying to tell. And they themselves couldn’t decide: One moment the good guys were desperate to rescue Eve at all costs, the next moment they abandoned her without even seeing her, to pursue some other goal.
Writing: 2/10. Genuinely terrible dialogue. Lines were written based on what information the audience needed to know, or what might sound witty, with little thought as to whether these were things real human beings would actually say to one another.
And the decision to write the script such that major plot points – including rescuing Petra, installing the EMP at Reisander, and two different dinosaur attacks – were resolved entirely offscreen is just insanity.
Production: 2/10. Terrible production value. Bad line readings. Bad ADR. Cheap costuming probably bought off of Wish and made by Chinese slave labor. CGI artists who were too lazy to make the T-Rex actually impact the soldiers it was supposedly killing. No effort to invest in the special effects of the series finale of a science fiction show? The only reason I didn’t rank this lower is there weren’t actual production errors; no visible boom mikes or dropped lines by the actors. But I’m not sure it makes it better, to point out that all of the awful parts of the show were there deliberately.
Characterization: 3/10. I’m being a bit generous here, but only because of the flashbacks with Scott that showed he went through some kind of character arc across the series. I’ll assume other characters also had character arcs. But there was little evidence of it in this episode.
Clarity: 3/10. Aside from the confusion the episode itself had, trying to decide what it wanted the good guys’ goals to be, there’s a lot of background I was missing. I have no idea why there are dinosaurs and modern humans and a military base and English-speaking natives in 10000 BC. The Auroras are human-sized; how did a massive T-Rex fit through it? Were there bigger Auroras I didn’t see? (I assume it didn’t come forward in the fighter plane.) Or was this just the writers being as inaccurate about when dinosaurs lived as they were about penicillin?
I have similar questions about the army base. Was it swallowed whole and transported into the past, or did the military build it in 10000 BC after entering the Auroras? If the latter, why was it built, and why so far away from the Auroras? How often do Auroras appear and where? Why are two Aurora destinations very close to one another (1965 and 2019) when the third destination is in the distant past?
Closure: 8/10. Most of the characters completed their stories, confessing love and/or making it back to their home time. I’m docking a point because of the stupidity of the resolution of the Eve-rescuing plotline.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No. No way.
Part of what makes films like Plan 9 from Outer Space so-bad-they’re-good is the earnestness with which the creators approached their work. They tried, God help them, they tried, and yet the output was so impressively bad.
That was not the case here! The entire production team, from the writers to the costumers to the CGI artists to the dialogue editors, had no respect for their work. That doesn’t make La Brea so-bad-it’s-good; that just makes La Brea bad.