The Event (or lack thereof) 10/11/10

Last night was the fourth episode of "The Event," and, like the first three episodes, there were not many actual "events" to be found.

Last week's episode ended with a promising cliffhanger, with all of the "dead" passengers from the plane mysteriously coming back to life all at once. I was genuinely surprised last week when that happened, and I was excited for this week's episode. Sadly, we didn't get to spend much time with the newly-alive passengers except for the inexcusably silly interrogation montage at the beginning of the episode and the subsequent interrogation of Mike, the pilot (Luke from "Gilmore Girls"), which ended up going nowhere.

This episode, like the previous three, was mostly focused on Sean Walker. Jason Ritter seems like a very capable actor, but he really isn't given much to work with here. Most of his lines are: "Where's my girlfriend?" "Do you know anything about who took my girlfriend?" and "I have to find my girlfriend!" Anyway, his girlfriend Leila was able to escape from her kidnappers and get to the safety of the police station. It felt like we were finally getting somewhere, but then the final twist of the episode revealed that the police chief was actually working with Leila's kidnappers, so everything ended up right back where it started.

I really want to like this show. There is a lot of promising talent involved and the pilot episode was very impressive. Since then, though, it has been mostly downhill. The show desperately wants to be LOST (flashbacks and all), but it is trying too hard. There are at least a dozen main characters, and we haven't really gotten to know any of them. The flashbacks are effective as far at giving us exposition. In LOST, however, the flashbacks were able to shed new light on the individual characters and give the audience an understanding of why a particular person acts a certain way, and the flashbacks in "The Event" have (so far) been highly ineffective as far as character development.

The show does have such an interesting premise with the idea of a longstanding government conspiracy involving aliens (or whatever they are), but after they are done establishing the mythology of the show with these initial episodes, I really hope they take a step back and allow the characters some room to grow. I will be watching next week.