Date of airing: April 13, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.54 million viewers, 11.1/17 in Households
This happened to be a nice episode about soft mother/daughter drama with a couple of emotions here and there, and here I was, sitting on my bed and thinking that I was watching an episode of TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL instead. It was a premise I would usually discover in any of the family TV dramas on the air, albeit not developed like in this episode, because in those family TV dramas, it’s an arc for six seasons, and not focused on one single episode. Mommy issues that get resolved after 45 minutes... it’s perfect. And it worked for me in this hour, since the story was light, but focused and on point, enough to connect with the characters and have hope that Eunice and Robin were able to connect with one another over the course of Eunice’s final year or two on this planet. In the meantime, this episode was also good enough to continue carrying on developing a backstory of a character who died before the show even began. It’s almost like EARLY EDITION wants to be a show about Lucius Snow as much as it is about Gary Hobson.
And that makes things intriguing for me. The writers decided to play with a character who never had any screentime (and who never will have any, because that character is dead), yet he is a focal point of the show’s backstory and premise, and almost a midpoint in the entire mythology that needs discovering, even if Snow’s story happens to be anything but important. Yes, Gary would most likely learn a lot in his efforts to help people through the paper, advance his knowledge about the paper’s origins, and understand how Snow did the same thing for fifty years. Although the question has never arisen whether Snow was indeed helping people in need for all of his fifty years – maybe he tried to prevent the assassination of JFK, but did he care enough for the little man in the neighborhood to get out every morning and save lives? Other than that, it’s not like the mythology of the paper will be explained through Snow. I don’t think that Snow was the first recipient of the paper, as he was just another Gary Hobson. Maybe Snow once tried to figure out where the paper came from, but didn’t get very far. Maybe the only thing Snow learned about is who received the paper before he did.
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| Eunice is a friendly cat thief. |
Eunice and Robin were interesting characters. I knew from the beginning that Eunice once was involved with Lucius, right after she remembered the cat that continued to deliver the paper to her instead of Gary, but even with that predictability, her story was still quite enjoyable. For once, I believed that Gary just wanted to not be involved in any of this drama, as he was annoyed that he had to run after the paper every morning, and in a way, he wasn’t involved in Eunice’s family drama, since the cat always forced him back to the family, where he had to deal with her illness, where he had to deal with her boyfriend, and where he had to deal with Robin. He reluctantly dealt with all of this.
Still, the writers helped themselves with conveniences, like not mentioning immediately that Eunice felt the cat reminded her of her week-long boyfriend in Rome, or having Gary wonder why the cat started delivering the paper to this dying woman (he could have asked her about her past, trying to figure out connections). The writers also reasoned that it was a good idea to not connect Snow’s fate with Gary’s future fate, to tell the audience that the only way Gary will not receive the paper is when he’s dead. Although maybe Gary realized for a moment that his and Snow’s life were not so different from each other: Snow had to leave Eunice in Rome, as his social life was in the way of helping people, which is the same issue in Gary’s life, even if he doesn’t have much of a social life at the moment (so, how exactly does he make money to pay the rent for his expensive-looking hotel room?). Snow met the love of his life for one week, so could the same happen to Gary one day? By the way, here is an interesting question: When Snow was in Rome, did he get the Italian edition of the Sun-Times and save lives in Rome?
The whole social life angle of the series brings me to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and how the Chosen One was supposed to fight against the forces of darkness by herself, yet during the first episode of the series, she assembled friends, and she wasn’t fighting the fight by herself, contrary to how it was supposed to be, according to the Watcher’s Council. In EARLY EDITION, the writers never went this far. Yes, Gary occasionally gets help from Chuck and Marissa, and Chuck even saved a group of Asian people because Gary had other things to do, but it’s not like Gary accepts help around him – he keeps to himself with the paper, showing that the premise of a Chosen One can truly be alive in a TV show that wants to deal with that premise. Plus, it probably kept the budget for the series down, not having to pay more actors to regularly appear here and be Gary’s life-saving assistants.
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| Chuck is like me: disgusted by human contact. |
The side plot of Marissa trying to force her way back to school seemed alright and fine. It was a cute little story, almost like a moral of the story, to tell the audience that it doesn’t have to be bad to go back to school and get a degree, even though you’re already an adult. It felt surprisingly realistic that Marissa would shy away from registering. In this case, I would have loved for the story to have gotten a bit more screentime and shown the viewers that this was an important step in Marissa’s life. So important that she was kissing Chuck on the cheek at the end, to celebrate the success of the registration. And Chuck definitely has not deserved this kind of love and affection from his friends, since he is still the egotistical type.
