Date of airing: February 8, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 12.11 million viewers, 7.9/14 in Households
As expected, there weren’t a lot of surprises in this episode, and things were going along as they have been planned from the beginning. That might be wonderful in hindsight, since the writers clearly kept their sanity and locked their insanity away by removing all twists from this episode and letting the story flow in a natural way. Although maybe the storytelling was kept on the downlow a little too obviously, since, by the end of the episode, I was wondering why Marley, also known as Dobbs, wanted the President dead in the first place (okay, explanations aren’t needed, but killing John F. Kennedy and this fictional president must mean something to him or his employer, especially when you most likely haven’t attempted another assassination between 1963 and 1997), and if he was the only one involved in this conspiracy or if Marley was hired by another party to execute the assassination, essentially creating a conspiracy as big as the one in THE X-FILES.
If Marley was the only person involved in the entire thing, it means it was the typical lone-man terrorist attack, the crazy white guy deciding that the world must change, and the only way it can be changed is through violence and death. Not all of it is a government conspiracy, and in a way, it was also a kick in the balls for all the people who believe in the conspiracy theory. No, it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald, it was J.T. Marley. Though maybe I don’t think it’s such a good idea to tell your audience that in your show, which isn’t historical to begin with, Oswald was not the shooter. Not that we are interested in even more JFK conspiracy theories, but EARLY EDITION just created another one. And I was just about to get used to the notion that the real JFK assassin was the Cigarette Smoking Man.
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| This should have been the end of the story, but Dobbs couldn't pull the trigger. |
It would be funny though that a new conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of JFK would involve the fictional characters of this episode. The QAnon “movement” believes in all kinds of crazy bullcrap, so there has to be at least one person among them who absolutely believes that this hour of television isn’t at all fictional and that the JFK assassination was truly a conspiracy with a man named J.T. Marley in the center of it all. The world and the QAnon “movement” are so crazy these days that I wouldn’t even be surprised to find this conspiracy on social media one day.
Anyway, this episode was solid. It was a little more streamlined than the previous one, since all Gary needed was to find out who framed him, but also a little more serious when it comes to the seriousness and tense drama. Even if you knew that Dobbs was Marley, there still was the potential of Gary being caught by the police and for Dobbs’s plan to blow up in his face like Hawks and Crumb were supposed to feel the letter bomb in their faces, and from here on everything could have been possible. But at the end of the day, this episode only had one purpose, and it was to depict what the JFK assassination had been like in 1997, and what a different conspiracy (this being a one-man job) would have looked like if perfectly executed. The writers had fun with the premise for sure, but it also meant that the character had to take a few steps back. They became pawns in the story they were in while Marley was running the show from the back of the room. At least it’s somewhat logical how Marley was hinging on Gary being in the building at the time, since Marley knew all about tomorrow’s paper and Gary being the next Lucius Snow.
To prevent the characters from taking steps back to let Marley run the show, there could have been moments of character drama. There wasn’t a sense of the paper having changed Gary (so forget all about Chuck’s voiceover which closed this episode), and in addition, the story didn’t do anything for Gary at all. Chuck became something of a hero here, but only because the writers figured they needed to rewrite his character to suit the story. And Marissa was basically left out of it, only being a voice of ... I don’t know what kind of voice she was, but because the police decided not to maybe call her into the precinct and ask some questions about her friend, who was after all the suspected killer on the run, it makes me think the writers not only used the characters as pawns for the story, but also forgot to use them as characters as a whole. Again, Marissa is wholly underused in the show, even if she has screentime.
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| Gary in the room with the device that could change the future. |
Meanwhile, the winter version of Chicago was shown, which was lovely, and it’s all I have been waiting for. The Christmas episode was a little void of snow, thanks to the fact that the episode wasn’t shot during the winter months, but I’m glad that the producers continued to use the setting of the city as part of the show, and have EARLY EDITION look like it wasn’t produced on a soundstage only. There is a different feel in watching a show which uses its exterior settings, to have Gary run through the snow, and to have him and Marissa meet up between whiteness that was left on the streets. All of this almost makes me want to wish to live in Chicago and just enjoy the freezing cold and chaos on the streets after the snow has fallen. I do like depressing weather. I am after all a depressed and lonely soul.
