Date of airing: January 11, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 14.2 million viewers, 9.0/15 in Households
I always remembered this episode for some unknown reason. Maybe it’s because Gary was generically wandering from one place to the next, always helping someone out. Maybe it’s because the writers managed to put Gary’s heroic adventures into a display and turn it into a dramatic story of Gary being unable to be someone else, doing something else, be a normal human being that does not receive tomorrow’s newspaper. Maybe it’s because Chuck has not been the worst character in this episode, which usually does not happen in any of the other episodes. Or maybe it’s because this episode turned the show more into a fantasy, creating a whole different aspect of the paper that comes to Gary, and making him something of a tool to save people.
It has become clear by now that the paper likes to change headlines, so that Gary notices them later, the plane crash from “The Choice” being the most prominent example, and the ever-changing title page from the Christmas bombings in the previous episode being the latest example. Gary hasn’t even affected anyone, yet the paper changes into something big and he springs into action. It’s probably the paper’s way to lead Gary to places, to have him notice those headlines, and have him think about things a certain way. And maybe the paper continued to “form” Gary this way, by leading him towards the runaway kid, instead of towards the people who need saving. As Marissa said, the paper wanted him to be somewhere at a certain point in time and a normal newspaper usually doesn’t have a place for runaway teenagers’ deaths, as told by the desk sergeant, which begs the question if the paper decided to give Gary the burned news clipping because Gary needed to be there for the kid especially and not because it was just another life he needed to save. It begs the question of whether the paper is actually the paper of tomorrow or if it’s just the future Gary needs to see to interact with, no matter whether it was ready to be in tomorrow’s newspaper. It’s certainly a question to ask yourself this, although it makes the show extremely convoluted and almost a bit too complex. After half a season, maybe it’s not a good time to ask yourself if the paper is a newspaper or the work of a higher being to form Gary into whoever he must become in this journey.
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| It's too cold to read the paper right now. |
Maybe the writers wanted it to be the latter because the show simply couldn’t just be about a guy who receives tomorrow’s paper today. Who knows, maybe Gary was about to be turned into a superhero and protector of the world, because he will be the only one able to stop the nuke from exploding (or something like that – would the reboot series have been like that if CBS had ordered it to series?), and maybe it’s the way the writers approached this show at this point. Maybe Gary wasn’t just a random person receiving the paper, but he was destined to become the recipient and had to go through all the annoyances and frequent denials before accepting the hero complex. Because if you consider yourself the hero, would you then become a real one by stopping big and even bigger threats? In this episode, Gary was saving a runaway teenager – is he going to fight terrorism in the next season? Well, so much for using the word “maybe” maybe a little too often in this wall of text.
Back to Chuck, the ever-annoying character: Yes, the guy is still an asshole, and I imagine it was intended for him to become an asshole in this episode once again. But the way he became unlikable in this episode was beyond any reasonable understanding. All I wanted was for Gary to punch his “best friend” in the nose (I’m thinking too violently), but no, this is Gary we’re talking about and he has a hero complex (which could have been a bigger plot device in this episode, but it seemed to have been a running joke during the opening minutes only). Of course, Chuck needed to contradict Gary’s behavior by being the absolute opposite, so Chuck had to be angry about his own mistake of leaving his fish in the toilet bowl. But every once in a while, all I want is for Chuck to disappear and not give Gary that kind of trouble. It would mean there is one less comedic foil and asshole in the show, and it would mean Marissa gets some more screentime, which might be necessary, considering her status as an African-American member of the 1990s scripted television society. And having a blind character accompany Gary in his hero-complex deeds might be more interesting, just because of the obstacles that could be thrown at them. Besides that, isn’t it one of those well-liked television tropes that the blind character sees the most? It was established in this episode as a fact when Marissa knew that Gary would go out to save lives before he said it out loud.
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| At least Chuck is not a prick to this woman. |
Fun fact: Sometimes I freeze-frame the articles of the paper and I start reading the texts under the headline, as long as the picture quality lets me do that (this show not having gotten a high-definition remaster, not all of the articles are clear and sharp enough to be read). The first time Gary saw the article about the pedestrian struck by the car, some of the text was about Pritchard’s murder, back when Gary’s ex-wife was about to get married to Gary’s ex-boss. I’m weirded out by the way the props are handled for this show, and it’s a certainty that EARLY EDITION will never receive an HD (re-)master, because then those faulty articles will be all over the internet and they would make the show look a little more ridiculous. This is a shame because I would love to see Chicago in HD, especially during the freezing season.
