Date of airing: November 23, 1996 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 16.4 million viewers, 10.3/17 in Households
Here is an interesting thought: CBS wanted EARLY EDITION to be their less fantastical and supernatural version of TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, but the writers thought otherwise, so they brought Meredith back for another episode. No hour of EARLY EDITION is always over after it ends, and things or people do come back to haunt Gary, to make him question his choices, and to create a sense of a bigger world interacting with the central character. It turns out the writers wanted to build a pool of supporting characters that might have a shot at returning for an episode or two, and it sort of makes the show a little better and might even turn into something more than just the story of a guardian angel called Gary who is pushing himself to save the lives of strangers in need of help. Then again, Meredith wasn’t really an interesting character in the episode “The Paper,” thanks to the fact that Gary and Meredith needed to immediately lock lips and create an episodic romance, just so Gary can have a girlfriend and EARLY EDITION can deliver its own version of James T. Kirk. The fact that the show is all this is proven by the fact that Meredith was heading to Washington, D.C. by the end of the episode, which almost means the writers will have to come back with some explanation to have her return to Gary’s life that is less boring than having her quit her job over there and return to Chicago.
The writers must have noticed that Gary turned into a Kirk-type
character in this episode, because Meredith was a different kind of
person here, which means she needed to have a different relationship
with Gary that doesn’t resemble a simple “man who has an hour-long
relationship with a woman” premise on television. Maybe she was in love
with Gary, maybe she was conflicted about her job, or maybe she was
supposed to receive the newspaper at one point, just so she can make the
decision to move to Washington, D.C. and leave Gary to his own devices and create room for him to do his thing.
As Marissa said, the paper was not stolen by Meredith, Meredith was
stolen by the paper. And the paper decided to give Meredith an opportunity to choose to get out of Gary's life.
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| She just could not stay away from the greatest power in the world. |
This is an interesting point to think about, because it might actually be true in the greater sense of the show’s mythology. Who or whatever brings Gary the paper every morning, it knew that he was about to lose sight of it, so it decided to “course-correct” the situation Gary currently found himself in, forcing Meredith to think about a change and guide Gary through it. That gives the paper a whole different kind of power, one Gary might not have even realized in this episode (or the viewers) – Marissa said it out loud, but who knows whether or not Gary listened, or if the writers decided to make it part of the backstory of the paper, whatever that might be. One can only hope this episode becomes a focal point in Gary’s life. He couldn’t trust Meredith with the paper, and he definitely can’t trust Chuck with it. At this point in his life, Gary should never trust anyone with the paper. The fact that he only trusts himself with the paper makes him a bit of an egomaniac and a paranoid reader of the Chicago Sun-Times, but it’s not like he hasn’t been wrong about the paper manipulating everything and anyone around him.
As always, the writers used cheap tricks to advance the plot of the story. The paper said something about the arsonists on a roof and Meredith decided to make it her own story, but that never happened because Meredith was kind of busy falling to her death. Maybe the paper attempted to lead Meredith to that roof, which means the paper can create false stories to lead characters to certain points in their lives, to lead them to specific spots in the city, but I don’t think that should even be an option for the show. If the paper can create its own stories and headlines to manipulate the characters into doing something specific, then Gary shouldn’t be trusting the paper at all, and that would lead to an entirely different storyline, not to mention the fact that the premise of Gary receiving tomorrow’s newspaper today is not true anymore, because it was never tomorrow’s newspaper in the first place. So I’m going to file that one under “cheap plot twist,” and it’s not like that happened for the first time. “The Choice” suddenly had the story of the plane crash on the title page, and that’s not the title page Gary received at first – it’s a fact that the paper changes, and sometimes it changes randomly. It changes when the characters need to notice something at a specific time.
Meanwhile, Chuck’s story was dull, which is not a surprise. He must be a dumb guy when he thought he could get away with making millions in dollars, although I was a bit surprised that the SEC made it to his office within minutes of him making all that money (does the SEC have offices close by?). Chuck was even dumber when he decided to get rid of all the money, thinking he could get away with it again as long as he doesn’t have the money. I really would have loved to know how he talked his way out of that one, because any which way he would have put it, it would have sounded absurd, and nothing would have explained Chuck’s behavior, as long as he tried to not talk about insider trading. Way to not care about the story and make Chuck look like an idiotic fool here, although one can only hope he learned something and will never touch the financial section of the paper ever again. He will most likely not have learned a single bit.
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| Having to explain how to lose $15 million: impossible! |
Finally, l liked the framing device of the tornado in the country, and how it connected to Chuck losing the pretty car that he recently bought. The tornado story might look like it has been randomly put into this episode to fill time because the episode came in short during editing (and who knows, maybe it was), but it still shows that the episodes don’t just have Gary be in the center of a specific story – he is still saving lives here and there and the episodes aren’t just about whatever premise the writers came up with for the majority of the hour.
