Date of airing: February 1, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 12.60 million viewers, 8.4/15 in Households
Interested viewers may have wondered how long it will take for Gary to be involved in a conspiracy that leads to a repeat of the John F. Kennedy assassination plot, or alternatively, to the revelation of the crash of an unidentified flying object (also known as an unidentified areal phenomenon these days - those dang Chinese spy balloons...), together with its deceased unidentified humanoid pilots. Interested viewers may have wondered how often Lucius Snow went through a JFK-type situation and how many he was able to prevent, as well as how often he failed. You know all the tragic accidents and catastrophic events in American history, but without Lucius Snow, there might have been a lot more, and that is usually something you don’t tend to think about when watching a show about characters changing the future and preventing catastrophes, except of course you’re watching a show about a character who knows the future seven days in advance and prevents tragic accidents and catastrophic events, which ran on UPN for three years during the change of the millennium and which I was reviewing concurrently with EARLY EDITION at the time of this writing.
Now Gary gets the chance to prevent an American tragedy from happening, and it might even be the event that turns the guy into a true silent heroic character, always in the background, waiting to spring into action to prevent your death and then going back to his hotel room and bitching about the fact that he still hasn’t gotten a job, let alone a life to live. No girlfriend, no real friends who are not pushing him to get to the race track and make some money, instead just the newspaper from tomorrow and an assassination plot against the president every once in a while. There’s a lot to do for Gary, especially when he is smack in the middle of a conspiracy plot and suddenly has to run from the police like Tom Cruise runs in all of his movies.
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| Gary is a bit behind in reading the news. |
This episode also went a tad bit further in things regarding tomorrow’s paper. The smeared title page headline showed that the paper was warning Gary of what is to come, which means the paper was giving Gary not only the future of today, but the future of two days from now, meaning the paper could easily be from the day after tomorrow if the writers wanted to get down that route. Granted, it was just a plot device to have Gary figure out the headline of the day after tomorrow on the day before tomorrow (damn, what a complex sentence I just wrote), and to end this episode with him on a run before everyone even figures out that the president might be in some crosshairs, but it’s also a good plot device for a two-part episode and to dump Gary into a seemingly inescapable situation, during which he will have to face the villains to save the day and maybe even risk his life to do so. And when the story even goes so far as to give some backstory involving Lucius Snow, then there even is a way to enjoy this episode and give some backstory to its fantastical premise. Who knows, maybe we will know a lot more about Snow by the end of the series. Here is to hoping!
But I didn’t enjoy the episode much, because it happens to be extremely predictable. Even without having seen the episodes once many moons ago, there is reason to believe that J.T. Marley is indeed alive and listens to the name of Dobbs; that Crumb might be suspicious of Dobbs already and also believes in Gary’s innocence in the whole conspiracy that plays out right in front of him; that Snow’s way of trying to prevent Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 pretty much has nothing to do with the story right now, because all the 1963 backstory wants to tell Gary is that he has to face the same adversaries today as Snow probably had to face 34 years ago. Who knows, maybe in this weird and messed-up series universe, it was Lee Harvey Oswald who received tomorrow’s newspaper and it was him who was framed for the assassination, and after Oswald got assassinated, Snow was given the duty of knowing the future one day in advance. Of course, that wouldn’t explain Snow’s decision to fly to Dallas on the day of the assassination (and it's pretty much explained in this episode that Snow received the paper already), but wouldn’t that be a fascinating headscratcher, even if it happened to distort well-known American history on a fictional television show, especially when it comes to making Oswald the scapegoat in the show when he was the assassin in the undistorted version of real-life history... I don’t know, if the writers had brought that twist in EARLY EDITION, might the show have gotten some criticism, similar to how FRINGE got some harsh words about depicting the twin towers in its first season finale?
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| The detective believes that something is fishy with the Secret Service agent. |
In a way, this episode was just a big setup. A lot of backstory regarding Snow was delivered, and a lot of preparation was done to lead Gary into the conspiracy and to have the viewers figure out how he is going to prevent the president’s murder, as well as the ongoing frame job against himself. Maybe without the backstory regarding Snow, the premise would have been enough for a one-hour story only, but the thing is, the backstory helps to put a spotlight on the narrative, and I found it fascinating to learn what Snow was doing to prevent an American tragedy, as Gary was going through his very own American tragedy.
But
yeah, some stupid moves were being executed by the characters here.
First of all, the terribleness that is Dobbs’s character, and secondly,
the way Crumb wasn’t even fully invested in what was happening. Getting
persuaded by the Secret Service to order a search warrant for Gary? I’m
pretty sure you need a super compelling reason to raid someone’s hotel
room, and Crumb did not have anything more to call a compelling reason
than a hunch that wasn’t even his own. And let’s not forget Gary’s
behavior when he realized he was in the middle of a conspiracy. Simply
running away from the scene of the crime, just to make himself look even
more suspicious? Although I can file that under “adrenaline can make a
man do stupid things.” But Gary was running away from something he hasn't even committed yet – his hotel room was technically not a crime scene.
