Date of airing: October 25, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 12.47 million viewers, 8.2/14 in Households
This may be a prime example of the series when writers have forgotten for a moment what the series was actually about. Gary still gets tomorrow's paper today, and he still helps people who are in need of their lives being saved, but the stories Gary found himself in became a little crude and weird and far-fetched these past couple of episodes. Instead of staying grounded and telling human stories, the writers have made the decision to go overboard, to have explosions rock wedding ceremonies, to have a journalist create a fake story he is carrying through its ending, to have a 50-something-year-old man decide to go with plastic surgery, because, in his life, there is apparently nothing more important than to impress a younger woman with a proper facelift. I have no idea if a story like Fred's is even close to reality, but it felt implausible here – especially when that soap opera twist came around the corner and revealed that Fred's partner of a couple of months also had some experience with plastic surgery.
I guess depicting that field of medicine in a positive light (minus the death that would have shattered everyone's worlds if Fred had gone through with the surgery) can be considered a productive thing, since I can assume that the business was marred by the press and media, especially in the early 2000s when reality television shows like THE SWAN came to be, beginning the era of "body culture media." Just think about plastic surgery a little more and you could make the argument that it demolishes body positivity and invites the promotion of a negative body image (largely for women), so normalizing the procedure could have been a practice every plastic surgeon would have wished for. Still, turning this field of medicine into a fictional story in a series that resembles TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL was weird to me, so I was mostly having a "Huh? What?" face while watching this hour.
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| In season two, EARLY EDITION gets to shoot at more famous Chicago locations. |
As I said, it looks to me like the writers have forgotten what the show was about. When Gary looked at a headline and realized that this will take him all day to change, those stories were meaningful, had a moral, focused on the characters' emotional lives, in which they had to make life-or-death decisions themselves, sometimes guided by Gary. But this episode took all of that and threw it on the ground. Fred wasn't making life-or-death decisions, his character arc was minuscule, the moral of having to look young and pretty was very much misplaced in this show, and for me, the relationship between Fred and Joanne was never meaningful, since I never knew enough about these two lovebirds to hope for their happy end. Not to forget that the aforementioned soap opera twist of Joanne's real age (I saw it coming – she definitely did not look like she was 33 years old) and the existence of a son put a damper on her romance with Fred and essentially deleted that story entirely.
This episode seemed like
Gary had no connection to Fred’s story at all. In fact, the character
was retconned into the backstory of Gary’s time as a stockbroker (even including a framed picture of him and Fred with Chuck), because there was either no room for Gary's other boss Pritchard (the one who almost married Gary's ex-wife Marcia) due to cast unavailability or the writers forgot about him entirely. I don’t mind
retcons, and it doesn’t even matter in this show, since EARLY EDITION doesn't have much of an ongoing story arc anyway, but it does leave me with a sour taste in my mouth every once in a while. Gary's life as a stockbroker looked a lot more different in this episode than what was depicted during a couple of episodes in the previous season.
In general, the episode was okay. Gary didn’t have much of a connection to Fred, so I didn’t have much of a connection to his weird story of wanting to look younger for his girlfriend (who lied about being younger). If Joanna felt the need to start off their relationship that way and keep that lie going for the few months they have been dating, then maybe Joanna is more insecure about winning his heart than he was about keeping hers. It seemed like this weird love story during which the two romantically interested parties had to lie in order to not lose each other and break up. I'm not even sure that was a good-enough story to fit into a 45-minute frame.
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| Ugh... TV doctors... |
The twists of the stories happened to be a bit boring as well.
Gary went straight into insider trading for a hot second, because it was the best way for him to save a life (instead of asking himself if Fred may have been in a coma or dead after the surgery due to mistakes being made in the operating room). Gary's insider trading (I should put that in quotation marks, because it was insider trading, and then it was not) did lead to a nice C story involving Sandra, and the possibility that she might become a love interest for Gary, or at least a future business partner, as she was very much interested in learning Gary's secrets. As a woman, Sandra had to climb up the
ladder of the stock market much faster than men had to, so maybe she felt the urge to cling to Gary and keep him for her own sake in this business – a story I would have liked to see instead of the mess Fred was involved in.
And finally, the weird Chuck story. The guy is still in the show for comedic value, and it’s not working for me, especially when he behaves like an asshat in front of women. Chuck was fun when he tried to roll Fred out of the hospital, but in front of the photographer, I would not have been surprised to see him get slapped by her sooner or later.
