Date of airing: October 17, 1998 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 8.63 million viewers, 6.1/11 in Households
written by: Sean Clark
directed by: Mel Damski
Great, now Gary goes undercover to save people and the world, which is a huge step forward compared to how he was saving lives in the beginning of the show. Yesterday, he was just trying to explain that something bad was about to happen, and sometimes, people listened. Today, he dresses in military uniforms and poses as an officer (which is a crime), just to save a few lives. This episode was intriguing on another level though, simply because Gary – for the first time – saved peace, something he said during the beginning of the episode was out of his league. When he said that, I was kind of expecting peace to be the deal maker or deal breaker of the episode, but I wasn't expecting that Gary would literally stop a terrorist attack and keep the peace in the world, as the attack would surely have caused some major geopolitical conflict later – a diplomatic meeting between two nations on a third nation's soil was forcibly disrupted – that is usually the beginning of a war.
By the way, this is the first real terrorist attack ("real" as in, what we understand under "terrorist attack" after living through them during the twenty-first century) of the show, and judging by the 1990s tone of the series, it was most likely the last one. The world got to know the meaning of the term "terrorist attack" when the towers fell in New York City in 2001, and when news media continued to cover every single terrorist attack on Western grounds when they were large-scale enough to freak out the public and force the government to fork over money for "defense purposes." And when terrorists learned that you can attack the West and know it will be covered on television wall-to-wall, their faces spread across newspapers and news television shows, giving them fame, and that's something I don't think was guaranteed at all before 9/11. I'm wondering whether terrorist attacks would be a regular occurrence for Gary if EARLY EDITION had been a part of the TV landscape in the 2000s (especially after September 2001). How would the Alice Eve-led reboot have handled the premise, if CBS had ordered it to series?
 |
| The fake Lieutenant is busted! |
The episode went back to the absurdity of the second season at times, as the peace talks between two rivaling nations were set in McGinty's, just because some random dude at the State Department thought that listening to a kid was a bright idea. That made me roll my eyes a bit, although it was not the only moment of the episode that gave my eyes the opportunity to crush through the back of my skull: Gary was able to enter the military base without anyone checking his credentials – not even the MP guys at the gate. When I was doing my duty, we only let officers through the gate when we knew their faces; everyone else's ID was checked. Plus, the officers usually have their identification ready to show as they step through the gate, to make things easier for the guards at the gate. The fact that Gary could just simply walk onto the base like this had me sink my head in shame. Not to mention that Gary was impersonating a Lieutenant and walking around the base like he owned the joint, and yet no one seemed to be wondering what this strange man was doing on the base. No one knew the guy and he was a Lieutenant set on this base? I call BS.
At the end of the day, this is just an easy target for me to nitpick about though, as it was just one heck of a convenient storytelling way for Gary to quickly get on the base and save a few lives – if the writers had handled this situation more realistically, he would have needed days to come up with a good plan to get on the base, and as we all know, the paper only gives you the events of the next 20-or-so hours. I am a bit surprised though that the producers came up with an entirely new explosion to shoot for this episode, when they recently couldn't even create a new scene to fill airtime with and decided to reuse a boom-boom scene from the first season finale during the previous episode. That makes me think even more that the previous episode came in short during editing, and there was no time left to shoot additional material, because the explosion in this episode looked solid enough to make me believe that the producers had some money to spend.
But whatever, the story Gary found himself in seemed a little boring. Okay, it ended with the thwarting of a terrorist attack, but it's like the writers attempted another one of those family melodrama plots when the Admiral delivered the backstory of his wife's recent death and his daughter's current situation, but didn't have time to actually get into the drama of it all, because the screentime that would have normally gone to such a story during the first season was taken by Henry's sudden interest in geopolitical peace talks. The final scene of the story was funny though: The Admiral continued to get his daughter's boyfriend out of her life, so he sent him to the Naval Academy – far, far away from his daughter.
 |
| One day, Sean Evans will host a diplomacy meeting over hot wings. |
Meanwhile, there was something about the idea to place peace negotiations into a local establishment. The thought of sending negotiators of a country into the international world and having them experience international lifestyles and cultures, instead of being surrounded by suit-wearing politicians and diplomats while staying at a fancy UN building somewhere in a big city, should be something the State Department could think about for real. Sending people to another country and having them sit in front of the flags of their countries is boring, and it doesn't give normal people an opportunity to follow that kind of life. Who knows if a round of Buffalo Wings and a pine of ice-cold beer is a good idea to ease up tension and make things easier, but it also seems like we never tried doing that in the first place. Also, isn't it better to make peace while drunk, or does come war much quicker when you have a few beers in you? The final scene in that story was also hilarious: Gary comes back and wonders what was going on here, with Henry taking Al Gore's phone call, and Erica and Marissa having dates with fancy people from the State Department. They will never know that Gary just guaranteed peace as well by preventing a terrorist attack.
