Date of airing: December 19, 1998 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.97 million viewers, 6.7/13 in Households
written by: Laura Doyle
directed by: James Quinn
When is there ever a right time to watch a television episode about a high school shooting? Before they were prevalent today, they were something of a rarity, and always guaranteed to be covered, discussed, and analyzed on cable news, on the radio, in Congress, and between family members. That all changed in April of 1999 with the Columbine shooting, and the thing is, that happened four months after this episode aired. It means that this very episode of EARLY EDITION, which feels timeless due to its premise, aired at a time when Americans have not begun becoming desensitized to school shootings, simply because they were not happening enough to traumatize every student. And now, school shootings do not even break my Twitter timeline – the school shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, which happened only three days before the publishing of this review, was not even part of the top of my timeline, and I only figured out something had happened when I saw tweets about Republican lawmakers being cowards and in the pockets of the NRA (which is the standard social media sign of something having happened). And here I am, watching a TV episode about a school shooting. It is something of a shame that even those are not a rarity anymore.
After the first-season episode "Gun," EARLY EDITION went back to the specific American problem of the gun epidemic, making it an issue for the entire episode for the sake of a moral-of-the-story story, because the producers and writers did not know it yet, but the topic would become a deafening issue in the public four months from now. SEVEN DAYS and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER had episodes that were canceled after the Columbine shooting (the former dealing with a class of elementary school children being taken hostage, the latter dealing directly with a student planning a shooting at the school), and now I got to see that a third show in that time frame was dealing with the same topic, and if it would have been produced only a couple of months later, it would have been the third episode of a series that I regularly watched being canceled due to a tragic real-life event. I know that high school shootings existed before Columbine, and it was obviously a topic for television writers before 1999, but it is interesting to notice that the topic became a premise for two, three shows right around Columbine that made high school shootings a worldwide issue. It makes you think if episodes like this one or "Gun" were created to make the viewers aware of the issue.
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It was a good episode. Maybe it was pushing a little too much to be funny at times, with Gary being the reluctant and slightly annoyed substitute teacher, and Patrick being the impromptu teacher teaching the movie ANACONDA to a class full of Shakespeare readers and finding joy in it. But there was something about Gary going out of his element to stop a headline from coming true, and there was something about the writers taking Patrick and putting him into the story, essentially treating him as a main character. As Gary said, Patrick is full of surprises, and like his traffic cop actions in the season premiere, Patrick happened to accelerate as Gary's helper in need, in case the writers wanted to create a little team around Gary to solve the issues the paper gives him. Patrick doesn't even ask "Why" when Gary asks him for a favor, he just does it. And in this case, he happens to be the catalyst of a shooting, making me wonder how much of the shooting was caused by Gary's decision to involve Patrick, and if the shooting might have been something entirely different before Gary got involved. Because as you know, even though Gary prevents the headlines from occurring, the paper does not know that yet, so it should not have known that Patrick got involved. That means the headline and the article changed as Gary and Patrick became substitute teachers – something Gary would have noticed if the cats would not have had a catfight right on top of the paper.
You may have noticed that the word "Rick" appeared in the headline or the lede, making Gary (and the viewers) think that Rick Williams was involved in the shooting somehow. And judging by how Rick was essentially targeted by one of the teachers, this might have been how the school shooting originally happened. Because the next time Gary checked out the headline slash lede, the word "Rick" changed to "rick" – the capital R disappeared and turned lower-case, and it became obvious that "rick" was part of a longer word. That brings me to think that the shooting was originally about the teacher and Rick, but as soon as Gary got involved and brought Patrick in, Patrick's efforts to make Megan understand that she has the ability to choose who she is hanging out with, the shooter changed, the targeted victim changed, the whole situation changed. Gary stopped one shooting from occurring (by locking the teacher in), and Patrick indirectly caused another shooting. It's a shame that the episode did not fully dive into that – or who knows, maybe the writers did not intend for that to happen, and if that is the case, the headline's change from "Rick" to "rick" was a prop mistake.
Of course, the ripped-to-shreds paper was a convenient plot device created by the writers to force Gary into action, having him experience an adventure when he does not know what is in the paper. With the paper, Gary would not have had the need to jump in as a substitute teacher, and with the ripped paper, there would not have been a "Whodunit" plot in most of the episode, with Gary trying to figure out who the shooter might be. And without the paper, Gary once again needed to impersonate someone involved in school counseling (he did the same in "Gun") to stop a tragedy from happening. The man has experience in that these days, and he will continue having to impersonate other people, as long as parents or the principal of the school decide not to call authorities over that, since Gary saved their lives after all.
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| A teacher and a student talk about teenage dating... |
Meanwhile, Gary got the home digits of Arnetta, a student that had a crush on him, and it almost looked like Megan was also somewhat interested in having a longer conversation with Patrick, albeit not in a romantic sense. Arnetta hoped to have some fun with an attractive teacher (uh-oh), but Megan probably thought she found a kind soul she could talk to about her problems and issues, and maybe find someone who could talk her out of her relationship with Eddie. It was great seeing Anna Chlumsky in this episode. Between her teen acting career and her co-starring role on VEEP, I was wondering if she did some extra stuff here and there, and maybe I should finally get to watching VEEP.
