Date of airing: December 18, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.32 million viewers, 6.1/12 in Households, 2.8/10 with Adults 18-49
written by: Carla Kettner
directed by: Scott Paulin
If you watched two episodes from the 1999/2000 television season that remaked Tom Tykwer's 1998 German techno thriller LOLA RENNT (which was released in English-speaking markets under the title "Run Lola Run"), it can only mean the film must have gotten the attention of quite a few writers in American television and film, and that Tykwer’s movie was somewhat of a shortlived trendsetter. The UPN sci-fi time-travel action pulp hour SEVEN DAYS would come with “Deja Vu All Over Again” two months after this episode aired, but here is EARLY EDITION, probably being the first of the shows to attempt the theft of Tykwer’s movie's premise, making me wonder how pissed the SEVEN DAYS producers must have been when CBS aired this episode. It is almost like they were robbed of their own idea which they already robbed from someone else. The funny thing is, LOLA RENNT was released in North America in June 1999 – it took TV writers less than half a year to discover it and steal it.
Unlike SEVEN DAYS, the idea of Gary being on a run against time, and running on the streets of Chicago, was fitting with the show’s premise, since the guy has been doing that for three and a half years now. Kyle Chandler was already accustomed to running through Chicago for his four-year television show (was continued exercise to keep up the stamina part of his job on the show?), and while this episode might have been a bit harder to shoot ( can imagine he had to run longer and a little more often), it was still a nice and usual sight of Gary taking a run and saving a life. Naturally though, the premise of an accidental time loop with no explanations, and not even being a real time loop, was just thrown into the script, because of a movie that was a hit and needed to be copied. It is weird and fascinating how LOLA RENNT might have been a success, but it did not mean millions of Americans have seen the film in theaters, meaning that millions of viewers were discovering the time loop premise for the first time.
 |
| Meet Gary Hobson, a guy who just wants to help people. |
But as it was the case in both EARLY EDITION and SEVEN DAYS, the attempt at explaining the time loops was unsuccessful, as in, the writers did not try and explain the premise at all (neither did LOLA RENNT). Their main characters have some memories about their previous runs, but other than that, it never felt like it was truly a sci-fi premise with a time loop storyline that could have been used for other stuff as well. None of the writers who took the idea from LOLA RENNT decided that it was necessary to explain the premise because when you steal from previously released work that also did not explain the sci-fi premise, then why the heck should they, right? By the way, has Tom Tykwer ever seen money after at least two television shows copied his film less than a year after its release?
But whatever. The setup of the story was terrible. All of a sudden, Gary is the guy you cannot trust to mail in the taxes and make sure that your staff gets their paychecks, and all of a sudden, Gary is the guy who does not take his job seriously as the owner of a bar, including all things related to bills and taxes – things that Marissa was here to do, by the way, as she is supposed to be the bookkeeper. That is a shortcoming of both characters that have never been established before, and not for a single second did I believe that Marissa was this angry at Gary for coming short with his job and putting some of his responsibilities on her. Marissa knows that Gary is burdened with the paper, and Gary knows that he can trust Marissa to let him go and save lives while she is taking care of the majority of the business sides of the bar. But in this episode, for the sake of the stolen premise, Gary became a troubled character who cannot do his job, and Marissa became the problematic and frustrated character who needed to be placed in a situation that needed Gary running for his life.
The story choices were okay, even if I had a few problems in accepting that Gary had only ten minutes to wake up, get dressed, and run for Marissa's life halfway across the city. Ten minutes of whatever Gary was doing before he got out of his apartment, ten minutes of running and fighting for a cab, ten minutes of running, ten minutes of random interactions with random people. Ten minutes do not seem very realistic in the story here. When the episode already had to steal the shot on the clock hitting zero from LOLA RENNT, maybe the writers should have also taken the 20-minute time frame from Tykwer’s movie, just to make it more realistic for Gary to take some time to get a cab or argue with people.
 |
| He should have gotten a bike long ago... |
Of course, the episode had some inconsistencies to offer, beginning with the guy who put on the wheel clamp on Gary's car, to the notion that Marissa was always out of the house when Gary tried to call her, even though she had just left and Gary called earlier in the next loop. The wheel clamp guy was not even present during the first loop, but was available for a little chat with Gary during the following loops for the sake of conflict, even if it made no sense for the guy to be there. The rest of the episode might have been silly and a bit too coincidental and convenient, like the guy with the nut allergy being the patient of the doctor in the cab, but nothing was more problematic than the decision by the writers to not have Gary interact with a character, because there was no time for that yet time yet, when there was, in fact, time for that later in the story.
