Date of airing: October 9, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.85 million viewers, 6.4/12 in Households, 2.9/10 with Adults 18-49
written by: Sean Clark
directed by: Reza Badiyi
At one point, I am hoping that the writers will have forgotten about Chuck entirely, so that he does not have to pop up in the show as a guest character repeatedly and continue to annoy me with his destructive and manipulative behavior. At one point, I also hope the characters will have forgotten about Chuck, so that they do not have to mention him ever again after trying to fix every problem he caused in the previous season (do you remember the tax issue that Gary and Marissa once had?). When the guy comes back, the episode might be back to some of its strengths and weaknesses from the first two seasons (the strengths being the dynamic energy between Gary and Chuck, the weaknesses being Chuck as a whole), but I have had a lot of problems with the back and forth of one Chuck Fishman, and how he was both a sleazy asshole and a man with a good heart at times, with the former winning out on numerous occasions.
I guess it is possible to be both an asshole and a good man, as Chuck has proven at the end of this episode, but he is bathing in water and oil at all times, and sometimes even in both liquids at the same time, making things confusing and irritating for me. He was hoping to give Pedro Mendoza some financial advice, just so Chuck can create a well-monetized future for himself (apparently, it does not pay to be the producer of a hit TV show in Hollywood), but at the end of the day, he gives the tickets he scalped for free to a father and son, because even Chuck wants to feel like the good guy every once in a while. Who knows, maybe Chuck remembered what Gary once did with a winning lottery ticket back in "Thief Swipes Mayor's Dog," but that event was not even thought of when Chuck handed over the tickets to the father and son. By the way, I believed that the tickets were fake, and Chuck and Gary would have never gotten into Wrigley Field, because who knows who Chuck scalped the tickets from? But I guess handing them over to a more deserved pair of people was the nicer thing to do for any of the characters.
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| Meet Gary Hobson, expert fire extinguisher. |
The episode really felt like it came straight out of the writers' room of the first two seasons. A random guest character, Gary gets involved in their life, and every once in a while, he has to consult the paper and see what is going to happen, so he can save the random guest character's life repeatedly. It is the standard EARLY EDITION formula at this stage, and while it brings absolutely nothing new to the table any longer, at least it was a bit entertaining, even if the criminal business Pedro’s brother was involved in seemed a little ridiculous and weakly developed. But hey, Michael Shannon returned to EARLY EDITION and, for the second time in a row, he was playing a criminal pointing a gun at someone's face. It was 1999 and the guy was already typecast, but I do have to say he kind of looked like a 1980s high school geek with shoulder-length hair and the mustache of a 13-year-old boy who got on the wrong tracks a bit and behaved like a dick. The only thing that was missing were those oversized rim glasses, and he would have completely gone to 1980s Hollywood high school prom without a date, about to become the victim of a prank directed by the school jocks.
The episode could have dived more into Pedro’s story, and what made the character the character. Absolutely nothing was known about him, and the writers did not even care much to develop his relationship with his brother Ramon. The episode could have lost all the references that they were brothers, and it would have been the same episode. In fact, the climax of the episode was sort of riddled with coincidences, not focusing on one brother trying to protect the other, and instead waiting for Gary to play the hero, because that is what EARLY EDITION is all about in pretty much every hour. In this show, the guest characters can never save their own lives, which means they are always hanging by a story thread here, waiting to move forward in their plot when Gary shows up and saves the day. Or in the case of this episode, when four overweight Sammy Sosa fans who lost their shirts show up and tackle the bad dudes to the ground. Oh, American baseball, you deliver so many cliches sometimes. By the way, when it comes to the Sosa superfans, all I could see were the two guys with the “S” on their belly, and the other guy with the “A.” I can only hope they were thinking bout where to sit in Wrigley Field, or otherwise, they are going to spell a whole different word that may be censored for broadcast television.
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| The moment when you see the white man racing towards you. |
Really though, it would be nice if the remainder of the show could do without Chuck. Not that he is the most hated character in my book (and I still do not understand how the show apparently could not live without him after he exited at the end of the second season), but the contrast between good and selfish is so strong with this guy, I cannot shake off the notion that he is being written and rewritten by the writers for the sake of the episode’s plot. But I would not mind seeing more of Michael Shannon with that 1980s high school mustache. That look was hilarious.
