Date of airing: March 4, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 11.31 million viewers, 7.3/4 in Households, 3.1/10 with Adults 18-49
written by: Diane Messina Stanley, James Stanley
directed by: Kevin Dowling
When the writers decided that receiving tomorrow’s newspaper today was not enough and they needed more characters to know the future, they decided to bring a new character into the mix with clairvoyant abilities, as this series is still in the fantasy genre, and not everyone can receive tomorrow's newspaper (or else, that "gift" would be public knowledge soon, and the powers tomorrow's paper gives to the recipient becomes useless). I do not mind at all the addition of another character knowing the future, although at some point, Gary dealing with a girl who "senses" the future and another dude who receives tomorrow's newspaper becomes a little far-fetched – why is it him who gets to know all these people? Why could it not have been Sam Cooper from New York who met Nikki and helped her out?
If EARLY EDITION would have been a show embracing its fantasy and science-fiction genre a bit more, this could have been the start of constructing a mythology surrounding knowledge about the future, by introducing people who know the future, who know when bad things are happening, and who prevent them from happening. And who knows, maybe some of those people deliberately make things worse by manipulating the present to make the future look chaotic. Some people receive tomorrow’s newspaper today. Some people are clairvoyant. Some people are homicide detectives in Los Angeles and might be stuck in a time loop while solving the murder of an Assistant District Attorney they are being framed for, and some people might actually have a time machine and can travel back in time seven days to prevent disasters. EARLY EDITION could have had so many crossover episodes with other time-travel-ish TV shows...
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| The paper comes now with a cat and a girl attached. |
This was a pretty good episode. Nikki was a solid character with troubled emotions, and Lynsey Bartilson is a fantastic actress, making me wonder why she never got out of the GROUNDED FOR LIFE stage and became something of an A-lister on television. She could have been the indie movie queen of the 2000s, someone who could have starred in films similar to FOXFIRE (and I say that because Bartilson and Jenny Lewis had somewhat of a similar look in the 1990s), or the scream queen in cheap horror films, and someone who could have made the jump from in front of the camera to behind it, directing movies herself. I liked Nikki’s emotional whirlwind life, and I appreciated that she was not a total screw-up and troubled teenager taking drugs and getting drunk in the back alley, just because she felt guilty for seeing her parents die. Sometimes having her be an orphan runaway who cannot make any friends is a better way to go through a teenage story arc than having to include alcohol, drugs, and sex orgies in it to make the story more R-rated.
But the writers could have emphasized Nikki’s clairvoyance a bit more. When she saw something, it came in a random fashion, and she was not really doing anything about what she saw either, as if she never believed what she saw in her mind was real. Not that I was expecting to see her save her first life, but maybe Gary should have said something in that regard. Yes, he sometimes gets annoyed saving people because they are not thankful, but when Gary and Nikki were saying goodbye to each other, I was hoping to hear him tell her that saving a life is a great feeling, and saving multiple lives is even better. Not just changing lives, but actually saving them (although saving lives also means changing lives). That alone should give Nikki the thought of becoming a superhero, making her feel better in an instant, because who does not want to be a superhero?
Of course, no answers were given as to why the cat decided to hang out with Nikki all day long, let alone give her the paper for a day. Who knows, maybe the cat decided to reunite Nikki and Gary for this episode, because one needed help and the other needed to realize that even if you are not able to save someone, there can still be a happy outcome. Or maybe the cat decided to stick with Nikki because it knew that the girl would run away and get into serious trouble, so serving as a subject Nikki can take care of and cuddle means she will not immediately run away and in front of a speeding truck. Nikki may have lost her parents and gone through an emotional minefield for three years, but maybe this experience was needed to have her end up like Gary in a few years – running through the city, saving one life after another. Maybe the Powers That Be who make the paper are also in the business of turning other people into heroes, and this episode was just one of those instances.
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| The foster father is hanging my a thread here. |
I found the flashback scene of Nikki's parents' death to be intriguing. From Nikki’s point of view, there was only her father making noise and being angry, and when it was mentioned before that both her parents died in a car accident, it made me wonder why there was nothing of Nikki’s mother in her flashback. Gary’s point of view was neutral, had all the elements it needed to be defined a proper flashback, and was not manipulated by any kind of emotion. Nikki was a kid who got scared that something was about to happen, which is maybe why her father came off as evil, and her mother was non-existent, since she did not do anything to stop anything. Gary was just there because he knew that the accident would happen and he tried his best to stop it. That flashback scene could almost be used for a little dissertation about the fictional depiction of how bad memories are conflicting with what really happened, simply because you were scared and could not think straight and did not even remember your own mother sitting in the car. That was kind of an impressive scene, but the way it was built made me think that this was just an accidental "kind of impressive" scene. And that makes things a lot weirder in this episode.
