Date of airing: May 27, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.21 million viewers, 4.8/11 in Households, 2.0/8 with Adults 18-49
written by: Sean Clark
directed by: Gary Nelson
This was not the final episode of the show that I watched, because the episode "Time" was intended to be the season finale (and therefore, I will watch it as the season finale), and yet, CBS, for some reason, decided to air that episode two weeks earlier and therefore air a random, meaningless episode as the season finale that also turned out to be the series finale. Imagine a television show airing in the 2000s that has a normal, "standard issue" episode as its series finale, instead of an hour that would conclude the story and character arcs. This is how shows in the 1980s and before ended, which kind of means that EARLY EDITION has the look and style of a 1980s TV show, simply because CBS rescheduled the final episodes and did not air the episodes in the order the writers and producers wanted to.
But there was something about the final images of this episode that could have worked well for the finale of the series. Gary was not the central character of the scene, he walked out of the bar, paper in hand, to save the day, and the camera pans to the cat before fading to black, as if the series was sort of about the cat in hindsight. This is a solid final image for any episode of EARLY EDITION, but it is also a solid final image of the series, making me wonder if “Time” will also have a scene of that kind.
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| Meet Gary,who regularly experiences the wrath of people. |
Other than that, this episode did not work well as a series finale at all. If Gary would have married Kate to give her a Green Card and get
her off the scent of the INA agent (or any federal government that may have noted down her name after she arrived in the United States), as a final "I am sorry I took away
your lottery ticket", maybe the show would have had a reason to end
with this episode, as Gary gets married before falling in love with Kate, and ending the series as a happy man who does not have to be pissed off and anxious about his "job" as a subscriber of tomorrow's Chicago Sun-Times ever again. Chances
are Kate and Gary would have been a great couple, as they already had good-enough chemistry to stick around with each other, although the in-laws
would have been a nightmare for Gary for years to come (Kate would probably have loved Gary's parents though). Thank the heavens that Kate was an interesting-enough character, and that Leigh-Allyn Baker was a charm, making me think that I should get back into the Disney Channel family sitcom GOOD LUCK CHARLIE, where she played the mother. Although her decision to oppose mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic stunk a little...
It seemed kind of awful that Gary would accidentally take someone’s winning lottery ticket away, which is probably why it is a good thing Gary gets tomorrow’s newspaper today and gave Kate and the INA agent $4 million during the epilogue (there is no question that this moment implied Gary’s involvement in their lottery win, if the epilogue was indeed true and not just a random story told by Mr. Quigley). After all, Gary can afford to buy a winning lottery ticket whenever he wants, and in a way, he corrected a previous mistake he did by doing so. If you think about it a little longer though, it took Gary to steal Kate’s one and only dollar for her to be steered towards the proper path of life she was meant to be on. Without Gary’s involvement at the train station, Kate would have won the lottery, gone to see Nigel, broken her heart all over again, and gone home crying without ever getting to meet Frank. Once more, Gary was not just a saint, but also a guardian of the right paths and fate for certain people, and he might not have realized it by the end of the episode, but he changed a life wholeheartedly. From top to bottom and for the better. Gary should have realized more often that he changed lives for the better for many people, and maybe that would have given him hope and strength to continue doing what he does. Usually, the episodes end before he can have such a moment, and I would have loved for this episode, which aired as the series finale, to have a scene closing with Gary realizing he changes lives, and that this is the greatest gift to humanity ever.
The story itself... I have no idea if Irish people were really like the O’Rourke family here, or if it was an Irish depiction from an American writers' room’s point of view. The Irish were weird and horribly aggressive in this episode, but at least I was giggling a couple of times watching their idiocy play out. Kieran punching Gary at first sight was weirdly comical (in addition to being a full-on assault), and Kieran dumping the pint of Irish beer into his mouth like he just drained it down his neck without swallowing gave me joy as well. But the depiction of Irish folks here made it look like this was a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch, because all Americans know about Irish people is how to make fun of their behavior. The writers failed to make the O'Rourke any more interesting though. Kieran was the punchable big brother who always drinks but never got drunk, while the rest of the family did not even get any character depth, let alone time to get out a sentence or two of dialogue. They were just there, filling the screen with people moving around and about. I cannot remember if anyone else in the O’Rourke family had something to say on camera at all, which means the writers were so focused on Kieran and Kate, they lost the sense of making this a real story about an Irish family on the verge of becoming... uhm, Americans in marriage, I guess.
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| The women are celebrating good news. |
And finally, I have one more note. There was a bus advertisement of the CBS show JUDGING AMY, when Kate was sitting at the bus stop during the beginning of the episode. And it was a welcomed bus advertisement, because, sometimes it is funny how dated a show is by watching the real-life advertisements of pop culture elements, when a show or a film shoots on location. JUDGING AMY was a show in its inaugural season back then, and maybe that moment might have been intended by the producers (after all, a CBS show promoting another CBS show – why is that a bad thing?), but in reality, a bit of promotion for a show that was more successful than the show that was promoting it seemed not needed. But who knows, maybe it was an accidental little bit and the editors were keeping the shot in the episode because it was neat.
