Date of airing: March 11, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.72 million viewers, 5.2/10 in Households, 2.2/7 with Adults 18-49
written by: Doris Egan
directed by: Gary Nelson
Dang, the writers really have been interested in getting into the mythology of the paper and who is behind it, and which group is running the "business" of sending out the paper. Having a performance review was kind of a neat idea, although maybe it went a little too far into the mythology and made too much of a mystery about who the men (and women) in late-19th-early-20th-century outfits were, and whether they were checking up on Gary and Joey to decide whether they should still be "subscribers" of the paper, or if new people needed to be convinced to be subscribers. On the other hand, the notion that there are a few dozen subscribers all around America really makes this whole thing of getting tomorrow's paper a prestige club. If a couple of dozen people know the future a day in advance, and something terrible happens could every subscriber do their share to stop that terrible disaster from happening?
Take 9/11 as an example. You could take four to eight subscribers to stop the planes from taking off, and take another eight-or-so subscribers to carefully have New York City evacuated just in case. It also makes you wonder if the same amount of subscribers were getting tomorrow's paper on November 22, 1963, and whether they did something to stop John F. Kennedy from being assassinated, or if Lucius Snow was the only one springing into action, as the guy who lived in Chicago and got Chicago's paper, instead of the one Dallas publishes. After all, there must have been a subscriber in Dallas as well, right? The one in Dallas was unable to prevent JFK from being assassinated? In addition, when Gary got the news that the President was being assassinated in the first-season two-parter "The Wall," was that being transcribed to every other subscriber in America as well, and did they do something to prevent it from happening?
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| This is a special performance review. |
What I want to say is, now that the writers introduced the premise of multiple people getting tomorrow’s paper, earlier episodes make a little less sense, as Gary has been revealed to not be the only one getting tomorrow's paper. While it is logical that more people would get tomorrow's newspaper (as Gary cannot just save the entire world from an apartment building in Chicago all by himself), it is also logical that, if global events are happening, more people than Gary would try to prevent those events from happening. In the case of a nuclear reactor malfunction, more people than just Gary would have called them to notify them of issues. When a space shuttle was about to explode, more people than just Gary would have called NASA to have them check their data a little more closely. And when I think about Joey receiving Dayton’s newspaper, it makes me realize that this whole performance review was not just about whether a subscriber deserves to receive the paper, but on what level. Joey was not able to be the subscriber for New York's paper (by the way, who will be his successor here?), so maybe he needed a smaller town and "smaller missions" to properly help people. Gary might be perfectly suited for Chicago, so he stays in the windy city. But Joey was not strong enough to "run" five Boroughs, when he cannot even run a street intersection.
Joey was an annoying character, however. He was not much different from Sam in the season premiere, although maybe a little more like a fictional character living in New York would behave. But like Sam, Joey was only interested in money, and sees the life-saving events as a nuisance to live life on top of the pyramid, or as a part of his job he wishes he could not do or just take the day off from, because going to the race track and making tens of thousands of dollars is the better option for him.
At least it showed how different Joey and Gary were treating their responsibilities. Gary, to mirror what he has been saying to Nikki in the previous episode, sees the paper as a gift, and therefore as his duty to save lives, a power he was using responsibly. Joey just saw it s a job he is allowed to slack on because no one is watching him – or at least he thought that no one was watching him. In fact, maybe Joey’s recent actions were the cause for this performance review. Maybe this entire situation was the paper's play to get Joey to Chicago, to let him hang with Gary for a while, and to lead him to help the people he ruined by insider trading in New York. Maybe this entire episode was not necessarily about a performance review, but an attempt at creating a row of events that would end with Joey signing a check for $100,000 to a company he ruined in the beginning. Sometimes, the paper sends Gary on random errands, and like a butterfly causing a tornado halfway around the world, he affects someone's life drastically. Maybe the people behind the paper "manipulated" Joey like that, so that the start-up company can be helped in the end?
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| This is not what Bill Gates looked like before he became filthy rich. |
Joey’s backstory leading to the event of the episode seemed okay. I do not know anything about the stock market (not even with Gary's backstory as a stockbroker), so I have no idea how selling off all your shares can lead to a crash in market value for a company, but it was nice to see that a decision to “make money” through the paper can still affect someone negatively. It might be easy to make money in the stock market, or even on the race track, but this episode showed that people's lives can still be ruined just because someone else decided it was a good idea to play the market for some extra cash in their pockets. Maybe the episode could have played up that idea a little bit – I am sure that Joey was not the only subscriber of tomorrow's paper who used it to play in the market and make some money. Although I am also sure that the people behind the paper know enough about their subscribers to not give these kind of people the paper. This begs the question of how Joey was allowed to get the paper in the first place.
