Date of airing: May 13, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.98 million viewers, 5.2/11 in Households, 2.3/9 with Adults 18-49
written by: Carla Kettner
directed by: Mel Damski
I watched this episode as the final one of the series, since this was supposed to be the season finale for the series, and not the third-to-last episode to be aired on CBS. It also worked somewhat like a series finale, as Gary appointed the next subscriber of the paper, should he be unable to do so at any given moment. Plus, this episode worked better (as expected) than the final scene of "Luck o' the Irish" with the camera panning to the cat during the epilogue. Not only did the writers finally explain why Gary is getting tomorrow’s newspaper today (he was chosen by the previous subscriber), but for the first time in the series, Gary said out loud that fate is not written, and that you have a say in it. Maybe he needed the information about his death 24 years ago to come to that conclusion, or maybe it is because he learned a little more about Lucius Snow in this episode, and about how close the two were in each other's lives. Lucius became a character who changed someone’s life, who would once become a person rewriting fate daily.
Besides all that, this was a solid way to end EARLY EDITION in general. Gary will receive the paper for many more years to come, until someone or something (hopefully old age) kills him randomly, but depicting his successor and the next subscriber of tomorrow's Sun-Times was quite intriguing. It sets an endpoint to Gary’s story without really setting an endpoint at all, and there is something finite about knowing who will receive the paper after him, even if the paper is not done with Gary just yet. Also, now that Gary knows why he receives the paper, it is almost like he does not have to ask any additional questions, since it is clear now why the paper lands in front of someone's door. Finding out who sends the paper must be a hardcore mystery to solve when not even Lucius Snow had an answer to that (and he had many more years to solve that mystery), but one big mystery for Gary for the past four years was why he received it. He got an answer. Not that it was needed for the character arc, but it is a nice answer to close the series with.
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| The kid from the episode "Gun" made another appearance – his second of three works of acting. |
The proceduralized story of the episode was a bit weird, random, and coincidental though. I can accept that Gary was going through some flashbacks to figure things out and learn what happened to him when he was eleven years old (I am stunned he would forget a somewhat scary encounter with two seemingly criminal entities in the washroom from which he ran away), but the story of Judge Romick being a corrupt little POS 24 years ago and his behavior still having a negative effect today felt like a typical story for EARLY EDITION, and one that was conveniently placed in Gary's laps, as he realized he was deeply connected to two different legal cases. It was one of those episodes where one thing happened that seemingly had no connection to the main storyline, but in the end, everything affects anything in this series, so it became obvious that the events from 24 years ago were partially causing the events today. Not to mention that the story of Judge Romick was not even finished with his death – if he was corrupt 24 years ago, who knows how many cases he worked on that need to be looked over once more because a corrupt Judge was sitting on the bench for those. Plus, I did not even recognize the dude from 24 years ago to be Judge Romick, that revelation came to me when Gary confronted the man in the present
It was another one of those episodes that showed the paper sort of functioning as a course-correcting device – mistakes that have been made by the paper’s subscriber many years ago can come back to haunt the current subscriber, adding another layer to the potentially complex workings of the paper. Besides that, the story also showed that sometimes, Gary is unsuccessful in killing two birds with one stone. Usually, he would face two different headlines at the same time, but prevents them from being lettered the next day by doing something random to prevent both disasters, or the writers were including a convenient twist – the pilot of the plane being the father of the girl Gary saved in season one's "The Choice," parking a car right in the middle of a freeway while saving Chuck to give another plane enough room for an emergency landing in season three's "Collision,” and those are just the two most prominent examples of the show that come to mind right now. But this time around, he exchanged one life for another. That is a premise EARLY EDITION should have worked through more often than it did, because it is not like dramatic stories like these are going to have to crush Gary as a character like he was crushed when the homeless man died under his hands in season three's "Fate." After all, it was the Judge who threw himself in front of the nurse. It was the Judge who saved her life. That was a moment of fate Gary did not have control over.
Meanwhile, it was good to see Detective Armstrong back, still hesitant and suspicious about anything Gary tells him, but slowly developing trust in the strange man. If there had been a fifth season, I would have loved seeing that relationship play out, because it is a relationship that is on the other end of the spectrum of Gary and Crumb’s “partnership” over the seasons. Having someone consistently doubt you, because that someone can and should never believe you that you are right (in Armstrong's case, it would make his work as a detective difficult), is a premise that could have brought fun and tension into the plot – a premise the writers never bothered with when Crumb was still in the police force, and a premise the writers were just scratching the surface of during Armstrong's appearances. What a shame that Toni Brigatti did not make one final appearance here. After all, Lucius told Gary to live life a little, and all my heart wanted was for Gary to get a bouquet and show up at Brigatti's place. It would have shown that Gary was taking Lucius Snow's words to heart.
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| Girl, you are subscribed! |
And finally, there is Lindsey Romick, the next subscriber of the Chicago Sun-Times. She is played by Janelle Ginestra-Adams, who became a dance choreographer and appeared in a movie I made a diary entry for on Letterboxd not long ago: HONEY 2. Her character here had me wondering for a couple of minutes if the gender-swapped reboot from 2022 could have been a sequel to this series, since I do believe that the character of Lindsey could have easily been the teenage version of Alice Eve, who was starring in the pilot of the reboot series. However, according to the trade publications, Eve's character was supposed to be called Beth (and the series was set in Seattle, instead of Chicago), but it is not like the script changes between the shooting of a pilot and the network greenlighting said pilot. And doing a sequel instead of a simple reboot could have enriched the history of the show's backstory, even if it meant that some viewers would have constantly yelled that they needed to watch the original series to understand the sequel. But then again, doing sequel seasons a decade or two after the original series ended never seemed to be an issue. And in the 2020s, it has been a regular occurrence. Would the 2022 series have been greenlit if written as a sequel from the beginning? A question we will never know the answer to.
