La Brea: Season 2
Created by: David Appelbaum
Executive Producers: Ken Woodruff, Arika Lisanne Mittman, Thor Freudenthal, Adam Davidson, Avi Nir, Alon Shtruzman, Peter Traugott, Rachel Kaplan, Steven Lilien & Bryan Wynbrandt, David Appelbaum, and Christopher Hollier
(Note: The beginning of this post covers Part 1. I was under the impression while writing Part 1 that season 2 was fully out. However, I learned in the middle of writing that there was a Part 2 which, at that time, had yet to air. My review of Part 2 is now written below my review of Part 1.)
-- Part 1 --
One and a half seasons in, La Brea is still almost directly comparable with Lost, in both good and bad ways.
Picking up after season 1's epic worldbuilding of time-travelling wormholes, families separated across time, and civilizations being set up in 10,000 BC, season 2's part 1 adds that people are responsible for these destructive wormholes, introduces new eras of time when people are trapped, and further complicates the already-difficult family dynamics.
La Brea perfectly adapts Lost's concepts of modern people becoming trapped in a terrifyingly foreign place, diverse people forced to band together for survival against the odds, and the increasingly ominous idea that there's more going on than meets the eye. However, it also adapts Lost's pitfall of an imperfectly-prepared world that might not have been thought out well enough. Lost got away with it for several seasons before the cracks started to show and then the writers wrote themselves into blatant corners. They accomplished this through characters that were very well developed and flashback sequences that told their individual stories for much of an episode, earning us the ability to care more about these characters than their freaky island for a long time. (Though the island was also very compelling.)
I haven't gotten that sense from La Brea yet, sadly. In fact, on the contrary, it's becoming apparent to me through this second season that Appelbaum may have a better grasp on his sinkholes and time travel shenanigans than Lost's creators may have had on its mysterious island and smoke monster. Unfortunately for Appelbaum, characters are indeed more important, and I felt myself losing a degree of interest in La Brea because I didn't care as much for his characters. Even though his world and its dynamics were fascinating and had a definite cache of wonder to explore, what's the use in that when I don't care (enough) about the characters doing the exploring?
Don't get me wrong--the core characters are developed well enough. Eve, Gavin, and Izzy are our primary people who get things done and drive the plot forward and Appelbaum has plenty on them that's driving the present plot forward. However... even with them, I don't know quite enough about their past to make me really care about them. We're told a bit in dialogue about what they went through as a family, and that makes things compelling. However, it's still not quite enough, and dialogue is never the preferred choice for flashback in an on-screen drama. It should be known that on-screen depictions are vastly more powerful.
It's possible that they thought dialogue was enough, though if this is the case, I'd have to flat disagree. (Evident by the fact that I don't care as much as I should about that trio currently.) It could also be that Paramount only gave them a 10 (season 1) and 14 (season 2) episode count from the get-go, and they felt restrained in what could be filmed for screen time by that limit. Even in that case, I'd still venture to disagree with their choice. I think that making less happen in the present and creating room for flashbacks to depict Izzy's plights and Gavin and Eve's family drama in the past would have been far more powerful. Even if we didn't get the same amount of plot development and worldbuilding, I think what we would have gotten would have been more powerful. Plus, there were enough worldbuilding development epic moments in the first season (and this beginning of the second) to trim a few of those and still have it be powerful.
We'll see, then, whether part 2 will make any improvements on that character development that I've criticized so far. I had meant to spend a bit more space complimenting the impressive worldbuilding and the well-done time-travel plots, but I would prefer to wait until part 2 is complete, like I otherwise would have if I had known.
-- Part 2 --
Now that the final 7 episodes of the 14-episode season 2 have aired, I'm forced to reconsider some of the things I had presumed in Part 1, especially in light of the series' season 3 renewal.
The only thing that's changed as far as character is I care more about some of the main cast: I feel invested in Gavin, Eve, and Izzy... but very oddly, not so much the son/brother of the family, Josh. I frequently forget that they're a family of four, not three, and the reminder of Josh's existence feels awkward and even forced. I can't figure out whether to place that blame on myself for not paying enough attention or the show for somehow failing him. I'm inclined to blame myself more because I can recall him having a fair amount of screentime.
Another downfall of the series that's remained consistent is the fairly contrived nature of things. A lot of things feel forced, both problems and fixes. We're going to create this problem to make things hard or to bring character development and then we're going to create this solution because the main characters have to survive. Some obvious examples of this are a herd of buffalo that stampede through the encampment and then a massive hive of deadly hornets that hatch in from the ground. Both feel like they came out of nowhere (far more so for the hornets), and then the show decided to fully solve both issues by the end of the episode with little to no lasting consequence. It just felt... very fake.
However, the show succeeds in terms of some character relationships and some of the time-travel dynamics, which I would say are more important. As I said above, I really care about Gavin, Eve, and Izzy. Their family is the entire crux of the show, both in character and in plot, and so it's very important that they work.
The crew within "the tower" (pictured in Part 1) also work. It's the headquarters for an organization who we learn invented time-travel by creating wormholes to effectively anywhere and anytime they desire. We learn that Gavin has unexpected ties to them, and that the organization's founder has potentially ulterior motives for the time-travel than the organization as a whole, which again relate to Gavin. There's also a scientist they encounter in the 1980s with ties to Gavin and a tribal elder in 10,000 BC with ties to all of them and.... the complexities keep rolling out, with Gavin at the emotional and functional center. Impressively, all of this works, though some of it feels contrived, and sometimes trust is formed or broken in ways I didn't agree with.
The season finale brings much of this to a head while creating new problems, just as it should. While in some ways it felt satisfying, it also didn't resolve anything major. I didn't feel like there was much character growth or much of any plot development. There was no ultimate goal whose solution we were brought closer to. It felt like the writers just wanted to continue the status quo.
But it's a fun status quo, and that's keeping me going. I don't feel strong connection to the show for a lot of these reasons; there's no goal I feel invested in, either series-wide or personal to a character. But I still find myself somewhat invested in these characters and interested in how all the time travel will resolve.
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