The Event - I Haven't Told You Everything, Pilot, S01E01

Sure, I'm left with a sense of confusion. I'm not actually sure what is going on and that does create a lot of questions. Unfortunately, I really don't care about what the answers will turn out to be. Last year's FlashForward started off with a much bigger bang, and look how well it did. The Event may end up being the next Lost, but no thanks to its pilot episode which not only didn't leave me wanting more, but also failed to retain my careful attention for the full hour.

I found it really jumpy. I get that they wanted to give back story, to not reveal too much too quickly, and so they told only told the different parts of the story as they wanted them to be revealed. It did not work. All the tension they developed would suddenly dissipate when the scene cut from high stress to relaxing afternoon. Perhaps they hoped to build a sense of ominous doom behind all the ordinary and pleasant action we were watching, but to me it felt like they kept taking away anything worth holding onto.

The characters themselves seem interesting enough. Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) came across as some ordinary guy, but after his girlfriend was kidnapped, he somehow managed to make it on a plane armed in an attempt to get his father-in-law-to-be to not crash the thing. Hopefully that means that there is a lot more to his character than we originally assumed. He did jump off a cliff into the waves in order to save a young woman from drowning, which shows he has courage. If this show does it right, he'll turn out to be so much more than what we could imagine.

I was most drawn to Simon Lee (Ian Anthony Dale). His brash determination to accomplish whatever needed to be accomplished and his utter anger at anything less that success gave him spunk and energy. The President (Blair Underwood), on the other hand, came across as a man too stubborn to listen to the advice of his advisers who have been doing their jobs far longer than he has been doing his. Michael Buchanan (Scott Patterson) I liked. He was a great family man, willing to do anything for those he loved. Of all the questions, the one I am most interested in knowing is why he of all the pilots in the world was the one targeted.

I also have to point out how odd I think it is that all 4 leads presented to us were male.

I do also have to give them points for using an airplane as a weapon. Watching an American man drive that plane towards the President of the United States of America was a very powerful image. The tragedy was that suddenly the plane just disappeared. It didn't get shot down, it didn't crash somewhere off target, Sean didn't convince Michael to pull up, it just disappeared. Way to pull the rug out from under my feet. And maybe that'll be a more interesting choice as the series develops, but I am not going to see that happen.

A show which refused to tell us anything about what was going on in it and the posters of which were so ugly I could barely stand to look at them, the result is worse than even I suspected. I will not be watching. Will you?