Loyalty: honorable, and dangerous. At least, that's the concept of loyalty as presented by this week's episode of The Event. It's a very fitting title, considering that those of us who have been loyal to the show for this long have now been rewarded with an actual, watchable show, one that avoids Flashforward's pitfalls, learned just the right amount of lessons from LOST, and has all the high-octane action that 24 delivered for eight straight seasons.
The main story here revolves around Agent Simon Li (not his real name!), the double agent whose story I completely dismissed back in the pilot. I apologize for that -- the revelations from last week regarding Thomas (and how cool it is to have aliens that look like humans who don't age -- props to the creative team for that idea) opens the door to a whole host of new stories involving the extra-terrestrials (henceforth ETs, at the risk of getting sued by Spielberg). For Simon, we get a simple love story -- he loved a woman in 1954, but sacrificed her for his loyalty to his people. They encounter each other again, after "Mason" has changed his name to Simon and gets work as an agent of the government, but she's got Alzheimer's and he's a young whipper-snapper. Ultimately, though, Simon isn't willing to make the sacrifice for his loyalty again; though he lets Thomas and Sophia escape (and smacks his superior upside the head, though I think we all know how inconsequential that was), he also tries to save his field team. Honorable, but dangerous when an entire building is collapsing all around you. For added brilliance: leave his fate unknown until the next episode. I'm hooked.
But let's not forget Jason Ritter just yet! Sean's finally got Leila back... and now Leila gets to find out that her mom is dead, her kid sister was kidnapped, and her dad is who-knows-where. Desperate for answers, they leave behind FBI Girl and return to Leila's house, searching for evidence that Michael Buchanan was somehow involved in something that caused him to submit to a terrorist's will. And then we get Paula Malcolmson, freshly revived from Caprica's demise, playing a crazy journalist whom Michael called when he accidently stumbled upon the Inostranka facility during a re-routing of his flight. It's kind of a cheap way to get Sean and Leila involved with the rest of the characters, and with the plot at large, but I'll take it, if only because not everyone was a fan of the Sean-Leila plot in the first five episodes, and this promises to be a more interesting line to follow.
Most importantly, "Loyalty" showcases, for the first time, the brilliance of the show's title. The Event doesn't just have to be about the game-changing ET crash-landing in 1944 -- it can also be about the events in our lives that shape us to be who we are, and the events that are catalysts for change. Sean's loyalty is noble, if kind of stupidly blind to the person Leila really is, while Simon's is tenuous but brutally honest. It's clear he loved this woman, and it's clear he didn't want to leave her, but his loyalties were torn, and he chose to help his people instead of living the life he wanted. But all of these characters got to this point through various "events" in their lives, and it is these events that are the focus of the flashbacks -- which now fit comfortably into an episode without being intrusive, confusing, or both.
And... I will leave you with the quote of the night, because I don't want to forget it: "Are you an angel?" "No... I'm so far from that."
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