The (Killing) Event

So a big thing happening on tv is The Event. A strange thing happens with a plane as the President finds out that We Are Not Alone. Then a guy is racing across the country to save his girl-friend, and...

Y'know what, this is just such a mess of criss-crossing plots, I don't really care. I've seen four episodes and am ready to draw conclusions about the series. It was billed at one point as the next Lost (yeah, as if that's something to aspire to), but it could easily be the next 24, what with all the twists and turns and Presidents and multiple things happening at once.

But here's the thing. And not even Lost was this dick-ish, and it was very dick-ish. Whenever anyone, absolutely anyone, threatens to reveal anything approaching what is really going on to the audience, they are killed. Even though there are plenty of people with plenty of facts. Some of them even ostensibly on the "good" side of the narrative. But absolutely nothing shall be told to the audience, not a hint, not a fact, not even a tip of a nod that whatever is going on is actually important. Either the good guys turn out to be bad and start killing, or the bad guys are really bad and start killing ('cos this is one of those shows where the bad guys are leagues ahead of everyone else, except the one lone under-resourced hero of course), but as long as whomever was thinking of talking is dead, that's all that matters.

There're mysteries, there're slow reveals, then there's just continuously giving the finger to the audience.

How bad is it? This show thinks it's so wonderful, with side-by-side plots, and going back and forth through time to reveal... whatever irrelevant piece of information it doesn't want anyone to actually know... that in the first episode, we get a hint of the event, then cut back to "23 minutes earlier"... which then takes the whole hour long episode to get back to The Event...

Screw you, The Event. Screw you.

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