THE EVENT “Loyalty” Review

THE EVENT “Loyalty” Season 1 Episode 6 - The plot of this episode goes thusly: Sean and Leila talk about her missing family, she finds out her mother’s dead, they go to her family home and meet a half-crazy ex-journalist who tells them that Leila’s father found out about the existence of aliens. Meanwhile, Simon Lee thinks about his long lost love, helps Sophia evade the agents keeping tabs on her, and then takes part in one of the schlockiest scenes this show has given us to date.

No, really, that’s pretty much all that happened in 45 minutes.

In the first storyline, Collier questions Carter, who, in turn, asks for an ambulance because he’s bleeding all over the motel room. He doesn’t get one. Leila wants to know where her sister is and attacks him briefly, but he claims not to know. He does, however, say that her father brought all of this on himself.

Sean tells Leila that Collier’s ex-husband is coming to lock Carter up and take her somewhere safe, since he still has to run from that warrant out for his arrest. She points out Collier can fight his side, he says the evidence is against him, she says she’s not leaving, he tells her she needs to be safe. She tells him she has to find out about her dad and sister, and he speeds off with her in the 4×4.

They go to her family home and start searching for any information in her dad’s office. Leila has clearly taken Searching For Television Actors 101 because she throws a lot of stuff on the ground before trying a more logical hiding place. Cue an out of focus person walking up behind them, all sexy-walk and distorted edges making her look like a Kaminoan from Star Wars. But she’s really a journalist and she wants the file they just found. She even threatens to kill Leila but Sean goes badass and stops her.

Turns out Michael, Leila’s father, saw the Inostranka base during a flight over Alaska, contacted this journalist after reading one of her conspiracy theorist-esque blog posts, and somehow that lead to this whole scenario.

As a sidenote: Paula Malcolmson is great, but she’s in everything right now. There comes a point where an actor reaches overkill and Ms Malcolmson, I fear this is it.

Meanwhile, Sophia finds an earpiece and a change of clothes on the train. She uses both and sets about evading the CIA. Simon steals some of the radioactive solution that they put into her food and doses up a jug of coffee at a coffee shop she stops in. After everyone else in there suddenly has an overwhelming urge to drink from the same jug, they end up with tens of targets to track.

But then they use facial recognition software and find her anyway. Meanwhile, one of the agents – or someone, they don’t do a great job of explaining roles on this show – finds the radioactive solution missing. Only Simon’s teams had access to it, so he takes a radioactivity scanner and goes to see who the thief is. But Simon knocks him out, stuffs him in a trunk, and goes to let Sophia and Thomas know everyone is onto them.

He reaches a warehouse just before them, but Sophia and Thomas already have an escape plan. He declines to go with them. They end up going into another of those wormhole/singularity/dohickeys, this one in the ground, and the building starts to come down around Simon’s ears. He orders his men out, one gets injured by falling debris, and then this happens:

Simon and another soldier, sorry, agent races to get him out of the building in a total war-movie style scene. This is clearly to make us like him once more, despite the poor guy locked in his trunk, because the lost love with Alzheimer’s flashbacks obviously weren’t heart-wrenching enough. And then the building collapses 9/11 style and we even have the President, Sterling and co staring, shocked, at the screens depicting it. And then one of Simon’s men stands up, covered in dust, and surveys the rubble that Simon is presumably lost under. Oh, and there’s a huge crater in the ground, but they’ll probably tell the media that it was a gas explosion, because this show loves its TV tropes.

This wasn’t a bad episode, it just wasn’t particularly good. There are too many characters for us to really care about any of them, we’re possibly about to start yet another search, this time for Leila’s little sister, and the big reveal of the episode was that there are aliens in the Inostranka base, something that we were told a few episodes ago.

So rather than analyze this to death, why don’t we focus on trivialities?

For example, what the hell is with the voiceover at the start of the episodes? If the voiceover is really needed, couldn’t they find a VO artist who isn’t so cheesy? It’s off-putting.

Sophia’s photographs – has she been dying her hair at Inostranka? The colour changes over the years.

How did the bag with the clothes and earpiece get onto the train? Didn’t the agents doing the security sweeps see it? Did they see it and leave it be? Did they do security sweeps? Did people come on and off the train at different stops, and we only saw Sophia when the carriage was empty again?

Watching video stream, why didn’t the President, Sterling and co see Simon pull up and break into the building?! He wouldn’t have gone in alone if he was following protocol, so it should have looked suspicious. Even if the supposed time delay meant they didn’t see it for whatever reason, they would have seen an extra, empty car parked outside the building while watching their guys prepare to go inside.

What did you think of this week’s episode of The Event? Let us know in the comments below!