The Dinosaur Box
Primeval. Dinotopia. Terra Nova. Primal. Did you know how many dinosaur TV dramas there are? Or that some of them are actually good? Switch on The Dinosaur Box with hosts Thomas Gomersall and Darby Knight as we sink our teeth into every paleo drama you've ever watched, and some you probably haven't too. Featuring detailed and (we hope) humourous breakdowns of characters, themes, production histories and of course, creatures, this is the podcast for anyone who loves dinosaurs, storytelling or any combination of the two.
The Dinosaur Box
La Brea S1: Terra Nova 2.0?
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In our longest episode of The Dinosaur Box so far (skip to the 58-minute mark if you’re just here for the creatures), Tom, Darby and guest host, Woody Laui, check out a paleo drama about a dysfunctional family living in a prehistoric world with a frustrating lack of creatures in it…Wait, didn’t we cover that show already? Join us as we find out how much La Brea really lifts from its spiritual predecessor, Terra Nova, encounter godawful CGI dire wolves and ground sloths, wonder who thought having magic psychic visions in a sci-fi series was a good idea, and try to answer the show’s most baffling question: …Why does Tom somehow still love this shit?
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Hey everybody, before we begin I need to give yet another heads up about sound quality issues. Our guest host Woody's microphone unfortunately wasn't giving its best during this recording. It's kind of all over the place in terms of quality, even after my attempts to fix it. And after the creature segment it gave out altogether and he was forced to switch to his computer microphone. Again, I've tried to fix it up as best I can. We apologize, and I hope this is the last episode for a while that I'll have to open like this. Anyway, on with the podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Gomasol. And I am your co-host, Darby Knight. And today we're covering another show from the new golden age of Paleomedia with an odd sort of deja vu for a show from the last one, hence why I'm bringing back a previous guest host with ample experience in talking about the latter. Please welcome back to the Dinosaur Box. Hopefully recovered from the trenches of Terra Nova, Woody Lowy.
SPEAKER_02Hi Thomas, thanks for having me back on. I'm excited for today's episode.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, glad to have you back. I said I would, didn't I?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, the thing is, after Terra Nova, I wasn't sure what you'd throw at me next, so here we are.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Darby, this is the man who spared you from having to watch Terra Nova for this podcast.
SPEAKER_06I guess I owe you something then. But to what magnitude?
SPEAKER_02Well, discuss it later.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I uh I know I said I'd try to get you back on to talk about a good show sometime, Woody, but uh not today, my friend.
SPEAKER_02That's alright. That's alright.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Uh so anyway, on that note, La Braya. La Brea is an American science fiction drama television series that aired on NBC from 2021 to 2024, created and executive produced by David Applebaum. The show follows the Harris family, Mum Eve, Dad Gavin, and teenage kids Izzy and Josh, after they are separated and attempt to reunite when a massive sinkhole opens up in the middle of Los Angeles, pulling many people, vehicles, and buildings into its depths. The survivors, including Eve and Josh, fall through a time portal at the bottom of the sinkhole and find themselves trapped in the mysterious, dangerous, primeval land of Ice Age California, 10,000 BC, where they must band together to survive, while Gavin in the present grapples with strange psychic visions of where and when Eve and Josh are in the past. You know, just in case you thought you could take this show seriously.
SPEAKER_06There's a difference between taking the show seriously and the show taking itself too seriously, because I think it does that to its detriment a little bit.
SPEAKER_02It definitely tried very hard to make us believe that its storyline was very, very thought out.
SPEAKER_04My friend called it Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost, but serious.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, Will Ferrell and Serious don't really strike me as comfortable bedfellows, so if that's the tone that they've taken from it, oh dear.
SPEAKER_04Quick footnote for those of you who are perhaps not familiar with the paleontological aspects of this, the name of this show comes from the Labrea Tarpets in Los Angeles, which is one of the most famous fossil sites in the world on account of having trapped, killed, and perfectly preserved the bones of countless prehistoric animals during the last ice age. That being said, the tarpets themselves play very little role in the show, as for that matter do the prehistoric animals, unfortunately. So what is everyone here's history with Labreo, Woody?
SPEAKER_02I came across it pretty randomly, uh probably when it first around the time it first came out. Um but you know, knowing a lot of these procedural TV shows history with enticing you with animals, I was sort of dubious from the outset.
SPEAKER_04Was this before or after you'd been burned by Terra Nova?
SPEAKER_02Um It might have been after. Man, I never really ended up finishing Terra Nova, right? So it was just what are you talking about? Well, with you, but what I mean is like in terms of when La Brea first came out, I was never drawn to it, so I'd never been burned by any other series per se at that point in my life. I was just dubious because I know that most movies and TV shows in this genre don't often do the paleocology justice per se.
SPEAKER_04Darby, what about you?
SPEAKER_06I recall seeing a trailer online for it at some point and just sort of made a mental note to check it out if it ever appeared on a streaming service that I could actually access. It took until last year for that to actually happen, but in the interim I just never felt massively compelled to seek it out and watch it specifically. Again, it didn't sell itself enough on its prehistoric premise.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I'm kind of in a similar boat. For me, it was kind of like primal in that I just happened to come across a mention of it on the internet and then Wikipedia searched it to find out more. Unlike primal, though, I was not impressed by what I found, and so I never got around to watching it until we did this episode. But I will confess the first season of this show at least has become something of a guilty pleasure for me. I remember Darby, I texted you when I first started watching it saying pray for me. And then actually, as it went on, I did find myself genuinely looking forward to seeing a new episode after work. It did end up becoming a highlight of my evenings, oddly enough.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, that pray for you is still applying, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, I mean, I do need to make it clear though, I don't want it misconstrued that I think this is a good show per se. It's just more my kind of trash.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, everything was executed just well enough to keep me curious, but never strongly enough to make it straight up enjoyable.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think because the execution wasn't great. I mean, it wasn't poor per se, right? But it wasn't great, and I think that leaves room sometimes for viewers to get a little bit checked out while watching the show.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's kind of like a raccoon that found a still warm cheeseburger in a trash can. He's happy he's got food, but it's not exactly gourmet eating material.
SPEAKER_04It's enjoyable in the same way that Dinotopium is enjoyable, I think. You know it's not great or arguably even good, but there's just something about it that hooks you in just enough to make you want to keep watching.
SPEAKER_02I think we all have shows like that.
SPEAKER_04It probably also does help that I've never seen Lost, which I've heard the first episode of Le Bré is a bold-faced beef a bit ripoff of.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I I wouldn't know because I've never watched the whole series. I think I got through the first two seasons and I just couldn't keep up with it.
SPEAKER_06They made multiple references to that TV show in the series itself, so it's like basically just wearing the inspiration, not just on your sleeve, but your entire outfit pretty much.
SPEAKER_04I guess they're saying the quiet part out loud.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04They do use flashback scenes in a few of the earlier episodes, which I've heard is something that Lost does do a lot, but then I guess they decided that was treading a little bit too much on that show's IP because they mostly drop that in the later episodes.
SPEAKER_02That's just enough self-awareness, I suppose.
SPEAKER_04I have heard Lost also gets way too convoluted for its own good, as LaBrea definitely does. In fact, when we were planning this episode, we ended up having to leave out certain characters and story threads just to keep it succinct. So, in the off chance, you feel compelled to watch this show out of mobile curiosity after this. Just know there is plenty left for you to discover. So, normally at this point in the episode, I might go into some lengthy backstory as to how this show came to be, but in this case I'm not going to because there doesn't really seem to be one. David Applebaum, as far as I can tell, has never really revealed that much about what the creative process for La Brea was. The only thing he said that I've been able to find is that it all started with an idea of what if a sinkhole opened up in the middle of LA? And that was what got him excited because he'd never seen a show that opened with that kind of action scene before. Then eventually he decided he wanted to make it about a family that gets separated because of this, and everything else just sort of fell together from that. The prehistoric Ice Age element seems to have almost been incidental.
SPEAKER_06Sorry, can I just go off on a mild rant there? Go on. I'd forgotten about that. That's right.
SPEAKER_00Why do they call them roadworks when there's never any work going on?
SPEAKER_06Okay, so yeah, that that already speaks to the amount of actual research that went into previous sci-fi prehistoric IPs.
SPEAKER_02I do sometimes wonder, and I think we might touch on this later, but I sometimes wonder if the prehistoric aspect is really just to drum up more attraction, as opposed to having it be an integral part of the story, you know?
SPEAKER_04Although, to the show's credit, they clearly did put a lot of effort into the sinkhole opening scene. It starts off seemingly as just another earthquake, complete with a massive crack appearing right in the middle of the street, which I'm pretty sure is a thing that only happens in cartoon earthquakes, or when Bugs Bunny gets lost digging somewhere.
SPEAKER_00Don't look much like Los Angeles to me. I know I should have taken that left coin at Alba Coiki.
SPEAKER_04But from there it just escalates and escalates into this massive apocalypse scale disaster. The cinematography I thought was incredible. You get a really good feel of how devastating this whole event is and the scale of the disaster. You see whole buildings and cars being sucked in, these massive dust and ash clouds from the collapsing buildings. The shaky cam I thought was really good at showcasing that sense of panic and disorientation, particularly the scene when Eve was driving the car backwards with the kids in it. I also really like this one great slow-mo shot of Izzy running away while the debris falls all around her and the ground crumbles away just feet behind her. It's by far one of the best, most cinematic action scenes in the whole show, I'd say.
SPEAKER_06It became clear to me that the ambition trumped the resources they actually had to work with as they just kept making it bigger and bigger. You could tell they were CG buildings with CG debris and CG ground movement, and it was like, okay, you've taken it from being tense and suspenseful to almost like Michael Bay on a much smaller budget.
SPEAKER_04That's interesting because I was actually I had in my notes here, I kind of felt like I was watching a Michael Bay action scene, and in this context, I meant that as a compliment. Like I say, it was very much movie-level effects.
SPEAKER_02I would say I'm on the fence in between you two because I think part of me thought, oh, this is actually quite a good dramatic opening to the series. And then the other part of me was thinking, are they going to have the budget to keep up that level of drama and that sort of scale of things happening?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you can tell this is where a lot of the effects budget definitely went to.
SPEAKER_06I think in principle it worked, but I don't know if I'm going to cause offence by this, but it was just undercut by the overindulgence of like American style melodrama that seems to accompany any sort of TV show that comes off of the continent. I have no idea what it is, but they just always seemed to just turn that up to eleven to try and make sure that you feel everything. And in some ways that just dampens the emotion somewhat.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I think culturally that's uh that's one of the trademarks, right?
SPEAKER_04So when the trailer for this show first dropped in 2021, I remember a lot of people's reactions were basically, hmm, family drama, portal to a prehistoric world, family goes through said portal with a bunch of other people, people have to survive together in prehistoric world. Doesn't that sound a lot like that awful Terra Nova show from 10 years ago?
SPEAKER_02I think the comparisons in the beginning are very reasonable, right? I mean the premise almost feels exactly the same, unless you obviously know the fine details.
SPEAKER_04Actually, it's funny. About a year after Terra Nova got cancelled, I remember thinking to myself, what if someone did that concept again, but in the ice age this time, and then you know, flash forward to 2021, monkeys poor cows, and we get La Brea.
SPEAKER_06In basic premise, yes, there were similarities, but I think in terms of how well thought out they were, there's just a gaping chasm because Terra Nova, the characters had, from what I recall, I'm not as familiar with it as you two, but very defined roles, personalities, relationships, whereas in La Brea, they all seem to be a little bit all over the place.
SPEAKER_04It definitely has some of the same problems as Terra Nova, especially in the creature department. Both shows were also filmed in Australia too: Terra Nova in Queensland, LaBrea in Victoria, which to those with a botanical eye does kind of make it hard to buy that this is California with all the eucalyptus trees in the background.
SPEAKER_06Pretty famous Australian plant there.
SPEAKER_04And like Terra Nova, LaBrea was similarly savaged in the reviews. The Guardian described it as gloriously brazenly bad. The Irish Independent called it truly madly deeply atrocious, and the Pittsburgh Tribune even made a point of comparing it to Terra Nova, saying, paraphrasing here, remember Fox's time travel dinosaur show from 2011? It was as doomed to failure as this land of the lost update.
SPEAKER_02That's a pretty creative review.
SPEAKER_04But despite seemingly everything going against it, not only did LeBrere manage to avoid Terra Nova's fate and be renewed for a second and then a third season, but the first actually ended up being NBC's highest-rated show during the autumn of 2021. Now, we'll be making comparisons between the two shows all throughout this episode, but for now, why do you guys think LeBrea might have done better than Terra Nova in ratings if not in reviews?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think for one, let's say post 2004 when Friends Ended, NBC's track record of shows hasn't always been stellar. I mean, they do mostly like police dramas or medical dramas. I mean, two of the actors in LaBrea are from NBC medical dramas. So generally anything that's a bit different from their usual lineup probably pans out quite well.
SPEAKER_06To me, it just seemed to come out at about the right time. It was 2021. That was just after the peak of COVID, so there was not many other shows being made, being aired, even I guess planned and produced in this kind of genre. So it just had a lot less competition before the proper rebound of TV shows in the following two years.
SPEAKER_04I would also say that to LeBrea's credit, it is a very different story as well. For one thing, it's a lot more serialized than Terra Nova. Terra Nova tended to be quite episodic and would often forget about the overarching story to focus on standalone plots. LeBrea stays much more focused on its through line, which I personally felt made it much more engaging. I found it was a lot easier to get invested in the plot and characters here, such as they are. It sucks as a paleodrama for the same reason Terra Nova did, but as a story in general, it's upper end of okay. It's a good, bad show, is the way I've described it to people. So what do we want to say about the characters in this show, in a nutshell?
SPEAKER_06It's not as much a fault of the characters, but the show itself potentially stretches itself too thin over too many character plot lines, I think. And that means it fails to keep a focus on the Harris family situation, which is a shame because I think the idea of a fractured family marooned in the past would be enough to lend itself to a series without all of the additional characters that they throw into the mix as well.
SPEAKER_02I know from a writing standpoint it's a tricky thing to do to make the characters feel very real within the first five minutes. I think that's quite hard to achieve. But still I just found it difficult to feel bought into the characters by the time the single opened up and everything was happening.
SPEAKER_04I feel like La Brea has the weird problem of having characters that aren't necessarily badly written, and I dare even say are kind of compelling in their own way, but aren't particularly memorable either. I think the acting does a lot more to Carrie than than the writing does.
SPEAKER_06Definitely.
SPEAKER_04So let's begin with the Harris family. So the lowdown on them is Gavin is a former Air Force pilot whose career was tanked three years previously when he started having visions he couldn't explain, causing him to crash his plane in the Mojave Desert. By the time the show starts, he and Eva separated because his visions and his coping mechanisms for them have put a strain on their marriage, and she's moved with the kids from their home in San Bernardino to LA. As she's driving them to school one morning, she and Josh fall through the sinkhole, and Izzy and Gavin spend the rest of season one trying to get them back, while also getting entangled with government officials who were also investigating the sinkhole for reasons.
SPEAKER_06With regards to the Harris family, particularly early in the season, it's Eve that we really get to know the most, I think, in those first few episodes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Eve is the main protagonist of La Brea alongside Gavin, which in itself is a pretty big departure from Terra Nova, where Jim Shannon was the lead character alongside Commander Taylor, and Elizabeth was mostly just support.
SPEAKER_02I think Eve in this case was sort of the spearhead of a lot of what happens in Terra Nova. The female characters really are there to sort of aid as accessories to whatever, for example, Jim was doing and whatever Commander Taylor was doing. So it was. I think their functions are completely different.
SPEAKER_04I would say she's a much more proactive character than Elizabeth Shannon. She really takes on a co-leadership role among the survivors, alongside this character Sam, who I guess is the closest thing this show has to a Commander Taylor analogue, given that he's also a badass war veteran. She goes out into the wilderness to forage for food for them. When a couple of them get trapped under some concrete, she leads the effort to get them out. And later, when their supplies are wrecked by a storm, she's the one who has the idea of going to this, for want of a better term, tribe they encountered earlier in the show to ask for their help in surviving.
SPEAKER_06She definitely proves herself as a bit more of a proactive thinker, looking outside the box at what they can do, particularly while a lot of other people are stuck in, I guess, lingering shock from what has actually happened and coming to terms with it when they realize that they are traps 10,000 years ago.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and they do also give her a decent amount of backstory explaining why she's adept as she is in this completely new environment. You find out that she grew up on a farm in Montana, and that's how she learned how to forage for food in the wilderness, like setting traps for rabbits and finding edible mushrooms. She also runs 10 miles a day, which is why she's so fit wandering around outside. That's fit in the exercise way for those of you familiar with British slang.
SPEAKER_02Wasn't there a comment about her looking like Blake Lively somewhere out there? Was there? I don't know, it's each their own, right? Like you could take it in both meanings, right? So yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06While I think she is proactive and very efficient outdoors, she can also come across as very blasé in what should be otherwise stressful situations.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Natalie Zaya, who plays her, isn't necessarily good at acting fear, I've noticed. There's a few scenes in this where she's called upon to show concern for Josh in situations where he's in danger, and every time she just gives the most deadpan performance you could ever imagine.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think her intentions to convey fear definitely comes across as very stiff.
SPEAKER_04It may also have something to do with the fact that one of the directors of La Brea, Thor Freud and Tal, also directed Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, which, depending on how you look at it, either means he's got great range as a filmmaker or that he was hopelessly unsuited for directing serious drama like this.
SPEAKER_06On top of that, she doesn't really have any sort of massive character change.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, she doesn't really have much of a character arc. They set her up in the first episode as supposedly being a helicopter parent via exposition because Izzy lost her leg in a car accident some years before. But she really doesn't act that way towards her kids for the rest of the show. She's not unduly protective of Josh when they're in the ice age. She even lets him wander around the survivor's camp unaccompanied at night a few times, and this is after he's been attacked by a direwolf, by the way. And then in the sinkhole opening scene, Izzy grabs her hand before she falls through, and she knowingly pulls out of her grip, because I guess she's afraid she'll pull her in two, rather than trying to save herself so she doesn't leave her disabled teenage daughter to fend herself in the middle of an ongoing natural disaster.
SPEAKER_03I love you.
SPEAKER_04She's set up as having a flaw, but then she never actually demonstrates it. So she has nothing to grow from as a character.
SPEAKER_06I think the main issue is that she goes from being supposedly mothering to teenage children to then just being mothery to someone else's child at the end of the series. So she probably just stays static most of the time.
SPEAKER_04Oh, okay. I was I was gonna say I don't know if that's a big issue because that doesn't happen until right till the very end. But yeah, I guess when you think about it in terms of the long-term mark, she kind of just stays in that same sort of archetype as it were. It's just the focus of it changes slightly. There's also the plot line of how she had an affair with Gavin's best friend from the Air Force, Levi, who she reunites with when he's chosen by the government for an unsuccessful attempt to fly an aircraft down into the sinkhole to rescue the survivors.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I just think it's just one of those elements that, you know, okay, it's not unrealistic, but I don't. Know how much it ultimately contributes to her character growth or the overall story.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I feel like it doesn't really work because Eve is not romantically into Levi anymore by the time they see each other again. Like they had their fling and she's already moved on from him. If anything, once she learns from him that Gavin's visions were real after all, her main motivation is to get back to Gavin so she can apologise for not believing him and salvage their relationship.
SPEAKER_06It just feels like a love triangle for the sake of a love triangle, because you know, apparently audiences like that kind of thing, so we need to have one in there. How can we do it? Uh, this is probably the easiest way. Have a hookup with an Air Force buddy of his. It doesn't really serve any more of a purpose than that.
SPEAKER_04Well, I mean, in fairness, we haven't seen season two yet, so maybe it'll come to mean something then. But yeah, as far as this first season goes, I think it's intended to create more drama than it ultimately does. Speaking of which, let's talk about Gavin now, played by Owen Mackin, which interestingly creates another similarity to Terra Nova of an American father being played by an Irish actor.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's one of the guys I mentioned earlier who is on another NBC show. It's a medical drama called The Night Shift. I only know of it because of a reel I come across on YouTube of a doctor reviewing the medical accuracy. You can imagine how that went. But he plays a discharged army doctor who's found work in a hospital and is pretty much just a sort of a cowboyish character, which is quite interesting to me because it's sort of the same archetype, maybe not exactly the same, but very similar.
SPEAKER_04Actually, the very first time I saw this actor, and Darby, you might kind of be in the know of this too, given the types of shows we would have grown up with. But the very first thing I ever saw him in was as Sir Gwen in the BBC show Merlin. So it was kind of interesting for him to show up in this American show, like God, how long ago did Merlin end? I kind of I can't remember anymore.
SPEAKER_06Merlin was one of those shows that I never watched, but what was that, 2010? And it looks like he's not aged in like 10 plus years. It's quite astonishing.
SPEAKER_02So Gavin incites a lot of the complicated elements to the storyline. He was found as a small child in 1988. But you don't find out about this until later because all you know him as is a retired Air Force pilot who constantly has visions, which really is the driving force of the rift between him and his marriage and his kids. And um, he is essentially an alcoholic because of it, because that's his way of coping. The visions, though, are actually real-time insights into the ice age.
SPEAKER_04And psychic live streaming, if you will.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. It was the point, I think, where I began to dread the rest of the plot line. Similar to when the whole thing with Lucas was introduced in Terra Nova.
SPEAKER_06The visions were compelling as they just gave you questions that you kind of wanted answers to, but at the same time just sort of worried a bit what those answers were going to be, because everything else, apart from the time travel, seemed fairly grounded, but visions just seemed maybe a little bit of a stretch too far.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it takes the show into fantasy territory where it does not belong. Like at least Terranova knew it was sci-fi and stayed firmly grounded in that genre.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. Here you're like, oh god, is there some sort of psychic power magic thing also kicking around as well?
SPEAKER_04It also really undermines any sense of realism the show might have had, particularly with the government involvement aspect. That could have given this story a level of groundedness a la primeval, except that A, it also has goofy fantasy shit in it like magic visions, and B, the government agents actually base their decisions off the ramblings of this random guy who says he can see what's on the other side of the portal. There's a scene where he's talking to a couple of them about how he first started having visions of the Ice Age and the Mojave at the same time another portal opened up there. And one of them says to him, and I quote, For some reason the event in the Mojave connected you to that world. Up until then, I could kind of take that scene seriously, and then that just fucking killed it for me.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's like they just took coincidences as absolute biblical truth and just ran with it.
SPEAKER_04And then based on that, they managed to convince their superiors to grant permission for Levi's rescue mission, which really calls into question the credibility of US homeland security. I mean, more than their real world decisions already have.
SPEAKER_05We're going down there, and you're gonna help us do it.
SPEAKER_06There's some Olympic level mental gymnastics going on, that's all I can say.
SPEAKER_04It's the equivalent of the government in pixels hiring Adam Sandler to fight aliens based on his knowledge of 80s video games.
SPEAKER_06You're the closest thing we've got to an expert.
SPEAKER_04I will say, at least Gavin doesn't lean wholesale into the idea that he's completely right. You do see he definitely does have a lot of doubts about this himself, and he does acknowledge that the idea of him having visions is crazy.
SPEAKER_02I mean you would hope so.
SPEAKER_06Despite the visions, I I did find Gavin to be the most compelling out of all of the Harris family. He just seemed to have more emotional drive and investment in what was going on. Gavin is very acutely aware that he's already lost his family once due to his own struggles, and it is his core motivation to just get his family back and try to make sure that he doesn't lose them for good.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I feel like you can see he's someone who's really just trying so hard to make up for how things went in the past. The father-daughter scenes between him and Izzy are probably some of the best family moments in the show. Especially in large part, I think, because of the actress who plays Izzy, Zyra Gurecki, who, by the way, actually did lose her leg in a car accident when she was 13. I feel like I believe them a lot more as a parent child Jiro than even Josh, although that could be because Zyra Gurecki is younger and so feels more like a real teenager, whereas Jack Martin, who plays Josh, was 22 when they filmed season one.
SPEAKER_02I think it depends sometimes if the person playing the younger character can capture the innocence and the vulnerability that a teenager might have, you know? I agree with casting an actress who has, in fact, lost her leg because I think it's very difficult to emotionally replicate the struggles and feelings that one would have in that sort of existence. So I do think that can make the acting a little more genuine on screen.
SPEAKER_04I would agree with that, except to me it kind of feels like a bit of an empty gesture when you watch season one at least, because Izzy's disability is almost completely irrelevant to her character and the story. It never comes up in any meaningful way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_04Without going into spoiler territory, Jurassic World Chaos Theory also has a character who loses a body part in a traumatic incident, and that show does a much better job of exploring the personal impacts of that. You really see how it affects them psychologically and their ability to live their life. But here they don't do that. So you kind of wonder why even make Izzy disabled in the first place? Were you just looking for work points?
SPEAKER_02I just thought that Izzy's disability could have been a good tool for Eve's character development. You know, Eve being set up as very much a helicoptered parent because of Izzy's disability. You know, it could have been a way for Izzy to demonstrate her own capability despite not having one of her legs, and then Eve sort of learning to accept Izzy's personal abilities, as it were.
SPEAKER_04I think that could have worked, except that they have the able-bodied Harris kid fall into the sinkhole with Eve. Like I said though, Zaru Gareki's acting is really good in this. Half the time she just walks around with this really haunted look on her face, like this lost little wave. You can tell she's completely shattered by what's happened to her and her family. I think she only smiles twice in this whole first season, and one of those is before the sinkhole opening. She really conveys this real sense of grief and vulnerability to her.
SPEAKER_06That's what I think makes her really effective at just being sort of like Gavin's guiding light when both of them are reeling with lives shattered in a completely new and unexpected way. She's the influence over Gavin's actions and decisions, pretty much. She's just the angel on his shoulder that he wants to take care of and listens to all the way throughout the series.
SPEAKER_04So now let's talk about the other Harris kid, the teenage son Josh. Arguably LeBrea's biggest similarity to Terra Nova outside of the premise.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it is interesting how they went with almost the exact same type of character.
SPEAKER_06Again, is is this blatant copying or is this the showrunner not really doing research of shows that already exist in this area and thinking he's come up with something new?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I I know Josh is a pretty common white guy name, but still it seems a little bit too on the nose for it to be just a coincidence.
SPEAKER_04So, first question about Josh. How many people do you think watch LeBrère for the first time and thought he was played by Cole Sprouse? I have no idea who Cole Sprouse is.
SPEAKER_02I know him from a Disney channel way back when I was a kid.
SPEAKER_04Well, that or Riverdale, which is what most people know him from now. I mean, if you Google image him, it is weird how much they do superficially resemble each other. They have the same blue eyes, the same wavy hair, the same kind of jawline. In fact, coincidentally, Jack Martin did play a parody of Cole Sprouse on an episode of the Planned Bree Uncut podcast on YouTube. And not only that, his current girlfriend at the time of this recording, Lily Reinhardt, actually previously dated Cole Sprouse, so she's clearly got a type.
SPEAKER_06I think for me, Josh was the least interesting out of all the Harris family. He just spent most of his time voicing disdain for other people or chasing a teenage girl, and he didn't show much growth other than I guess being a little bit more forgiving of the mistakes of adults. But yeah, he just seemed to be there for the sake of having, I guess, two kids in the family, mostly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree. He definitely falls into that trope of what a teenage boy is like in a lot of these dramas. It's a bit sad that they seem to always write teenage boys like this. I I don't know what you guys were like as teenagers. I don't feel like that.
SPEAKER_04Um yeah, but I did feel he was at least acted decently enough. Jack Martin does have a real charisma to him, even when he's not really trying. It does also help to me that he's not always perpetually mody and whiny like Josh and Terra Nova.
SPEAKER_02Terra Nova Josh was a very whiny character.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the LaBrea Josh is a lot more likable, but the problem is he also doesn't really have much of a character outside of nice guy, or at least not bad guy. Josh and Terra Nova had more of a personality, albeit one you didn't particularly like. So it kind of is the question which is worse, likable but no character, or unlikable with character.
SPEAKER_06As well as being just seemingly there as the second child. He's also there for the really unconvincing romance with a medical school dropout called Riley.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they very predictably set this up in the scene before the sinkhole opens, where they're stuck in the same traffic jam and make eyes at each other through their car windows. Which, by the way, is there a more LA way to open a show than having your main characters bitching about being stuck in traffic?
SPEAKER_05Why is driving such a difficult concept in this city? Go!
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean that is. I suppose it draws the LA people in, right? Because they'll be like, yeah, that's home. I mean, it's very accurate.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the only way this could be a more LA opening is if La La Land was playing on the car radio.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, it's true.
SPEAKER_04We fall down through the ground and it's another Ice H song.
SPEAKER_02How old was Riley's character?
SPEAKER_04I think she's meant to be older than Josh because they mention that he's applying for colleges and she, I think, was midway through her degree when she dropped out. I'd put him at maybe 18 years old, and she's like 20 or 22.
SPEAKER_06I've just found an interview that confirms that she's meant to be 19.
SPEAKER_02Oh, really? Interesting. Okay, well then that's alright. That makes more sense then, because I was thinking, like, how many women do you know who are 22 or 23 who would actively date an 18-year-old dude?
SPEAKER_04I don't know. That doesn't match up to me because she talks about how she's had all this experience in medical school. My sister is a doctor herself, and I'm fairly sure by the time she learned enough to be able to do back surgery, she would have been at least 21.
SPEAKER_02Well, actually, no, it would be older than that because they're in the States, right? So you'd have to do pre-med as an undergraduate and then go to medical school.
SPEAKER_06Then they get acquainted because she uses her medical knowledge to care for him after the diewolf attack.
SPEAKER_04Well, yeah, but actually technically they get acquainted with each other off-screen before that because Josh introduces Riley to Eve after she reunites with him at the Survivor's camp. So we don't even get to see them meet and establish a baseline for their relationship. Although, like you say, I guess her taking care of him after he's attacked by a direwolf counts as the inciting incident for that.
SPEAKER_02It is one of those relationships in terms of them knowing each other that just is.
SPEAKER_04It's also unconvincing, in large part, because Riley never really seems that into it, which needn't necessarily have been a problem. Primeval took a similar approach with Abby and Connor in its first series, and that is still to this day the greatest paleo fiction love story of all time. Yes, I will die on that hill.
SPEAKER_06The writing of Connor and Abby's relationship is far more proactive, I think. You see them grow from strangers to, well at least on Connor's side, actively trying to spend more time together, such as inviting her out to investigate an anomaly, and then as they spend more time together, Abby comes to realise that there is a lot more inherent goodness to Connor that she couldn't initially see. Whereas here you don't really see much of Josh and Riley, you just see them not really be on the same page, kind of know each other, and then at some point decide, yeah, why not?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you're never really given enough scenes of them developing a relationship together. And even if they were, Jack Martin and Veronica St. Clair, who plays Riley Lee, don't really have quite the right chemistry for it. They have their moments, like when they're sheltering in the 18 Wheeler, reminiscing about school and their families, but it never feels enough to make you quite believe them as a couple. Contrast that to Josh and Skye in Terra Nova, where Landon LeBron and Alison Miller had such great chemistry that they convinced me in one episode they were meant for each other, even if that whole thing did end up being one massive rug pull.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think the energy that Josh and Riley have between them is I don't know, they just came off more as friends in terms of their on-screen chemistry, you know. I didn't believe them as a couple.
SPEAKER_04Also, Riley is kind of the anti-Sky from Terra Nova, I realized, because Skye, as we mentioned, was a lot more easygoing. Riley is usually frustrated with or disapproving of the other characters.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree with that.
SPEAKER_04She's also a lot less adventurous than Sky, like when she and Josh are exploring the tribal village and they find a secret passageway under one of the houses. Josh is the first one down it while she's trying to talk him out of it. Whereas Sky, I think, would have led the charge to explore it. She's arguably more similar to Maddy from Terra Nova in that she's a female character in a love story where the actress is clearly just phoning it in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's also true. I don't know if it's a casting thing or a writing thing. They just couldn't make the pair work, I think.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, even when she does supposedly get into having a relationship with him and they have their first kiss in the wood, she still doesn't seem that into it.
SPEAKER_05She's like, Are you really gonna kiss me right now?
SPEAKER_04In a tone that almost was more like, just get it over with. And I'm thinking, really, this is the best take you could get of this actress saying these lines. I feel like Josh and Riley both have a much better dynamic with Scott. You do see the two boys gradually forming a bond in the first few episodes. And when all three of them are together, they do actually have pretty good chemistry, like when they're helping to do impromptu back surgery on Riley's dad, or even when they're just hanging out around the cars at night. And I do wish we got more scenes of them building a friendship with each other.
SPEAKER_06Scott was there, I guess, just to be the young Chipper comic relief, and also, interestingly, their local paleontology anthropology experts.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Scott is an Indian Australian anthropology student at the George C. Page Museum at the Labrea Tarpits, which is very odd seeing as only one human skeleton has ever been found there. The imaginatively named Labraya woman.
SPEAKER_02Did the writers just accidentally conflate anthropologists with paleontologists?
SPEAKER_04I feel like they must have done because most of the knowledge Scott demonstrates is much more like the animals and the environment of the ice age. He's the first one, along with Eve, who realizes they've gone back in time based on his observation of prehistoric camels at the tar pit and then also of the ground sloth.
SPEAKER_05But I think when we fell through that sinkhole, we ended up sometime around 10,000 BC. Dude, what are you talking about? Obviously, the introduction of time travel is a lot to take in.
SPEAKER_04Although the anthropologist background does at least come into play when they come across the tribal village and he identifies it as probably belonging to the Tongva people, which by the way, I'm really impressed that the writers actually did research into who the indigenous people of this area of California were and didn't just make up a tribe name. It's little things like that that make me think, why can't you go that extra mile for everything in this show?
SPEAKER_02Because that's where all the research budget went into.
SPEAKER_04Although, in the interest of indigenous acknowledgement, I do want to point out that the Tongva weren't the only tribe from the Los Angeles region. There was also, forgive me if I'm butchering these names, the Tataviyam, the Serrano, the Kesh, and the Chumash, which incidentally some speculate is the tribe the aforementioned Labra woman belonged to.
SPEAKER_06I feel like they started with the idea of them interacting with the fort and thought we need an anthropologist, and then they didn't want to have a paleontologist as well and thought we'll just merge them into one character.
SPEAKER_02The sort of catch-all academic.
SPEAKER_04I do find it noteworthy that Scott has an academic background in this stuff because when I was watching this, I realised there's actually been surprisingly few professional paleontologist characters in the shows we've covered so far, primary for the side. I guess the closest Terra Nova gets to that is Malcolm Wallace.
SPEAKER_06I guess technically everyone in Dinotopia with a Sorian partner is a paleontologist to an extent. Yeah, maybe. Beyond the academic knowledge, Scott is basically just there to crack funny one-liners and sort of be the person to poke fun at because he's the resident pothead smoking weed, and yet he's also the one that turns out to be right.
SPEAKER_04Oh god, I got so fed up of all the weird jokes in this show. It's like, guys, come up with something else to make this character funny.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, they're there are from LA. Well, he's not from LA, but you know, you've got to have at least one pothead.
SPEAKER_04So his storyline, if he can be said to have one, is that he and Riley find a car full of heroin while looking for supplies in the first episode, which you might think he'd be stoked about, given he's a stoner. Um, but I guess he must have some lines he won't cross.
SPEAKER_02That would have taken his character for a very different turn.
SPEAKER_04Then later, after he, Riley, and Josh use some of it as a painkiller during her dad's operation, he gets high on weed, buries the rest of it in the woods, and forgets about it.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, not his best move, because he then makes a very considerable enemy because the heroine dealer is also trapped down there with them, a man that we meet a couple of episodes in called Lucas.
SPEAKER_04There was this one scene actually where Scott, in a moment of lucidity, finds out about this and then reveals what he knows about Lucas to Josh and that he was high when he buried the heroine and doesn't remember where it is. And Josh says, What's wrong with you? And Scott says, A lot. I'm sorry. I did love that exchange. That was some real that was genuine comedy.
SPEAKER_06I wonder how much of that was intentional writing or just ad-libbing. Speaking of Lucas. Yeah, with Lucas, we find out that he's in LA to close on a big deal with someone, but fell into the sinkhole before that could happen. Along with his estranged mother, Mary Beth, who happens to be a police officer and who tracks him down to try and prevent him going through with that deal. Both of them are from Baton Rouge, but strangely enough, don't have any southern accents.
SPEAKER_02I was surprised that they didn't go with any sort of an accent. Because Louisiana is one of America's more culturally diverse places. When people talk about southern accents, there are quite a range of them. And to go with nothing, not even like a tinge of it. Let's say they're city folk and they don't they don't really have a distinct draw, but to not even have any sort of an artifact of an accent when you're from Louisiana was sort of nuts to me.
SPEAKER_04Then again, I guess at least it means you don't have another Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc scenario with that sort of exaggerated fog on leghorn southern accent.
SPEAKER_02That's true. That's true. That was a very bizarre accent.
SPEAKER_04Interestingly, neither of the actors for these two are even American. Karina Logue, who plays Mary Beth, is Canadian, and Josh McKenzie, who plays Locus as a New Zealander.
SPEAKER_02That might also potentially be why, because I think learning to do a nuanced Southern accent might be more challenging than maybe what time allowed for it.
SPEAKER_04Also, I'm pretty sure those actors are the same age as each other.
SPEAKER_02Are they? Oh, that's bizarre too.
SPEAKER_04I don't know, but they definitely look like they are.
SPEAKER_02Do you want to talk about the comparison to other Lucas?
SPEAKER_04Oh yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. How do you feel Lucas and La Brea compares with the Lucas in Terra Nova?
SPEAKER_02I mean, at least Lucas and La Brea, his plot line wasn't so extreme. Like Lucas from Terra Nova, he basically turned that show into a cop show. Whereas this one, I mean it's m it's cliche, but at least it's not one of those ridiculous things that just makes the show infinitely more complicated.
SPEAKER_06I was gonna say, in terms of some of the character dynamics going on, a strange relationship between mother and son was one of the simpler ones to get on board with.
SPEAKER_04I feel like Mary Beth might be one of my favourite characters in the Brayer, but I kind of struggle to articulate exactly why. The closest I can get to explaining it is that she's sort of like that teacher from school who is kind of a hard ass, but you end up respecting them for it because you can tell they do ultimately have the interest of other people at heart.
SPEAKER_02I think her willingness to care for others also just makes a lot of sense with her. Profession. It's also good to see that for once a cop character isn't just the person who becomes the leader of everything. Because often the people with law enforcement backgrounds tend to be like, oh, well, now you're gonna start leading this and you're gonna play sort of like judge and jury at the same time.
SPEAKER_06She was one of the characters that I think showed the most obvious growth. When we first met her, she was a bit more on the selfish side of only really looking out for herself, but putting on a community face. Whereas as the series went on, that sort of switched and she was putting the community's interests first.
SPEAKER_04She does form a genuine friendship with Eve, which I found very endearing.
SPEAKER_06They both shared similar, I guess, familial struggles. They were both not on the best terms with their children and both understood wanting to do better, and I guess encouraged each other to try and do so. So there was a good common ground between the two of them.
SPEAKER_02How did you feel about her attempts to sort of resolve the family issues?
SPEAKER_04I did really buy her as someone who was trying so hard to keep their shit together with a family member with drug issues. I have a friend whose brother has a very long, very sordid history with drugs, not dissimilar to Lucas's, and I did get some of that same frustration and despair I've seen in him from Mary Beth. There's one point in where she even temporarily gives up on him saying, I've done my best, I've tried everything with you.
SPEAKER_02I like that they didn't try to make it so black and white in terms of how she's perpetually feeling about Lucas. Like in Terra Nova, you know, Commander Taylor just I mean, there are other reasons, but he just has no willingness to sort of try to reconcile things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, she at least makes more attempts at reasoning with her son than Taylor did with his. She's just as good at playing good cop as playing bad cop is how I'd put it.
SPEAKER_02In Lucas' defense, a lot of his frustration and resentment towards Mary Beth is because she killed his dad, who was also a drug dealer, mind.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Lucas and his dad went into the drug business together, and when his dad realized he was being investigated, he decided to frame Lucas as the kingpin behind their business, which I'm honestly surprised Walter White never tried to do that at least once to Jesse on Breaking Bad. Yeah, I'm surprised that never happened either. He just did it to Hank instead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, true. Hank has been building a meth empire for over a year now and using me as his chemist.
SPEAKER_04Anyway, Mary Beth caught wind of this and begged him not to go through with it, partly because Lucas has had crippling claustrophobia ever since he was a kid, and she knew being shot up in a prison cell would potentially destroy him. So she tried to reason with his dad, and when he wouldn't listen, that's when she shot him to protect Lucas.
SPEAKER_06Lucas, for the most part, doesn't want to hear anything from her. He's just not interested in hearing anything about it. When he does find out though, it does absolve Lucas of a lot of resentment and rage, and he does understand why she had to do what she did. And it's sort of from that point that they both sort of mellow out a little bit, and it allows him to start embarking on that healing process.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you can see them slowly starting to be at least a bit more civil to each other, they're not actively at each other's throats all the time. And I do feel like that part of it was done pretty well, at least as far as this show can be said to do its writing well. So next character, and I think this is one of your favourites, isn't it, Darby? Ty.
SPEAKER_06Yes, Ty, the former psychotherapist with a terminal brain tumour. He's one of the few characters that we don't actually see in the opening episode. I don't think we see him until Yes we yes, we do.
SPEAKER_04He's one of the first people Eve meets after she falls through the portal. Sorry.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. I mean, I I think he's one of the few characters that we don't meet until we're already down in 10,000 BC.
SPEAKER_04Unless you count Scott, Lucas, Mary Beth, Veronica, Lily, bunch of other people from the tribe.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but he he's one of the core characters that we meet for the first time down there in the first episode. So why is Ty your favourite character, Darby? You just seem to fall into the role of the voice of reason, and he sort of slips into this peacekeeper role.
SPEAKER_05Give me back the damn baby roof. Not gonna happen. Hey, hey, come on, let's just calm down, okay? You've got yours now, give it back and move along.
SPEAKER_06So he sells his cool heading credentials very well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think the casting for this character was really good too. Chiquit Okonquo, who plays it, has these really soothing British tones, which do lend themselves really well to Ty being a therapist. He's very calming to listen to.
SPEAKER_02And also him being a therapist means that you can get more characterization of other people from them speaking to him.
SPEAKER_04Character development by way of psychiatrist couch.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah. I guess for me as an audience member, he was a very grounded character, which certainly made it easier to keep up with everything that was happening, particularly as things got increasingly wacky and convoluted.
SPEAKER_04He also has a really sweet romance with this other character who we meet later on in the series, and we will get to that. But first we need to talk about Veronica and Lily. Probably the two characters in the show I was least invested in.
SPEAKER_02I'm with you there. I'm still not entirely sure that they really needed to be there. I mean, I know they they wrote in plot lines where they were involved, and that's why they need to be there, but I'm saying those rules could also potentially have been handed to other people.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, probably. So Veronica and Lily are quote unquote sisters who fall into the sinkhole with their quote-unquote father, Aaron, who ends up being killed by a direwolf in the first episode. Veronica is a god-fearing control freak, and Lily initially seems to be selectively mute around anyone who isn't her quote-unquote family. But later it's revealed that none of these people are related to each other, and Veronica and Lily were both kidnapped by Aaron because reasons.
SPEAKER_02I think whoever wrote these two characters was having a bad day and needed a bit of therapy. It's because of the genre of the show, right? Like in a paleo fiction to write about a victim of child trafficking being convinced to kidnap another girl, and then having them both be essentially victims of Stockholm syndrome to this dude. And it's it's so out of left field. I don't understand why these two people were written in like that.
SPEAKER_04It's out of left field for a paleodrama. It's another character storyline in a show already overstuffed with them because it's not enough of a headache keeping up with the others. And like you said, Woody, of all of them, it's the one that feels the least like it needs to be there.
SPEAKER_02Definitely.
SPEAKER_04So Veronica and Lily have a very oddly written relationship. Veronica is a domineering quote-unquote sister to Lily. She doesn't let her talk to other people, as per Erin's rules, and is over controlling of her. She slaps her when she talks back to her. And yet she does also seem to act sometimes at least from a twisted sense of genuine affection for her, too.
SPEAKER_06It was a very Jekyll and Hyde kind of presentation from Veronica, because as you say in private, she's quite nasty to Lily, but when she's under scrutiny of others, she plays the loving, caring, compassionate, and supportive older sister almost to perfection, like she's honed how to do it perfectly.
SPEAKER_04Well, in fairness, and this is why I kind of made the point of saying, but also there is this other element to her. I think there is also a kind of genuine affection for her, because I think that Jekyll persona of hers is partly born out of a fear of being punished by others for her treatment of Lily, but also partly out of a fear of being separated from her as a result.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, no, I get that. Veronica is portrayed as a very confused and confusing person. She's certainly written with a fair amount of whiplash. Sometimes she's steadfast and dominant, and yet she's also supposed to be conditioned and brainwashed at the same time. So there's an unhealthy marring of those two things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the backstory for her is very weird. She's been brainwashed into believing Eren was this good man who set her free from her old life. And when she's confronted by Tyabathus, she says that she thinks it's too late for her to return to her real family. But then it's a weird actually she ran away from her real family on purpose, because she didn't get on with her stepdad, and so she ran away from Texas to LA and was living on the streets when Eren found her.
SPEAKER_06Her backstory could partially explain her relationship with Lily, as after what sounds like quite a life of instability, she leans heavily into those things that she can control, to the point of it being over-controlling, which is probably giving the character writing a bit too much credit, but there it is.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I do feel like in trying to make sense of some of these characters, we kind of inadvertently make them sound better written than they actually are.
SPEAKER_02I was just gonna say, sometimes as a viewer, you want to give the show credit as long as you try to rationalise writer decisions, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, the the way that I sort of rationalized Veronica and Lily's relationship is that Veronica leans on Lily completely for the fulfillment that a family would give. And without that, she then just begins spiralling under the pressure of everything that has happened and all the consequences of it. Hence all the control issues and possessiveness.
SPEAKER_02I think for me what was sort of bizarre was that Lily didn't seem quite as traumatized as I would have expected from a child who was kidnapped. I mean, I understand that with child actors, they do do their best, but it's either the writing or the acting, but it never really came through for me. And you know, also the show doesn't really spend much time on laying the psychological foundation for why she wouldn't be more distraught. But this is just one of those things where when you have so many character plot lines, there's not enough time to do any of that.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, she doesn't seem quite as traumatized as she should be, but also she does seem to have a bit of a slightly weird Stockholm syndrome-y type relationship with Veronica, in that despite all the abuse she received, she largely chooses to see the good in her. Like she remembers how she was kind to her in the early days after her kidnapping when they were both locked up in a room together by Erin. Disturbingly, it almost manages to be kind of sweet in some scenes.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's an in well, interesting is the wrong word, but a suspicious dynamic, I guess, that they have.
SPEAKER_02For me, Lily doesn't really become like a true character who is her own person until she's really allowed to flourish later and is sort of given more of a real deliberate purpose by the writers.
SPEAKER_06I agree, it's only really in sort of the later half of the show, once everything's out in the open about how Lily and Veronica are actually related, that Lily or not. Yeah. That's when Lily truly sort of comes out of her shell and flourishes a bit more when she is sort of under the care and guidance of others.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, her arc is about coming to find herself a bit more on the show, and likewise Veronica's arc is about learning to let go of her control of Lily.
SPEAKER_06Veronica very much just clung to Lily as the last familiar person in her life when they were thrust into 10,000 BC, and once everything is blown out of the water, she has to sort of learn that she does have some freedom now that Aaron is gone, and also find a comfortable way to use that for her own wants and needs.
SPEAKER_04I don't think it's so much a case of that in season one, so much it's more a case of she, like I said, she learns to let go of Lily, and also she has to kind of learn to endear herself to the other survivors and make them realise that she can actually be a better person than the one she's presented herself as. And Lily herself is partially responsible for that. She's the one who encourages her to prove her better nature to the other survivors, and that is what in turn prompts her in one of the later episodes to take proactive action in teaming up with Scott to find this dairy cow that's just shown up, because of course it has, um, so they can provide unpasteurized milk for the survivors to live off.
SPEAKER_06I think the portion of Veronica's arc where she does help Scott find the cow does show the part of her arc where she starts to understand and proactively consider the needs of others, and this then extends to Lily as well, as Veronica realises that she needs to completely put Lily's needs first because she truly cares about her and let her go, pretty much.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, because towards the end of the show, another portal opens up, this one to 1988, and Veronica decides to go through, initially assuming Lily would just come with her as a matter of course, and when Lily reversed actually she wants to go back to her real family instead, she's really upset and indignant about it. So even though she's made a lot of progress, she is still prioritizing her own needs and feelings and not really thinking about Lily's to some extent. But then when Veronica ends up being caught in a bear trap, she ultimately makes the decision to tell Lily to leave her so she can fulfil the conditions of this deal she made with someone who offered to get her back to her family in exchange. And that is an important character moment for her because, like you say, Darby, that is her finally learning to put Lily's needs before her own.
SPEAKER_02I thought the scene where they were saying goodbye to each other was quite sweet and it was a good representation of their arcs coming full circle. But I also must admit I was suffering from a little bit of viewer's fatigue by that point.
SPEAKER_06That was certainly the point in the show where both the characters seemed their most mature. Lily had to leave Veronica when she was clearly injured and vulnerable, but they both understood that it's what had to be done. So yeah, like Woody said, you did see a lot of the growth come through in them.
SPEAKER_04I found it sweet too, and I felt that it did show they did ultimately really love each other in spite of their backstories and highly dysfunctional relationship. But yeah, I mean, like you say, Woody, it's just kind of something that ultimately just doesn't really need to be in this show for the most part.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, the thing for me is this circles back to did this need to be in the paleo fiction? Because I think the character arcs on their own could be compelling, but I don't necessarily think they add much to the main premise of why there was a draw to La Brea's sort of setting in general.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's an okay at best story if you really try and tease it out, but it just comes across as really sloppy and inconsistent and not thought through when you're watching it.
SPEAKER_06The word that's been rolling around in my head when we've been talking about this is underdeveloped.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, definitely. Anyway, I'm sure you're as tired of bubbling about the characters as I am. Let's move on to the creatures now. So, interestingly, despite having very similar problems as a paleodrama, La Brea I feel both does and doesn't make the same mistake as Terra Nova when it comes to its creatures. It doesn't feature them nearly as much as it should do, in fact, barely at all most of the time, just like Terra Nova. And even when it does feature them, it also makes the mistake of writing them out of the episodes as quickly as it introduces them.
SPEAKER_02I mean, obviously I understand that shows of budget and the CG budget gets burned through pretty quickly a lot of the time. But for me, I watch a paleodrama so I can see creatures that I wouldn't normally see. Right, so I don't remember I don't know if you know the total screen time of creatures in La Brea, but I remember in Terra Nova it was shockingly short as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's probably about the same as Terra Nova, two minutes per episode, if that.
SPEAKER_02If that.
SPEAKER_04I have to say I feel like it wasn't as much of a letdown to me as I thought it was gonna be, partly because Terra Nova has desensitized me to the creatureless paleodrama.
SPEAKER_06It kind of detracted from the peril of the prehistoric world, I think, because you'd expect them to run into things by accident, things to be stalking them, having to be on their guard all the time, but they were just wandering through it like it was a national park half the time.
SPEAKER_04The thing is, La Brea actually does potentially have a very legitimate excuse for its lack of creatures that Terra Nova didn't, which is that it's explicitly set in 10,000 BC, the time when the Ice Age megafauna in North America were going extinct.
SPEAKER_06I would have still thought you'd have seen evidence of that though, because they wouldn't have just vanished off the face of the earth. There would have been carcasses and gravesites and other things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you could have written it so that they'd been overhunted by the local tribe. Or they could have even had one of the characters note the lack of animals around and have Scott exposit the real-world explanation for that to them.
SPEAKER_02That would have been a good usage of Scott.
SPEAKER_06I think we thought about this far more than the showrunners ever did.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, definitely. But on the other hand, it does sometimes make better use of them in the scenes when they do show up. The first three episodes all have at least two species appear, and does write them into the stories so that they actually impact the plot in some way, even if only minorly. Whereas Terra Nova had about one species per episode at most and usually just use them as background.
SPEAKER_02I can't say that I always agreed with why the creatures were showing up as far as contribution to story goes.
SPEAKER_06Meaning the the carnivores just seemed to exist to attack and maim. Half the time they just were written and acted more like movie monsters and actual animals with real behaviours. I remember was it episode two? There was two Smilodons and one charged, and once that one was shot, the second one charged. And the fact that they were just acting like NPCs to take out just took all of the tension out of the scene.
SPEAKER_04Getting onto the creatures that do appear, I will give the writers of this show some credit. They clearly did do their homework on what animals were found in the Labra tarpits, for the most part. And they didn't just stick to the most famous ones either. There are a few species here that I doubt the average viewer would be familiar with, such as the very first animal to appear in the show, the Teratonis.
SPEAKER_06These were given sort of the key role, I think, just after the sinkhole opened, because these were giant vultures, and a large flock of them flies out of the sinkhole. And that is what partially convinces Homeland Security and all those looking at the sinkhole that something is amiss because living ice age creatures that should be extinct should not be coming out of the bottom of a sinkhole in LA. So that was the first inclination that there was something with time travel going on. It's called a territoris miriami. Gavin as well also recognises them from a vision he had earlier that morning, which raises his suspicions that what he was seeing was actually tethered to something in reality somewhere, sometime.
SPEAKER_04So yeah, this is probably a good point to talk about how bad the CGI in LaBrea is. The Irish Independent said of the effect, quote, if the late stop-motion genius Ray Harryhausen had been blind in both eyes and missing a hand, he still would have made something that looks more convincing. And often when people talk about the quality of the CGI in this show or lack thereof, this creature is the main poster boy for that.
SPEAKER_06The design to me felt very Jurassic Worldified-ish. It was far more gnarly. Yeah, it was far more gnarly than the animals probably would have looked in real life. So they were going for that movie monster kind of aesthetic a little bit too hard.
SPEAKER_02And I think for me that makes them a bit underwhelming. Ironically, right? Because they're designed to look very threatening, but I think when you make them that cartoonish in terms of how threatening they are, it almost takes me out of the environment more. It's like trying to do something to make it look super scary, but it just makes it feel very unserious. I felt like they had done the bare minimum amount of research on their hypothetical appearances.
SPEAKER_04I don't think they even did that much, to be honest. The beak is all wrong for a start. Teratonists in real life had a pretty standard hook beak of a bird of prey. These ones remind me more of a helmeted hornbill with that sort of bulbous knob on top. But secondly, I imagine Teratornists probably did not travel in large flocks like the ones in the show, because modern birds of prey are generally solitary animals, and vultures only gather in large groups when converging on a carcass.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't think they did any research into current birds, which would have helped them as well. So I want to know what you guys thought about the direwolves.
SPEAKER_06When my partner walks in on that episode and the wolves came on, she immediately just went, Oh look, Team Jacob.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, my first thought when I saw them too was they look like Twilight Wolves, which tells you all you need to know about the Quadu, the CGI.
SPEAKER_06I think they're worse than the Terra Taurus, sure.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so the Direwolves show up after the characters have all fallen into the sinkhole and attack even Josh at the clearing, even though there's a dead guy hanging out of a truck window who didn't survive the fall. Because why go for that when you can have the healthy athletic teenage boy and his mother?
SPEAKER_06It was just random attacks. There was no coordinated hunting like in real canids. They just behave more like feral dogs.
SPEAKER_02It's just more disappointing because there are current examples they could have used as references for behaviour. At least with Terra Nova, you could have given them a pass on, like, well, I suppose with dinosaurs it is still educated speculation in terms of behaviour.
SPEAKER_04I will say one nice thing about them. They do at least contribute to the plot by attacking Josh, because that is what forces Eve, Ty, and Sam to go in search of the ambulance, which in turn leads Eve to realise that they're still in LA, but have gone back in time when she recognizes the outline of the Hollywood Hills in the distance.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_04Also, as fake as this thing looks, it's still more of a real diewolf than anything Colossal Biosciences has ever made.
SPEAKER_06At least Colossal didn't make their diewolves look like Twilight Wolves. Moving on to the next creature. Yes, we got a ground sloth in a paleodrama. I think that is that the first time that's ever happened?
SPEAKER_04I think so. I mean, we're not including Ice Age movies.
SPEAKER_06No, no, definitely not. I loved that they included the giant ground sloth, even if it really doesn't do much in the show at all. It just scavenged. Changes the survivor's food, forces them to go foraging in the woods, and then leaves again.
SPEAKER_04I guess no one's getting their baby right now. Yeah, Hunter boys in a race to the bottom for worst creature effect in La Brea.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the uh the CGI was it did look like something out of the old Sims Pets game.
SPEAKER_04I mean, points were at least having better faux animation than some of the primeval mammals, minus points of being a shittier effect overall.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, you would have expected far better considering the amount of time that's passed since prime evil, but here we are.
SPEAKER_04Actually, on a slight paleo tangent here, it's a shame none of those California hippies had any avocado toast to add to that food pile, because avocados and ground slows actually have a very interesting relationship to each other, which is that avocados evolved specifically to be eaten by Ice Age megafauna, especially ground slows, to disperse their seeds in their dung. That's why they have such large seeds that no modern animal could possibly swallow.
SPEAKER_01I did not know that. Yeah, I've read that before.
SPEAKER_04Also, since this whole show is all taking place in the same timeline, that groundsloth is now the first animal ever to have plastic in its digestive system.
SPEAKER_06Way ahead of the trend there, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_04I wonder if the ground sloth scavenging food here was inspired by the megatherium scavenging scene in Walking with Beasts.
SPEAKER_06It will certainly seem so, given that that is one of the most iconic scenes to come out of the Walking with series. In that one, they had a Megatherium, which is one of the biggest of the ground sloths. A sabertoothed cat pack had just made a kill, but the megatherium decided it wanted some of that carry-in for itself. If it was deliberate inspiration, I would say it was uncanny. It almost seemed like they just googled giant ground sloths, saw that clip, and then decided they just used the exact same premise for themselves. They might be herbivores, but they will occasionally go for baby roots to supplement their diet.
SPEAKER_04And when they do, nothing gets in their way.
SPEAKER_06One creature we can't criticize the CGI on because we barely see it is a giant snake that attacks the characters as they are crossing a river.
SPEAKER_00There's something in the water.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, it wraps itself around Riley. Levi kills it underwater, of course, so we don't have to spend money on CGI. And it doesn't serve any sort of plot role at all. And except maybe it's there to prove that Levi is adept at combat, which we probably could have inferred for ourselves since we know he was in the armed forces.
SPEAKER_06It was just filler. It just padded out the runtime. And there was never any sort of giant snake in Ice Age California.
SPEAKER_04But interestingly, there was one in the Ice Age of Australia, the Wanambe, I think it is. Could get up to about six meters long, probably preyed on some of the Australian megafauna, but it was definitely kind of a lightweight compared to Titanoba and other snakes at that ilk.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04There are also other creatures in the show that don't quite warrant full discussions, but are at least worth rattling off here. Short faced Bear, pretty cool to see one of these in a paleo drama. They've never really had that much presence in paleo media outside of documentaries and Zoo Tycoon 2.
SPEAKER_06It was included in the same episode as The Ground Sloth, which those in the same episode did make La Brea feel like a real paleodrama, even if only momentarily.
SPEAKER_04Sabretoot Cats, or Smilodon to use the scientific name, I guess we should mention, even though most of their scenes take place at night, and this show has Game of Thrones season 8 lighting, so you can hardly even see them.
SPEAKER_02Which I presume is a CGI budget-related thing.
SPEAKER_04I was gonna say, given the quality of the CGI and Library, it's probably just as well. It reminds me of this family guy clip parodying Game of Thrones season eight, where Peter says, prepare for the most epic battle of all time that nobody will see because it's too dark and we'll say it's because they have bad TVs.
SPEAKER_01I have to imagine that for Paleo fans, that was a bit disappointing.
SPEAKER_04To be fair, there is a later episode that has a scene with a smile of on during the day, and it does look a lot better there.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it does, but it again it's just proving to be no better at hunting. The fact that it's spotted so easily when it's stalking something, it's not even hidden itself amongst brush, it's just sucked at being an apex predator.
SPEAKER_04I think you're asking a bit too much of these writers to add that level of finesse. I apologize. Spoiled by primeval. We have a few Ice Age camels as well, which kudos to the show for an arjent that there were camels in Ice Age North America. I feel like a lot of paleo media tends to forget that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think that's quite an uncommon one, and I'm gonna guess that a lot of people who aren't familiar with paleoecology probably thought it was a bit of a farce to have camels. But for those who are a little more in the know, that's probably quite a nice surprise.
SPEAKER_06I was a little disappointed though that they just used living dromedary camels and they didn't bother to produce a CG model of a giant Ice Age camel, because that definitely would have helped Scott realize that they would in the past.
SPEAKER_04To be fair, if you're filming your show in Australia, you've got your pick of real feral camels to live act prehistoric ones.
SPEAKER_01I know, but it just sort of felt like they'd gone half the distance, which is not an uncommon theme I've I've found with the creatures in the show.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. And it also just got me, why why did the camels just run for the tar pits? Surely any wise animal would know, don't go near the black goo. Hey! Hey!
SPEAKER_04Hey! Definitely somebody go in here! In fairness, it's not like any of the animals who got stuck in the Labra tar pits knew they were dangerous beforehand. That's why they worked so well as animal traps. Those camels were probably just thirsty and thought there was a lake or something.
SPEAKER_06Black water, I think, would be a massive turn-off for most animals. I think they would have just looked for something else. Predator trap, it would have worked, but for just random herbivores running into a pool of tar, not really.
SPEAKER_04The thing is, it's not actually the tar that's making them run for it. It's some guy behind them with a cattle prod or a rising crop.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And finally, of course, we have a mammoth. Albeit in the very last scene of the last episode, because the show finally remembered it's supposed to be an Ice Age drama.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and I think they saved the best till last, because that was the best looking CGI animal in the entire series.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, totally. Clearly, most of what was left of the effects budget after the sync whole scene went to this creature.
SPEAKER_02Either that or they dipped into season two's budget.
SPEAKER_06I think in particular it was the hair on the mammoth that sold it, which is a bit strange considering they could have saved themselves all that trouble by using a Colombian mammoth instead, which was native to California, unlike the woolly mammoth. Colombian mammoths were a completely well, not completely, but a largely hairless species. So that would have saved loads on the animation and rendering budget.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, ironic that primeval, a show set in late 2000s, Britain chose to include a Colombian mammoth, whereas a show set in Ice Age, California, the perfect time and place to feature one, did not.
SPEAKER_02But you know it's because NBC said to themselves, if we use a hairless mammoth, people are gonna think we're idiots because that's not the mammoth they know.
SPEAKER_04Although the scene where it appears is in the Pacific Northwest, where it's much colder. So La Brea does technically get away with its choice of mammoth species on geography and climate grounds. Now I've already alluded several times in this episode to a tribal village plot in La Brea. So which of you guys wants to get us started on that?
SPEAKER_06While tracking a signal, which they hope is going to be coming from Levi's Downed Plain, they stumble across this prehistoric village that they name the fort and decide to go inside and have an explore, which, you know, to any sane person is ill-advised.
SPEAKER_02Don't they just walk into their houses?
SPEAKER_04Pretty pretty much, yeah. Like I I did actually like how Eve acknowledged that they were technically intruding on the Tongvar's land when they enter the fort. As given this is 10,000 years before European colonization, that technically makes her the first white person to ever recognise their intrusion on indigenous land. Truly a maverick ahead of her time. And of course, when the inhabitants return, they don't take to the intrusion very well. There's a scene where a bunch of them find Josh and Riley just outside the fort and chase them down the hill with bows and arrows and swords, like it's the Urukai scene at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, complete with one of them blowing a horn like Boromir. It did make me wonder if these people were going to be the Sixers of Lebraya.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the Sixers? That's what went through your mind when you saw them?
SPEAKER_04Uh initially, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I think you know, I I can see where you're coming from, to be fair, because there's sort of these outside people to the protagonist's camp, right? So definitely they could have gone in that sort of direction with the Tongva. I'm quite glad it didn't, though.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's something we ought to mention. The inhabitants of this fort are not all Tongva. They're actually a mix of races descended from both Tongva and people who came through another portal on a ship 60 years ago because these portals spit things from all periods of history into the ice age. That's also why they can all speak English, which I guess is better than whatever non-explanation Pocahontas gave or why they could all understand each other.
SPEAKER_02Probably would have been better than the potential alternative of them just making up some sort of Native American language or using the wrong Native American language.
SPEAKER_04Or translation through trace spirit.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. You know, one of those crazy options.
SPEAKER_06I didn't get that mix of ethnicities that they were saying lived there, as I would have expected a lot more, like you'd see in Waterfall City and Dinatopia in terms of different eras, different dress styles, different languages. It just very much felt like, yeah, we've gone with a prehistoric village setting, and we're just gonna say that people from here, there and everywhere are living here without actually showing it.
SPEAKER_04Meanwhile, even Levi escaped the fort with the help of a little white boy named Isaiah, who I was so certain that was a girl the first time I saw him. Later, Isaiah shows up at the survivor's camp after their supplies have been damaged by a storm, and they decide to bring him back safely to the village as a peace offering to the tribe to get their help surviving in the Ice Age. And I have to say, if there's one thing that both Labrea and Terra Nova genuinely do really well, it is practical sets and props. The set for this village is incredible.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I was quite surprised because I think for a lot of these shows, based on some of the writing and the CG budget and things, you wouldn't expect them to put in so much effort with the sets. Like it had the same level of detail really as the Terra Nova set.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's so refreshing to see a modern show with very little in the way of green screen backgrounds.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I remember for me and Terra Nova, it was one of the things that kept me in the show despite the rest of it.
SPEAKER_04I really enjoyed finding all the little details in this one, like animal skins drying on wooden frames, little serving bowls made out of shells. My absolute favourite visual in this show is the scene when Para, the tribe leader, brings Evenco to the garden where they grow their crops. That was so gorgeous to look at. It's just so lush and vibrant. It's got its own irrigation system with a well. You look closely and you can see they're growing chilies, and in the feast scene afterwards, they've got great big squashes and melons on the table. It feels like something a real indigenous civilization would actually grow based on those artists' recreations of Maya and Aztec farming.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_06I don't know, to me it just never really stuck out in my mind or made as big an impression as it sounds like it did on YouTube. Similar to Primal, I went into La Braya with a very paleo drama headspace and wasn't necessarily expecting such a heavy focus on human civilizations in that time period. None of those details seem to stick out to me. Compared to Dinotopia with its impressive waterfall city set, this one just f- I don't know, it existed and that's all it really did for me.
SPEAKER_04I only have one very slight nitpick with the set design, which is with the houses. Tongvar homes, or Kesh as they were known as, were these dome-shaped structures made from willow branches for the frame and dried grass for the outer covering. And the show does get the dome shape and grass covering right, but that's only for the roof. The rest of the house is made up of Adobe Walls, like you see in indigenous architecture from New Mexico and places like that. But I do concede an Adobe House makes for much better exploring possibilities, and this is by no means a major criticism. This whole set is a highlight of the show. Up there with Terra Nova and the Ark in Primeval as one of my all-time favourite paleo sets. Ooh, invoking the sacred arc. That's high praise. And while we're here, let's talk a bit about Para, the leader of the tribe, played again to the show's credit, by a part Tongva actress, Tonancine Carmelo, I think that's how you pronounce her name. We first see her when Isaiah's grandfather, Silas, has cornered even Levi when they first come to the village, and she shows up and orders him to let them go. Later she saves Ty from being bitten by a rattlesnake, which finally a snake species that actually would have been present in Ice Age, California, and shelters with him in a cave during a storm where they bund over their race's shared historical traumas with white people. It's not quite as poignant as I'm making it sound.
SPEAKER_06I liked how they made her more nuanced and they didn't just go down the whole savage native tribe routes. She became one of the more respectable leading characters in the show, I think.
SPEAKER_02I would echo that. I think a lot of depictions of Native Americans or or indigenous peoples in general, even when they're not framed as quote unquote savages, they still are quite vicious in demeanor, often just seem quite angry. So it was quite nice to see uh a depiction where the depth of character is on par with any other important character in the show.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I also really enjoyed her. I think she's probably one of my favourite characters in the show apart from Mary Beth. She had a real sense of altruism and good-heartedness to her, even though she'd had bad experiences with outsiders before. She lets these strangers who have trespassed into her community go free. And then later she goes above and beyond to feed them and offer to teach them to survive because she can see they need help.
SPEAKER_02That's a lot more than what a lot of uh, shall we say, shotgun touting homeowners would have done to trespassers, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there was even one point when Levi said, Why are you going to all this effort to help us? And she said, We've not always been peaceful with our neighbours in the past. I'd much rather have you be friends than enemies.
SPEAKER_06She seemed very aware of people acting potentially out of desperation and not really punishing them for that. She didn't judge people too quickly for what they perhaps felt like they had to do.
SPEAKER_02I think it does make sense, given that she's the leader, to be able to read between the lines of the situation.
SPEAKER_04I kept thinking to myself, I hope this goes better for them than the other time. Indigenous people in North America help strangers to their land survive. Something to think about if you happen to be listening to this at Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_06I think that it helped that the first of the stranded camp that she really got to spend one-on-one time with, getting to know the survivor's perspective, was when she got trapped in that cave with Ty during a storm. That encounter was the start of not just, I guess, collaboration and peace between the two groups, but for those two characters in particular, blossomed into an eventual romance.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I have to say, as cliche and undeveloped as this relationship is, I do kind of buy it. I think it must be the chemistry between the two actors.
SPEAKER_02It made sense that Ty was the one that she connected with because his character's profession lends towards being good at listening and being empathetic.
SPEAKER_06I certainly found them more engaging and believable as a romantic couple than Josh and Riley, which was a low bar, but they cleared it.
SPEAKER_02I I do sometimes wonder though if writers try to shoehorn in some sort of a romance between an indigenous person and the other party. I mean, granted, at least the chemistry felt quite real, so it was good.
SPEAKER_06I was watching a video on that yesterday about how romance is never the highest plot priority in sci-fi shows, and as a result, it often just feels shoehorned in and underdeveloped, which is what we saw with Josh and Riley.
SPEAKER_04Actually, it's interesting you bring up that point about Native American romance, Woody, because I feel like we don't see that many fictional romances between black people and Native Americans. The only one I can think of besides this is Sugar Mama and Kwana in the Proud Family Louder and Prouder.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's one more than I can think of, so.
SPEAKER_06I think Ty and Para's romance worked more than Josh and Riley because there was a lot more tension brought to the table when the two of them decided to be honest with each other. As well as the unclear possibility that Ty may get the opportunity to return to his own time. He also had the terminal illness to contend with as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there's a scene when she finds out about his brain tumour and she urges him to find a way to get back to his time to get treatment. But you can also see she's really reluctant for him to do that because she started to fall in love with him.
SPEAKER_02I actually thought that her being very conflicted about him going back made their relationship and interactions more compelling, because I do think that's what a person who has a good head on their shoulders would be conflicted about. So that actually added a lot more to her character.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and then later when he does get the chance to go back to a more modern time, he instead chooses to stay to be with the people he's come to care for. And you can see she is visibly relieved by that, even though she's also sadly turning down the chance to get medical help.
SPEAKER_06His arc culminates from being potentially suicidal due to his condition to realising that he can still form connections and be of value in the lives of other people, and Para is the person that he meets that really cements that for him.
SPEAKER_04Better love story than Josh and Riley, and still a better love story than Twilight, as the old saying goes. Okay, so if you think this first season of LeBray is coconutty enough, based on what we've said so far, first of all, watch the whole thing yourself and tell me that again. And secondly, wait till you hear about the last three or so episodes.
SPEAKER_02You mean when the plot line decides to go off the rails? Yes. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I'm gonna try and condense this down as best as I can, but no promises, and I apologize in advance if you cannot keep up with everything that's going on. So, in one of Gavin's attempts to get even Josh back, he and a government official called Rebecca Aldridge try to fly a military aircraft down into the La Brea sinkhole. They're forced to abort the mission, which is when Rebecca cryptically tells Gavin to Go back to the beginning, Gavin.
SPEAKER_05November 16th, 1988.
SPEAKER_06Which is the day that Gavin was found as a child, and then she parachutes out of the plane into the sinkhole. Later, Rebecca turns up at the village and attempts to kidnap Isaiah, but is stopped by Silas, who then takes Isaiah off himself. Eve, Levi, Sam and company find Rebecca and get her back to the fort to treat her wounds, which is where Rebecca then decides to tell Eve that Isaiah is actually Gavin as a child, and that they need to get him through another portal that leads to Tapanga in 1988, and if they fail to do that, then Josh and Izzy will never be born. In a nutshell. Meanwhile, in the present day, Gavin comes to the same conclusion when he has a vision of his younger self at a formerly active sinkhole in Topanga, near where he was found. At which point he realizes his visions aren't visions, they're memories. Which literally sounds like a line from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and doesn't help LeBray's problem of dipping its toes into the fantasy pool where it doesn't belong.
SPEAKER_04So, first of all, they needed to fire their casting director because the child actor for Isaiah looked nothing like Owen Mackin. I even said in my notes, blonde blue-eyed Isaiah somehow grows into brunette brown-eyed Gaffin.
SPEAKER_06I would say at least they didn't try and contrive some fantasy explanation as to why Isaiah is important, like he's part of some mystical Native American prophecy or something.
SPEAKER_04They kind of do though, because Rebecca has that whole scene on her sick bed where she's talking to Eve about this, like there's some fantasy prophecy Isaiah is meant to be part of, complete with the same vague, non-committal language. Like the boy is special, there's something he has to do, which I really have to applaud Natalie Zair for being able to keep a straight face listening to this awful cheesy dialogue. Maybe she got all her laughs out during the table raid.
SPEAKER_02I mean, for me, I don't know, it just felt like one of those things that writers added in because they maybe were worried that there wasn't enough drama or twists for people to want a second season. I'm not really sure.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, although to their credit though, Natalie Zaya and Jack Martin do really sell what a massive mind fuck it is for even Josh to realize they've been talking to their husbandstroke dad as a child in their acting.
SPEAKER_06I'm still not sure where Rebecca got half of her information from in order for these events to tie together in a circular fashion. It all just felt overly contrived, like it was bending over backwards for the sake of it.
SPEAKER_04Also, Rebecca reveals that the more the Tapanga portal closes without Isaiah going through it, the more Josh and Izzy will start getting sick as their chances of being born diminish because once one more stretched into outright fantasy.
SPEAKER_06The whole visions being memories revelation doesn't really add up with what you see in the show, because he was having visions of things that his childhood self wasn't necessarily there to witness, and all the ones they were trying to convince us he did witness just did not work in practice. For example, there's one scene where a character gets injured out by Levi's plane that Gavin has a vision/slash memory of. They load them into a working car, drive them back to the camp, and somehow Gavin also has a vision of what goes on afterwards at the camp. So are they insinuating that 10-year-old Isaiah slash Gavin can outrun a car or keep up with a car to get back to camp with everyone else?
SPEAKER_02I think that's sort of what happens when the writers realize they've made the plot line way too convoluted for how much time they've got left. So now they've got to just show you more things via his memories, quote unquote.
SPEAKER_04So Eve, Josh, and Co. take off after Silas to find Isaiah along with Mary, Beth, Lucas, Riley, etc. Meanwhile, Rebecca approaches Lily, telling her to go to the Tapanga portal to take a map to Isaiah, which has the location of several portals along the west coast of America and their opening dates, promising to get her back to her real family in exchange. Which I have to ask, has she considered the safety risks of sending a child off on a mission by herself through a wilderness full of dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and short-faced bears?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, all the mindfuckery just goes to eleven by this point. Where did she even get the map from? Why didn't she mention it before she went down? Couldn't she have just given it to Gavin before she jumped? It would have still then made it down there, because he was gonna go down anyway. I don't know, it was uh frustrating.
SPEAKER_02Do either of you recall why Lily was the one chosen? It just seemed so random to me. Like, could she not have chosen a character more directly related to this whole Isaiah Gavin situation?
SPEAKER_06I think the only reason that Lily was chosen was because they'd already established that Gavin was found with someone else in Tapanga, and they revealed then that that person was Lily as an adult.
SPEAKER_02Of course, they did do that.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. An adult called Ella because she changed her name.
SPEAKER_04Who is also revealed to have magic vision memories of the Ice Age, which is how we find out she's the grown-up Lily.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so that that is solely just to close that loop, pretty much, is why Lily's got to get to 1988. As if that wasn't enough going on. During a tussle, Mary Beth gets stabbed while defending Isaiah and ends up dying in Lucas' arms.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I was genuinely upset by that. And like, I'd had this ruined for me by internet spoilers, man's most accursed invention, but I didn't learn enough to know it was going to happen this early, so I kept hoping they'd hold it off until season two. And then when it happened to him, I was like, oh no.
SPEAKER_02They wrote off one of their better written characters. Maribet's death, I think, at least personally, in large contrast to, for example, what was happening in Terra Nova, I feel like there was a much more emotional upheaval when she died because her relationship with Lucas was getting really, really close, and it was really touching to see how that relationship developed. I thought it was a very refreshing change from the whole Commander Taylor and Lucas situation in Terra Nova, and I felt like they really could have given the audience a lot more of that instead of writing her off.
SPEAKER_06I think to me it did make some creative sense just from Lucas' point of view, because it did leave him at an interesting crossroads of whether to choose the self-improvement that he'd started or let the tragedy pull him towards self-destruction instead. And that was what really hooked me on for series two in terms of what Lucas was going to do next.
SPEAKER_04So Eve does eventually get Isaiah through the portal in time to save Josh and Izzy, but Lily shows up too late to give him the map, and by this time the portal is seemingly too small for her to pass through because they shrink as they close. But then when she touches it, it suddenly expands again and zaps her, Josh, and Riley into 1988 before disappearing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, of course. That's how it was always gonna be, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I I haven't I had no idea even at the time how to articulate how I felt about that.
SPEAKER_06It just seemed so cliche.
SPEAKER_04That's all I felt for it. Meanwhile, Gavin and Izzy work out from Ella, who still has the map on her over 30 years later, that there's gonna be another sinkhole opening in Seattle, which boyfrazier and Nas gonna need their coffee at Navosa when they hit about that. When they get there, Ella has a vision which shows her having to leave Veronica behind in the Ice Age, and she decides to jump down into the portal along with Gavin and Izzy to reunite with her, and then on the other side they wash upon a beach and come across the mammoth.
SPEAKER_02I think we made it. Oh, but we're still not done yet, are we?
SPEAKER_04No, because back in Ice Age, California, Rebecca reveals that she belongs to a group of scientists who created the portals and takes Scott to a fake CGI skyscraper that she claimed as her base, telling him, quote, there's more you need to see, because I guess he's important now too.
SPEAKER_06I'd forgotten we'd not talked about Scott for a good while, thanks for the reminder. There's so many characters.
SPEAKER_02For me, it was very reminiscent. The ending was very reminiscent of the American-style ad of Are You Ready for the Sale of the Season? That very in your face type thing, because they gave us the batshit insane plot line at the very end, the mammoth, which happened to be done fairly well, right at the very end. And it's all sort of asking the viewers, hey, you you know, or telling us rather, you better be ready for this next season. How bother them to think people are gonna watch a second season after this? People did, evidently.
SPEAKER_06I got a very similar impression. It didn't feel much like an ending to a series, but just as a passing of the baton for the next portion of the story. It's the best way I can put it as well.
SPEAKER_02My question for you two, given that you guys have seen way more paleo fiction than I have, is stories like this, right? A lot like Terra Nova, I don't understand why they need to be a paleo fiction. I mean, could this portal crap with going back in time and needing Isaiah to be returned to a certain date? Because that'd not have happened in any other time period.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there's a good point. It's kind of like what we said in the Terra Nova episode, how that show was basically a crime drama that just happened to be set in the Cretaceous. Its storyline essentially had no connection to its environment.
SPEAKER_06Can I just say that for a show named La Brea, the actual relevance of the La Brea Tar pits was shockingly minimal. Surely you would fold the tar pits into the plot somehow.
SPEAKER_04I was actually thinking about this. There's a scene in the final episode where Eve and Company are in a cave trying to climb up this rope ladder over a tar pit to get Isaiah to the cotton. And I had two thoughts on that. One was this is the second time in this whole show they've actually shown the tar pits and had them have any relevance to the story. And the second one is how do you make black bubble and goo look bad in CGI?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, the finale had some questionable effects, let's say. When they were up on the Tapanga Hill, you could really tell it was a green screen and they weren't outside. Everything went into that final mammoth shot at the end. So, final thoughts on LeBrere season one, guys. It's definitely not the worst TV show I've ever watched.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_06But it's not up there among my favourites, that's for sure. It's one of those shows where if something weird happens, it makes you go, really? But not to the point of getting frustrated and going, what the fuck was that? Every time an episode ends. Better or worse show than Terranova, Woody. Ooh.
SPEAKER_02I suppose, according to public opinion, it was a better show considering it got more seasons. Um I thought up until the plot line went apeshit, it was mildly better. Mostly Well, I don't know. I think my my perspective is is skewed because Terra Nova was disappointing. I'm not actually sure if I like this better or not. I just think my expectations going into it were much lower this time. So I think the way my emotions swayed, there was a lot less fluctuation in terms of my opinion of the show.
SPEAKER_04I'd say my final thoughts are, yeah, I had a very similar sort of reaction to you, Woody. I went into it with pretty rock bottom expectations, and the fact it was able to at least clear that lowest of bars did stand in pretty good favour for me. I found it more enjoyable than Terra Nova. I found Terra Nova frustrating. I found LaBray a more dumb fun. As I said earlier, I'm definitely not going to ever objectively call it a good show, but I would highly recommend it for your bad TV nights, or if you're recording a podcast like this.
SPEAKER_02You guys might be able to give me a recommendation, but I'm still waiting to watch a paleo series where it feels like it's supposed to be a paleo fiction.
SPEAKER_04Oh well, primeval for one. Okay. Primal for another.
SPEAKER_02Fair enough.
SPEAKER_04Well, anyway, thanks for being on this again, Woody. I'm glad this was easier to suffer through than Terra Nova.
SPEAKER_02Oh, thanks for having me on again. Uh I wouldn't say I suffered through Terra Nova. It was just more of a disappointing drop from the first episode. Um But I it's always fun to sort of critique and have a bit of an analyze of these TV shows and see what sort of shenanigans they end up getting into.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, like I say, Pinky promise I will get you back on for a good show one of these episodes.
SPEAKER_02Ah, no worries. I mean, it's always fun to talk about them. I think it's really getting through the season that's the hardest part. Yeah, no, totally.
SPEAKER_04Anyway, thanks for listening to this. Hope you've enjoyed yourself, and we will see you on our next dig. Take care.
SPEAKER_01Goodbye. Bye everyone.