La Brea (The TV Show)

Natalie Zea in La Brea

Last night was the final episode of La Brea, a science fiction family affair that ran for thirty episodes. The last six of those episodes just finished up.

Spoilers ahead, if you care.

The show features the Harris family, and in the beginning centered on Eve Harris, played by Natalie Zea. She is a tough mom who drops herself into a big hole that opens up near the La Brea Tar Pits in California because it swallowed her son, Josh. She left behind her husband, Gavin, and daughter, Izzy.

It was a big hole, so Eve finds her son and she and at least 30 other people set up a camp of sorts using automobiles and parts of buildings that the hole also swallowed up. 

They have landed in 10,000 BC.

The early shows indicated some kind of weird time warp overlap, as one of the survivors found a cache of coins from the War Between the States. In later episodes, there were tribes of ancient people who looked more like modern-day Native Americans, and strange men who kidnapped people who fell from the sky to work in mines.

This was never fully explored, and frankly the show lost the entire plot of the time travel thing somewhere along the way. The audience was supposed to accept that there was weird time travel stuff going on even though in theory it shouldn't have worked that way.

The show focused mostly on relationships that grew out of the survivors. Along the way, we learned about Eve's relationship with her husband and a lover, Levi, who was also her husband's closest friend.

I watched the show because I initially liked the premise, but as it progressed, I liked it less. I didn't mind the focus on emotions and character growth - that's necessary - but the plot around the time travel switched around from unbelievable to simply outlandish and back again.

Initially the time holes were being made by Gavin's father, who was from the future where time travel was developed. He brought Gavin and his family down with him to this upside-down earth and built a dome where he could work on his time experiments. His wife, though, left to live in another time (1988 or something), taking Gavin with her, and she gave him away to a foster family so she could focus on stopping her husband.

Gavin and family eventually found their way to his mother's time, and Levi chose to stay there instead of going back to 10,000 BC to try to stop the father from making more time portals or holes. Then Levi turned back up in 10,000 BC, older now, having lost his wife and a child to something to do with the Army.

Then suddenly, in these last few episodes, we learn that Gavin has been secretly flying in time ships for over a year before the hole opened up and took his wife, and a rogue army/government/something woman was working to sell time travel to the highest bidder. This also had something to do with 1965, although that was never explained to my satisfaction.

None of the last six episodes have Eve in them, as she'd been taken to a different time at the end of Season 2 and no one knew where she'd gone. So we only saw her in the final episode when there was a family reunion in 2021 (which was the present day) as she found her way back to them. Since she was the character I was most interested in, the last "season" didn't do much for me.

Because I have read so much science fiction and have a vague and tortured understanding of time travel, the inconsistencies in the time anomalies in this show frustrated me. The whole Gavin-is-from-the-future and his-dad-invented-time-travel thing that zig-zagged into it being a secret government plot that he was involved in before the hole opened up was completely chaotic as far as plotting goes. 

While some of the effects were cool and the idea of falling into a hole to end up in another world is certainly not new, I liked the initial premise of this show. I liked the characters, mostly. I just wish it hadn't gone so far off the rails in its efforts to contort the plot to meet someone's agenda, or whatever it was.

Here's a director's response to questions about the show. He seems happy with it.