‘La Brea’ Answers a Major Question About the Sinkhole in Episode 2 (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for La Brea Episode 2 “Day Two.”]
La Brea‘s showrunners promised we’d get answers early, and they deliver in the second episode of the new NBC drama.
Both those who fell through the sinkhole and those left up top now know when that green light leads to: approximately 10,000 BC. Down in the sinkhole, it’s Scott (Rohan Mirchandaney) who figures it out. While out with Veronica (Lily Santiago) looking for her father’s body — he was killed in the creature attack in the premiere — Scott stops eight camels from walking into a tar pit. It would’ve been impossible to get out, he explains, noting it used to happen all the time at the La Brea tar pits.
As he tells Riley (Veronica St. Clair) after returning to where the survivors are camped, eight camels’ bones were excavated last year from the tar pits. Did Scott change the course of history? Maybe, maybe not, but he’s more focused on the fact that those bones were carbon-dated to around 10,000 BC. They’re still in LA, he says, sometime during the last Ice Age.
Up top, they also use carbon-dating — of Eve’s (Natalie Zea) wedding ring Gavin (Eoin Macken) dug up after his visions led him to the place — to date the sinkhole to approximately 10,000 BC. Now Dr. Nathan (Virginie Laverdure) has proof of where the green light leads so she can get an exploratory mission authorized and Gavin has people who believe him about those flashes he’s been having since before he crashed three years ago.
Yes, he is seeing where the survivors of the sinkhole are, and Dr. Nathan has a theory: he crashed on October 26, 2018, and 20 miles from that site, the sinkhole in the Mojave Desert opened, with the same green light at the bottom. Somehow the event in the Mojave has connected him to the world beyond that light.
Sarah Enticknap/NBC
Furthermore, they’ve been designing an aircraft to fly down into the sinkhole for years, and since they now know where it leads and people are alive, they’re going down there — and Gavin’s going to help them do it.
Elsewhere in the episode, Eve, Sam (Jon Seda), and Ty’s (Chiké Okonkwo) trip to the ambulance and back for medical supplies to help Josh (Jack Martin) hits a snag in the form of an animal attack that leaves the doctor unable to walk back. Sam insists Eve go on ahead to help her son, then a stranger shows up to help. It’s when he, Sam, and Ty return to the others that we find out this mystery man is Lucas (Josh McKenzie), the man cop Marybeth (Karina Logue) has been looking for — and her son. (The drugs in the car are his.)
Plus, something’s not quite right between Veronica and Lilly (Chloe De Los Santos). Though Veronica claims her younger sister doesn’t speak, we learn that’s not the case. “You know we can’t trust these people. We don’t know them, they won’t understand us,” she says. “I know. You’re right. I didn’t tell them anything,” Lilly replies.
Then there’s the matter of who placed Veronica’s father’s body in the middle of rocks shaped in what looks sort of like a hand. Is it the same person seen in the woods in the premiere or is there someone else out there?
La Brea, Tuesdays, 9/8c, NBC
