Say what you have to about Lost's six-year campaign to leave people disappointed and embittered, but least by the end of the pilot we knew it was about a plane crash...on an island...with monsters. The Event, on the other hand, is perhaps (definitely) prematurely baffling and nebulous: After last night's "To Keep Us Safe," you're looking at imprisoned "non-terrestrial" races, sleeper agents, worm holes, kidnappings, layers and layers of conspiracy, mass graves -- not to mention all those arbitrary leaps in time. It's enough to get a diligent TV watcher's dander up.
And, so, as a cathartic exercise -- for me and for you -- let's rank The Event's, er, events in order of convolution.
1. Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) has been framed! This week finds him in an Arizona hospital, where he woke up after passing out in the desert, where the plane driven by his abducted girlfriend's father crashed -- after going through some sort of electromagnetically charged...hole. After a real bitch of a nurse gives him up, he is arrested for the murder of (bear with me a second) a fellow cruise ship patron who, as we learned in a splendid retcon, was actually killed by the people who abducted his girlfriend, Leila.
Convolution Alert Level: HIGH. Lingering concern: How did Jason Ritter get on that plane, anyway? And how did he learn about Leila's dad's involvement? Because from the way he was talking after the plane crash, he seemed to not know too much about who had taken Leila, which if you ask me is a bit incongruous with last week's dash to save the president.
2. Vicky, the cruise ship patron who Sean rescued/went snorkeling with last week, somehow orchestrated Leila's kidnapping and threatened Michael Buchanan until he tried to drive that plane into the president. Not a partner in this was Vicky's boyfriend, who is now dead (see above).
Convolution Alert Level: SEVERE. Oh, the couple couldn't have been working together -- that would have made sense. The decoy boyfriend was crucial.
3. Sophie (Laura Innes) is an alien who, along with 100 or so others, crash landed in Alaska in 1944. They've all been holed up in a prison -- though somehow some have escaped -- since then. If it looked last week like she was perhaps the president's alien czar, it's because she was, until the plane that was aimed at him disappeared in an electromagnetic worm hole.
Convolution Alert Level: ELEVATED. The arbitrary time leaps really mucked this up this week. It was 14 months ago that the president learned about the aliens. I assume that around that time, Sophie became the alien ambassador in the U.S.
4. The plane was "taken" by the aliens, who had to either let the military destroy it or have the plane land safely elsewhere, we learn as Lee, an alien sleeper who's ironically been tasked with tracking down infiltrators, chats with Thomas, another of the non-terrestrials.
Convolution Alert Level: GUARDED. It's too ambiguous to raise flags. Yet.
Got any more concerns or retcons or trifles to add to our burgeoning list?