The twin revelations that Thomas wasn't planning an attack on the United States (at least not directly) and of the reason why Dempsey was after Leila and her little sister gave the show a nice note on which to go out. But they were more "Hmm" than "Whoa!" as these things go, and while they worked, it's hard to say whether they worked well enough to keep fans on the hook until late February.
That the show won't be back until then is not The Event's fault, of course, and if it were coming back sooner, then this would have been a fine bit of teasing to tide us over till, say, mid-January. But that's not what's happening, and NBC's decision to hold off longer could end up hurting the show.
So, about those two revelations. Midway though the episode I wrote the following in my notes: "This nuke is going to launch at the fade to black, isn't it?" That the show chose not to do that -- and that it wasn't a nuclear missile Thomas launched after all -- is a big plus to its credit. The question now is why Thomas and Isobel were being so secretive about their plans with Sophia.
Is he transmitting a homing beacon, a distress signal or a call to arms into space, and regardless of which it is (or if it's something else altogether), why is that something that needs to be hidden from Sophia? She wants to return to wherever it is they came from, but is that necessarily mutually exclusive from what Thomas is doing -- especially since they don't quite have the technology here on Earth to make it happen?
As for the other big moment, seeing that Michael Buchanan hasn't aged in 50-plus years answers a couple questions while raising others. We now know why Dempsey has been kidnapping little girls -- they're the daughters of sleepers, and he's using them somehow to supply his young-making coffee additive. It makes them age prematurely, as does whatever was in the syringe Sean injected into Dempsey's goon.
Now that we know -- or at least can very strongly assume -- that Michael is an EBE too, it does explain how he was so certain that the helicopters that came for the Avias passengers weren't friendly. What it doesn't explain is Crazy Journalist Lady's info-dump to Sean and Leila about Michael's Mt. Inostranka research. Mostly likely Michael was just lying about having seen the facility from the air a couple years back, but that's an odd red herring to throw in.
It does seem to mean, though, that unless Leila's mom is also an alien, that humans and the EBEs can procreate, and the resulting offspring are different -- at least different enough for Dempsey to want to round them up and experiment on them.
Again, if these questions were going to be answered in a couple weeks, or even a little more than a month from now, we'd be more sanguine about where "The Event" was headed. This was a pretty solid episode, one of the better ones it's done in recent weeks. But the fact that we won't find anything out until three months from now takes away from its impact some, and that's a shame.
