At this point, the plotlines in The Event rarely rise about "let's riffle through boxes to find some answers!" so we have to make up our own fun. This week, we consider the alien question - and drool over Lee.
Oh, so you want some SPOILERS, too? You want to know what happened? Here it is, in a nutshell. Sophia has been freed, but Sterling and the spooks are tracing her progress through the city with an improbable piece of technology that tracks isotopes they dumped into her food. But double agent Lee covers her tracks by dumping some isotopes into the milk at a Starbucks where Sophia stops for coffee (because hey, if you were from another world, had been in jail for 66 years, and were finally free, wouldn't YOU want a frickin turbo pumpkin mocha latte?). So now she and everybody else who snarfs those lattes is registering as big red isotope dots on the isotope detectors that are apparently installed in every part of the city.
Sophia meets up with Thomas in a giant building, but unfortunately she's still been spotted on traffic cameras or something so the agents are on their way. And Lee's little trick with the isotopes got him found out, so he's on the lam too. They all meet up at the warehouse, where it turns out that Thomas' "plan B" is to escape the building via an underground tunnel, then suck the rest of it into a glowing blue light AKA alien technology. This kills a bunch of agents and sends a message, presumably. But we don't really know anything except that Lee refuses to go with Thomas and rescues some of his men before the blue light suckage.
It also left me wondering what the hell his Plan A was. Make out with Sophia? I got a distinctly intimate vibe between them, which could have been lovertastic or maybe mother-son.
Meanwhile, Sean and Layla are going through boxes and hanging out with Amanda from Caprica. Sean finally spills it to Layla that her mom is dead - "THEY killed her" - and her little sister is missing. After she randomly tortures the kidnapper they kidnapped last episode, he reveals that her dad, the pilot on Air Teleport, "brought it on himself." So now for some reason Layla believes that her dad might be a bad guy. Because kidnapped kidnappers are known to be extra reliable.
Then, after a predictable fight where Layla says "I'm going with you" and Sean says "but you need to be protected," they both zoom off to find her sister - leaving the Fed behind with Kidnappy Kidnapperson. Sad to lose the Fed because she was one of my favorite characters.
They go to Layla's parents' house and do the old routine where you throw a few boxes around and immediately find SECRET STUFF. Of course not before we have an intensely long scene of Layla finding a box of her sister's baby clothes and going all irritating and whiny. Anyway the secret stuff is a bunch of Google maps that somebody printed out with circles and lines on them and we're about to learn more when . . . Amanda from Caprica walks in with a gun and starts screaming about how she knows Layla's dad and she's trying to tell the TRUTH about how there are ALIEN BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS among us! Apparently she's some kind of blogger but she lost her job? Hard to know why.
Also, the episode ends with a creepy look at where Layla's sister might be - in a scary schoolroom!
So, people, is it aliens or what? This brings me to the crucial question that people keep bringing up in comments so I might as well just address it head-on. Are Sophia and her people aliens or are they humans from the future or another dimension? Yes, they share DNA with us, but no more than chimps share with us, and we know they are a pretty different though humanoid species. We know they arrived in a ship, from a place where nobody uses vacuum tubes anymore. We know they knew enough about Earth to learn English and wear Earth clothing. And in this episode, in a flashback with Lee that I'll talk about in a minute, we find out that there is "no water" where they come from.
So: they could easily be aliens, who share human DNA due to the usual panspermia or "seeding" arguments we get in Star Trek and exobiology blogs. But everybody keeps CALLING them aliens, including crazypants Amanda, which makes me think they probably aren't. Because this show's level of cleverness is pretty much situated right at that spot where somebody thinks it's ultra-sneaky to make us thing that there are aliens before a BIG REVEAL where we discover that they are actually all out-of-work doctors from other TV shows.
Or maybe they are from a future Earth where there's been so much industrialization and pollution that DUM DUM DUM there is no more water! Ya think? I dunno - the hints about this are SO SUBTLE.
Anyway I'm just going to tell you right now that I really don't care whether they're people from the future because I want them to be aliens. So I'm going to call them aliens, no matter what. Even if they are magical squilla who fight giant squid in an alternate universe of human-sized monster wrestlers.
Which brings me to Lee, who is pretty much the only character I care about at all. Oh Lee, you are so handsome and romantic and Thomas has been so mean to you. First you fell in love with that white girl whose main personality trait was red lipstick, and then Thomas showed up and made you leave her! I'm pretty sure he used death threats. Because she would figure out that you weren't growing old. And then you became a federal agent, to please Thomas, and you ran into your lost love on the street - she'd grown old and Alzheimery but she remembered you and it was SO ROMANTIC that I totally non-ironically got a lump in my throat. That is really true. I am a sap.
Also, Lee is the only alien who has successfully lived among humans and sympathizes with them so he's a perfect double-agent (except for the whole stealing isotopes thing) and that also makes him awesome. What else can I say about Lee? His tragic past sets him apart from human and alien alike, making him the perfect butch emo hero. Can we just have the Lee show, please? What did he do in the 1960s, for example? I want to see him in hippie clothes, or maybe working with the Mad Men guys. Why not? He could go from romantic beach bum in the 50s, to ad exec in the 60s, to sensitive new age guy in the 70s, to Wall St. guy in the 80s, and federal agent in the 90s. I want to see ALL OF IT - every last bit of Lee.
And so, in summary, GIVE ME LEE FANFIC NOW INTERWEB OR I WILL HAVE TO USE MY GLOWING BLUE LIGHT ON YOU AND MAKE CLUMSY REFERENCES TO TERRORISM.