La Brea Season 3 Episode 1 Sierra Review And Recap- New Threats and Possibilities Take Shape As The Final Season Begins

The Broad Strokes:

• La Brea Season 3 Epsiode 1 continues giving us what works and expanding on the mythos of this screwball reality.
• Veronica and Lucas continue their personal growth.
• Dinosaurs force everyone out of the clearing and seriously injure Riley.
• Gavin makes contact with someone who claims to know where Eve is but wants Sierra in exchange.
• Three people went through a double-sided aurora, including Ty, Riley, and Josh.

NBC’s goofy sci-fi show that shouldn’t work has somehow found its rhythm. David Applebaum knew the story he wanted to tell even if the viewers were sure we wanted to hear it. This series has found its footing and an eager audience through commitment and perseverance. La Brea Season 3 Episode 1 establishes right from the beginning that everything we love about the series will continue, and we better buckle up because it will be a wild ride.

La Brea Season 3 Episode 1 picks up shortly after the events of the Season 2 finale. Izzy is reeling from the loss of her mother again, but Gavin is hoping the laptop they took from the bunker holds the key to finding Eve. With the exception of the Harrises and Levi, everyone else is doing relatively well. After being elected the leader last season, Lucas is taking his job seriously. He and Veronica have a child on the way, and he wants to be better than his father and redeem himself for his past. Lucas is still Lucas, though, and he has trouble understanding that honesty is the best policy and he doesn’t always have to be the strong one.

Veronica is good for him. She grounds him and helps him become the best version of himself. Lily Santiago(Veronica) and Josh McKenzie(Lucas) have genuine natural chemistry. They have settled into a comfortability that is fun to watch. Their affection doesn’t feel forced. It feels earned. In one of many dinosaur attacks this week, he suffers from a head injury that he tries to hide. He collapses, and he and Veronica have an emotional breakthrough. It’s a great moment for the characters, but I worry that this head injury is more than it appears. La Brea has a habit of killing off or removing characters without warning. With a baby on the way, I hope he sticks around.

For now, he and Veronica have committed to honesty and partnership. He doesn’t have to be perfect or always the protector. He only has to be her partner and tell her the truth. Putting these two in this extreme circumstance has allowed them a future neither of them had in their time. Lucas would be a drug dealer and possibly dead, and Veronica would still be trapped by an evil man. Fate has a way, though, and the past two seasons of La Brea have shown that everything has a reason. With a shortened final season, we won’t have to wait too long for all the storylines to converge.

A glut of angry dinosaurs was one of the many fun things to fall through the auroras last season. They attack the clearing and destroy everything, forcing the group to move to the village with Ty. Unfortunately, they also break up a sweet moment between Riley and Josh. Riley is gravely injured, and by the time La Brea Season 3 Episode 1 is over, things look bleak for her. This would not be the first time we have been fooled, though. Miracles have a habit of coming when needed most in 10,000 BC.

Ever resourceful, Scott plans to power up the laptop using potatoes. Not only has he settled into his role as the Macgyver of the group, but his penchant for finding people means he’s got Petra with him. She knows more than she is saying, and her mother is pivotal to getting Eve back. Petra fears that if they use the laptop, they might be found by the military folks from whom her mother ran. She doesn’t know why her mother didn’t trust them, just that they weren’t good people. Unfortunately, her fear was warranted as Levi and Petra were traquilized and taken by a group of people that looked like they were wearing fatigues.

Someone on the other end of Gavin’s laptop claims they know where Eve is. They could describe her down to her clothing. They tell Gavin to look for Sierra, which doesn’t mean much at first, but later, he remembers that Sierra is the code name for a woman he used to work for. Sierra is Maya Schmidt, Petra’s mother. Before anyone can digest this information, though, three more group members are lost in an aurora. The aurora was where the signal was coming from and likely where the group that Petra escaped from was located.

This aurora is unique. It is a dual-sided aurora that takes things to two different places. One of them is probably where Eve is, but they cannot know which one. Josh takes Riley through the aurora, hoping to go someplace with medical help for Riley, and Ty gets pulled into the portal as well. At the end of La Brea Season 3 Episode 1, we learn that one side of the portal goes to Los Angeles on September 12, 2021. That was a few weeks before the original sinkhole formed, landing them all in 10,000 BC.

The idea of a dual aurora is intriguing. How did this form? Is the military behind it? What would the purpose of it be? Although La Brea constantly reminds us how dangerous things from our distant past could be, they also show us the future is just as dangerous. It’s an interesting throughline for the series. Regardless of timeline, nature and technology can be deadly.

We don’t know where Eve is or if Riley and Josh found help, so we must wait and hope everyone is safe. Based on what was asked of Gavin and Petra and Levi’s abduction, though, it is likely Eve is at the military base being held hostage. I think they want to leverage her for Maya. The one thing that seems constant is humans can be greedy, selfish, and exploitative. Find all our La Brea coverage here.