The sci-fi disaster series returns for an abbreviated farewell season
Science fiction stories help us escape the reality in which we live to fantastical worlds that are sometimes literally turning themselves inside out. The final season of La Brea, the sci-fi drama that explores a world full of time-bending portals and city-destroying sinkholes, premieres the first of its final six episodes on Tuesday.
Natalie Zea, Eoin Macken, Zyra Gorecki and Jack Martin all return as the Harris family, who have been searching for each other, along with some answers about the La Brea Tar Pits sinkhole that opened up and separated them, for these past two seasons.
La Brea will wrap up its story this season with a shortened but action-packed third season, tying together the threads between its timelines. The series began in present-day L.A., when a massive sinkhole opened up in the middle of the city, sending everything and everyone deep into the past. Survivors landed in what they eventually learned was the exact same place from which they fell, but all the way back in the year 10,000 B.C.
Two members of the Harris family were sent through the sinkhole time portal: mother and office manager Eve (Zea) and her teenage son, Josh (Martin). Now separated physically from her estranged husband, former Air Force pilot Gavin (Macken), and her daughter Izzy (Gorecki), Eve has struggled to understand the new world she was dropped into and find her way back to the present.
Eve and Ty emerged as leaders among the new sinkhole society early on, joined by former Marine and surgeon Sam Velez (Jon Seda), who entered 10,000 B.C. with his daughter, college student Riley (Veronica St. Clair). Rohan Mirchandaney is Australian stoner Scott Israni, whose knowledge as an anthropology major became a key commodity. Scott has grown close with Josh and Riley, but often gets himself into dangerous situations — like when he was almost killed by The Exiles before Gavin stepped in last season.
A mysterious, well-armed group of warriors, The Exiles seem to have arrived from another time. Led by Taamet (Martin Sensmeier), who happens to be Paara’s ex-husband, they use advanced steel weaponry. The Exiles are foes, not friends, to anyone new they encounter, taking Eve hostage in the second season, along with Veronica (Lily Santiago) and former Air Force pilot and longtime friend of the Harris family, Levi Delgado (Nicholas Gonzalez).
Veronica is a strong-willed, religious young woman with a shocking past. When the man who calls himself her father is killed shortly after falling through the sinkhole, the awful truth about her family comes out — he was never her father, and he had kidnapped Veronica and the girl who appeared to be her sister, Lilly (Chloe De Los Santos), calling them his daughters to cover his unthinkable lie.
As if one sinkhole and time portal wasn’t enough to try to get to the bottom of, there are multiple timelines and interconnected stories within them in La Brea.
It was revealed last season that the event that caused the sinkhole was orchestrated by a shadowy organization in the future. With natural resources completely tapped out, the “Lazarus Project” attempted to reach back in time from their place in 2076 to bring those necessary resources back with them and potentially end extinction entirely.
So what lies ahead for the upcoming season? Well, last year’s finale brought all the “Sky People” together, about to step through a repaired portal back to the world they knew, before a major malfunction began opening portals to several different periods, about to connect with various times in both the past and the future. Eve was separated from her family once again, this time completely on her own as she was pulled into the broken portal unsure of when or where she would land this time. (Reports indicate that star Natalie Zea will have a very reduced role in this final season, so expect her to be M.I.A. for much of these six episodes.) The rest of the Harris family, however, have gone seriously prehistoric. In the season-two finale, Gavin, Josh and Izzy marvelled with horror at a muddy dinosaur footprint, before looking up to see the beast that made it.
La Brea premieres Tuesday, January 9 on CTV & NBC