Writing about new television shows can be a little tough; you’re expected to know what a show is and what it’s trying to be based on very little information. A successful show will go on to run for hundreds of episodes and will usually take some time before settling into what it wants to be, and getting a clear view of that endpoint is made even tougher by the fact that some of the early episodes of a series will try radically different things. Pan Am’s most certainly in that stage of its life, moving from the breezy pilot to its more dramatic and serious third episode and now back to a lighter tone here in its fourth outing. It’s not just that the show is trying out new things though since “Eastern Exposure” was originally intended as the series’ second episode, and ABC likely decided to show it later since it’s not quite as strong as some of the other episodes we’ve seen so far. While that makes sense from a ratings standpoint, why not try and put your best episodes up front, it makes for a viewing experience that’s less than entirely smooth.
What makes the experience so strange is that the episode bounces back in regards to some of the character relationships. The main conflicts that emerge are between Kate and Laura as well as Ted and Dean, conflicts that the pilot episode played with but subsequent episodes mostly moved past. The fact that they emerge so strongly and abruptly makes it all the more apparent that some sort of shifting has been done and it undercuts the drama as well. It just feels weird to have Ted and Dean at each other’s throats about the fact that Dean made Captain over Ted when they’ve failed to mention it since the pilot. The same goes for Kate and Laura’s fight over the ways that Laura is still acting childish, it simply feels outdated since other episodes have already dealt with the ways that Kate and Laura have chaffed in their newfound relationship.
The entirety of the plot isn’t wrapped up in these conflicts, indeed it begins by returning to the first episode’s focus on globetrotting as the crew suddenly has their flight diverted from Reykjavik to Rangoon and a few other Asian destinations. We get a scene of poolside lounging as Ted swaps some not quite friendly banter with some members of the American Navy who get a little flirty with the stewardesses. From there we leap off into a few flashbacks that note just how Ted became a Pan Am First Officer. Apparently he was a test pilot for the Navy with his eye on becoming an astronaut, but when one of the planes he was testing failed and he was unrightfully blamed for it he was forced out of the Navy. This leads to the best scene of the episode as Ted and Laura monkey with a set of rabbit ears as Ted tries to glimpse the first space launch that will send a man off the Earth for more than a day.
It’s a sweet scene that nicely answers a few questions, like why Ted decided to spend his entire day in a foreign country trying to watch TV rather than exploring, and there are more than a few striking images. It’s sad then that the underlying revelations that come from that scene are spelled out a little more explicitly when another flashback reveals that Ted’s father, an airplane manufacturer, forced Ted to leave behind his hopes of spaceflight. Ted’s father could have saved his career but it would have meant owning up to the mechanical failure of the plane Ted crashed since it was a plane Ted’s father’s company made. The first scene got most of that across already, save for the fact that Ted had a pretty selfish father, and I much preferred the subtle longing that Michael Mosley displayed as he watched the rocket lift while Laura looked on to the more overt sadness that his scene with the father showcased.
In general I find moments where Pan Am highlights the more subtle aspects of the happiness and sadness that are part of growing up to be more compelling. Kate and Laura’s big fight didn’t quite work for me simply because it’s not a particularly new fight. Two sisters arguing about the ways they both envy and resent the other isn’t the freshest idea and this episode doesn’t make a strong case for it either since it plays the big, obvious version of the fight. Despite that the plotline has a few rather beautiful moments mixed in among plots that are a bit too large. Most of Laura’s plot involves Maggie showing her around Jakarta after the pair freak out about a snake in Laura’s hotel room, a detail I most certainly could have done without. There are a few scenes that are just a little too silly, Maggie sitting down to take some money from locals in a variation on dominoes or the pair checking out a cockfight are two fairly overt examples. When the director, Thomas Schlamme who handled the pilot as well, deploys a graceful shot though, like a slow motion view of Laura’s happy face as she does the twist, it beautifully depicts just how happy and exciting a moment like this can be without relying on overly obvious ways of depicting the allure of a foreign land. Laura’s drinking in her new surroundings and wants the experience to last as long as possible and it’s an intoxicating feeling that’s beautifully mirrored in the way the shot plays out.
By the end of the episode though Laura’s moved out of Kate’s apartment, hurt by Kate’s insistence that she’s not really a grown up and is leaning too heavily on her sister. Kate doesn’t feel that way, even if the episode doesn’t quite make a coherent case for why she reverses her feelings on the matter, but her peace offering of a new camera is too late and the image of a regretful Kate alone in her apartment contrasted with Laura moving into Maggie’s seemingly overfull home nicely draws out the loneliness that Kate feels in her new life as a spy. The spy plot itself was enjoyable tonight as well; it’s not an overly dramatic affair as Kate simply has to deliver a camera from one Rangoon to Jakarta and while her instructions take a while to get to her thanks to a less than helpful cablegram office she gets the job done and the plot moves on.
The strangest thing about this episode though is that it simply felt scattershot. Some of this was clearly due to problems that were the result of placing this episode later than it was originally intended, the scene where Laura and Ted watch the space launch would have helped make the scene where Ted attempted to kiss Laura play much more smoothly last week for instance, but the fact that there were so many locations also lent to the feeling. The episode features the crew flying into multiple different airports, and one of them features a particularly difficult approach with a heavy crosswind and while they do so there’s brief talk about just how difficult the landing is. It’s a scene that feels like it comes out of nowhere, especially since the dialogue implies that it’s something of a legendarily difficult approach to make, so much so that it sounds like it should have been mentioned earlier on. The show doesn’t do a good job of getting this information out early, so while it has been building the conflict between Ted and Dean that erupts due to the fact that Dean pulls rank on Ted during the descent, the subject mater of the scene doesn’t fit nicely into the rest of the story and makes the conflict that emerges from it feel less organic than it might have otherwise.
By reshuffling the order the episodes aired in large parts of “Eastern Exposure” share that feeling of simply not quite fitting. Conflicts that seemed settled reemerge, characters revert to their earlier selves, and the tone itself bounces back to a version of the show that seemed to have been left behind. It’s an interesting thing to see, and it’s not particularly uncommon, but it can make things tough for a viewer in the early going. Pan Am’s finding its voice, and while that doesn’t mean it has to be the same exact show every week, so far it hasn’t found the core parts of itself that make sure that we don’t get whiplash when it changes course.
Other Thoughts:
- Very little from Karine Vanasse this week, which is sad since she proved to be one of the best parts of the first three episodes.
- The landing in Hong Kong was a very showy piece of Special Effects, another thing that makes sense when you remember that this was originally slated as a second episode.