Forget the Present

It’s Julia Roberts. There’s never a moment where you don’t know it’s Julia Roberts. I saw the commercial for this and my first thought was, “Julia Roberts did a television show, this must be good!” The commercial hinted at mystery and a military cover-up. I was intrigued.

The show began and I remember thinking in the first episode that something huge was going to go down. I didn’t think they were in Florida. I thought they were in area 51 or something weird like that. The cranes scared me and made me think that something really freaky was going on behind closed doors.

The problem I ran into — it never touched on any of these things for me. I watched the entire series and I don’t know much about what happened at the facility. Yeah, soldiers with PTSD were given meds in their food that causes them to lose their memory, but what else?

We didn’t delve too deeply into the pasts of the soldiers. Was it the PTSD that they all understandably come back with or were these patients in this program because they saw or were part of some EXTRA shit out there? Were they chosen because they were broken beyond repair, the kind of people you just want left behind bars? We never learn because the show becomes about Julia.

It’s about her memory loss. Her inability to remember what happened to her while she worked there. That was a great avenue as well. I thought for sure we were going to learn that she walked in on something that was so horrendous that she scarfed down those mashed potatoes because it was closer than a shotgun.

That didn’t happen. None of it happened. She drank the kool-aid because she fell in love with a soldier. She wanted him to go home, but he drank so much of the secret sauce that he forgot his pain and plans and decided to re-enlist. That’s what the facility did. It masked all of your hesitations about war and made you comfortable to go back.

What they were working on at that institution would have been interesting to delve into, but we didn’t get to see any of that. The concentration was on Julia. Her feelings and what led her to make the decisions she did.

I can get that. She’s Pretty Woman. She’s what you think about when you think about leading actresses. I just wish for a story like this, they would have went with a no-name because the camera wouldn’t love a no-name as much and maybe we would have gotten a little more story than such a huge concentration on Julia.

Another hurdle that I had was the ability of Julia to throw everything away because she had fallen in love with a soldier. If they were going to go that route, they should not have cast a boy, but should have cast a soldier with more to risk all for. The soldier love interest was in his early to mid-twenties. Julia is fifty. (Don’t @ me — I know anything is possible, but give me a chance to explain). I didn’t feel the twenty something soldier had enough going on that he could scramble Julia to the point of pulling what she did.

It’s not my show or what I would have made, but rather me watching someone else’s story. Let’s keep going. At the end when she just gets in her car and drives West, I can get behind that. New beginnings. Julia is great at scenes like this. When she sees him in the diner, I didn’t know what to root for. I’m glad they left it open ended because I don’t know if I want these two to make it and find each other again. So much happened that was not explained that I don’t know what I felt. I just know that I was glad they were out of that institution.

I’m glad I watched this show. I just think the show I watched and what I was looking for were two different things. That’s okay.