Plot Summary of the First Five Episodes of "The Event"

SPOILER ALERT - This tells everything (or at least everything that I could understand and remember) that happened during the first five episodes of "The Event." If you haven't watched the first five episodes yet, don't read this. You have been warned.

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I'm writing this a few days after the fifth episode of "The Event" aired, so the show is not too far along yet. I must say that it is already a hot mess. If you are confused about the plot, you probably have good company among the show's writers. There are plot holes big enough to -- well, to fly a jet through.

Nevertheless, I will take a stab at untangling the story lines, such as they are.

* The lovers *

Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) and Leila Buchanan (Sarah Roemer) are young lovers. They go on a romantic cruise on a luxury liner. On a shore excursion, just as Sean is about to propose to Leila, a frantic man interrupts the happy couple. The man says his girlfriend is drowning. Sean heroically jumps into the ocean and rescues the drowning woman (except, we find out later, she wasn't really drowning - it was all an act), and the frantic guy and his girlfriend glom onto Leila and Sean and basically follow them around everywhere.

One day, Sean goes to the front desk (or whatever they call it on a ship), wanting to get his key to his room, but no one knows who he is - - there's no record of his ever having been on the ship at all. He runs up to the room, but Leila is gone. It's a kind of Twilight Zone moment where no one will admit that Leila ever existed. This was the most intriguing moment of the show, and it's all been downhill since then.

All this was told in flashback, and the next thing we know about Sean's whereabouts is that he's on an airplane -- the show hasn't told us yet what happened in between the ship and the plane. Anyway, on the plane, he at first appears to be a hijacker, but he is actually trying to stop the pilot -- who turns out to be Leila's father -- from crashing the plane, 9/11 style, into the presidential retreat near Miami, Florida.

The plane is heading right towards the President when all of a sudden it disappears -- "Lost"-island style -- in a flash of light.

The plane lands in the Arizona desert. Don't ask.

Leila's dad tells Sean to get away, and he does.

Meanwhile, Leila is kidnapped by the woman who had posed as the drowning girl during the cruise -- Vicky Roberts (Taylor Cole). The plot takes some ridiculous turns here. Apparently, one of the reasons Vicky kidnapped Leila was in order to get Sean, but why didn't Vicky and her co-evil-conspirators just grab him on the boat?

Vicky stages an unbelievable long con, locking Leila in a basement and faking a whole bunch of complicated events to make Leila believe she had escaped -- none of this makes any sense. Then Sean, along with an FBI agent that he's hanging out with, rescue Leila. A lot of people get shot.

* Meanwhile, back at the plane

After Sean left the scene of the plane crash, everyone else who was on the plane died. Really. Then the authorities took the bodies somewhere. Then the bodies came back to life. Really. Then they were taken into quarantine. Then their noses start bleeding and they all start dying again. Would I make this up?

* Sophia's people

Sophia Maguire (Laura Innes) is the leader of a group of people (if they are, in fact, people) who, it turns out, share only 99 percent of their DNA with us. I think the show wants us to think they are aliens, but some fans believe that Sophia's people are really humans from the future, which is an intriguing theory which very well may be correct.

One of the ways Sophia's people are different from us is that they live a longer time and don't age as quickly. Lucky for them, because they've been here a while. They came when their plane crashed in Alaska in the 1940s. Some of them, led by Thomas (Clifton Collins, Jr .) got away, but many of the group were too badly injured to be able to escape, and Sophia stayed behind to take care of the group at the plane.

The government captured Sophia's group and put them in some kind of secret prison deep underground or inside a mountain or something like that. They are still there to this day - or at least until the middle of Episode 5.

Thomas turns out to be an angry (still) young-ish man, and he's apparently the one who has been messing around with the passengers on Sean's plane, who last we saw were bleeding from their noses and dying all over again. He says he has an antidote, and tells President Elias Martinez (Blair Underwood) he will save them if the President releases Sophia and all her people. The President bargains and bluffs, with the end result that they agree he will release only Sophia. Last we saw of her (at the end of Episode 5) she was on a subway train, on her way to freedom - or to more trouble with Thomas.

* The President

He's a nice guy, surrounded -- "24"-style -- by possibly treacherous underlings. Vice President Raymond Jarvis (Bill Smitrovich) and the CIA Director Blake Sterling (Zeljko Ivanek) hate each other. One of them is a bad guy. It looks like it's the Sterling, which means the show is probably trying to fake us out, and it's probably really Jarvis. A CIA operative, Simon Lee (Ian Anthony Dale) is, unbeknownst to the President, really one of the aliens (or future folk), working undercover.

The First Lady, Christina Martinez (Lisa Vidal), was acting oddly in the fifth episode, getting very upset when the President was (apparently) bluffing about killing all the aliens. It's hard to tell whether we were meant to sympathize with her in these scenes (but bad writing got in the way), or if she really was meant to be seen as acting strangely. Some fans speculate that she herself might be an alien.

So there you have it. The show basically jumped the shark in episode 4, when Vicky set up an elaborate long con for no apparent reason. Yet, it trudges on. In mid-October, NBC announced it was picking up the show for at least a full season -- a decision which, unless the show takes a sharp turn for the better, the network may soon come to regret.