La Brea Final Season Opens With Awkward Eve Stand-In, Other Cast Changes — ‘You Roll With the Punches,’ Says EP
The following contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of NBC’s La Brea.
NBC’s La Brea opened its third and final season with a flashback to simpler times, as the Harris family gathered for a breakfast cooked by mom.
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Or… at least smiley-face pancakes poured and plated by someone who looked like Eve, seeing as the family matriarch was only viewed from behind, below the neck, or as a mane of blonde hair brushing up against husband Gavin’s face.
Oh, and she never said a word.
In addition to serving up that conspicuous stand-in for series vet Natalie Zea (who as TVLine reported will have a very limited presence this six-episode season), La Brea‘s return established that Ty’s bride Paara is all of a sudden away on a mission to shore up alliances with a neighboring village. And in the episode’s closing moments, Josh impulsively carried Riley (who had been wounded by a raptor) into a new portal to a place/time unknown, with the lovebirds’ return timetable very much TBD.
That’s all because Jack Martin (who plays Josh), Veronica St. Clair (Riley) and Tonantzin Carmelo (Paara) are no longer series regulars for this, the sci-fi drama’s swan song.
TVLine spoke with La Brea showrunner David Appelbaum about navigating these assorted “actor availability issues,” and in some instances — for example, Paara’s role as the village leader is about to be filled by someone more wary of “sky people” — finding opportunities to create fresh drama.
“There are so many situations and opportunities that come out through production that you write towards and you embrace,” Appelbaum told TVLine. Just filming in Australia, “in a pandemic and across a 17-hour time gap, can present problems, but that’s the job,” he added. “You figure it out, and it is what it is.”
So despite having to keep a disappeared Eve off-screen for much of the farewell season or abruptly exiting Josh/Riley exit stage left, “I think we’ve been able to hold onto what the heart of the show has always been, which is about this family trying to get back to each other,” Appelbaum avowed. “This is an action-adventure story about scale and scope and entertainment, and making it really emotional and making it exciting are the things that we’ve always held true to.”
Elsewhere in the first of La Brea‘s final six episodes:
*Using potatoes to power up the laptop that had been attached to Dr. Moore’s portal, Gavin found himself messaging with someone who claimed to have eyes on Eve. Gavin was advised by this unseen messenger to “FIND SIERRA,” which nudged him to recall a fuzzy memory from his past, of covertly meeting with some sort of operative code-named “Sierra” (aka Maya Schmidt).
*Baby daddy Lucas found himself being very protective of Veronica, while also being seen as more of a leader of the survivors, who just lost their camp in the Clearing to a dino-brawl.
*Levi and Petra got tranq-darted by someone, then spirited away in a helicopter.
*The same double-aurora that Josh leaped into with Riley wound up sucking in an unwitting Ty shortly thereafter. Ty found himself in the middle of a road in Los Angeles on Sept. 12, 2021 — two weeks before the sinkhole/series premiere happened. What will Ty do with this potential opportunity to affect future events?
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