Twenty minutes into this episode I knew it was a total dud so this is going to be a short review. I did make it through to the end but there was only a total of about five minutes of quality and they came in the last five minutes. The episode just lacked substance and portrayed a seemingly wrong environment that lacked historical context.
While flying from NY to Caracas, Venezuela an older passenger has a heart attack. The plane needs to land in order to try and save him. They can’t land in Miami because it is being threatened by a Hurricane. The end up having to land in Port Au Prince, Haiti but not without barriers. The airport was closed, and the only people who heard the radio speak French. At least Collette was needed this episode for her language skills. Then when they try to land the runway lights are off and they almost came in too fast.
When they landed they encountered a hostile Haiti. They did it all without any context so all I saw was they they purported this image of Haiti that it’s just a bunch of non-english speaking rebels who kill each other. That just wasn’t good. Then when Collette and Ted finally find a doctor (after going through the “war torn” countryside) he won’t help because he says that one life is not more important than the other dead. I get it, but it just wasn’t done right. Collette tries to do a good thing by telling a Hatian girl that she could come back on the plane with them.
Meanwhile Dean finds out that the runway has been damaged by the hurricane and there’s 500 feet of it missing. Oh no! They can’t take off. Not enough runway and the plane it too heavy. That leads to some upset passengers and some really poorly done scenes of snotty first class passengers being upset that they have to lose their luggage and that the crew decided to take a stow away.
Unfortunately the heart attack passenger dies. In the end they have to trade his body for the body of the stow away to make sure that the plane took off, which it did. They return to Miami and Dean gets reprimanded. The final five minutes were the only good part of the episode. The women all stuck together and wouldn’t sell Collette out. Kate used her CIA contact to make the the refugee could stay. Collette and Dean finally kissed.
They certainly did not continue the momentum that they had with the past three episodes. Not a good episode at all. I guess I’ll watch next week’s. What did you think?
Watch Pan Am Sundays at 10:00PM on ABC. Catch up on ABC.com or Hulu. Next episode in three weeks.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.