Note: This 11.22.63 review and recap was originally published in May 2016, shortly after this episode was first broadcast.
Spoilers for episode 8 of 11.22.63, The Day In Question.
We are hours away from the assassination of JFK and Jake is driving pretty recklessly trying to get as close as he can to the plaza where Oswald is ready to fire the shot. They get as close as they can which is not nearly close enough. The crowd gets thicker and thicker the closer they get to the heart of downtown.
Thanks to a hallucination, Jake almost loses Sadie. We can see whispers of the past fighting back for all its worth. A car chases them down, and they luckily manage to not get hit by it.
Still they run. No time to lose. Three shots, the first might miss. The person who testified that he saw Oswald with the gun doesn’t know if Oswald is where he’s supposed the be. The building where Oswald is was supposed to stay open but closes at lunch.
The past is changing things to keep Jake from changing them. Part of me wonders why. Isn’t the point of it fighting back to make sure nothing changes .
After the opening credits we get our first glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald.
A quick glimpse of the clock as Jake gets into the building lets us know that he has five minutes.
The motorcade turns the corner onto the street in question. I want to take a moment here to note that once again, the show does a great job and splicing footage shot in the 60s with footage that was shot last year.
We get our first glance at JFK’s car here.
Jake and Sadie are running as Oswald gets ready to fire. He lines up the gun, we can see that he is aiming at the car and the clock tells us Jake has about thirty seconds.
One shot fired, the one everyone knows missed. Jakes makes it inside and stops him. But the door slams shut trapping them in a room with Oswald who’s gun is loaded.
JFK is safe and the motorcade drives away.
Oswald wants to know why they stopped him, why they are even here in the first place. Telling Sadie to stay put, Jake goes towards Oswald. Barely missing a shot, he continues to try to advance. Oddly enough, that potential speech his mom gave him? Told him he had the potential to do something important. That and the newspaper are what gave him the idea to shoot the President of the United States.
In the scuffle, Oswald gets shot and so does Sadie. Jake tires to get help but Sadie won’t let him leave her. Sadie dies just as the cops arrive. They cuff Jake and take him off thinking he’s the one who shot JFK.
He gets processed and you can hear the reporters trying to find out what’s going on. They want to know what he was doing there. Without giving them details about time travelling and related things, Jake tells them what happened.
Agent Hosty is there and thinks Jake is a spy. After giving us a synopsis of the show, Jake calls out Hosty. After all, he’d gotten a letter from Oswald a couple days earlier and almost let JFK get assassinated on his watch.
Hosty let’s Jake know that he’s going to pen it on all three of them. That he’s going to spin it so the three are in cahoots and in the aftermath, two get shot and one stands trail.
Jake’s story is verified when Hosty’s superior comes in and tells him to burn the letter. He realizes something is up but the sherrif steps back in.
Somehow the President hears that Jake saved his life and calls to tell him thank you. You can see the surreal look on his face as he talks to one of the Kennedy’s.
Secret Service already figured out that Oswald was the shooter and that Jake saved him so he’s allowed to walk free. He heads for the bus station. With Sadie dead and the president saved, there’s nothing for Jake in 1963.
Back in Maine, we find ourselves in a spot we haven’t seen since episode one. He goes through the rabbit hole and we see him have the intention of coming back to save Sadie.
But instead of the familiar diner, we see a wasteland where the present should be. Rubble, half there buildings, an empty street. What is the future like where JFK lived?
Jake wanders around trying to figure out what on Earth is going on. People are coughing, people are fighting, Harry Dunning finds him on the street.
Harry still seems to know him, ignoring the paradox that is the fact that him and Al might not have gotten to know each other since JFK lived and Al didn’t need to send him back into time to stop it.
Turns out he recognizes him from 1960 when Jake killed his father.
Turns out there were bombings and something called Kennedy Refugee camps. Kennedy founded the camps after he was no longer president.
Harry wants to know why he saved them.
Jake knows what he has to do. He has to go and reset the past. He has to go back to 1960 and let JFK die.
Sadie is there, she’s alive and has no idea who Jake is. But she’s alive. He talks with her for a minute and sees the man who had told him before that he shouldn’t be here. The guy who is stuck in his own loops.
He doesn’t want to help Harry and he doesn’t want to save JFK. He just wants Sadie. But then he realizes that he needs to let her go too and he does. Jake smiles as she drives off with her cousins, alive and happy.
Knowing he can’t change a thing, Jake heads back to his own time. Three years he lived through, he lived, he loved, and he has nothing to show for it. Harry’s father lived and killed his family, and Oswald shot JFK.
To everyone else, no time has passed. But we see Jake in his classroom back in the presnt day and his students can tell something is up. Harry shows up and tells him he didn’t get the promotion he was putting in for back in episode one. Jake apologizes not only for that but for not helping his family.
Back home, he googles Sadie to see what happens to her. The Governor of Texas has named her woman of the year and Jake is there to see her receive that honor. It seems as if Sadie went on to touch the lives of everyone in that small town of Jodie.
She reads a poem and looks over the crowds and seems to recognize him. After her speech, the celebration turns into a dance. Jake asks Sadie to dance and their briefly talk. He asks if she was happy.
They seem to be more or less in the same spot where they danced at that dance in the first half of the show and in fact, there’s a flashback to remind us of that as the same song plays.
It seems as if Sadie remembers him in a vague way but when she asks Jake about it, he tells her that he’s just someone she knew in another life.
And here we reach the end of 11.22.63. Our time is Jake is done. JFK still dies, but Sadie lives and is happy and the world is more or less back to normal.
We don’t get an explanation as to what exactly happened to make that alternate future so bad. Vague hints about bombings and riots let us know that it wasn’t pretty.
I find that Stephen King’s take on it was interesting. I’ve always argued that the assassination of JFK is a fixed point in time and he seems to have a similar view, at least for this book.
The ending was bittersweet, a sharp contrast to the tension filled beginning of the episode. I’ll admit to anyone who hasn’t watched and reads these that the show has it’s dark moments and there is a lot of strong language throughout it.
My favorite episode was episode 7 because it is perhaps one of the best examples of a ticking clock episode I’ve ever seen. Another thing I really enjoyed about this show was how they spliced footage from the 1960s with present day footage and you could barely tell.
While the show wraps up what happened that fateful day, chances are we’ll never exactly know what happened on 11.22.63. I guess the past is allowed to have a few mysteries of it’s own and the event can leave us wondering…
What if?
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