“Pilot” is episode one of season one of La Brea.
Eve Harris and her son, Josh, and daughter, Izzy, are in a car near La Brea Tar Pits. Eve has been late to work a few times and her children say she could stop taking them to school. Izzy also suggests moving back and giving her father another chance.
Then the tar pits bubble, the road cracks and a sinkhole opens. Eve reverses the car back, and they get out when she crashes. Buildings are collapsing and Josh stops to help a child, then gets knocked down. Before he can get back, he’s swallowed by the sinkhole. Eve also falls but Izzy catches her, Izzy can’t pull her up and Eve breaks free and falls.
Gavin Harris is in a car. He has a vision, a drink, then gets out. He’s at USAF base El Segundo, and he’s meeting with a Captain Souza. Gavin is a former pilot but has been out of the air force for two years. His plane crashed in the desert and he was seeing things, apparently the residual effects of a concussion. Gavin claims that hasn’t happened in a while. A lie. He was medically discharged but he’s not asking to fly again.
Souza says she’ll think about it and Gavin leaves the office. The sinkhole is on the news and Izzy rings. He finds her in LA just as strange birds fly out of the sinkhole.
Eve remembers falling towards a green light, then comes round with a green rift in the sky. She loses her wedding ring and sets off looking for Josh, finding a man with a gun, who apologises for pointing it at her. He wants to know if she’s real. There’s smoke in the distance and she runs towards it, finding bits of LA that fell into the sinkhole, Josh and more survivors. A girl with Josh, Riley, says no-one knows where they are. The sinkhole scattered then randomly. The man with the gun, Ty, joins them and asks if everyone fell through the light.
Riley’s father, Sam, says they need water, shelter and food and should gather supplies. Shre everything. Stay in groups. Eve realises she dropped her wedding ring and Josh heads to look for it. Then gets in a confrontation with another survivor, who is hoarding supplies.
Riley, Sam and Scott are searching mostly together. Riley and Scott find some heroin and decide not to mention this or take it. Eve and Josh find someone dead in a car. Then a rather large wolf. It runs after them and a second arrives at the survivors. One man is killed and Josh is badly injured, but Ty shoots the wolf.
The survivors are somewhere strange. And in LA the official story is everyone is dead. But the visions that have been plaguing Gavin are of where everyone ended up. Somehow, he knows more than anyone else, but he has no real clue what he knows.