2.18: “Journalist’s Day”

In some ways, I was very happy with how this episode turned out, primarily in the first few acts, but in others, I was disappointed. The core plot of the episode was interesting – Zach, our friendly (and oh so modest) Horizon reporter finds that there may be a plot, and does everything he can to uncover it and protect Horizon, while at the same time, maintaining his… personality. It begins to seem like all of Horizon’s higher-up personnel have been compromised, but then we find out at the end that none of them were and that Zach had it all wrong, despite being right in some ways. I very much enjoyed the bulk of the beginning of the episode, particularly in the realm of Acts I through III, because of the comedy relief that was worked very nicely in there, as well as making canonical, or, for the very least, recognized within canon, the suspected ‘ships’ of Horizon, without actually doing anything remotely shippy – in other words, we got to see and over-the-top fanboy commentary, as well as the over-the-top fanboy try to be a part of it.

I was a bit disappointed, though, by how the end turned out – there wasn’t any actual danger, because the agent was actually a double agent working for the Command Council, and everyone on Horizon but Zach knew about it. For the most part. The lack of conflict just led up to Zach praising Horizon, but let’s face it, we didn’t really need an entire episode leading up to that. Another thing I was disappointed with was that although we were promised that we would like the Zach character a lot more, I actually didn’t care much for him before, and still don’t. An episode entirely dedicated to him didn’t do much for his character development, and especially not for his relationships with the other members of Horizon (in fact, I’ll go so far as to say that he’s made them near-hate him).

We didn’t get to see anything of the other characters, and the one man show fell to Zach, who didn’t really do much for me. It’s tough to rate this episode because of all that, and because it’s not really an episode of Horizon – it’s more like a fanfic of Horizon, by a self-insert type of author. I suppose it falls on the average, because it’s not like it was a bad episode, it was merely an ‘okay’ one.

Overall: **1/2