In the first season of La Brea, Eve Harris’s (Natalie Zea) entire world comes crumbling down. One sunny morning in Los Angeles, Eve is driving teens Josh (Jack Martin) and Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) to school when a giant sinkhole opens up beneath the La Brea tar pits. While Izzy makes it to safety, Eve and Josh fall into an abyss, soon waking up with dozens of other survivors in an ancient world — with no idea where they are or how they got there. They’re without cell service, there’s no civilization in sight, and there are prehistoric predators after them.
The group’s only chance of being rescued rests in the hands of Eve’s ex-husband, Gavin Harris (Eoin Macken), a washed-up former Air Force pilot who remains in present day LA. After reuniting with Izzy post-sinkhole, Gavin has mysterious visions of Eve, Jack, and the others struggling to survive. After digging up his ex-wife’s wedding ring at the sinkhole site (which he carbon dates, finding that it’s aged over 10,000 years), he becomes convinced they’ve fallen through a time portal. Now, he’ll do anything to persuade the government to launch a rescue mission. Keep reading to find out everything that happens in Season 1 of the sci-fi thriller from David Appelbaum (NCIS: New Orleans) before diving into Season 2.
Check out this guide to read about the cast and characters.
When they realize help isn’t coming, Eve, Josh, and the other sinkhole victims do their best to find supplies and create a shelter. Many have theories as to where they are, but stoned anthropologist Scott (Rohan Mirchandaney) suggests the most outlandish theory: that the strange, pulsing green light they can see in the sky transported them from 2021 to 10,000 BC. They’re where Los Angeles will eventually be — except in the Stone Age.
After a series of mishaps — including sabertooth tiger attacks — delays their efforts at finding a way back to the future, Eve leads a crew to find sustenance and help. Meanwhile, Scott notices the portal is rapidly shrinking. Based on his calculations, they have 24 hours before the only way home closes forever. Unbeknownst to the refugees, two strangers from a local tribe, a curious child named Isaiah (Diesel La Torraca) and his suspicious grandfather, Silas (Mark Lee), watch their camp from a distance.
Back in 2021, Gavin tries to persuade his military contacts to embark on a rescue mission, to no avail. Eventually, however, he connects with Dr. Sophia Nathan (Virginie Laverdure), a scientist who works for the Department of Homeland Security studying sinkhole portals. She informs Gavin that the La Brea sinkhole isn’t the first one that’s spit people into the past. Now, with Gavin’s visions to guide them, the pair can launch a manned journey through the portal. Unfortunately for Gavin, his spotty history in the Air Force bars him from going on the buttoned-up DHS mission, so his pilot friend, Levi Delgado (Nicholas Gonzalez), flies solo instead.
Upon entering the sinkhole, Levi loses radio contact and his right engine, which bursts into flames. He bails out, only to wake up in 10,000 BC, where Eve, Josh, and the others find him. Their desperate effort to fix Levi’s plane before the portal closes leads them to a village marked with a red handprint — the same ominous symbol Eve’s been finding all throughout the woods. Inside the village, they meet Isaiah, Silas, and the leader of the Indigenous tribe that lives there, whose name is Paara (Tonantzin Carmelo). Luckily for Eve and her group, Paara’s tribe knows English thanks to decades of “sky people” having landed there. Despite the tribe’s feelings toward outsiders, Paara allows Levi and Eve to cross through the village to get the plane parts they need — but before they can get the aircraft off the ground, the portal disappears.
Back in present day, seismic activity rocks Los Angeles, which DHS agent Adam Markman (Toby Truslove) tells Gavin is an apparent side effect of Levi’s flight. When Markman tells Gavin that further missions would pose too much of a threat to the city, Gavin flips out and gets blacklisted from DHS HQ. But not all hope is lost: Sophia’s former colleague, Dr. Rebecca Aldridge (Ming-Zhu Hii), happens to have a plane that causes zero seismic activity when going through portals, which she built after previous missions gone wrong. As Gavin and Rebecca are about to fly through the sinkhole, Sophia — who’s staying back as a lookout — sends them a warning: DHS is sending two F15s to shoot them down. Just before the F15s reach them, Rebecca tells Gavin some ominous information: He’d be wise to investigate the day he was adopted — Nov. 16, 1988 — if he really wants to help his family. With that, she jumps out of the plane via parachute and into the portal. Upon landing, Gavin is briefly held under arrest.
Rebecca descends into 10,000 BC — with a motive she’s kept from Gavin. She’s here to kidnap Isaiah and take him to a mountaintop in Topanga, where there’s a second portal that leads to 1988. But after she takes Isaiah, the pair run into Silas, who hints at hidden history between them before stabbing her, saving the boy. Eve rescues Rebecca and takes her to Paara’s village for medical attention. There, Rebecca tells Eve that Isaiah needs to walk through the mountaintop portal at any cost. Why? If he doesn’t, he’ll never be adopted by his foster parents in 1988, be renamed Gavin, or meet Eve. If Gavin never meets her, then Josh and Izzy will cease to exist. Terrified by the thought, Eve — along with Levi and her other allies — takes off after Silas and Isaiah.
Before heading back to Eve’s camp, an injured Rebecca sneaks into Silas’s home and steals a map he’s made of all the portal openings in 10,000 BC. When she rejoins Eve’s group, Rebecca reveals that she’s part of the scientific team that opened the portals in the first place — and that none of them anticipated the damage such portals would cause. To make up for what she’s done, she informs the survivors that they can escape via the 1988 portal, but only if they leave now. While the survivors debate traveling to a different decade than their own, Rebecca tracks down a 12-year-old girl from the 2021 portal named Lilly (Chloe De Los Santos) and bribes her into taking on another mission Rebecca can’t complete herself: She tells Lilly to take the stolen map and give it to Isaiah before he goes through the 1988 portal. In exchange for Lilly’s help, Rebecca promises to take her back to her biological family in 2021. Why she would ask a child for help rather than an adult is anybody’s guess.
In the modern timeline, Gavin and Sophia track down information about Gavin’s adoption, which he has no clear memories of. They discover that a nun found him and a 12-year-old girl together. Digging further, they realize the girl is now an artist named Ella Jones, and so Gavin sets out to meet her in person. When he does, the visit triggers more of his visions, which he realizes are actually childhood memories from when he was called Isaiah. Ella, afflicted by similar visions, remembers that the day she and Gavin were found, she was carrying something in her coat. Gavin, Sophia, and Ella head to Ella’s home, where she unearths her childhood coat and has a realization — her name used to be Lilly. In the pocket of the coat, they find the map Rebecca stole from Silas’s house in 10,000 BC. Thanks to the map, which marks not only the locations of the sinkholes but also the era they open into, Gavin, Sophia, and Ella discover the next portal to open will be in Seattle — which might be their only chance to save everyone from the La Brea incident. With Izzy in tow, the trio races to Washington in an effort to mount a third rescue attempt.
Meanwhile, Eve, Levi, Josh, Paara, and their friends ambush Silas and nab Isaiah. While Eve and her crew make the arduous trek up the mountain to the 1988 portal, Eve explains to Isaiah that, if he doesn’t go through, Josh will cease to exist — since Isaiah is, in fact, young Gavin. As soon as Isaiah disappears into the portal, 12-year-old Lilly arrives with the map, devastated to realize she’s too late to pass it on to Isaiah. As Josh and his new girlfriend Riley (Veronica St. Clair), a fellow La Brea sinkhole victim, comfort Lilly, the portal pulses and all three disappear into thin air — along with the portal’s green light. Eve, Levi, and the other adults have no idea how to get them back or what to do next. At camp, Rebecca tells Scott that, if he helps her get to a certain secret location, she’ll provide answers to any questions he has about the portals. When they near the location, Scott is gobsmacked: There’s a pristine skyscraper tucked into a massive valley below them. Rebecca tells him — impossibly — that she built it herself, and invites him in.
Back in 2021, after contacting DHS so they can evacuate the city and avoid another sinkhole disaster, Gavin, Ella, and Izzy make it to the Seattle sinkhole just as it starts to open. Taking a leap of faith, the three of them jump into the portal in the hopes of making it back to their loved ones. They wake up on the beach, thousands of miles from Eve and the other survivors, but finally in the same timeline — for now.
Stream the entire series (30 episodes in total) now.
