What I’m Watching: 11.22.63

11.22.63: Season 1, Episode 5 “The Truth” (C+)

I’m liking this show less and less, but with only three episodes left, it hardly seems worthwhile to abandon it after being invested this far. Jake’s involvement in the past isn’t causing it to fight back against him, but it’s getting him distracted in a major way to the point that he’s missing some very crucial moments that he needs to witness in order to really put the picture together. I’m not sure why he thinks going back to 2016 is a smart idea without sticking around through the actual date of the assassination since something could well go wrong before then, and then he’d have to come back and live through the whole thing again. Not taking Bill with him is probably smart because he’d have trouble adjusting to a different time period, but that didn’t help his case too much. The bigger problem Jake had to deal with in this hour was the ugly return of Sadie’s ex-husband Johnny Clayton, who gave Sadie a good beating before trying to get Jake to drink a glass of bleach to save her life in true soapy villain form that didn’t feel too fitting tone-wise for this show, far less compelling than the equally dark arc featuring Frank Dunning. Somehow, escaping that deadly situation worked out in Jake’s favor, giving him a free pass for killing a man and getting back into Deke’s good graces for saving Sadie’s life after getting fired for his big web of lies. Bill meeting Lee face-to-face definitely wasn’t supposed to happen, and there’s way too much going on now for Jake and Bill to be able to focus on what they’re supposed to be doing.