YMMV / La Brea

• Moment of Awesome: Two spinosaurs fighting with each other for dominance. What's better is that spino in this show is almost completely accurate!
• Questionable Casting: We're supposed to believe that blond-haired, blue-eyed Isaiah grows up to be brown-haired, hazel-eyed Gavin. Blond kids' hair has occasionally been known to get darker with maturity. Eyes? Not so much. People's eyes are usually set in stone by the time they're Isaiah's age.
• Tear Jerker: Marybeth's death is quite sad and ends up as one of the best scenes in the show, and it hits even harder when you realize Lucas never called her mom until after she passed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Despite being an adult Lilly and technically Gavin's adopted sister, Ella has very little to do once she travels to the past. The most she gets is a brief reunion with Ty, an awkward relationship with Veronica more built on Veronica's trauma than Ella's character, and then gets unceremoniously killed off by prehistoric wasps.
  • Caroline barely lasts half a season before being killed, despite being Gavin's mother. An entire plot seems to be set up to suggest she's a lot more unscrupulous than she suggests, isn't being truthful about how "evil" James really is, and is hiding something from everyone, even trying to have Riley hide documents from the others. She's killed by Kira though before anything is really done with that setup.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Levi decides to remain behind in the 1980s to try and make difference there rather than go back to the past. Not even three episodes later, he's somehow found his way back into the past, now a decade older, and having undergone an entire character arc offscreen including falling in love, having a daughter, and losing them both, blaming James for it, and now wanting more than anything to kill James even if it means trapping everyone in the past, and betraying all his friends. It becomes hard to see the character as the same Levi as a result, and the change hardly feels organic due to everything happening offscreen.
  • Caroline and James are both given an air of being ambiguously evil, both being depicted as flawed individuals trying to do what they think is right, but neither being truly "good", creating a more nuanced conflict between Gavin's parents. After Kira kills Caroline though, any ambiguity is dropped, with none of Caroline's shadier actions being relevant anymore and her being treated as solely good posthumously, while James is depicted as purely evil, losing what little sympathetic traits he had left in favor of being a generic wannabe Evil Overlord.
• The Woobie: Lily. She's repeatedly treated horribly by her sister Veronica. It gets worse when she reveals that Aaron and Stockholm Syndrome-suffering Veronica abducted her from her own family some time before, and she yearns to see them again. And then the season 1 finale sees her not compelled to abandon an injured Veronica in order to deliver a message to Isaiah, on the promise of being reunited with her biological family, which results in her being sent forward in time to 1988.