I don’t have much of interest to say about this week’s episode of “Lost” (”There’s No Place Like Home, Part 1″), but that’s never stopped me before…

I’ve been really impressed with this season, and how well they’ve turned the series around. It’s gone from something that I watch just to see where it goes, back to must-see “I can’t believe how cool this show is” programming. Still, a lot of the episodes feel like characters being moved around on a giant island-shaped chessboard. People meet up, separate, and travel from place to place not so much out of a genuine motivation, but because the story just needs them to be in a certain place at a certain time.

Still, it’s good stuff. A while ago, I recommended that they just dispense with the new mysteries and spend the rest of the series just wrapping up the old ones. I’m glad to see they haven’t done that. Instead, they introduced the Ben/Widmore rivalry and put that on a low boil, while they work backwards from the end of season 3 and attempt to get it to hook up with the events of season 4. And they’re calling back to the old favorites (like the numbers), as well as giving some closure to stories developed in flashbacks.

Speaking of that, this is one of the few episodes where the flashbacks (or flash-forwards) are more interesting than the island-based story. Not a whole lot happened here, but Sun’s moment of retribution just kicked all kinds of ass, making me think they’re actually going to have a somewhat satisfying conclusion to the whole Sun & Jin story.

Also, I’m glad to see I was wrong when I accused them of just perfunctorily ending the Sayid & Nadia story. Instead of devoting an entire episode to it, they just let us piece together what happened from snatches of dialogue, and from seeing them together in the other characters’ flash-forwards. That turns out to be a lot more effective than any number of love scenes set to swelling music.

Watching the episode on the website doesn’t give a teaser trailer, so I’m going into next week’s episode completely oblivious. (Is it the season finale, or is that the week after?) Since we’re getting into The Orchid station and finally meeting the other Others, not to mention a ship loaded with explosives, I’m expecting no small amount of awesomeness. And most likely the deaths of a few more characters.

Frustrating things:

• Since I was wrong about Nadia & Sayid, I could be wrong to assume that they’re done with Danielle’s story. It’s only been a couple weeks, but the longer they go without mentioning it, the more anxious I get that they’re going to drop that whole storyline and never give a resolution to the Black Rock/Numbers/Sickness business.
• Michelle Forbes is usually the anti-Ted McGinley; when she shows up in a series, it’s a sign that things are about to get more interesting. I hope there’s more to her character than just being an Oceanic Airlines PR person.
• They’ve been spending a lot of time on the Claire/Jack/Aaron/Jack’s Dad business, without actually saying anything we didn’t already know.
• Things don’t look good for Jin. Seeing Future Sun administer a smackdown to her father helped make this a little easier to swallow, but I’m still holding out hope for a happy ending there. I hope that the Oceanic Six believe they’re covering up the truth, but that there’s more going on than even they are aware of.

Plus I wonder if next week is when we find out who was in the coffin.

Nintendo’s WiiWare service went live last week. To help pass the time until the release of SBCG4AP, other companies have graciously agreed to release their own games. One of those games is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, which I downloaded to “check out for a few minutes,” to see how the whole WiiWare business worked.

That was my first mistake. This game is pure digitally-downloaded evil. You play as the annoyingly foppish child-king of a village, staying at home to rebuild your kingdom while non-player characters run out to explore dungeons, fight monsters, and do the kind of stuff you usually do in a Final Fantasy game.

You wander around the castle, building houses and shops, talking to the villagers, and hiring adventurers to go out to explore dungeons. The adventurers bring back money and magic crystals-or-whatever, which let you build more stuff and hire more adventurers. Talking to the Sims villagers gives you money bonuses and helps your adventurers perform better. Unlocking new buildings opens up more of the Final Fantasy job classes, which in turn open new buildings. The game is divided into short “days” of about 10 minutes each; the game saves itself at the end of each one, and then presents you with a set of tasks for the next.

For anybody reading this who’s not familiar with videogames, the gist of that last paragraph was this: imagine someone taking a deadly grizzly bear, a man-eating shark, laser beams, the Ebola virus, and Hitler’s brain, and combining them all into one hideous creature. For this game, Square Enix has taken all of the most insidiously addictive game systems in existence; combined them in their most raw, unrefined form; and unleashed it on the hapless, obsessive-compulsive populace.

It’s city building + dungeon exploration (without having to actually explore anything) + Final Fantasy job systems + leveling up + a light Sims-style social game. All wrapped up with the Harvest Moon savegame system, which is itself a masterpiece of evilly manipulative game design, in that it makes it impossible not to play “just one more day.”

I couldn’t begin to explain to another human being how any of this is “fun,” but still I’m looking warily at the TV in the next room, thinking how it wouldn’t hurt to get up and play just a little bit more. This is pure stimulus/response type stuff — I might as well be a monkey with electrodes attached to the pleasure centers of his brain, pushing a button over and over again.

You do get new buildings every once in a while, and occasional story moments, but 90% of the time, your “reward” for doing stuff is a simple text message saying that you did it. But still, it always feels like there’s a big reward just over the horizon. I’ve been thinking that I’ve just got to clear out a certain dungeon in the game, because that will open up this next area, all without realizing that the “reward” for opening up the next area is nothing more than a flashing dot on a map. It’s a little bit like reading a debug log of someone else playing a Final Fantasy game.

I need to learn to avoid these games that have you doing city building, or gardening, or leveling up, because it always ends the same for me: I go on automatic for a week or two, then suddenly snap out of the trance and wander around, Lost Weekend style, with nothing to show for it but a level 15 watering pail or a city with a 5×5 skyscraper or a Sim who’s reached the top of the journalism career.

But on the other hand, this game does have a character named Hugh Yurg, and you gotta respect that.

The satellite feed for channel 7 went out this Thursday, leaving me “Lost”-less until I can summon the patience to watch the episode on ABC’s website.

Luckily, Turner Classic Movies was available to keep me from doing something productive or sleeping, and I got to catch the last 30 minutes of the 1978 classic The Boys From Brazil. This is the one about Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) hiding out in South America after WWII, creating dozens of clones of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi hunter (played by Oscar-nominated Laurence Olivier) who puts a stop to his evil scheme.

It’s also the one that’s finally convinced me I just don’t get the 70s. For some reason, this movie is described as a “suspense/thriller” instead of a “comedy.” Did people just not get how silly this movie is? Were laughably absurd things genuinely scary back then? This is the same era that brought us the ridiculous The Omen and the yawn-worthy Halloween. Does it have something to do with all the cocaine I keep hearing about?

Going through the list of Culturally Relevant Movies I’ve Never Seen has been like walking through a minefield. For every genuinely bad-ass movie like The Killers, or goofily surreal masterpiece like Night of the Hunter, there’s at least two more that leave me convinced I should just avoid seeing them, so I can just trust Common Knowledge and go on believing that they’re better than they really are.

At least I can check off another Mystery Science Theater reference that I finally get: during a scene in Hercules Unchained, Joel has a lion scream “You killed my dad, you freaked out maniac!” That’s from the “climax” of The Boys from Brazil.