ABC has dug out clips from an old “In Search Of…”-style series from the 80s called “Mysteries of the Universe.” They say it’ll be interesting to followers of the series “Lost.” Here’s the first clip, more will follow in the [...]
ABC has dug out clips from an old “In Search Of…”-style series from the 80s called “Mysteries of the Universe.” They say it’ll be interesting to followers of the series “Lost.” Here’s the first clip, more will follow in the coming months:
(Check out the official version to see it larger and without as much of the embedded-video junk).
Whoever at ABC is in charge of this archival process, I want to give them a big hug. They nailed it.
My thoughts on the “Lost” season finale, “The Incident.”
There’s no talking about the season finale of “Lost” (“The Incident”) without great big spoilers so be forewarned that everything in this post is a spoiler.
In fact, I’m going to include an extra paragraph in here because occasionally people end up here from my company’s blog or from the auto-generated announcements on Twitter, and the “read more” link is removed, making it easier to read ahead and see something you didn’t intend to. I remember before The Crying Game came out, I saw a message on USENET (yes, I’m old) where the poster put in “spoiler space” but not enough for larger monitors, so I accidentally saw the big twist of the movie. Which kind of ruined the movie (not that it was all that great to begin with), but I couldn’t really be angry at anybody because it was unintentional. Actually, though, it was made even more interesting because I knew what the twist was, but I kept expecting it was going to be about Miranda Richardson’s character — after all, she’s on the poster. I spent the first half of the movie wondering how they were going to do the reveal and then hey! there’s a penis I didn’t expect to see. So if you’re still reading at this point, it’s your own damn fault.
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My opinions of “Lost” episode “Follow the Leader”.
This is chock full of spoilers for this week’s episode of “Lost” (“Follow the Leader”), so be forewarned.
Probably my biggest problem watching “Lost” is that I have no way of gauging how smart I am compared to the source material. I’m embarrassingly dense about most of the naming and the historical and literal allusions, as well as some of the details from previous seasons. For instance, I keep waiting for angry bearded Dharma guy to get his comeuppance with a gruesome death, but the internet tells me he’s already gotten it. Apparently, he’s the guy who was stuck in the hatch before Desmond showed up, until he went crazy and killed himself.
On the other hand, I’ve read enough comic books and seen enough science fiction concepts translated and re-translated through years of pop culture, that all the time traveling and alternate reality stuff seems more obvious than the show (or its fans) are letting on. I keep reading complaints that the series “got all weird” this season, and I’m just left wondering: what series have you guys been watching? Because the one I’ve seen had polar bears, numbers stations, smoke monsters, psychic premonitions, and miraculous healing all within the first couple of episodes. When the characters are spending entire episodes going over how time travel works, I’m left wondering: is this supposed to be complicated? Am I missing something complicated, or are they trying to pander to the millions of ABC watchers who are trying to keep up?
So I make this observation: if an “incident” on the island in 1977 caused a massive amount of energy to be unleashed, resulting in a hatch to contain the energy and the warning that you weren’t allowed to go outside without a hazmat suit, the solution to that isn’t to go back in time and detonate a nuclear warhead. In fact, it seems extremely likely that going back in time and detonating a nuclear warhead is exactly the “incident” in question. But I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be obvious, or if they’ve already addressed it, or if it’s nonsensical based on the hand-waving “electromagnetic energy” the show is basing everything around.
Which wouldn’t be a big deal — I’m perfectly content to just shut up, stop speculating, and wait to see what they come up with next — except that we’ve been building up to the big season finale and I have yet to be able to tell where the big tension is.
So far, everybody has reacted to the whole time travel business by doing exactly what they were supposed to do. I was disappointed that Farraday’s fate seemed to be pretty much “go back in time because I know you’re supposed to go back in time,” and I’ve been concerned that the same thing was going to happen with Locke. And then this episode pretty much made that explicit: Locke is important only because he went back and made himself important. There was a scene earlier in the season where he meets Richard Alpert during his time travel, and that was intriguing: who is Alpert, and how does he know the things that are going to happen? Then we see it played out from another angle: he knew it was going to happen only because Locke told him so. The whole gestalt of “Lost” is that the questions are always going to be more intriguing than the answers, but I didn’t expect that the answers would be this mundane.
So ignore the plotting for a second, and get back to the “meaning” or the overall themes of the series. Locke & Jack have basically switched roles: Locke is now a leader, and Jack is the one who’s blindly doing what he believes he’s “supposed” to do without thinking of the consequences. Locke has found his purpose, while Jack is just wanting to escape from the ruin he’s made of his life while off the island. Locke knows why he’s here, Jack is still asking why they came back, what it is they’re supposed to do, and grabbing at anything to give himself purpose. (For Locke, it was pushing the button; for Jack, it’s apparently Farraday’s journal and his plan).
That’s a very neat shift in characterization, one that’s been pretty well handled. It’s just that there’s a giant snowball of plot points bearing down on this philosophical character study, waiting to be answered. For one, apparently Sayid has been waiting behind a bush this whole time, just waiting for somebody to walk by and threaten to shoot Kate. And I’m still wondering how Sexy Bounty Hunter and the rest of the castaways on the other island are going to come back into play. (Incidentally: I’m assuming that when “The Island” vanishes, that includes the side island with the polar bear cages, right? And that’s where Frank and the gang are hanging out now?)
Our momentum leading us into the 2-hour finale is based on two things: Locke says that he’s going to kill Jacob; and Alpert says that he watched Kate, Jack, and the others all die. I suppose the third question is what’s going to happen when/if they detonate the warhead; will they be able to change history, or is that the “incident” that started the whole mess in the first place? It says something when the least interesting aspect of an episode of television is a group of castaways and seemingly immortal people swimming to an underground temple to detonate a nuclear bomb. I’m not sure what it says, exactly, but it’s something.
And is it time to start with the “who or what is Jacob?” conjecture again? For the longest time, I was sure it was going to turn out to be Locke: he went back in time and somehow inserted himself into the timeline as the main prophet of the island. Now I’m wondering if it could be the Jughead bomb that the Others are worshipping, Beneath the Planet of the Apes-style.
Double-header post-vacation “Lost” recap: “Some Like it Hoth” and “The Variable.”
When I was able to get internet access on vacation, I’d get e-mails from Apple telling me that I had brand new episodes of “Lost” ready to download. I was looking forward to spending my last couple of vacation days sitting like a lump doing nothing but getting caught up with glorious television.
And then they gave me a clip show. Bad form, Bad Robot.
Come to think of it, why do we even have clip shows in the age of DVD box sets and downloadable season passes and time-shifting? I’m sure they justify it by saying it’s needed to get new viewers up to speed, or to satisfy the people who gave up on the show in season 2 and are now wondering how they went from “survivors of a plane crash” to “commune in 1977″. But that’s what the hour before the show is for! The rest of us are just left feeling cheated.
The two real episodes were about the characters (along with the writers, apparently) figuring out the rules of time travel. The first one, “Some Like it Hoth,” was focused on ghostbuster Miles and his issues with his dad, who as it turns out in a convenient twist is Marvin Candle from the Dharma orientation films. (“Lost” gets away with implausible coincidences like this by having characters comment on it. That seems to be Hurley’s sole purpose on the series now).
It’s getting harder to believe the illusion that everything on the show has been carefully and expertly orchestrated, but you have to give them credit for being able to take all the plot twists and developments and force them into a consistent Philosophy of The Entire Series. Namely: the nature of free will vs. destiny. It could get a little ham-fisted at times, back when Jack and Locke were left to try and provide some deeper meaning while everyone else was just interested in the polar bears and the Apple II that could somehow save the world. Locke had faith that entering the code and pressing the button actually did something significant; if not, then why was he here, and what was his purpose?
It’s not exactly subtle now — considering this season’s subtitle is “Destiny Calls” — but it is pretty clever that they’ve extended that to the other characters. If they’re unable to change anything in the past, then why are they there? This episode gave one possibility to one character: Miles could develop a relationship with his father that he never had. (Resolving the problem set forth in his flashbacks, meaning he can die soon).
The most recent episode, “The Variable,” was apparently a “game-changer,” based on what I’ve been reading online. Either I missed something, or internet fans of the show are over-reacting. To me, the whole episode seemed like it was asking the question “what if they could change the past?” and acting as if just raising the question was intriguing enough; they didn’t have to actually accomplish anything.
It could just be the inevitable disappointment of a series that’s in its winding-down phase. I’ve accepted for a while that the answers to the questions are never going to be as intriguing as the questions themselves, but it’s still kind of a drag to see that played out. Ever since Faraday’s character was introduced, I’ve been wondering about the implications of that scene: why did the footage of the plane wreckage make him start crying? Who was the woman with him in the room? What was significant about that moment?
And now, the pay-off: he doesn’t know, an unidentified and mostly irrelevant caretaker, and Widmore (secretly his father) was about to show up. I’d started to expect more from Faraday’s storyline, and he basically ended up with the same fate I was scared Locke would have: he was important only because he went back in time and made himself important. His supposedly brilliant mind went mostly unused — he came up with an idea of how to prevent “The Incident,” but it’s not an idea that any of the other characters couldn’t have come up with independently.
I think the other problem I had with the episode is that, as reluctant as I’ve been to admit it, the actress playing Faraday’s mother isn’t all that great in a large part. It takes a while to realize: she’s a woman of somewhat advanced years from somewhere in the British Isles, accent and all: to Americans, that just exudes class. But there’s a ton of moments in the episode that hinge on her being able to convey “a mother’s anguish” that just come across as “gas.”
So the big question is whether Jack, Kate & the Gang will be able to (with the Others’ help, possibly?) pull off Faraday’s plan, or whether they’ll even try to. At the moment, though, I’m not feeling as intrigued as I am wondering about all the loose ends. There’s nothing too glaring; it’s mostly a bunch of minor stuff that seemed to have greater significance when it was introduced.
My recap of “Lost” episode “Dead is Dead”.
Now that’s a pick-up line.
I guess technically, this week’s episode of “Lost” (“Dead is Dead”) was another character-centric flashback-heavy episode, except focusing on Ben Linus instead of one of the “good guys.” But that was okay, for two reasons:
I really hate it when people give one person all the credit for a particularly good movie, TV show, videogame, whatever. There’s always a ton of work from a ton of people involved in these productions. Instead of being the product of one person’s genius, it’s just as likely that they got some really good material to work with, or everyone else brought his best work to the project, or any of a thousand different variables. Plus, titles on TV shows in particular are somewhat nebulous; from what I understand, it’s often the work of a group of people that gets credited to one person.
But still: the guy’s got a streak going here. This one felt like it had a momentum that even flashbacks to stuff we kind of already mostly sort of knew were unable to stop.
My favorite aspect of this episode was seeing Locke finally starting to get his pay-off after getting piled on for the past fifty years or so. The guy has basically two settings: desperation, or condescension. It’s amazing how much mileage he gets out of it from context: sometimes, his forced calmness and condescension have you convinced he’s evil incarnate; other times, like this episode, you’re rooting for him.
He never says it outright, but getting killed may have been the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s spent his whole life having people tell him he doesn’t have a greater purpose, he’s not special, and his stubborn conviction that there is meaning to all this and that he does have a crucial part to play is nothing more than naivete. Now, coming back from the dead seems to be a pretty clear sign that he was right all along. And it’s a very subtle shift in his character, but he no longer seems to be trying to convince himself that he’s in charge and he knows what he’s doing; as far as he’s concerned, he’s got proof.
Of course, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they turn this into some kind of weird temporal-causation-loop type thing, and the only reason he’s been “chosen” is accidental or arbitrary. (As in: he’s important because he went back in time and told people he was going to be important). But I say he should enjoy the moment as long as it lasts.
Other things I liked about this episode were Locke’s revelation to Jin and Lapidus that he was still alive:
and that they somehow managed to find an actor who looks eerily like a younger version of Widmore:
At least, to me. I could tell who he was supposed to be the second he came on screen, and it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t the older actor in a bad wig.
As for the smoke monster: I’ve got a bad memory, so I can’t recall what exactly we saw back when Mr. Eko got “judged.” Was he really responsible for his brother’s death, or was he convinced that he was, or did he just want to be killed as penance, or did they really just want to get him off the series? Whatever the case, I like how this episode handled Ben’s “judgement.” We got to see that he really did feel genuine remorse, and that there is still the barest hint of a human that will do the right thing even when no one’s watching.
But he didn’t get any points for that. The Island just dug the knife in deeper and said: “You feel bad? Suck it, you should feel bad. You won’t get any resolution, or acceptance. Instead, here’s a reminder that your worst fear has come true: you’re not the leader, you’re not special, you have to play second fiddle to the bald guy and you damn well better do everything in your power to protect him.” We don’t have a word for that, but I believe you call it “cold.”