I realize that this week’s episode of “Lost” (“Whatever Happened, Happened”) was mostly about Kate, and that Juliet was in it for like five minutes tops, but what can I say? She’s my favorite character/actress combo on the show now. Her character is the only one who both knows what she’s doing and isn’t a total ass about it, lording it over everyone. And on a series that spends so much time showing close-ups of its actors desperately trying to convey some emotion or another, Elizabeth Mitchell is the only one who’s subtle and nuanced enough to tell you almost everything you need to know before the dialogue starts.

For example, in the photo above, the mood isn’t just “pissed.” It’s “really pissed, plus extremely disappointed.” I’d face down the smoke monster before I subjected myself to one of her looks. But then, I probably wouldn’t need to worry about that, because I’m not a total dick like Jack is.

As for Kate’s story: well, okay, whatever. I probably would’ve had more sympathy for the intense emotional trauma she was going through, if her transfer of custody hadn’t consisted of: “I’ve never met you before, but there’s a three-year-old child sleeping unsupervised in a hotel room three doors down the hall. Whenever you feel like it, go pick him up and take care of him while I go to Guam. Later!” Also: universal donor or not, is Kate really the one you want to be giving blood? She looks like she’s got about half a pint in her, tops.

And for a while now, people have been trying to figure out the pantheon of The Others. Because of the hieroglyphics on the countdown clock, and the brief shot of the four-toed statue a few episodes back, current money is on their worshipping the Egyptian god Horus. I’m holding out for the Egyptian god of plot contrivances, whichever one that is. That seems a lot more useful than just worshipping “the sky” or “war,” because you could ask for anything.

“Oh mighty Deus Ex we beseech thee! Help us cure this boy of a fatal gunshot wound.”
“NO PROBLEM.”
“Also if it’s not too much to ask: it would be great if he could forget that this ever happened so that we don’t have to explain a plot point from a couple of years ago.”
“CAN DO. ANYTHING ELSE?”
“Well gee, as long as you’re offering: we kind of set it up that this kid’s transformation into a super-villain would be a long, involved process playing out over several years, but it’d be a lot easier if we could just take care of it in one episode. We wouldn’t have made such a big deal of it at the time, had we known…”
“NO NEED TO EXPLAIN. THESE THINGS HAPPEN. IT IS DONE.”
“Great, thanks! Can you make people forget about the tent village and ‘Miss Clu?’”
“DON’T PUSH IT.“

No offense to William Sanderson, but I think Sawyer was being more than a little bit generous with the comment “He’s Our You.” (This, or at least, last week’s episode of “Lost”).

I’m not sure what my standards are supposed to be for this blog, or if I should even start introducing standards at this point. Do I still have to write something about “Lost” even when I don’t have anything interesting to say? Has that ever stopped me before? Spoilers ahoy!

After all the momentum of last week’s episode, it was a little odd to get an episode that went back to the focus-on-a-single-character-with-flashbacks entry. No matter how good it was. I guess we already knew that Sayid’s superspy work for Ben had been killing off Widmore people, but it still felt as anti-climactic as Sayid made it sound: “That’s it?” But I’ve always wondered what you do after you go on a multinational killing spree, and now I know: retire to the Dominican Republic and build houses. (Now I’m even more curious as to what Jimmy Carter was up to during the 80s….)

I’m already tired of the Jack/Kate/Juliet/Sawyer business and want that to end, preferably in a way that doesn’t kill off Juliet. Because that would really suck.

And I feel like a bad “Lost” fan, but I wasn’t shocked by the ending, nor am I on the edge of my seat with suspense. They’ve said a few times that the rules for time travel in Lostland don’t let you mess up the timestream, so it’s just a matter of explaining how he survives a gunshot wound to the chest. Or actually: not explaining, since Locke’s survived much worse. My overall reaction to the episode was, “Fine, sure, whatever. Let’s keep things moving.”

Also: after seeing some of the making-of documentaries, I wish they’d find some excuse for Naveen Andrews to use his real accent instead of the Sayid-ified one. In case you haven’t heard him talking out of character, he talks kind of like Jason Statham. I can’t remember much of anything about Planet Terror, but I think in The English Patient he was doing the same Sayid accent. I kind of want to see the guy just get a chance to relax and sound a little less, well, fruity. Maybe they can set it up so he’ll die unless he puts jumper cables on his nipples or licks high voltage wires or something, because that would be cool.

I’m running a few days late on my crucial entertainment blogging duties, partly because of the iTunes delay but also because I had to go on internet blackout to avoid having the BSG finale ruined for me by excited internet folks. (Fortunately, it was ruined for me by Mssrs. Moore and Eick.)

This week’s episode of “Lost” (“Namaste”) was just great. I’d been worried that bringing the now-annoying LA people back to the island would screw up the whole dynamic, but they managed to distill exactly the amount of drama they needed from that, without its turning into some tedious love quadrangle (yet). It’s corny to say “I didn’t want it to end,” but that was the case: I was surprised when the end credits started rolling, since I’d thought there was at least 30 minutes still to go. They jumped right into things with a plane crash in the very first shot (as “Lost” is wont to do), and the momentum just never let up from there.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that nothing more epic or revelatory happened in this episode than you’ll find in your typical good episode of “Lost.” But one of the things that makes the series really stand out is its ability to have several different kinds of “whoa, did that just happen?” moments all crammed into one episode. This was a great example of that, but to explain any more requires a spoiler warning.
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I loved this week’s episode of “Lost” (“LaFleur”). I’m guessing that the reason the last couple of episodes have been so exposition-heavy and tedious is that they were all just anxious to get back to the Island and telling stories that people actually care about. (Spoilers follow, if you’re concerned about that kind of thing).

This one pushed all my buttons, so much that even when I thought it was about to go off the rails, they’d do something to remind me they still were in complete control. I loved all the character moments in it: Juliet’s clumsy “some kind of sonic fence… or something” line and then Sawyer’s calling her on it. Sawyer’s calling Richard Alpert “your buddy out there with the eyeliner.” Sawyer’s spur-of-the-moment lie about the Black Rock. Sawyer in general; the character annoyed the hell out of me for… well, pretty much the entire series up until just recently.

But the episode was designed to make Juliet look like a total bad-ass, so much so that I started to worry she was going to get killed off soon. Clearly, they were setting her up for the love quadrangle, just in case you weren’t in love with her character yet, but I think they overdid it. I think if Kate had seen this episode, even she would be saying, “Yeah, okay. You win.” She went from consoling a guy who’d just had his girlfriend die and vanish, to taking out a bad guy with a perfectly-timed sniper shot, all within five minutes. Then she fixed a van and delivered a baby, which was kind of overkill, really. It reminded me of Janeane Garafolo’s old bit about George Clooney’s character on E.R. and how he was designed to be like catnip for women: on top of looking like George Clooney and having issues only a good woman could fix, he was a pediatrician.

Whatever they did, though, it worked. It was obvious how this episode was going to end, even before Sawyer’s “can you get over someone in three years?” speech. Still, when Hurley came out of the van I let out a disappointed groan. Great, those guys again. When was the last time they did anything for me?

Although it was a neat bit of tension to advance both groups by three years, I wonder if they would’ve gotten more drama out of having it be three years to Jack/Kate/Sun/etc., but only a week or so to the guys on the island. And although they’re doing a fantastic job of filling in pieces, I’ve still got to wonder:

• Is that for real the last of the time travel? Seems like some wasted opportunities, things that they wouldn’t be mentioning if we weren’t gong to see them again: the statue, the Black Rock, the whispers in the jungle, more of Rousseau’s backstory, etc.
• Speaking of Rousseau: when we last saw her group meet the smoke monster, when was that? It’d have to be sometime in the early 90s, if she were still pregnant with Alex, right?
• When did the new castaways, Ben, and Locke land? Are they somewhere in the early 70s part of the island?
• Why didn’t our Dharma gang spend these three years planting stuff in the jungle to help themselves after the crash landing? Seems like Sawyer at least would’ve left himself some guns or books or smokes or eyeglasses, and avoided a lot of the hassles he had in season 1.
• When does Miles get to use his ghostbuster powers again? There’s got to be something they’re saving him for, right?

Speaking of Miles, one of the cool things about watching the show on iTunes is that it’s a lot easier to do embarrassing screen grabs:

I suppose it’s pretty hypocritical of me to say so, but I get annoyed really quickly when series go overboard on the meta-commentary. Just a little bit, and you’ve got a clever callback. A little more, and you’ve got a nice “see, we get how silly this is” repartee going with the audience. But too much, and it just comes across as lazy or a fey “look how clever we are!”

This week’s episode of “Lost” (“316″) didn’t plunge completely over the abyss, but it was just barely hanging on with the back wheels, all the cast members and plot points desperately huddled in the back seat waiting for a bird to land comically on the hood and send them over.

Of course there was the shot of Jack’s eye as he lies in the jungle at the beginning of the episode, a callback to the pilot (and several other episodes following), but that was probably the most innocuous of them. Ms Faraday delivers the “Oh, stop thinking how ridiculous it is!” line at the end of 20 minutes worth of exposition. Jack looks back on the plane and asks about all the people in the tail section; Ben replies, “who cares?” Plus dozens of smaller moments: Dharma logos, number boards flipping over, binders full of print outs, dead Dad anguish, people reading books whose titles are just a little bit too visible.

And it’s not just that so much of this stuff has been done earlier in the series, it’s that it was done so much better. As far as poking-fun-at-ourselves meta-commentary goes, I don’t think the series will ever be able to top the episode called “Expose”. Back in season 1, they made each character’s story getting on Flight 815 compelling on its own; here’s it’s just “oh, you’re here.” And wouldn’t the big cliffhanger reveal have worked better if we hadn’t already seen that he’s still alive, two episodes ago?

I think the biggest problem I had with the whole episode is the big information dump at the beginning. It’s probably unfair that I’ll stick with “Lost” through its tedious exposition, but fault “Battlestar Galactica” for the same thing, but there’s no denying: you can make any amount of dialogue more compelling by putting a giant pendulum in the middle of the room and making every shot look like someone is just about to get whacked by it. And it’s probably unfair that I’ve been complaining that the stories of the people in L.A. are uninteresting, but am now complaining that they shuttled them all out of L.A. too quickly and undramatically.

But it all felt to me as if they had a bunch of burgeoning plot lines that they had to abandon quickly, and then somewhat clumsily introduce new intrigue instead of tying those up satisfactorily: what happened to Aaron? How’d Hurley get out of jail? Who’s the woman with Sayid? Did Lapidus just happen to be on the same flight? The show tends to be reluctant to give out information, but the answer to that isn’t just to give out any information. Of all the questions I’d like to be answered explicitly, “why does Locke need to be on the plane?” wasn’t one of them.

Still, they’ve got everything set up to have everybody back on the island, traveling through time and also with flashbacks to explain the loose ends left over from L.A. They’re in a fine position for the rest of the season; I just wish they’d gotten there a little bit less goofily.

And incidentally, if you’re like me and it was driving you crazy wondering who was the (stunning!) woman with Sayid in this episode, it was Zuleikha Robinson, who played Gaia in “Rome.”