I think I missed the cut-off date for talking about this week’s episode of “Lost,” but it’s kind of difficult.

For one thing, I feel guilty. Maybe I’m seeing something that’s not there, but it feels like the show’s in desperate-to-please mode, like a dog that’s been scolded for getting on the couch too many times and now he makes a point of showing you all the time how not on the couch he is right now. This last episode was all, “hey look, see we’re getting away from the Others camp and we’re focusing on the main characters again and we’re answering big questions from the first season and isn’t that what you wanted?” and I have to wince and say, “I really just wanted you to be better!”

And for another, I’m in danger of turning into one of them. The people who really just don’t seem to enjoy the show anymore but still watch it, either out of masochism or a defeatist “I guess that’s as good as it gets” mentality. And I really don’t dislike the show, and I’m not even as frustrated with it as a lot of other people are; it just seems like it’s always a relatively solid show that keeps reminding you how much better it could be.

This week’s episode was all about Juliet, which is fine by me. She’s the most interesting character they’ve got going now; again, unlike every other character in the series, she somehow gets more intriguing the more you find out about her history. We found out even more about her this episode, but they were all fairly insignificant details, and still nothing about the three year gap where she received her ninja kung fu training. And we still don’t know her real motivations. I was saying last week how cool it would be if she turned out to be a villain — this week’s non-twist wasn’t so much a shocker as it was coming to a fork in the plot and nudging things in one direction instead of the other. I’ve still got hope that we’ll find out more about why she’s doing what she’s doing, instead of discovering she’s just another Michael.

And again, Elizabeth Mitchell just does a great job with the part. She’s the only member of the cast these days (apart from Terry O’Quinn, I guess) who gives the impression that there’s really things going on inside her head, and she’s not just delivering lines. Her best scene was the showdown against Sayid and Sawyer. I read somewhere that it was completely implausible she could make them turn tail, but I totally bought it. It’s that look. That look of “I’m not angry, I’m just very, very disappointed in you.” That’s some black belt manipulation right there. And as she was walking away, she had the perfect expression of “holy shit I never expected that to work.”

Still, my mind began to wander. I kept thinking about how the show could be more interesting if they played around with the flashbacks, introducing an aspect of the unreliable narrator to them. Actually showed us how these events were remembered, instead of how they really happened. Maybe what Juliet remembers as being browbeaten by Ben into staying on the island, he remembers entirely differently. So you’re not just given a villain and This Week’s Shocking Twist^TM, but you have to interpret what happened for yourself.

But then, that’s the kind of thing you’re left to think about when your mind is wandering. And when you’re desperately forcing yourself not to think about inconsistencies. Like it’s still weird that they didn’t just move into the Others’ camp, but accepting that, why didn’t they at least take a shower first? Instead of walking through the jungle with caked-on mud and being delighted to find a stream to wash off in?

I’m glad that the episode ended as it did, because the idea that Juliet was given a complete run-down of Ethan’s entire plan, down to where he hid the medicine stash, and she still remembered every detail after this time, was straining credulity. (And I never notice that kind of thing.) As it turned out, that part ended up making sense, but in the Never-Ending Jenga Game that is Lost Episode Plausibility, the explanation of Claire’s abduction doesn’t make sense anymore. Even though it was a complete, exhaustive, plausible, and well-thought-out explanation, and it’s now been replaced with “we were careful to insert a magic radio frequency hemmoraghing device for just such an emergency.”

Speaking of which, I’m less convinced now that Ben & Juliet’s Scooby-Doo style exposition from a few episodes back was the clever self-referential comedy I’d thought it was at the time. It seems like all they do is have clandestine meetings together where they clumsily remind each other of what’s happening. “Boy, it sure was nice of your aunt to let us use her island for top-secret experiments in fertility and electromagnetism!” “You said it! I just hope we don’t run into a… sm-sm–sm—SMOKE MONSTER!”

Even if I weren’t too busy to ramble on at length about TV shows, there’s just not a lot to say about this week’s episode of “Lost.” Just look at the final score:
Pro

• About a minute of marginally interesting character development from Locke
• Cool, creepy scene with the smoke monster flashing itself at Juliet and Kate
• Girl-on-girl dislocated shoulder re-alignment

Con

• Boring, redundant flashback
• Painfully obvious and pointless B-story
• Main plot is culmination of an adventure that just fizzled out with no real development other than trading a castaway for an Other
• About a dozen character-motivation misfires or just plain plot holes. (Why can’t the smoke monster fly over the fence? Why choose living on a beach over living in the nice-but-boring Others’ camp? Why isn’t Sun pissed at Charlie instead of just Sawyer?)

The shows lately, if not all season, have just settled into a routine: mostly boring, pointless, but well-produced episodes, each with one or two germs of neat ideas that would be really cool if it all just could coalesce into something.

The House Next Door has a detailed review and recap, which describes that better than I could. Since the beginning, it’s seemed like Juliet is an interesting character, and it’s felt like they’re just almost on the cusp of having a really cool story there, but it hasn’t ever really come together for me. That blog post sums up exactly why the character is interesting, and why Elizabeth Mitchell is doing such a good job with her:

Part of the reason that Juliet has emerged as my favorite character on the show (apart from the school-boy crush I’ve developed on Elizabeth Mitchell) is how she comes across more menacing the more soccer-mom, faux-warm she is. She is essentially the opposite of Dickens’ character; we question her every motive out of conditioning and well-earned skepticism. Her Betty Crocker façade is the ultimate cruel joke not because of how easily she slips out of it (witness her lightning fast reflexes after Kate sneak attacks her) but how smoothly she transitions back into it (she seems legitimately bothered by the aforementioned altercation, offering up a hurt “I was just bringing you a sandwich” before stepping over the incapacitated Kate).

That’s exactly it. They’ve got the potential to make Juliet one of the most interesting villains in the history of TV. All the focus is on Ben as the master manipulator, and they’ve been building that since last season, but he’s still just a couple steps above a cliche. It’s so obvious that he’s manipulating people that even the Lost castaways — maybe the most willfully ignorant group of television characters outside of “Three’s Company” — can tell that he’s manipulating them.

Juliet’s manipulation is different, though, because it actually works. Not just on the characters, but on the audience. You can see her do freaky Jedi things like judo moves or waking up from a gas-induced knockout to grab onto a hand holding a knife over her, and still feel sympathy for her. And it’s the rare case where knowing more about a character actually makes her more mysterious — we’ve seen her secret origin flashback, so we know she at least started out as a mousy good guy. Which would make it all the more interesting if we see her become truly evil after three years on the island.

But since I don’t have much confidence in the series anymore, I’m convinced she’ll just be the fourth point of the Jack Love Rectangle. And Ben is our Hannibal Lecter-esque villain; interesting on some level, but completely obvious. What would really impress me is if “Lost” had been pointing big flashing arrows at Ben all along, when it turns out that Clarice Starling (Juliet, in this metaphor) is the real villain.

The planets must be aligning or something. I saw that two more of my favorite things are coming together: the RiffTrax guys released a track for the pilot episode of “Lost”.

I haven’t listened to it yet, but of course I bought it the second I saw it and realized what it was. This RiffTrax idea is getting better all the time. I can see how people who were into MST3K out of a love of bad old B-movies might be disappointed (but there’s always Film Crew Online if you want that). For me, I just like the “sitting in a room with a bunch of funny people cracking jokes” aspect. All of the RiffTrax have delivered on that.

It’s like having imaginary friends to watch “Lost” with me!

I can’t describe how much I liked this week’s episode of “Lost.” No exaggeration, it’s one of my favorite episodes of the entire series, and maybe even one of my favorite episodes of any television series. It’s like Darin Morgan “X-Files” good.

The reason I thought of Morgan is because “Exposé” does the same for “Lost” what Morgan’s episodes did for “The X-Files.” They’re darkly comic, they work on a bunch of different levels, and they make fun of the series and its format without being too heavy-handed or breaking out of the show’s mythology. Here’s some of the ways “Exposé” worked:

As its own story: The more cynical in the audience can object, but watching this show I lost track of how many times it surprised me; there were at least four twists in the first ten minutes alone. Every single reveal worked for me. Each one either genuinely surprised me, made me laugh (intentionally) at the implausibility, or just impressed me with how clever it was. Towards the end I, like I’m sure most of the audience, started to piece together what really happened, but there was still one last gruesome twist I hadn’t seen coming. And to go from the cameo at the beginning to the really creepy ending — that’s just plain good TV. And in just an hour, they had more character development than some of the regulars have after three seasons.

As part of the larger story: Sure, it started to drift into Zelig territory, seeing as how Nikki and Paolo were at even more of the major events of the island than Jack, Kate, or Sawyer. But it took a lot of balls to force them into so many places, and they all worked. I really couldn’t tell what was filmed new and what was taken from existing footage. No, there weren’t any huge revelations, but this series has had enough — what’s been lacking is fleshing out existing storylines and tying up loose ends. And all of them, from Juliet and Ben’s appearance, to the mention of Mr. Eko’s mysterious line after he encountered the monster, to Locke’s line about secrets, to Sawyer’s change of character, to Paolo and the toilet; just worked.

Did they have this planned from the first introduction of these characters? Hard to tell, but almost certainly not. Does it matter? Not one bit. In a way, it’s even more impressive that they had to work backwards and still managed to make everything fit together.

As commentary on the series: This was heavy on the self-referential humor, but never too heavy-handed. The comment about “you know what happens to guest stars” started it off, and it ended up being the most blatant one. (Well, except for the obvious joke of the whole episode, that they’re the characters nobody knows and nobody likes.) They poked fun at the implausibility of what happened to Boone, Locke’s nonsensical behavior, the reunion of dead characters, and Shannon’s over-the-top bitchiness at the beginning of the series.

If I remember correctly, Juliet reacted with disbelief when she heard about Ben’s “master plan.” That struck me as a great way to retroactively shoe-horn a “we meant to do that all along” rationalization for the convoluted plot of the second to third season, and at the same time poke fun at how convoluted it was. All with just one expression from Juliet.

As a reminder of “Lost”’s potential: The series has been so dry lately, it’s easy to just remember what happened in earlier episodes but forget why it seemed like such a big deal at the time. At the end of the pilot, the show had already introduced a horrible plane disaster, flashbacks, numbers stations, a monster, a burgeoning love story, a jungle, and hints at mysticism, all on top of the marooned-on-a-desert-island concept. And it seemed like it could go anywhere from that.

As the show’s progressed, it’s taken some pretty big risks more than a few times, but has also settled into a pattern and a formula. Even big plot-revealing episodes (or at least as close as we ever get on this series) are still mostly straightforward. This episode showed that the series can be formulaic, and still have as much potential as an anthology series. Really, what other series on TV can show a black comedy film noir set on a tropical island?

TVSquad forwarded along a New York Post story, which is pretty much completely unsubstantiated speculation quoting from an anonymous “tipster,” that the producers of “Battlestar Galactica” want to end the series after the fourth (next) season. This is similar to the claims the “Lost” guys have made that they’ve got an ending in sight and are figuring out how to bring the series to a close after “one or two” more seasons.

It’s a good idea in both cases, and I’m not saying that just because I really really want to see “Galactica 2009.” I can’t think of any series that maintained its quality after four seasons, and with high concept series with a definite premise (finding Earth, getting off the island), it just makes it all the more clear that you have to have an end in sight.

By all rights, the most recent “Lost” episode, “The Man From Tallahassee,” should have had me jumping up and down making awkward grunting sounds. It was exactly the kind of stuff I’ve been wanting to see in the series. Real answers to questions, including one that’s been around since episode 1. A flashback that mattered, and had a really shocking scene in it. Hints at something larger, with a mysterious power about the island. Strong performances all around. A big explosion.

And a sign that they knew what they were doing, and Locke’s actions a few episodes ago weren’t just unmotivated idiocy. He had a plan, and we’re only seeing now what his real motives were.

I read a review of the episode that complained this development just made it clearer that the writers are making it up as they go along, and now they’d written themselves and excuse to pull any plot development they wanted out of their asses. (Or their magic boxes, as the case may be).

I had the opposite reaction. I thought this was the first in a long while that really showed steps towards tying things together. Jack’s dad, Kate’s horse, Eko’s brother Yemi, and now Locke’s discovery — they’re all connected, and Ben has seen this kind of thing happening on the island and is trying to explain it. Not only were the characters brought back to focus with this episode, but the events were as well.

Still, it ended with my feeling pretty unimpressed. I’ve been saying for a while that the “feel” of the show is more important than the answers. That anything the writers could possibly come up with to explain everything is going to feel like a let-down, because the hints at greater mysteries are by definition more interesting than the explanations. Now I’m having to back up that claim, and it’s tough. Myst-like hatches full of antiquated video monitors and mail slots that lead to nowhere, and underground bunkers with secret UV messages and record collections and secret serums, are always going to be more interesting than bright yellow compounds with swingsets and pool rooms.

And they’re already getting a diminished return on investment with their shocking revelations. I can guarantee you that had Locke’s flashback shown in seasons one or two, it would’ve been horrifying and exciting. But last night, it was just a brief flash of interest, like any other instantly forgettable TV stunt. After another season of this, they’re going to have to bring out the big guns to be satisfyingly shocking and relevatory.

In preparation for next week’s “Battlestar Galactica” finale, and the long hiatus until the next season, I’ve been going back through and watching the DVDs, starting with the miniseries. I came to the show late, so I always had the impression that the series was much larger than what I was aware of. That some of the events of the series had more impact to those who’ve been watching all along, seeing more than just the glimpses shown in the “previously on…” bits.

I’ve been surprised by two things: First, that I’ve seen more of the series than I remembered. I’d somehow seen the entire miniseries and first several episodes, apparently, and there are just four or five from the second half of the first season that I’d missed.

Second, that they covered so much in the first three hours of the miniseries. I’d thought that they’ve been building layer on layer of intrigue over the past couple of years, but 90% of what’s going on now (minus New Caprica and the Occupation) was established at the beginning. That’s both good and bad — good that they have had solid ideas of the characters and the central drama since the beginning, bad that they’ve kind of been coasting on that for so long.

I think BSG would do well to have a clear ending in sight, explaining what really motivates the Cylons, what is this plan we hear about at the beginning of every episode, and perhaps most importantly, finally explaining exactly what the hell is going on with Baltar and his visions of Six. I don’t know if they could do all that in one season, but in the past they’ve shown they can. Whatever the case, a fifth season would most likely kill the show.

And I guess I’ve realized a third thing about “Battlestar”: the value of subtext. My memory of the series was that it was just overwhelmingly, unrelentingly dark and depressing. Watching the miniseries again now reminded me that it’s not, really; in retrospect, it’s even a little bit manipulative and melodramatic. Obviously, now I know what’s going to happen, so the surprise is gone.

But more than that, I’m watching to see specific plot developments instead of just the “feel” of the show. They communicate that feeling so well, without having to repeatedly state it directly. It makes the more recent episode seem all the more heavy-handed and deliberately obtuse by comparison. The best thing I can say about the series is that at least in the early days, it doesn’t overstate its message. During the miniseries, you’d get a line of dialogue like, “It’s the end of the world, Lee,” and that was enough. Lately, it’s been more “It’s the end of the world, and that is why we need to maintain strict demands on fuel production and remain anti-labor in spite of our push for democracy, and it is this kind of thing that shows what a gray moral area we now live in.”

Last night ABC aired a new episode of their series “Lost.” Apparently it’s about a bunch of people marooned on an island or something. Watching it, I was reminded of a series that ran two years ago, also coincidentally called “Lost.”

In last night’s episode, though, everyone was acting strangely out of character. Not five minutes in, and Locke is actually chastising someone else for not exchanging information. Later, Kate asks Rousseau a question about something that happened very recently, and, amazingly, she got a complete answer. People made a plan to do something, told each other about the plan, and then actually accomplished it. Not once, but twice!

Charlie and Desmond were, of course, completely annoyingly evasive throughout most of the episode, but that’s to be expected, since Desmond’s still relatively new and Charlie’s still relatively a total dick. But by the end, Claire reveals, “Desmond told me everything.”

The flashback wasn’t just repetition of stuff we already knew (everyone suspected Claire’s parentage, but it wasn’t confirmed), but real character-building stuff that resonated with the theme of the episode; it didn’t just repeat the theme of the episode outright. Nice to see an episode say, “Claire is consumed with guilt and self-doubt, and because of frequent abandonment, has trouble trusting people,” without having Claire say, “I’m consumed with guilt and self-doubt. And also, because of frequent abandonment, I have trouble trusting people!”

All that, some duplicitous behavior on the part of Locke, a pretty creepy death scene (with an explanation!), and a little clever twist of intrigue at the end!

And did you notice how I’m not still bitching and moaning about their quickly killing off a mysterious character that showed so much promise from a Boba Fett-style fleeting glimpse on a security monitor several episodes ago? See, “Lost” guys, it’s easy! Just keep making solid episodes where stuff actually happens — they don’t all have to be show-stoppers — and a lot of your whiny fanbase will stop complaining about all the loose ends and details, and just get back into the action. We’re easily placated by competence.

Do the “Lost” guys seriously expect anyone to still believe they’re not making it up as they go along?

I feel like a joiner, seeing as how it’s fashionable now to rag on “Lost,” but there’s just so much material there. They try stunt casting, and the best they can dig up is Cheech. Their heart-warming what-it-means-to-be-alive episode just covered old material and worse, dragged out one clunky in-joke after the next like a late-series episode of “Moonlighting.”

But this week’s episode “Enter 77″ was just plain annoying to those of us who’ve been fans of the series. Everybody acted like a caricature of himself. Sayid is haunted by his past as a torturer, and resolves never to do it again. Even though he’s already come to the island, tortured somebody, and started wandering out of remorse — he’s not going to do it again, starting now.

And Locke, who used to be an interesting, endearing character, so stubborn in his need for an order to the universe that his faith in mundane routine set up questions about the nature of what it means to be human — now, he’s a videogame-addicted monkey who just can’t resist pushing buttons. Even when he’s supposed to be guarding a dangerous prisoner who’s already shot one of the group.

And those Dharma Initiative guys love to code up voice-mail systems for communications networks and urgent fail-safes against an attack, that only become available after you defeat a “grandmaster-level” chess program. (But considering that Locke beat the thing twice in the time it took Sayid and Kate to search the basement of a small farmhouse, maybe that’s not much of an issue).

But worst is the way they’re handling the new characters. Is this the way they’re going to tie up all the loose ends they’ve left dangling? By killing them, blowing them up, or pretending they didn’t happen? Creepy mysterious eye-patch guy looking into a security camera from a so-far-unseen hidden post with lots more tantalizing secrets for the castaways? Let’s go blow the place up without getting a good look, and then (from the looks of the previews) get rid of the guy two episodes later.

The mysterious woman who was set up to be the mastermind of The Others, conducting experiments on telekinetic Walt and running a mysterious primitive camp at the edge of the island? Give her one line of intelligible dialogue, then shoot her dead.

Not that anybody on this show would ever take a minute to actually read the Dharma Initiative handbooks they found — not when it makes so much more sense to just ask recalcitrant people and get inscrutable half-answers — but even if they wanted to read them, they’re all blown up now. It’s just as well; if the rest of the show is any indication, the books probably just contained an index of questions that led to blank pages.

And for yet another week, “Heroes,” the show it physically pains me to like, came up with a winner. How did things get to this state? I’ve got a theory, but it’s not a happy one.

What really got me into “Lost” at first was the notion that it was combining the best of “low art” and literature. It was a mash-up of philosophy and conspiracy theories, comic books and Kipling. It was evidence you could take all the twists and turns and explosions of an exciting TV series and present them in a way that didn’t make you feel as if you’d gotten stupider just by having watched. They frequently mentioned their admiration for Stephen King, and it was a good fit, I thought. He’s proudly populist, referencing rock songs in his novels, giving folklore an urban update and a literary thrust (e.g. haunted houses + alcoholism, witches + outcast teens). And with “Lost,” I was so happy to have numbers stations and polar bears and psychics all mixing together with free will and the question of faith versus science that I was confident something big and meaningful was always just over the horizon.

For all its bluster and pomposity, “Heroes” doesn’t have those pretensions. There are no lofty goals there. They’ll say that it’s all about character and ordinary people in extraordinary situations, but it’s not really. It’s pure plot, with a healthy dose of action and gore and effects, and just enough soap opera to keep you engrossed. It’s all formula. And it’s all working, possibly because it doesn’t aim higher.

You don’t think about the plot holes, or people acting out of character, or weird gaps in time and space, because the show doesn’t ask you to think. I’ve no doubt that there are fansites and wikis out there poring over the details in the show, looking for hidden meanings and symbols and easter eggs, but it’s all overkill. Everything is right there on the screen, which is where it should be. And the biggest difference is that I really believe them when they say that they’ve planned out the entire first season, and they know exactly where it’s headed.

TVSquad.com has a link to an interview with Damon Lindelof about the upcoming season conclusion of “Lost.” I agree with the TV Squad guy — dude could stand to shut up for a while and lessen the backlash.

The part of the interview that annoyed me the most was at the end:

But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch “Twin Peaks”? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch “Moonlighting”? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch “Lost” will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.

One of the reasons it bugs me is because I used to buy that schtick — hip young guy who loves TV, not just makes TV; can combine high culture and pop culture; and in touch with what fans are saying and what they want. That was before I read about a dozen of these types of interviews (and that’s only a fraction of what’s been published), and they’re all the same — unbelievably cool things are coming up in the series, so just wait; “Twin Peaks” sure fizzled out, huh?; and we want the show to be cool, but it’s all Disney’s fault.

This is going to make me sound like a Disney apologist, but I’m speaking more as a fan of the show teetering on the brink of becoming a former fan. But I’d bet one 30-second block of ad revenue that Disney just wants to make money off the show, they don’t care how it’s done. As long as the series doesn’t full-stop end, I bet anything would be fair game.

And mentioning “Moonlighting” and “Twin Peaks” is just weak sauce. What killed “Twin Peaks” wasn’t revealing who killed Laura Palmer; what killed it was having nothing planned for after the reveal. They’d put all their effort into one mystery, and didn’t start with the larger-scale Black Lodge stuff until it was already too late. “Lost” doesn’t have that problem; if anything, they’ve got the opposite. It’s all Black Lodge stuff, and they keep throwing more into the mix.

They could bring any of the big mysteries to a conclusion and keep the series going. They could bring all of them to a conclusion and — hey, here’s a thought — invent new ones. Hell, they’ve already got enough threads going; if they just devoted two episodes each to resolving every single one of the open stories, that’s at least two seasons’ worth right there.

And what about the stuff that’s been hinted at but never evolved to full-blown mystery? The Black Rock ship that’s over 100 years old — why not do a half-season of that crew and their flashbacks? I’d watch.

As for “Moonlighting,” it was on the decline a long time before they got the two leads together. Because they took a prize-winning formula from the start of the series and killed it by doing the same thing over and over again. They put so much effort into one gimmick (will they ever get together?) and didn’t have anything left over.

Sounds like “Lost” is going to waste its dozen interesting characters and intriguing premises with pointless, never-resolved subplots and more obfuscation. Look forward to the Shakespeare episode, all-musical episode, and black-and-white episode to come soon.