Category: Lost

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.
Continue reading “Right On”

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.”

Okay, “Lost,” I can see how watching a bunch of French-speaking scientists slowly going mad and shooting each other might not be the gripping, edge-of-your-seat drama that I’d been imagining all this time. Thanks for letting me discover that for myself, though, and showing us only the cool parts.

For at least the first 20 minutes or so of this week’s episode (“This Place is Death”), I was back to loving “Lost” at near-they-just-opened-the-hatch levels. Not only was there pay-off on the long-awaited “So whatever happened with Rousseau, anyhow?” question, but it involved dismemberment! Considering how I’ve stuck with “Heroes” solely because of the promise of scenes like the one where the cheerleader wakes up in mid-autopsy, you might think that all it takes is some TV-level gore to keep me interested in a series.

And you’d be right. But this episode, if not this whole season, has been like finally cresting the lift hill of a roller coaster that I’ve been on for three years now. Spoilers start now!
Continue reading “This place is AWESOME”

After watching this week’s episode of “Lost” (called “Jughead”), I think I’ve finally figured out the secret of the island: it loves killing unnamed people. If I were a Flight 815 survivor at this point, I’d be going around to everyone who would listen, introducing myself and giving a little bit of my backstory. And then, most likely, stepping on a land mine.

I was really impressed; I thought this was just a great, solid episode. It wasn’t full-to-bursting with shocking revelations, but it broke two cardinal rules of “Lost:”

1. Stuff happens.
2. That stuff is worked into the story.

Usually, reveals in “Lost” consist of 30 minutes or so of people running purposelessly around the jungle and then everything stops and the music crescendos and then there’s The Big Reveal suddenly followed by a bunch of violins then a cut to black with that sound effect like a bookcase falling over at the end of a long concert hall.

But this one found a way to tell an episode-long story, and mention big stuff throughout, almost casually. Big stuff like (spoilers):
Continue reading “Fat Man and Little Boy and Jughead”

The “Lost” season 5 premiered with a two-parter, “Because You Left,” and “The Lie.” You can tell that they’ve finally mastered the “Lost” formula because they aired two full hours jam-packed with over a dozen characters, eight or nine locations all over the world, multiple flashbacks, a genuinely surprising reveal of a familiar character, multiple shoot-outs and double-crosses, and at least three extremely cool action sequences (including flaming arrows!), and still nothing happened.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to point out that they’ve decided to go all-in with the time travel angle, especially since Desmond’s back-story and the Dharma Initiative orientation movie for “The Orchid” pretty much said it outright. I am extremely disappointed, though, that they didn’t include an appearance by Bubblegum Tate or any of the other Space Globetrotters.

I guess it’s unfair to say that “nothing happened,” since they at least laid the groundwork for answering a lot of questions, without actually answering those questions. And those questions, as far as I can make out (including spoilers, so don’t read the rest until you’ve seen the episodes), are:
Continue reading “Density Calls”

Okay, the “Lost” people are totally making this stuff up as they go along.

At least, I hope they are, because if the season finale of season 4 really is what they’ve had planned since the end of season 3, then they’ve been yanking our chains for a year.

It’s not that it was bad; it’s just that the story started off so strong, and it hinted at all kinds of fantastic twists and turns that were going to be coming. And then it ended with pretty much the most obvious resolution to every new plot point that was introduced. It felt so predictable that I don’t want to believe that was what they predicted; I want to believe that they had more in mind, and then fell back on plan B.

What I like best about episodic television is those moments when it seems like the writers have painted themselves into a corner. And then right as you’re about to give up on them, you turn around and see that not only have they painted the entire room, they’re pointing at the elephant in the center of the room and saying, “What, you didn’t notice that before? It’s been there the whole time.” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was best at this; there were several times I’d thought the series was in a nosedive, and not only did they manage to pull up in time, they started doing loop-de-loops. (If that’s too many metaphors for one paragraph, I’m talking about the bit where they turned the awful “Initiative” storyline into a Frankenstein’s monster story with one really awesome and unexpected scene).

Season 4 of “Lost” started out so well, it was promising even more than the beginning of season 2. And the season’s been solid overall. It’s just that all they did was gracefully close up most of the loose ends and set up the next batch of episodes. They didn’t do all that and drop a bombshell on us.

(And the rest is spoilers for the season finale and the season in general).

Continue reading “Tales of the Expected”

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.

Most of the people who wander into this blog are looking for one thing: pictures of the star of Resident Evil without any clothes on. But the ones who don’t get here via misguided Google searches usually mention the “Lost” recaps. I missed last week’s because I’ve been commuting between Strong Badia and Liberty City.

It’s just as well, since last week’s episode, “Something Nice Back Home,” was kind of dull. There are still spoilers though: Jack had his appendix taken out, Claire revealed who her dad was (to the audience, who’d already figured it out anyway), and… Baltar hung out with a bunch of horny women? I can’t remember. Something about Jack being haunted and getting engaged to Kate in the future, too.

This week’s episode, “Cabin Fever,” made up for it by being double plus cool. I started counting “holy crap!” moments, where I actually said, out loud, watching alone in my apartment, “No other show would do something like that.” There was only one of those, but plenty of times I was reminded how cool this show is. Here’s a list!

• Seeing creepy immortal guys following Locke around his entire, 50s-cliched life.
• It made me feel mysteriously smart, somehow, when I was able to predict that Locke would pick the vial of salt (sand?), the compass, and the knife before he did it. And that the knife would be the wrong choice.
• I liked young Locke repeating the old Locke’s “Don’t ever tell me what I can’t do” mantra. I didn’t like it so much that this guy has had the most miserable life imaginable, but it does kind of make you root for his being happy on the island for once.
• Special-ops guy tries to shoot Michael and fails; I’d already forgotten that the island was keeping him alive.
• I was surprised to see the doctor up and about on the ship, since I mis-remembered him already getting snuffed in an earlier episode. It was kind of perfunctory how they closed off that time loop real quick — special-ops guy just does not understand the word “hostage” — but I still appreciate the effort.
• “Lost” has the coolest dream sequences; Locke’s dream about Horace Mathematician is my favorite since Hurley’s dream inside the bunker where Jin showed up speaking English.
• I wasn’t expecting to see Jack’s dad in the cabin, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to see Hot Claire lounging there, either. I’m still hoping that there’s some point to that, and it wasn’t just there for shock value.
• Some of this feels like moving pieces around on a game board and having to skip a few moves — what was the point of Desmond just sitting there and watching the climax on the boat take place?
• In case anybody reading this has access to the writers’ room, could you sneak an index card that says “DANIELLE’S BACK STORY” up on the board somewhere? It shouldn’t be a problem to sneak some explanation in the show, since they’ve got no problem making dead people main characters.

I’ve been plenty frustrated with the series, but every once in a while you’ve got to take a step back and marvel at how such a weird show got to be such a huge phenomenon. Larry mentioned in a comment that they “lied” about its not being a sci-fi show, but really, it’s not. It’s just a conglomeration of pop culture detritus, and sci-fi is just ingrained in pop culture at this point. Treating it as a separate genre just seems kind of weird and dated now; when everybody has a communicator and a robot that’ll vacuum your house, and time travel is a concept that most people can grasp with no problem, what’s to be gained by trying to confine this stuff to some nerdy ghetto?

I’m always hearing people (sometimes it’s me) complaining about a TV or comic series, saying, “They’re making it up as they go along!” Most of the time, I don’t see the big deal about that — they don’t have everything planned out? Cool! It means they’re “nimble,” right? But sometimes it gets awkward.

This week’s episode of “Lost” was called “The Shape of Things to Come,” and it felt like they had to saw a few of the rough edges off before they could get everything to fit with The Shape of Things That Have Been Coming So Far. There was a lot of awesome stuff going on, and the episode itself had a solid story. But it also felt like they had to prune out a few characters instead of following through on them, and that they suddenly decided which of the two dozen storylines they were going to run with.

Everything else is a spoiler:

Continue reading “Not without my daught… well, okay then.”

This week’s episode of “Lost” was called “Meet Kevin Johnson.” It ended on a soap opera-like cliffhanger, with Sayid making a dramatic announcement and the camera lingering on other characters giving meaningful looks at each other. And then another cliffhanger with gunplay. Which won’t be resolved until late April.

But “Battlestar Galactica” starts back up real soon to hold us over! And that kind of sums up the give and take with this episode. For every scene that delivers a “This is totally the best show on television” moment, you have to take another that makes you ask, “Whuh?” (And for every post on here about “Lost,” you have to take spoilers).

For instance:

• Michael, like everybody who watches “Lost,” hates Michael, and he tries to kill himself!
• …but fails every time, because the Island has some kind of control over him, even in Manhattan.
• Driving a car off a pier? no into a dumpster while more hatch-like music is playing on the radio!
• …and a really shockingly creepy comeback from Libby!
• …but she got like 30 seconds total screen time in this episode, which seems like a waste for flying her out to Hawaii and everything. Plus there’s still no sign of getting more of her back-story with Hurley in the institution.
• …also, Michael recovered from his suicide attempt within less than a week storytime, because of the above-mentioned Island powers..
• Big Other Tom got officially outed, posthumously, clarifying that “You’re not my type” comment to Kate in season 3 that had some people on the internet speculating he was an alien or something!
• …and they handled that pretty well, actually. It was just another aspect of his character, and they had him back to fist fights and telling Michael to “man up” instead of mincing around or becoming magically extra-sensitive or something.
• A new Dharma location, with an appropriately creepy name and a cool Lord of the Rings-esque map and the location of Ben’s secret forces!
• …leading to a betrayal that I saw coming from the first scene of the episode, when they showed Ben looking warily at the boyfriend with his arm around Alex’s waist.
• An opening scene of like 10 minutes of a bunch of characters standing around telling each other “no more secrets” and explaining in detail everything that’s going on and everyone’s secret agenda!
• …which was jaw-dropping only because this is “Lost.” On any other show, it would’ve been annoyingly clunky exposition.

But really, on the whole I was more impressed with this episode than annoyed by it. All of the episodes this season have been surprisingly solid, and this one had moments (especially when Libby was involved) that surprised me more than anything since the beginning few hatch-centric episodes of season 2.

I’d been hoping for no more than that the series would find its feet again, just so that it could limp to some sort of resolution for the various storylines, instead of imploding into an incomprehensible mess like “The X-Files” did. But this season has exceeded all my expectations, and it’s really delivering. Maybe not delivering on the answers, so much, but delivering on the potential of the premise.

The only question I remember being raised here: We saw two characters getting shot, one we don’t care about at all and one we kind of almost care about. Did they both die? And I guess a secondary question: Could they be setting it up for Alex to lead a counter-offensive against Ben and/or Jacob?

And what is the deal with Starbuck, anyway?