Addicted to Lost

s6e01: LA X

2010-02-03T23:13:00.003-06:00

I'm not going to attempt to summarize this entire episode... so let's just talk about some things.

1. It seems like the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. The talk since the finale was, did the bomb work - leading the characters to avoid the crash - or did it not work, killing everyone (hence Richard's claim to have "watched them die" in one of the final episodes of season 5). As it happens, this wasn't just having your cake and eating it too - this was like eating your cake twice. While it's not like I expected them to kill everyone off, the answer turns out to be, apparently, "Parallel timelines." In one, the plane lands safely; in the other, the survivors get bounced back to 2007. This seems odd. I mean, either the plan worked or it didn't, right? How can both things have happened? (I'm dubbing this "Schrödinger's Hatch.")

I suppose it depends on how you view time. If we're assuming that things that have already happened cannot be erased, the Losties in 1977 can't simply vanish. Their change to the timeline by blowing up the energy pocket ripples forward, creating an alternate 2004 where the plane doesn't crash... but at the same time, the existing timeline continues to exist, and they end up back in 2007 because in that timeline, the detonation also initiated a time skip. I guess.

2. Following up on that, what are we in for this year as regards the two timelines? Should we expect them to meet? What kind of horrible paradoxes would result if they ever did? Is there actually a possibility that they might not meet? (Remember, the producers have said that the rest of the series will be a lot more character-driven along the lines of season one - and given how much 2007 island plot there still seems to be to resolve, it seems like the best way to get that is by tracking the non-crash 2004 characters back into their real lives, as we've clearly started to do.) Surely they couldn't get away with the two never meeting.

3. Along those lines: Desmond on the plane with Jack. This isn't impossible in a timeline where the Swan's energy pocket was destroyed in 1977 - if Desmond never crashes his boat on the island in 2001 or so, by 2004 he could just as easily be flying from Sydney to LA as anywhere else. However, Desmond seems just a little too wise (although he's good at covering it), and his sudden appearance and subsequent vanishing act seem a little too convenient. Desmond's certainly traveled through time before, and he's got a history with Faraday's mother, who knows more than a little about the subject herself.

4. It certainly looks like the 2007 plot will be "battle for the island" or perhaps more specifically "battle for the soul of the island." But when Esau, or whatever you want to call him, says that he wants to go home... well, what does that mean? What's home for a guy who's hundreds if not thousands of years old and changes into a smoke monster when he gets upset?

Plenty more to talk about as the season continues, I'm sure.

s5e15: Follow the Leader

2009-05-06T20:11:00.002-05:00

Previously on the Lost I didn't recap (because I didn't see it until Saturday due to school commitments): Faraday brings us back to the trend of flashback = dead. We learn that Widmore was his father (heavily foreshadowed before the late-episode reveal) and that his mother encouraged him to return to the island knowing full well that she would end up shooting him in the past. Before that, Faraday tells Jack and Kate that he thinks he can stop 815 from ever crashing by detonating Jughead to nullify the energy that Dharma is going to build the Swan station on top of, and Radzinsky has Sawyer in a tight spot after he finds Phil tied up in the closet. I liked that episode but I'm pretty sure I just covered everything important in it. Moving on!

Why, exactly, was Faraday so reckless with the gun? Anyway, he gets shot again, and then a couple Hostiles (the second of whom is Widmore) go all Planet of the Apes on Jack. Meanwhile, Eloise reads the inscription in Faraday's journal (which she gave him, decades later) and then says that Jack and Kate should be brought to their tent. Widmore can't figure out why Dharma has declared war. Eloise says these people aren't from Dharma. It's starting to fall into place for her, clearly.

Back to now-times. The non-aged Richard is greeted by Locke with a boar. Locke says he'll tell Richard where he's been "on the way." Richard notes that Locke seems different. "I have a purpose now," Locke says. Richard spots Ben and Sun trailing in and asks what Ben is doing here. Ben talks to Sun about Richard's long-term "advisor" job. Sun runs up and asks Richard if he was around in 1977, and if he remembers the Losties in the photo. Richard says that he was around and remembers meeting them very clearly, because "I watched them all die." Uh-oh.

Sun asks if Locke thinks it's true. "I don't think we went through all this for nothing," Locke says. He invites Ben on the trek with Richard. Ben asks if Locke is afraid that he'll "stage a coup." Locke says he's not afraid of anything Ben can do anymore. Ben says he'd love to come with in that case. Locke promises Sun that if any way can be found to save the Losties, he'll find it. Back in 1977, Jack and Kate get tied up and worked over by the Hostiles. Jack says to Kate that if they can do what Faraday said, everyone would be alive again, and "all the misery" is erased. Kate is a bit offended at the idea that it was "all misery." "Enough of it was," Jack says. Eloise comes in and asks why Faraday wanted the bomb. Jack says she wouldn't believe him. Eloise tells Jack about her meeting with Faraday in 1954 and that she just shot him and learned he was her son. "Explain to me, and you have my word I will believe you," she says. Jack says that if they do what's in the journal, "none of this will have happened." Complicating factor! The bomb is buried under Dharmaville.

Speaking of which, Sawyer's in big trouble. Radzinsky threatens him with death if he doesn't tell where Kate was going. Phil thinks he can get Sawyer to talk by punching Juliet. (Nice.) Somehow some Dharma guy quickly figures out to check the last sub manifest and realizes that Jack, Kate and Hurley were suspicious last-minute additions. Hurley is in the kitchen trying to stockpile food, then heads into the jungle. Dr. Chang sees him. Hurley meets up with Miles and Jin, and Dr. Chang catches up with them. He asks Miles if they're from the future. Hurley denies it, leading a delightful exchange in which Hurley can't come up with a plausible birth date or name the current US president, and then has to admit that he's from the future. Miles admits to being Dr. Chang's son, but no time for a catch - Faraday said to evacuate, so evacuate they shall. Unfortunately the rest of Faraday's plan will be tougher to implement since he's dead. Widmore looks at his face and wonders why he seems familiar. Eloise tells Richard to come with her and informs Widmore that she's taking Jack and Kate to the bomb. Jack asks who Widmore is to enable Richard to establish the Wid-Hawk ship. Back to 2007! 2007 Richard asks what happened to Locke and where he's been. Locke says he's about to find out and then asks to see Jacob. "That's not how it works," Ben says. Locke asks Richard if seeing Jacob will be a problem. Richard hems and haws a little but caves after Locke pulls rank. Locke says that they're almost to the plane. "What plane?" Ben asks.

It turns out that they're headed not for some big jetliner but to the Beechcraft that Yemi crashed in. Locke tells Richard what to say to time-traveling Locke, who we then see stumbling out of the jungle. "Who is that man, John?" Ben asks. "Me," Locke says. After the break, we get a repeat of the scene from earlier in the year with Richard helping Locke. Meanwhile, Locke and Ben look on. Ben asks the obvious question - how did Locke know when to be there? "The island told me," Locke says. He taunts Ben a bit about never being told things, and Ben taunts back, saying that it hasn't told him where Jacob is. Locke asks Ben if he's ever seen Jacob. Ben has no answer. Time-traveling Locke vanishes. (Quick aside: didn't the writers say "no paradoxes?" This is pretty darn close to one, if it isn't outright - Locke only knows what to do in the past because he told Richard to tell it to him in the future. It's a loop. Might be a problem unless there's some excuse for it... but I have no idea what that would be.) Richard comes back and says time-traveling Locke seemed convinced, especially about having to die; Richard says he's glad that didn't have to happen. Locke says that it did. Richard seems as shocked as anyone.

Dr. Chang wants to evacuate, but stumbles into Radzinsky's torture chamber. Radzinsky, mad with power, says that drilling at the Swan will go ahead as scheduled and that Horace isn't in charge anymore. Sawyer strikes a deal - put the women and children on the sub, and if Sawyer and Juliet get to go too, he'll tell them everything. Radzinsky asks Sawyer to draw him a map of exactly where the Hostiles are, and Michael Giacchino reminds us that "map" is a huge, huge callback clue. Meanwhile, Eloise reveals that the tunnels leading to the bomb require an underwater trip. Kate wants to go back and find the others, and asks Jack what he's doing aside from getting everyone killed. She makes to leave, but the Hostiles won't let her until Deus ex Sayid kills the one with a gun.

Jack fills Sayid in on the plan. Sayid says it won't matter because he already killed Ben and it made no difference. Kate informs him that he didn't exactly kill Ben. Sayid asks why they took him to the Hostiles to be saved. Kate asks when shooting kids and setting off bombs became okay. Jack sounds very Locke-ian when he says that the reason the three of them were pulled off the plane into 1977 was to change things. Kate says that if he's wrong, everyone dies. Jack says he's not wrong. Kate says he sounds like Locke and goes off to find the rest of the Losties, "because if I can't stop you, maybe they can."

The other Losties are watching Dr. Chang yell at his wife to make her leave, which Miles unfortunately has to witness. Then they see Sawyer and Juliet head for the sub. Hurley says Sawyer always has a plan. His plan appears to involve buying Microsoft. Sawyer says he should have listened to Juliet and gotten on the sub three years ago. Juliet asks why he talked her out of it. Sawyer just looks at her. Juliet gets into the sub; Sawyer turns and looks at the island. You think he'll miss something, but he just says "Good riddance" and heads below. Elsewhere, Jack follows Richard into the tunnel underwater, and when he comes up... he's in the Temple. Eloise and Sayid follow. Sayid seems eager either to be saved or to be "put out of [his] misery." "Let's get started," Eloise says.

Back in 2007, Locke returns to camp with Richard and Ben. Locke wants to go to Jacob right away (which Richard doesn't like) and also wants to talk to everyone there. He tells them that the entire group is going to see Jacob. Richard tells Ben that he's starting to think Locke is going to be trouble. "Why do you think I tried to kill him?" Ben asks.

Okay, time to set up the finale! Sawyer says they're free once the sub gets to where it's going. They exchange I love yous. Then... Kate gets dumped onto the sub! You didn't think this triangle would be resolved that easily, did you? Juliet looks unhappy. The CGI sub heads out to sea. Back at the Temple, Sayid asks Jack if he trusts Eloise, that the bomb might be to annihilate Dharma. It's occurred to Jack, but he trusts her because she's the one who helps them get back. Sayid isn't sure that makes her trustworthy. We come to the bomb, and everyone stares at it. "Well!" says Eloise. "Now what?" Back in 2007, it's time for yet another march, as the Others head for Jacob. Ben tells Locke that Richard isn't sure about the plan. Locke reveals to Ben that he isn't actually interested in reuniting the Losties; he's going to Jacob because he wants to kill him. Ben stares for a long, long time. I really expected a tiny "What?" right before the cut to black.

Next! Sawyer and Juliet and Kate get the sub turned around or something, and try to stop Jack. Some stuff in 2007 happens, including Frank asking "What's in the box?" (Frank is with Bram's group, so who knows what we might learn there.) Jack shoots up Dharmaville. Sawyer gets called out for looking at Kate but swears he's with Juliet. And more! Looks exciting.

s5e13: Some Like It Hoth

2009-04-15T19:56:00.002-05:00

Kid Miles starts us off, getting a vision of a dead body at an apartment complex his mother is trying to move into. Presumably this is when he discovers his gift for talking to (or at least hearing) dead people. Then it's back to the island, where Sawyer tells Miles to erase some security tapes so no one knows that he and Kate took Ben to the Others. Miles is about to do that, but then Horace comes in and tells Miles to take a package to Radzinsky, who pops out of the forest with a gun as Miles drives up. The "exchange" is for a dead Dharmite, who "accidentally" got shot. Miles isn't supposed to ask any questions, but hey, would anyone mind if he... asked the dead guy?

Teenage punk Miles! Hilarious. He visits his dying mother, looking for answers about his "gift." He also wants to know who his father is. His mother tells him that his father kicked them out when he was a baby, and has been dead for a long time. Miles asks where the body is, and his mother tells him it's "somewhere you can never go." Back on the island, Miles isn't enthused that he has to take the body to Dr. Chang at the Orchid. (I wonder why not.) Hurley gets in on the ride over. Then it's over to Juliet and Kate, who discuss handing young Ben over - then Roger bursts in with the medical supplies. Did they think it was going to take him like, a week to get them? Juliet acts like she walked away for ten minutes and Ben was gone, so Roger runs off to security. "Here we go," Juliet says.

Miles and Hurley drive through the jungle, with Hurley writing something "personal." He asks how to spell "bounty hunter," and the title of the episode is "Some Like It Hoth." Is he trying to write Star Wars before George Lucas can? Since it's already 1977, I think that ship has sailed. I guess maybe he's just trying to write Empire. Hurley asks Miles if he cut one and won't let the smell issue drop, so he makes Miles pull over to check on the food he brought. But, uh, it's the dead body. Miles explains that the guy had a filling pulled out of his tooth and yanked through his brain, killing him (so it wasn't actually a bullet hole). Hurley notes that Miles couldn't possibly know all this unless he could talk to dead people, then tells Miles that it's okay, because he can also do that.

Back to the past, where Miles is now working his talking-to-dead-people business. It's a high school kid killed in a car accident, but unfortunately he was cremated, so Miles says it will cost extra. Then he does a little séance thing. Fake? Maybe, but the dad got he wanted, so he doesn't follow up. Out front of the house, Miles is met by Naomi, who mentions a job offer. Miles checks her out none too subtly as she walks away - good character continuity, since he called her hot in one of his first episodes. And then back to the island, where Roger is getting drunk on Dharma beer. Kate approaches and says she thinks everything will work out, but apparently is a little too convincing about it because Roger starts asking if she knows what happened. She insists that she doesn't, so Roger flips back into full-on douchebag mode and tells her to mind her own business.

Miles and Hurley debate the intricacies of the "power" that each has regarding talking to dead people. Miles describes his gift as just a "sense" of who the person was and what they knew before they died, not a conversation with a ghost as Hurley describes. Then they arrive at the Orchid, which is still being built. Hurley intelligently reveals that he knows about the body, and Dr. Chang threatens him with polar bear poop duty if he can't keep his yap shut. "Dude, that guy's a total douche," Hurley says. "That douche is my dad," Miles says, confirming what everyone suspected for like, a year now.

Naomi takes Miles to a restaurant, but it's not for food - there's a dead body there that will serve as his "audition." Miles says this isn't really his thing, but Naomi flips him a wad of cash that says otherwise. Miles senses that the guy's name is Felix, and that he was assigned to deliver a bunch of photos of empty graves to a guy named Widmore. He also senses that there was a purchase order for an old airplane. Naomi asks Miles to join her expedition to an island, where there is a man who killed a lot of people, and those people will hopefully be able to provide his whereabouts. Miles says that sounds really safe, but he'll pass. Naomi offers $1.6 million. "When do we leave?" Miles asks. Presumably this explains why Miles demanded exactly $3.2 million from Ben. Also, Widmore faked the plane crash, apparently.

Back to the island. Miles doesn't want to talk about Dr. Chang being his dad. Hurley asks how long he knew. Miles says it was on the third day, when his mother got in line behind him in the cafeteria. Dr. Chang comes out and asks to be taken to Radzinsky. "What happened to the body?" Miles asks. "What body?" Dr. Chang says. Over to Jack cleaning a classroom; Roger huffs in and notes that it's on his rounds. (No, I want to clean the dirty schoolroom!) Jack says he figured Roger would want time off. Roger says he has nothing better to do, then kicks Jack's water bucket to the door. Very protective. Roger tells Jack that Kate has a "weird thing" for Ben, and that he thinks she was involved in his disappearance. Jack says that Roger is drunk and not thinking straight, and that Kate would never do anything to hurt Ben. "Sure," Roger says, and leaves.

Hurley, stupidly, starts a conversation with Dr. Chang in the car. When Dr. Chang reveals that his son's name is Miles, Hurley says, "Small world!" Then he keeps doing a cat's-in-the-cradle thing which gets really annoying after the second iteration. Fortunately, we arrive at the Swan. Hurley happens to see them building the hatch and putting the serial number - 4 8 15 16 23 42 - on. When the last number is smudged and the guy can't read it for a second, Hurley mumbles it to himself. Miles asks how he knew that. "They're building our hatch," Hurley says. "What hatch?" Miles asks. "The one that crashed our plane," Hurley replies.

Miles is walking down the street when he's pulled into a van. A guy in it - who I recognize after a second as the guy with Ilana when she hit Frank with the butt of her rifle last week - tells Miles he wants to talk him out of working for Widmore. Miles doesn't know who that is, and the guy (Bram?) tells him that he's the one who chartered the boat Miles will be on. "Do you know what lies in the shadow of the statue?" Bram asks. Miles doesn't. "Then you're not ready to go to that island," Bram says. But if Miles goes with them, he'll learn the answers to the questions he's had all his life. Miles says he's more interested in money at this point, and that he'll want double (there you go) not to go. The van pulls over and tosses him out. "You're playing for the wrong team," Bram says. When Miles asks what team Bram is on, he replies, "The one that's gonna win."

Back on the island, Hurley tells Miles what the Swan is going to look like when it grows up. Then he keeps going on about Miles' dad, and suggests that maybe Miles could change his own diapers. Miles stops the van short and yells at Hurley that he doesn't want to know his dad better, because his dad never cared about him and nothing he can do will change that, and for that matter, his dad is dead. Hurley notes that he's not dead; they just dropped him off. Miles grabs Hurley's notebook to get into his business. He reads from Hurley's book and yes, Hurley is trying to write The Empire Strikes Back. He plans to send it to George Lucas with "a couple improvements." Miles says that's the stupidest thing he's ever heard. "At least I'm not scared to talk to my own dad," Hurley says.

Sawyer comes back to find Jack and Juliet talking. Jack tells Sawyer that Roger thinks Kate was involved in Ben's disappearance. It doesn't matter, because right after Jack leaves, Phil steams up with the tape that Miles didn't get a chance to erase. Phil hasn't even finished saying that he hasn't yet talked to Horace because he wanted to give Sawyer the benefit of the doubt when Sawyer knocks him out. Might have been a better way to handle that.

Miles returns to the dad of the dead high schooler and gives him back his money, telling him that he lied about being able to reach his son. The guy asks why Miles exposed the lie, and Miles says it wouldn't have been fair to his son - if the guy wanted his son to know that he loved him, he should have told him when he was still alive. (Sounds familiar.) Back on the island, Hurley tells Miles that he had cut his dad out of his life after he left, but that he was glad he reconnected. Miles says it's different since he was a baby, not ten like Hurley, and that he doesn't want to know his dad. Hurley says, "That was Luke's attitude too," and describes how Return of the Jedi would never have had to happen if Luke and Vader had worked out their relationship at the end of Empire. Miles oddly seems to take this to heart, and wanders by Dr. Chang's house, where he can see Dr. Chang reading to baby Miles. This chokes him up, understandably. Then Dr. Chang gets a phone call and comes outside. He sees Miles and tells him to drive to the dock, where scientists from Ann Arbor have arrived on the sub. Miles resists the urge to ask if Dr. Chang wants to have a catch.

At the dock, who should climb out of the sub... but Faraday! "Long time no see," he says with a smile. Logo. Next time? Fighting and stuff! And Faraday says that any of them can die. Does that mean someone will, by season's end? Apparently this is two weeks off. Kind of annoying.

s5e12: Dead is Dead

2009-04-08T21:01:00.002-05:00

Previously on Lost: Ben is a bad dude.

Widmore (I bet) rolls into Others camp to confront Richard for saving young Ben. Richard tells him that Jacob wanted it done. Sure enough, it's Widmore, and he tells Ben that he's among friends. Then it's 2007. Ben is indeed stunned that Locke is alive... except he claims that he knew it would happen. "It's one thing to believe it," Ben says. He tells Locke he was going back to the main island to be judged for breaking the rules. Locke asks who's going to judge him. "We don't even have a word for it," Ben says, but it's Smokey the Monster.

Hey, did you know The Unusuals is premiering next?

Still 2007. Ben plants the seed in Cesar's mind that Locke is Ethan-like and also "dangerously deranged." Cesar tells Ben he has his back. Even on his way to be judged, Ben is a scheming asshole? Christ. Back to... well, we don't know exactly, but based on Ethan's age I bet this involves Alex. Nice to see they went for goofy 90s haircuts even on the island. And, in fact, it's Rousseau and Alex. Ben takes Alex and tells Rousseau not to follow him, and to run if she ever hears whispers if she wants Alex to live. So, we finally got that flashback. A little underwhelming, right?

2007. Ben digs up a picture of himself with Alex (clearly Photoshopped) in the Hydra. Locke wants to talk about why Ben killed him. Ben tells him it was the only way to get everyone back. Locke asks the obvious question that everyone was asking a few episodes ago - why stop him hanging himself only to strangle him seconds later? - and Ben gives the obvious answer, that Locke had information Ben needed. After that he just didn't feel like talking Locke back into hanging himself. Ben also notes that it worked - everyone's back (somewhere or other) and Locke is alive. "I was just hoping for an apology," Locke says. He also wants to accompany Ben to the main island. They go for a boat but bossy ol' Cesar, having been egged on by Ben earlier, shows up and tells Locke he's not going anywhere until he tells them how he knows so much about the island. When Locke declines to do so, Cesar attempts to produce a gun, only to find that Ben has it, and uses it to blow the hell out of Cesar. (Really? That's all we did with that character? Okay.) "Consider that my apology," Ben says.

When they arrive, Locke notices Sun and Frank's boat. When Ben mentions that Sun clocked him with the oar, Locke asks if she hurt his arm, too. Ben says that someone else did that. Locke tells Ben that he doesn't believe Ben wants to be judged for breaking the rules, but rather for being responsible for Alex's death. Ben again looks fairly shocked. Back to - when was this, do we think? 1987 or 1988? Lostpedia says '88 was when the distress call started, so it would be around then, I guess. Widmore tells Ben he was supposed to kill Rousseau; Ben protests that Rousseau poses no threat, since she's crazy, and doesn't want to kill the baby. Ben asks if Jacob wants that. "Then here she is," Ben says, "you do it." Widmore walks away.

Back at the dark, deserted New Otherton. Locke asks if moving into the village was what the island would have wanted. Ben tells Locke that he doesn't have the first clue about what the island wants. Then a light creepily goes on in Alex's old room and a female figures moves in shadow. Creepy! Ben enters the house as Michael Giacchino attempts to scare the shit out of us. It turns out just to be Sun (and Frank) inside the house. Frank shows Ben the 1977 photo. Ben professes ignorance of it. Sun says Christian told them to wait there for Locke if they wanted to find their friends again, and Ben reveals that Locke is alive. Sun looks outside to see Locke giving a little wave.

Frank tells Sun they should go back to the plane, but Locke says he "has some ideas" on finding the others. Sun insists on staying, while Frank leaves. Sun asks Locke how they find Jin, but Locke says Ben has something to do first. Ben heads for his secret closet, where he pushes aside a runic stone, heads down some stairs, crawls through a passageway, and comes to... a puddle. Reaching into it, he unclogs something (or something?), the water drains into a hole, and Ben says - one assumes to the Monster - "I'll be outside."

Back to... 1993 or so. Ben heads to the sub to "say goodbye" to Charles, who's being escorted away. "You left the island regularly, you had a daughter with an outsider - you broke the rules, Charles," Ben says. Widmore asks why Ben will be a better leader, and Ben says he'll sacrifice anything for the island. Widmore notes that he wouldn't sacrifice Alex. "You're the one that wanted her dead," Ben says. Widmore asks what will happen if Ben's wrong about that.

Back to 2007. Sun says Jack must have lied about Locke being dead. Ben insists that Locke was dead. Sun asks if Ben knew that Locke would come back to life, and Ben says he had no idea - "Dead is dead," and while the island has done miraculous things, it's never resurrected anyone before. "So the fact that John Locke is walking around this island scares the living hell out of me." Then Ben tells Sun to go inside when he hears trampling in the brush. It turns out to be Locke, who says that they should go to the Monster. "I only know how to summon it," Ben says, "I don't know where it actually is." "I do," Locke replies.

And now it's 2007. Ben calls Widmore from the marina, taunting him that he'll succeed in getting back to the island where Widmore has spent 20 years failing. (Bit of an overstatement, right? More like 15 years. Whatever.) But first, he's going to kill Penny. "Don't you dare," Widmore hisses. Ben hangs up. Well, we all saw this coming. I've paused it - does he really do it? I say no, but stranger things have happened.

Well, back to the island before we see anything. Ben asks Locke how he knows where he's going. Locke says that Ben doesn't like having to follow someone blindly in the hopes that they'll lead him to the right place. Ben admits that he doesn't. Locke says that now Ben knows what Locke's life used to be like. Turns out they're headed for the Temple (gee.), although according to Ben, what we know as the Temple is just the wall around it, with the real Temple being a half-mile distant so that outsiders wouldn't see it by accident. Locke says they're not going in, however; instead, they're going under it. Before heading into the "vent," Ben tells Sun that if she ever gets off the island, she should find Desmond and say Ben was sorry. "For what?" Sun asks. "He'll know," Ben says, and heads down.

And back to the marina. Desmond spots Ben before he can get to Penny and asks what he's doing there; Ben shoots him, although through a grocery bag, so I'm assuming he's fine. Then he approaches Penny, who's running over. Penny insists that she and her father have no relationship (true!) but Ben doesn't really seem interested, telling Penny that her father is responsible for the death of his daughter. Charlie pops his head up just then and Penny tells him to go back inside. Ben lowers the gun, and the just-fine Desmond gets him from behind, beats the crap out of him, and throws him into the water.

Island, 2007. As Frank arrives at the Hydra, one of the survivors yells at him that Ilana (sp?) and a few of the others have guns and are saying they're in charge. When Frank asks about this, Ilana asks him, "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" Frank has no idea what she's on about, and gets a face full of rifle butt for this. She tells another guy to tie Frank up and bring him with the others. Say what, now?

Locke lights two torches and he and Ben proceed into the Temple's guts. Ben tells Locke that Locke is right; he could have saved Alex by leaving the island with Widmore's men. "I appreciate you showing me the way but I think I can take it from here," Ben says. "I'll meet you outside - if I live," and then he falls through the floor. Locke goes to look for something to help with, but Ben gets up and examines the columns, then finds his way to some sort of altar, where a carving of what looks a lot like Anubis is on the wall. Ben's torch extinguishes and Smokey starts coming out through a grate of sorts. (Anubis, you may recall, is associated with the judgment of the dead prior to their passage to the Underworld in Egyptian myth. Fitting, no?) Smokey surrounds Ben and starts playing back moments from his life (similarly to what it did with Eko), fixating pretty much entirely on Alex, from when he didn't kill her at the camp to the moment he watched her die. And then Smokey recedes into the grate and Ben's torch comes back...

...just in time for Alex to appear behind him. Ben admits it was all his fault. "I know," Alex says. Then she grabs him and throws him up against a column and tells him she knows he's already planning to kill Locke again. She (Smokey?) tells him that if he harms Locke in any way, she will hunt him down and destroy him, and that he is to follow Locke's every order. Ben swears he will, and then Alex vanishes and Locke shows up at the hole with a vine. "What happened?" Locke asks. "It let me live," Ben says.

Next time: back to 1977! Remember how Miles can talk to dead people? Well, that's gonna get real-ass important. And! Does Pierre Chang know that Miles is from the future? Maybe? Remember that secret video.

Not a bad episode all told. Good to get some mythology in there again, and it's good to see that Ben actually has some humanity and vulnerability, although since he was planning to kill Locke again, clearly not that much. But will he really follow that order?

s5e11: Whatever Happened, Happened

2009-04-01T20:27:00.002-05:00

Jin brings shot-but-alive Ben back to Dharmaville, where Kate has just met Roger Workman. Then we flash back to early 2005; Kate drops in on Cassidy (Sawyer's baby mama), who's surprised and happy to see her until Kate says that Sawyer sent her. (Has to be one of the longest waits for a reveal of something that everyone guessed the second it happened in show history, right? Though I would like to know how Sawyer imparted that much information in about four seconds of whispering.) The meeting doesn't go all that hot; turns out it's not even Sawyer's money (so he didn't whisper a bank account number and PIN to her!), but Kate's. Cassidy says Kate got left by Sawyer, just like she did. Then she correctly divines that Aaron is not Kate's son. B'oh.

Back to Life on Mars: Island Edition. Ben very cleverly left the keys in the lock of Sayid's cell, so it's even clearer it was an inside job; only three people have that kind of keys, including Roger and Jack. (Every Dharma Initiative member has keys to the jail cell? Or every janitor has a skeleton key to everything, including the jail cell? To quote Dennis Nedry, no wonder you're extinct.) Sawyer tells Miles to "sit on" Kate, Jack and Hurley so they won't talk to anyone, as things are going a bit haywire. Roger is waiting outside the infirmary, where Sawyer finds he's the one missing his keys (no kidding). Juliet is operating on Ben and tells Sawyer Ben needs a real surgeon. Guess who.

Hurley brings up the Back to the Future corollary (if young Ben doesn't turn into old Ben, the A3 never come back to the island [or presumably never even get there in the first place, since if Ben doesn't purge the DI then the Swan probably isn't manned by Desmond and Inman like it is and 815 never crashes at all]), which proves that the writers are thinking about this stuff. "You can't change anything," Miles says. It always happened, but they just haven't experienced how it turned out yet. Sawyer asks for Jack's help, but Jack won't do it - he's cool with Ben dying, figuring, perhaps, that it could somehow be his ticket out of his current situation. (You do get the feeling that Jack was hoping to be greeted as a hero upon his return to the island, and being a peon in the DI isn't exactly his idea of a good time. But why should it be, really.)

Kate isn't sure this is such a good idea. Jack notes the connections to when he had to operate on Ben the first time, then asks Kate if maybe all the work he did trying to fix things on the island the first time was getting in the way of the island trying to fix things itself. Kate says she doesn't like the new Jack. Jack says she didn't like the old Jack. Kate huffs off and decides to donate blood because she's type O negative. Roger comes in and realizes Ben stole the keys, then actually looks human as he says that it's because of him. Then Ben goes into "hypoxic shock." Kate looks at him like she's trying to figure out a way to donate oxygen too.

~~The writers~~ Miles have a scene where they try to explain time to ~~the viewers~~ Hurley. Hurley asks what I've seen many people ask - why didn't older Ben remember Sayid shooting him when he was a kid? "I hadn't thought of that," Miles says. (Correct answer: who says he didn't?) Hurley gives him a checkmate look. Meanwhile, Roger paces; finally, Juliet comes out and says Ben is stable. But after Roger runs off, Juliet tells Kate that Ben is going to die. When Kate insists that he can't, Juliet offers that maybe there's something they can do. You know, the Others? (This reminds me of a creepy story I read as a kid from a book called The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural. My recollection of the plot is that a kid wanders away from his family and falls off a cliff, but later returns unharmed, except that he keeps referring to a figure called "Boo Mama." In the end of the story, it turns out that the kid was saved only via a blood transfusion from these talking bear-like creatures, and he's turning into one of them and ends up leaving with them. If the Others really do save Ben, it's a pretty straight parallel, no? By the way, I didn't look up any of that and I haven't read that book since about 1993. It was pretty creepy.)

Somehow no one sees Juliet and Kate put Ben in a van. Kate won't let Juliet go with her (but what is Juliet going to tell Sawyer, that she wasn't involved?). Then it's back to 2007, where Kate huffs off from the pier (the fifth time we've seen this scene this year, I think). Kate takes Aaron into the grocery store and as she checks her cell phone, he vanishes into thin air. Then she finds him at the front of the store with some woman who says she was about to make an announcement. Whatever. Back to 1977. "Tell my dad I'm sorry I stole his keys," Ben says as Kate stops in front of the sonic fence. (It kind of sounded like he said "Tell my dad he's a total skeeze," which was funny.) Sawyer gets there really fast, but he's not there to stop Kate, but rather to help her.

Back to 2007. Kate drops in on Cassidy again, then confesses to losing Aaron at the store. "As scared as I was, I wasn't surprised," Kate says. Cassidy tells her that she expects him to be taken because she took him. No, Kate says, Claire was gone - he needed me. "You needed him," Cassidy says. And really it's true - if not for Aaron, isn't it entirely likely that Kate's in jail right now? Back in 1977, Sawyer disables the fence. Kate asks why he's helping her. Sawyer says he asked himself the same question - why was Kate helping Ben? Juliet said it was wrong to let a kid die. "I'm doing it for her," Sawyer says. Kate looks like a dagger went through her heart.

Juliet confronts Jack about not helping Ben, then tells Jack that he didn't need to come back, and asks why he did. "Because I was supposed to," Jack says. "Supposed to what?" Juliet asks. Jack doesn't know. Juliet tells him to figure it out. Meanwhile, Kate tells Sawyer that she helped Clementine, and passes on Cassidy's theory regarding why he jumped from the chopper. Sawyer says he wasn't fit to be Kate's boyfriend, much less Clementine's father. Kate notes that he and Juliet are doing fine. Sawyer says he's grown up a lot over three years. The Others pop out of the woods and Sawyer tells them that Ben being shot is everyone's problem, and that they need to take him to Richard.

Back in 2007, Kate knocks on Claire's mother's door and tells her basically everything. Then she gives her Aaron and tells her she's going back to find Claire. (So she didn't go back for Sawyer. Assuming this was true.) 1977 again. Richard shows up. "Is that Benjamin Linus?" he asks. Kate asks if Richard can save Ben. Yes, says Richard, but he will always be an Other if this happens. (There you go!) He also says that Ben will forget that any of this ever happened. (Convenient much?) Richard descends into the Temple with Ben.

And then we're back to old Ben, and we finally see Locke again. Ben wakes up to find Locke staring him down. "Welcome back to the land of the living," Locke says. Ben looks more than a little surprised to see him.

Next week! Ben faces judgment from the island, apparently? How can this episode not rule?

s5e10: He's Our You

2009-03-25T21:18:00.002-05:00

Young Ben thinks Sayid is there to take him over to the Hostiles, and offers to spring him. Meanwhile, in flashbacks - when was the last time we had any of those? - we learn more about Sayid and his killin' ways. He kills the last of Ben's list and then doesn't know what to do next (I'm guessing it involves whatever got him shackled and on the Ajira plane, but hey, we'll see).

Horace tries to interrogate Sayid but gets nowhere. Meanwhile, Juliet worries that things are going to fall apart with the others back. Horace tells Sawyer of his issues with Sayid, so Sawyer goes in alone. He tries to convince Sayid to claim he's a Hostile who's planning to defect, but Sayid refuses to play along with the Dharma game and decides to go it alone.

Hey, it's Roger Workman! And he's still an asshole, adding actual physical abuse to his delightful repertoire. Then it's back to Sayid's house-building project, where Ben visits him again. He tells Sayid that Locke was murdered and suggests that Sayid is in danger from Widmore. He also suggests that Sayid is simply a natural-born killer. Sayid isn't thrilled by this suggestion, of course.

Sawyer gives Sayid one more chance, and then it's off to the guy who, presumably, is "our you." (He is.) He gives Sayid drugs to make him tell the truth, which makes Sawyer look down, worried. Then it's back to the past/future in LA, when Sayid leaves after Ben makes clear the intention to return to the island. Then Sayid is in a bar, where he meets the woman who takes him onto the plane. And then it's back to the 1977 island (*whoosh*, motherfuckers, huh?), where Sayid is interrogated again under the effect of drugs. He admits he's not a Hostile and that he's been to the island before, describing his knowledge of the Dharma stations. Then he tells them they're all going to die and that he's from the future. The Dharmites think they've used too much truth serum, but Sayid laughs and says they've used exactly enough.

Meanwhile, it's time for Juliet and Kate to meet about Sawyer, but that takes like two seconds. Then it's a Dharma meeting where Radzinsky keeps agitating that Sayid should be killed, and says that if it's not put to a vote he's going to "call Ann Arbor and they'll make [a decision] for us." Amy agrees that it's risky to keep Sayid around. Horace puts it to a vote, which of course everyone but Sawyer agrees to; he ends up raising his hand in defeat so that Horace can say it was unanimous.

Past/future again. Sayid and the woman are pre-coital when it turns out she's a bounty hunter hired to bring Sayid to Guam (convenient!) for the family of Mr. Avellino, the guy Sayid killed on the golf course. And then it's back to 1977, where Sayid tells Sawyer he knows why he's back on the island. (Of course he doesn't actually say why.) Very Locke of him. So Sawyer runs off to Kate to ask why they came back. Kate doesn't know why everyone else came back, but she knows why she did. Of course she can't say why before the flaming Dharma van comes hurtling into Dharmaville and sets a house alight. Who did it? Why, young Ben of course. (Why do they bother hiding people's faces in scenes like this where it's so obvious who it was?) Ben says he'll let Sayid out if he'll take him to the Hostiles. "That's why I'm here," Sayid says, although he clearly doesn't actually think that. The purpose he feels is killing Ben to stop everything else, I'm sure of it. But will the island and/or time let him do it?

In the coda, we're back at LAX. Sayid doesn't want to get on the plane when he sees the other O6 there. He asks the woman if she's working for Ben, but she doesn't know him. And then it's 1977 again, and young Ben lets Sayid out. As they run through the jungle, another Dharma van drives past. It's Jin - Sayid ends up knocking him out, but it's just to get his gun. Then he tells Ben that he was right - Sayid is a killer. "What?" young Ben says. Sayid shoots him. Young Ben collapses, and Sayid runs.

Apparently the island will let Sayid shoot Ben (it's not a Michael situation, for example), but what next? Nothing good, if the teaser is anything to go by.

s5e09: Namaste

2009-03-18T21:18:00.002-05:00

Sun and Ben - along with Frank and apparently everyone else on the plane - are in 2007. Meanwhile, Jack, Kate and Hurley are back with Sawyer and Jin in 1977. They brought Sun back against Jin's wishes and she's thirty years away from him? That blows. One wonders how these two camps are going to meet again; maybe that's this year's cliffhanger-in-waiting? Well, let's not overguess.

Sawyer tells Juliet about the return of the Ajira 3. Meanwhile, Jin hears that Sun was on the plane and starts running around trying to find out where the plane is (little does he know). In 2007, Ben tells Sun he's going back to the main island, although since he's still on the Hydra later (as this conversation must take place before the scene with Locke talking to Cesar in the Hydra building) something must go wrong.

Well, in case you were wondering if Horace and Amy's baby was someone we knew - it's Ethan. Sawyer tells the A3 to pretend to be Dharma recruits. Meanwhile, someone trips the motion sensor grid outside the Flame - it's Sayid, and Jin catches up with him first, but has to play tough guy when Radzinsky (in his pre-Swan days, apparently) runs up behind him.

Hurley wonders if Sawyer plans to warn Dharma of the Purge (he should have a good 15 years or so), but Sawyer says Faraday has ideas about what they can change. "Faraday's here?" Jack asks. "Not anymore," Sawyer says. Miles sees the A3; Jin reports Sayid's appearance to Sawyer. Back in 2007, Frank warns Sun not to trust Ben as the two of them head for a boat; Sun ends up clocking Ben with an oar (so that's how that happened), so presumably she's heading over alone.

The Swan, it turns out, hasn't even been built yet. Radzinsky is building a model of it, which Sayid apparently sees, so Radzinsky freaks out and won't just let Sawyer take Sayid away. Meanwhile, Jack is assigned "workman," and Kate nearly gets caught until Juliet swoops in to save her. Back in 2007, Frank and Sun row to the island and visit the now-empty barracks, at least until Christian shows up and says he can take Sun to Jin.

In a great little Shining-esque moment, Christian pulls down a 1977 Dharma photo with Jin and the rest in it. He tells Sun she has a long journey ahead. Back in '77, Sayid is stuck in a prison cell. Jack goes to see Sawyer to find out what's up; Sawyer somewhat revels in the fact that he's now the leader among the Oceanic survivors - Jack et al. are forced to rely on him. He tells Jack that Jack reacted rather than thinking when he was leader, and got a lot of people killed. Sawyer says he thinks instead, and that's what he's been doing and what he'll continue to do. In the final scene, young Ben - you knew he'd show up sooner or later! - brings Sayid a sandwich.

Next week! Sayid is tied to a tree! And Juliet tells Kate to stay away from her man! And then we're led to believe that Sayid thinks he's back on the island to kill young Ben and stop the Purge, which probably means that has nothing to do with what actually happens. I wonder what kind of timeline-breakage that would cause, if it did happen, though.

s5e08: LaFleur

2009-03-04T19:43:00.002-06:00

Recap time!

We start off with a pretty big mindfuck, but one that certainly explains Jin's appearance at the end of "316," as well as where Jack, Hurley and Kate are. After a quick refresher of Locke moving the island to stop the skipping (just before which we see the full statue of which the four-toed foot was clearly a part), we move ahead three years - at which point we see Horace (remember him?) getting wasted and blowing up trees. Two Dharma guys run to wake LaFleur, the head of security, who is not a very effectively hidden Sawyer (it's easy to recognize his voice before we see him).

Sawyer/LaFleur drags the drunken Horace back to his pregnant wife Amy. She admits they fought, then goes into labor. We jump back three years (this is starting to become a kind of loose concept, "years," but hey) and find out how our crew got involved with Dharma; Sawyer saved Amy from armed men. In other words, when the island stopped, our guys were in the 60s or maybe 70s (Juliet guesses 70s or 80s). This explains seeing Daniel in the past at the Orchid before as well, now that I think about it.

Amy is slippery like all Dharmites; suspicious after Juliet recognizes the sonic fence, she tricks the group into getting knocked out by it. But I guess everything worked out, since back three years later she's having problems giving birth (the baby is breech and the island's doctor can't help her; she was due two weeks later and booked on a submarine to see a doctor on the mainland). Sawyer recruits Juliet to help deliver the baby, which she does successfully despite worrying about her inability to help women give birth on the island. We also see that Jin's English has come along swimmingly in the three years, and he's apparently checking some list of people looking for other 815ers (or so I took from it).

Back to three years earlier. Horace interrogates Sawyer, who uses all his con artist skills to make up a story credible enough for Horace to tell him that he'll put the group on the sub to Tahiti. Sawyer doesn't like this plan, but Horace tells him he's not Dharma material. Later, Daniel sees young Charlotte just before the Hostiles breach the compound; from inside a building, Sawyer and Juliet exchange a glance as Richard Alpert - same age as always - strides into the compound. "Uh oh," Sawyer says.

Since Richard is there because of the broken truce resulting from Sawyer and Juliet killing two Hostiles, Sawyer goes out to talk to Richard, convincing him he's not with Dharma by citing the events of "Jughead." Richard is suitably impressed but still needs something to show his people, so Paul (Amy's first husband, who the Hostiles killed)'s dead body is traded. Juliet is ready to leave the island via sub, but Sawyer dates us (1974) and points out that she's not going back to whatever she thinks she is. Juliet doesn't care, but Sawyer has bought two weeks from Horace by helping save Dharma from the Hostiles' wrath (the next sub arrives in two weeks) and convinces Juliet to stay that long. Three years later? She's still there, of course, and now she and Sawyer are an item. Who wants to bet that Kate showing up soon is going to mess all that up?

Sure enough, she does. Sawyer has a heart-to-heart with Horace, who reveals that Amy was still holding on to an artifact of Paul's and wonders if three years is enough time to get over someone. Sawyer tells Horace that he felt strongly for a woman about three years earlier (Kate, obviously) but that now he can't even remember what she looks like. Naturally he gets a refresher. After being awoken from Juliet-spooning slumber by a Jin phone call (during which Elizabeth Mitchell's bare back gets its contractually-mandated yearly appearance), Sawyer drives out to the beach to find Jin with Jack, Hurley, and Kate. With music swelling and Sawyer staring, we cut to Lost logo.

Back in two weeks. Two weeks? Lame. The teaser shows that at least Sayid also appears in 1977; Sun is less clear, but you'd have to assume (Jin is no doubt thrilled). Is the rest of the plane in 1977? Seemingly not, since it's at the deserted Hydra station, which the active Dharma Initiative presumably would still be using. Are Locke and Ben going to be 30 years adrift of the rest forever? Are we going to see young Ben soon (by 1977 surely he was already a Dharma member based on his flashback)? And given that every heterosexual permutation of Jack/Juliet/Kate/Sawyer has happened by now (although Jack and Juliet never actually got it on), just how messy is that little love quadrangle going to get? And I'm still wondering where exactly this season is poised to leave off.

s5e07: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

2009-02-25T22:11:00.002-06:00

It's been kind of an odd season so far. There are scheduled to be 17 episodes, and yet at the end of Episode 7 - not even halfway through - everyone's back on the island. So what, exactly, was so important about leaving? It's almost like the plot only went that way to help add some depth to the Ben/Widmore dichotomy which, needless to say, got quite a bit more interesting tonight.

So Widmore claims to have formerly been the leader of the Others and then exiled by Ben. He also knew to watch the exit point in Tunisia, although apparently he didn't know to watch it when Ben popped out of it (you'd think Charlotte's discovery of the polar bear skeleton was the major tipoff, and that was certainly before Ben's appearance there, but I guess getting a surveillance camera set up in the middle of the Tunisian desert takes time). Matthew Abaddon is working for Widmore - no surprise there - and drives Locke around to visit Sayid, Walt, Hurley and Kate. None of the O6 agree to go, and Locke doesn't ask Walt (probably because he doesn't have the heart to tell him what happened to Michael). Finally Locke demands to know if Abaddon could locate Helen, his former girlfriend (not seen since Season 2); Abaddon takes him to her grave (both Drew and I found this scene a little suspect, but I have my doubts that there's any trick behind it if only because that's way too much at this point). As they leave the cemetery, Abaddon is gunned down; Locke takes off in the car and ends up in an accident, sending him to the hospital at which a not-yet-fully-bearded Jack is a doctor. Jack is dismissive of Locke until Locke tells him that Christian said to say hi, at which point Jack freaks out a bit. Finally Locke decides to kill himself. It's not clear at this point whether he really believes that's the only way to get everyone back or whether he's simply despondent. At any rate, Ben comes in and stops him from hanging himself, but when Locke reveals that he's supposed to see Ms. Hawking, Ben strangles him to death and sets up a fake suicide. The entire flashback is bookended by scenes on the island, where we see that Locke is alive once more.

So. Who's good and who's bad? Or is it just not that simple at all? It seemed like the mention of Ms. Hawking - on Widmore's bankroll, we might remember - led Ben to kill Locke, perhaps because of the Widmore connection. But then how is Ben able to work with her? And since Christian told Locke to find Ms. Hawking, does that mean that the island "prefers" Widmore's side?

It could be. Consider that Widmore was aware that Ben had tried to kill Locke (by shooting him, recall, in the late S3 episode "The Man Behind the Curtain"). The only people who knew this were Locke, Ben, and Richard (who, we can surmise, guessed it after Ben brusquely informed him only that Locke had an "accident" in "Greatest Hits"). We also know that Richard has been able to leave the island in the past. So if Richard is working with Widmore at this point... is Widmore really the good guy? Did he simply miscalculate with Keamy, trying to find someone who could capture/kill Ben at any cost and looking past his most mercenary tendencies?

People who want to have Lost episodes spoiled before seeing them

2008-05-21T23:43:00.002-05:00

Congratulations! You're all fucking idiots.

s4e12: There's No Place Like Home, Part 1

2008-05-18T22:34:00.002-05:00

We get our earliest flash-forward yet, as it starts with the Oceanic Six on the plane about to land in Hawaii. I'm beginning to suspect (well, maybe not beginning) that the end of this season might do something like connect the "present" to the "flash-forwards" (in other words, could it possibly end with the same scene that this episode started with, or with what happens directly before it?). But as we've seen before, I am horrible at guessing where this show is going next.

Anyway, in flash-forward, we see that Sayid and Nadia get together; Hurley sees the numbers in the odometer of the car his dad fixed and freaks out; Sun somehow gets so much money from Oceanic that she can buy majority control of her dad's company (seriously? I didn't realize Paik Industrial was a lemonade stand), as she blames him for Jin's death; and Jack finally delivers the eulogy at his father's funeral, only to be told by a no-longer-comatose Claire's mom that Claire was/is his sister. I've long wondered how and when they were going to present this news to Jack, and I have to say it went off pretty well. Also have to love the irony they squeeze in there; Claire's mom mentions how Jack would have been a few rows from Claire without ever knowing she was his sister, then compliments Aaron to Kate, of course not realizing that he's really her grandson.

In present times, Jack and Kate go into the jungle after hearing that Keamy is headed for the Orchid. Kate swaps with Sawyer after they run into him (with Aaron and Miles in tow), and Sawyer and Jack make for the chopper. When Frank (cuffed to the chopper by Keamy) tells them that Locke and Hurley are probably going to be killed when Keamy finds Ben, Jack heads for the Orchid.

Meanwhile, Sayid arrives at the beach to get people off the island. When Kate arrives at the beach, she and Sayid head back into the jungle to warn Jack about how dangerous the mercenaries on the helicopter are; Kate leaves Aaron with Sun. In the jungle, Kate and Sayid are ambushed and captured by Richard Alpert and the rest of the Others. (I kind of wonder why those guys still bother to wear those outfits when everyone on the island knows they don't really live in huts or whatever; possibly something necessary due to one of the various mythological island factors?)

In lieu of Sayid, Daniel starts ferrying people back to the boat. Michael has fixed the engines, but due to some interference, the sonar isn't working properly, so the helmsman refuses to move the boat closer to the island (lest it run aground on the reef). When Desmond and Michael look for the source, they find a room full of explosives. Some connection here between this and the device on Keamy's arm?

Ben, Locke and Hurley make their way to the Orchid (Ben has some communication with the other Others by mirror first), which is already surrounded by the mercenaries. After telling Locke what to do to move the island once he's inside the Orchid, Ben surrenders himself, and Keamy hits him in the face with his gun (he apparently really likes doing this).

Two-hour second part of the finale coming on May 29. So what can we expect? Well, someone will probably be dying; the likelihood of Jin's survival in one form or another seems slim at this point, but I think Desmond will survive because of the integral part he has to play in the Ben/Widmore battle. Not sure about Michael; possibly he would sacrifice himself to save everyone else? Will the island actually move? And if so, will it move to the location of "Membata," or are the castaways moved there first, or is that entirely a fish story? With the various members of the Oceanic Six in four different places at the moment - Sun and Aaron on the freighter, Sayid and Kate with the Others, Jack heading for the Orchid, and Hurley at the Orchid - how exactly are they all going to be pulled together and yet no one else will be saved? It's seemed for a while that some sort of deal will be cut by the six who do get off, but why those six, and what kind of deal, and with whom?

Excited.

s4e11: Cabin Fever

2008-05-10T21:46:00.002-05:00

A plot: Locke, Hurley and Ben go looking for Jacob's cabin.

This plot really kind of mixed the amusing and the creepy. Just look at the first scene where they're arguing about who's leading the way, or where Hurley splits his Apollo Bar with Ben... then, at the same time, look at, well, the entire scene in the cabin, or Locke's dream sequence where Horace tells him how to find the cabin. (It turns out that Horace built the cabin, apparently.) Oh, and Locke's very literal use of "pit stop" made me smile.

Anyway, Christian (dead) and Claire (not dead?) are inside the cabin, and they tell Locke what he needs to do - move the island. What in the fuck?

B plot: Various confrontations on the boat as Keamy plans to return to the island in force.

A very tense, action-heavy plot. Keamy comes back and confronts Michael for ratting him out to Ben, but the gun misfires when he tries to kill him. (Michael is impervious right now, apparently.) Keamy gets the "secondary protocol," which apparently tells him the only place Ben can go to hide if the island is "torched." Captain Overacting doesn't exactly agree with Keamy's plan and gives Sayid (and Desmond, who elects not to return to the island) a boat. Also, we see the ship receive the Morse code message about Dr. Ecklie, who's still alive and well - and then he's killed and tossed overboard. So clearly there's a big time issue here. In a big confrontation, Captain Overacting is shot by Keamy, and Frank decides to fly them back to the island after initially resisting. Meanwhile, Keamy has had some odd device attached to him, which I'm sure will come into play later.

C plot: In our brief view of the beach, Jack et al. receive the radio/GPS that Frank drops. Aaaand that's about it.

Flashback: In our first full pre-crash flashback since the second-to-last episode of Season Three (Charlie's "Greatest Hits"), we learn significant and confusing information about Locke's long-term ties to the island's mythology.

So Baby Locke was ridiculously premature but he managed to battle off all kinds of infections and survive. Then we see - dum dum DUM! - Richard Alpert, who visits Baby Locke in the hospital and then Kid Locke, giving the latter some sort of Dalai Lama test, as Drew noted. Kid Locke fails, but that's clearly not the end of it, as Mittelos Bioscience tries to recruit Teen Locke, who might have gone for it if he'd been getting laid. Sadly, he's unpopular, and rejects the idea as he has no intention of being more unpopular. Finally, we see Wheelchair Locke during his rehab, where he meets with - dum dum DUM!!!! - Matthew Abaddon, who, we discover, is responsible for planting the idea in Locke's head that he should go on the walkabout.

So the question thus is: did Matthew Abaddon, who appears to be on the Widmore side later, point Locke towards Australia because he knew Locke's plane would crash, ridding the world of the Others' "chosen one?" Or because he knew it would crash in such a way that Locke would get to the island? Either way, how did and could he know? And the whole "when you and me run into each other again, you'll owe me one" - time traveling? Or just knowing the future somehow?

All in all, a pretty strong episode. Now we just have three hours of finale left over the next three weeks (one, off, two). Can you say awesome?

s4e10: Something Nice Back Home

2008-05-02T14:31:00.003-05:00

When you consider the fact that three episodes (though, ultimately, only two hours) had to be dropped from this season, doesn't that make "Something Nice Back Home" feel like kind of a missed opportunity? Let's run down the major plot points of the episode really quick.

A plot: Jack gets appendicitis and Juliet has to perform surgery.

Has there ever been a Lost plot with less inherent tension? We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jack survives well into the future. So the only thing that we really gleaned from this entire segment came at the end, when Juliet reveals that she knows Jack really loves Kate, in spite of the seemingly blossoming relationship between Jack and Juliet.

B plot: Sawyer, Claire and Miles head back to the beach, run into Frank (and have to hide from a shaken-but-alive Keamy), come across the bodies of Rousseau and Karl, and have Sawyer claim the "overly-protective of Claire, to no benefit" mantle from the late Charlie. Claire winds up vanishing, leaving Aaron behind, having apparently gone off with Christian, who was certainly corporeal but about whom we can't say much else with certainty.

I guess this plot was fine, but the Keamy thing was kind of cheap tension (since it turned out to be window dressing) and the final scene was frustratingly inconclusive even by Lost standards. Miles has calmed down a lot in the few days he's been on the island, though, hasn't he?

C plot: Charlotte turns out to speak Korean, and Jin asks her to make sure Sun gets off the island.

Again, this seemed fairly irrelevant, other than setting up Sun getting off the island while Jin does not - but that's also something we already knew and obviously doesn't even come close to answering the main question about that plotline, which is: Is Jin secretly still alive, and if not, how does he die? We'll probably find that out by the end of the season, one would suspect, but at any rate this added very little to the effort.

FF plot: Overcoming his reservations about Aaron, Jack begins a serious relationship with Kate, eventually proposing to her. But the seeds of the relationship's downfall are sown when Jack goes to see Hurley at the mental hospital, where Hurley passes along a message from Charlie: "You're not supposed to raise him." Jack begins to see his father and eventually starts drinking again, finally confronting Kate about who she's been off to see behind his back. It turns out she's been running errands or something for Sawyer. By the end of the episode it's pretty clear how we got to the point Jack was at in last season's finale.

This was probably the best part of the episode, which is kind of sad because the idea of Jack and Kate being all lovey-dovey in the future - even if the entire scope of their relationship fit into this episode - really sort of bothers me. The scene between Jack and Hurley was really well-shot, though, and the introduction of Sawyer back into the mix was interesting although fairly implausible. (Jack wants to kill himself because he can't find the island, but Sawyer, apparently still there, can just pick up a phone and call Kate whenever he wants? I guess we've established that voice transmissions aren't affected by the island's power while the jamming is off, but it seems odd somehow.) You also wonder what Kate is even doing for Sawyer - something related to his daughter? The end of the flash-forward also all but confirmed what we suspected based on "Eggtown" - that Jack has, at some interim point, found out that Claire is actually his half-sister (as his rant that Kate isn't even related to Aaron was dripping with "While I, on the other hand, am" implication). When he finds that out seems to be up for quite a lot of debate; I would have assumed that Christian would have confirmed this for Jack at some point, but given how shocked he is to see his father off-island in the FF here, I can't believe that he would have spoken to his father (or any avatar thereof) to be able to find that out. Perhaps he finds out from Ben at some point, or perhaps he finds out after getting off the island from some sort of investigation into the lives of people on the plane (done by whoever seems like they might do that and publicize it). I don't really know at this point but it appears it's not Christian.

Next week: do you realize that there is only one episode remaining before the start of the two-part finale on May 15? Of course, the finale is three hours over two nights (two weeks apart, no less), so it's not like we're going to be hurting for Lost over the next month, but we're really coming right up against it here. Hard to believe that episode 11 is going to tread as much water as this one did, with that in mind.

s4e09: The Shape of Things to Come

2008-04-26T13:21:00.002-05:00

On island, we find out that the people responsible for killing Karl and Rousseau were in fact the team of soldiers on the boat. They drag Alex back to the camp and make her turn off the sonic fence; she uses a special distress code, warning the village of the approach. The soldiers arrive with "shock and awe," as Ben puts it (I suspect this may have been intended as political commentary of some sort), killing several Socks and blowing up Claire's house (miraculously, she is unharmed). The soldiers send Miles in with a walkie-talkie so they can communicate with Ben; he won't come out, so they threaten to kill Alex. When Ben attempts the old "Go ahead, she means nothing to me" ploy, they kill her. A stunned Ben remarks that "He changed the rules" and proceeds to loose Smokey on the soldiers. Everyone else runs into the jungle. Sawyer, Claire and Miles head for the beach; after a confrontation between Locke and Sawyer over who gets Hurley (who is needed to find the cabin, according to Ben), Hurley heads off with Locke and Ben to find Jacob.

On the beach, Dr. Ecklie washes ashore with his throat slit. Daniel repairs the radio enough to send Morse code to the boat, asking what happened to the doctor. The boat replies that the doctor is fine - but Daniel lies, claiming that they've said the helicopters are coming in the morning. Bernard, who conveniently knows Morse code, catches him, and Jack demands to know if there were ever plans to rescue the crash survivors. "No," Daniel says.

In flash forward, Sayid has married Nadia (which is like post-Season 1 fanfiction) only to see her killed. Ben teleports to the Tunisian desert (I think we can safely assume this is what happened; did you notice that he was wearing a jacket that belonged to Dr. Edgar Halliwax, by the way?), then makes his way to Iraq, posing as a member of the press. Sayid notices him taking pictures and attacks him as a "vulture" - clearly life in the public eye has been quite stressful - but Ben reveals that one of Widmore's men killed Nadia. Later, Ben tracks the man responsible as what appears to be a distraction; in other words, he distracts him just long enough for Sayid to kill him. Sayid all but begs Ben to let him be a killer for him, which kind of contradicts Sayid's suggestion in "The Economist" that Ben had virtually blackmailed Sayid into becoming a killer for him. Ben's smile as he walks away makes it clear that this was what he wanted to happen, however, so maybe that's what Sayid was getting at. In the final scene, Ben breaks into Charles Widmore's penthouse suite and tells him that because Widmore "changed the rules" and killed Ben's daughter, Ben is going to kill his daughter - of course, this is Penelope, and I think this means Desmond is getting off the island because you get a lot more potential conflict out of this reveal that way. Widmore says by way of exposition that everything Ben has, he stole from Widmore, including the island - this continues to suggest that Widmore was, decades earlier, Dharma's bankroll. This is also kind of a classic "Who am I supposed to be rooting for?" scene; depending on who you tend to believe in this scene, one or the other of them is really evil.

Quite the upping of the body count, no? If we include the last five minutes of "Meet Kevin Johnson," that's more than a dozen people who have died in just slightly over the last hour of the show - Alex, Karl, Rousseau, the three Socks, Dr. Ecklie, and presumably all six soldiers. And we haven't even been back to the boat - I assume next week we will be.

s4e08: Meet Kevin Johnson

2008-03-21T00:28:00.002-05:00

Not much beating around the bush this week. Miles reveals to Locke's camp that he's here for Ben, and doesn't exactly deny it when Ben says that if he is captured, the Freighters will kill everyone else, per Widmore's orders. Ben then reveals at Hurley's prompting that Michael is his spy on the boat. It's off to the boat, then, where Sayid forces Michael to tell his story. And tell he does, over most of the rest of the episode.

Michael attempts to kill himself by crashing his car, with a note to Walt pinned to his chest. Walt is now living with Michael's mother and won't speak to his father - it is implied that at some point, Michael had to explain to Walt just what he did to get them off the island. Also, this way we don't have to see clearly-older Malcolm David Kelley for more than a second. Pretty crafty, writers. Michael tries again to kill himself, this time with a gun, until Tom steps out of the shadows. They fight, and Tom eventually points the gun at Michael, who urges Tom to shoot. Tom says that Michael can't die even if he wants to, because the island won't let him. Michael tries to shoot himself again but the trigger just clicks, even though it's fully loaded. After seeing that 815 has been found, Michael runs back to find Tom.

Tom (who is briefly shown to be gay, because why not, I guess) explains that Widmore faked
the Bali crash site so that no one would go looking in the right area and possibly stumble across the island. Naturally this contradicts with the suggestion in the last episode that Ben was behind the fake. Tom's explanation seems a little more convincing - he actually has evidence, and of course it's possible that Widmore would have lied to the freighter's captain - but who ever knows with the Others. At any rate, Tom tells Michael to join the crew of the freighter so that he can kill everyone on board. Michael tries, via bomb, but it's a dud - a little flag goes up saying "Not yet." Ben, pretending to be Walt, calls Michael on the boat (clearly the only way he could call without arousing suspicion) and tells him that the difference between Ben and Widmore is that Ben doesn't kill innocent people. Michael is instead ordered to make a list of the people on the boat, then sabotage the radio and engines.

After hearing the whole story, Sayid drags Michael in front of the captain and reveals that Michael is the saboteur and a spy for Ben. I guess Sayid really wants to get back to the real world, huh? Makes you wonder just how bad things have to get for Sayid to end up killing for Ben himself.

To wind up, Ben sends Alex, Karl and Rousseau towards the Temple, but, fulfilling the teaser's promise that someone would die, Karl and Rousseau are shot by unseen assailants. Alex jumps up and yells that she's Ben's daughter, and we go to Lost logo. The last scene was a little weird; was it perhaps intended to show that in spite of what he may want people to believe, Ben is just that dangerous? He seems to have sent them into a trap that would bump off Alex's boyfriend and biological mother, thus leaving Ben as her only family on the island - as verified by the fact that she leaps back to her connection to him to save herself. Pretty fucking diabolical, no? Kinda makes you wonder if we're supposed to end up rooting for either side in the Ben/Widmore conflict.

April 24: Lost is back. It sounds like it's going to spread over six weeks, with the finale coming in two parts over two weeks thanks to dumb-ass Grey's Anatomy. Should be pretty awesome. By the end of the season we're supposed to at least have some idea how the Oceanic Six get off. Works for me.

s4e07: Ji Yeon

2008-03-14T11:41:00.003-05:00

Well, that was a fucking downer.

In the A plot, Sun decides she wants to go off to Locke's camp, because she doesn't trust the Freighters. Juliet warns her against doing so because it would lead to her death, due to the fact that pregnant women (at least those who conceived on-island) do not survive past the middle of the second trimester or so. Sun notes that Juliet doesn't exactly have the best history of veracity, and starts to head off with Jin anyway. Juliet pulls out all the stops and tells Jin about Sun's affair with Jae Lee, forcing them to stay at the beach. Jin goes off fishing with Bernard and, in a fairly nice scene, Bernard says he believes that staying at the beach is good karma. Jin forgives Sun for the affair, saying he knows that the person he used to be, pre-island, pretty much deserved it, and Sun confirms for him that the baby is his. They decide to stay at the beach, hopeful that they can get off the island soon.

In the B plot, Sayid and Desmond meet the captain of the ship, who shows them the black box from Flight 815 and tells them that Charles Widmore is financing the whole thing. He tells them about the discovery of the plane with all 324 dead bodies aboard, and asks them what it means to them that someone could have gone to the trouble of faking the entire thing - including presumably killing 324 people just to serve as dead bodies. And that, he says, is why Widmore wants Ben. We also see that the crew of the freighter is going nuts due to their proximity to the island, but the captain has been unable to move the ship because a certain someone has sabotaged the engines. As should come as no surprise to anyone, that someone is... Michael, now posing as the ship's janitor under the name Kevin Johnson.

In the flash-forwards, Sun is rushed to the hospital, heavily pregnant, and keeps asking where Jin is. He's in transit, but having some difficulty buying a large stuffed panda. Finally he makes it to the hospital... where we find out we're actually in flashback in his half of the flashes, as he presents the panda to the daughter of the Chinese ambassador on the birth of her new son as a way of helping to curry favor for Sun's dad, Mr. Paik. As Jin leaves the hospital, a nurse mentions that maybe someday he'll be a father too. "Don't rush me," he jokes. "I've only been married two months!"

In the final flash-forward, we find out where Jin was when Sun was calling for him at the hospital - the same place he'd been for a while, presumably, six feet under in a Korean cemetery. Hurley, who has come out to visit, and Sun visit Jin's grave with the baby, which Sun has named Ji Yeon, in accordance with wishes stated by Jin on the island at the start of the episode. Sun cries and tells Jin how much she misses him. I cried a little bit too. Lost logo.

Holy shit. Could that have been any more of a depressing ending? It's interesting that this was how they chose to kill a character - it's certainly in keeping with something William Mapother (aka Ethan) once said, about how he'd made far more appearances on the show after being killed than he ever had while alive. So is Jin one of the Six, and Mr. Paik had him killed for returning to Korea? Is he one of the eight mentioned in Jack's story at Kate's trial, supposedly surviving the crash but dying soon after? Neither? Damon and Carlton said that the Oceanic Six would be cleared up after this episode, but frankly I'm still not sure whether Jin or Aaron is supposed to be the last one. (I really don't think it's anyone else.)

I resented the storytelling a little bit, I have to say. Last year, with the initial flash-forward, there were at least ways to pick it up. The combination flash-forward/flashback seemed like kind of a cheap trick because even though there were, in retrospect, clues that Jin's half was a flashback, they were all negated by other evidence. Jin having large amounts of cash available - well, if he's one of the Oceanic Six, he would, wouldn't he? Jin having short hair again - big deal, maybe he got a haircut. And Sun kept calling for him, a similar trick to Jack mentioning his father in the present tense in last year's finale. Wouldn't it have been just as easy not to show Jin in the flashes at all, rather than having to pull the wool over our eyes like that? It's not that I don't like twists, but unlike last year's, which was amazing, this one just felt like a cheat.

Aside from that, though, it was a pretty strong episode. Like the best of past seasons, it was able to combine some good emotional character moments with other scenes in which information was actually doled out. With the rush being put on the final five episodes, I'm a little worried that some character bits are going to go by the wayside, so at least we got a couple good character episodes in (this one and "The Constant") before the flood of information starts in six weeks or so.

s4e06: The Other Woman

2008-03-08T18:10:00.002-06:00

Coy start to this one, as it's briefly made to look like Juliet (wearing way too much makeup) has gotten off the island and is now meeting with a therapist. But oh, we tricked you! It's actually a therapist of the Other variety. We're on the island for the whole of the episode, as Charlotte and Daniel make their way to a power station where apparently there is a way to release a toxic gas that would kill everyone on the island - the therapist, Harper, appears to Juliet and tells her that Ben wants Juliet to go after Charlotte and Daniel and kill them if necessary. So that part of the episode is mostly split between walking/talking in the jungle and Juliet's flashbacks, where we see the trajectory of her previously-revealed relationship with Goodwin, who it turns out was married when he and Juliet met. To Harper. B'oh! Ben, who has a big crush on Juliet and is creepily possessive of her, sends Goodwin to his death at Ana Lucia's hands. (How could he have known that, some have asked? I say he just figured it was likely that eventually the Others were discovered. You could also make the case that he was just getting Goodwin away from Juliet, and then once Ethan was killed, not retracting Goodwin was Ben's way of leaving him for dead, when he had to figure Goodwin would also be discovered eventually.) Eventually we get to the Tempest station, where it transpires that Daniel and Charlotte are actually trying to turn the gas mechanisms off, presumably so that they can do their thing on the island without fearing that a loosed Ben could use it on them (we know he hasn't hesitated to gas his enemies in the past). Juliet and Jack kiss again, with Jack telling her that he's willing to take Ben on for her. Drew has said that one thing he didn't like about the flash-forwards from last season is seeing Jack at such a low, depressed point, and I guess I would agree in one sense - we know from the flash-forwards that Jack and Juliet don't end up together (at least not off the island), so the little courtship going on seems like kind of a waste. This episode wasn't "Eggtown" bad, but it did tread a lot of water in the main plot.

But then there was the "B" plot. In this case, B stands for Ben. Ben shows Locke a video with unsurprising master bad guy Charles Widmore, who Ben says has been looking for the island for some time. When Locke asks why, Ben compares the island to a piece of mold shaped like the Virgin Mary that drew 5,000 pilgrims to Gainesville, Florida - he asks Locke if that many people would go to see mold, how many people would come to see Locke, a man healed by the island's mystical properties? Locke has one more question - who is Ben's man on the boat? Ben tells Locke while we have to watch some commercials instead of finding out. Come on, show - we know it's Michael. Ben told Locke he had to sit down - it's not like it's going to be some character we've never met, and no one else got off the island. And we know Michael's coming back, and we know that next episode has a cliffhanger good enough that the episode split was made 7-6 rather than 8-5 even though the first eight episodes were produced. Are you really going to tell me it's not Michael? There's no way it's not. Everyone has suspected this since episode 2. Quit fucking around. Anyway, the episode ends with Sawyer and Hurley seeing Ben out walking around and expressing surprise and anger (at least on Sawyer's part). This combined with Locke's shutdown of Claire when she asked if she could talk to Miles and Ben's question of whether the revolution had started yet might not be so far off.

Next week: a Sun/Jin episode! We learn the last of the Oceanic Six - so, Sun and Jin, right? I mean, presumably Sun and someone. And a face we never expected to see again! Jesus. It's Michael. You are fooling nobody.

s4e05: The Constant

2008-02-29T22:24:00.002-06:00

I'm not even sure how to recap this one, since it involves a lot of time-jumping of Desmond's consciousness between 1996 and 2004 - or really, it involves Desmond's consciousness being knocked back to 1996, and then that 1996 consciousness jumping back and forth between 1996 and 2004. God, I'm already confused.

The episode starts without a "Previously on Lost" bit, which I found curious. Frank is flying the helicopter directly towards a large storm cloud, following the bearing that Daniel insisted he stay on. They make it through the storm okay, but Desmond appears to get jolted and no longer knows who Sayid is or where he is. He bounces back to 1996, where he is in the Scottish army, and gets in trouble for the lapses he experiences when he comes back to 2004. The freighter people are upset that Desmond and Sayid have been brought to the ship; Desmond is taken to sick bay and told to wait for the doctor. There, he runs across Minkowski, who has been having the same problem - which, he reveals later, was caused by going too close to the island. Meanwhile, Sayid calls Jack to discuss the situation; despite Daniel's suggestion that Jack and Juliet's perception of how long the helicopter has been gone may not match the reality, it certainly seems that traveling through the cloud has also propelled the helicopter in time, as Sayid comments that they took off at dusk but they land on the freighter around midday.

Daniel gets Desmond on the phone and tells him to seek out Daniel at Oxford back in 1996, giving him some information so that '96 Daniel will be convinced. '96 Daniel is working with radiation, which is hinted to have given rise to his later memory problems. He shows Desmond how he can transport the consciousness of a rat forward one hour so that it can learn how to run a maze in the future, then come back and apply it in the present. However, a short time later the rat dies. '96 Daniel explains to Desmond that he needs a constant in his life in both 1996 and 2004; otherwise, he will keep jumping back and forth until his brain overloads and he dies. Not long after this, Minkowski does just that in 2004. Desmond realizes that Penny is his constant; not knowing how to reach her, he manages to find Total Bastard Mr. Widmore, who is all smug assholishness as usual. But, confident that Desmond can now do nothing to win back Penny, he gives Desmond her new address. Desmond goes there and convinces her that if she gives him her new phone number, he will not call it for eight years, until December 24, 2004. She does so, then asks him to leave.

In 2004, Sayid manages to get the radio up and working again, and Desmond calls Penelope, fortunately reaching her. This grounds him back in 2004, as they profess their love and Penny tells him she'll do everything she can to find him. Back on the island, Daniel looks at a note in his journal - presumably from his 1996 self to his 2004 self - saying that if anything happens, Desmond will be his constant.

All in all, a pretty crazy episode, even more so than "Flashes Before Your Eyes." It doesn't tell us a ton about the problem, though. It seems that the storm is some sort of island barrier, and that people exposed to high levels of radiation or electromagnetism - hence, Desmond, and presumably Daniel later - have "side effects" when passing through it. This doesn't do anything to suggest what the deal is with time, however; as I mentioned earlier, it seemed like we were getting the answer when Daniel started talking about perception being different than reality - except it didn't seem like perception was different from reality, or at least, while the trip only did take 20 minutes, it covered a day's span of time both for the people on the island and the people in the helicopter. It's just that the people in the helicopter didn't really have to sit through it. This then returns to the issue of the missile from a couple episodes ago, which should have made it to the island in about 30 seconds but instead took 31 minutes, or ~60 times as long. Thus, a flight that should have taken maybe 20 minutes took 1200 minutes - or 20 hours - instead? Ultimately, though, I'm not sure how much effect this is going to have on the ability of anyone to get off the island; indeed, given what we know about the future, it seems like the answer is "Not a whole heckuva lot." Given that Ben seems to come and go from the island all the time, it can't be that big a deal, can it? Still, if the writers introduced it, there has to be something to it, I think, so I'll withhold judgment for now. Reading back in this blog reveals that nearly all of my guesses have turned out to be wrong, so I'd hate to make an assumption like that.

With that in mind, I'm more convinced than ever that Michael is Ben's man on the boat; someone had to open the door for Sayid and Desmond, and Minkowski comments that they have a "friend" on the ship. Since it's unlikely to have been Frank, doesn't that leave someone who knows Sayid and Desmond? Michael could also have been the one to sabotage the radio, preventing contact with the mainland, although that's not really uniquely identifying. Still, we know he's coming back - can you think of a more plausible way?

Oh, and how about Ecklie as the doctor? I wonder if Marc Vann gets tired of being cast as snotty authority figures all the time.

s4e04: Eggtown

2008-02-23T17:46:00.002-06:00

I'm not a big fan of Kate episodes. In fact, aside from "Exposé," this episode was probably the worst overall since s3e06, "I Do," which was - surprise! - a Kate episode. Frankly, the writing just wasn't very good - the "surprises" were all forced in by a clunky writing style that required the characters to talk unnaturally around names just so we could hold for the big reveal at the end of the episode which a lot of people, including me, had already guessed anyway.

Locke's group is living in the Barracks and Locke has actually assumed a sort of Ben-like role, which I assume isn't an accident. But he doesn't know what to do next, a fact that Ben - held captive in Locke's basement - taunts him over. Meanwhile, Kate wants to know what Miles knows about her. Locke won't let her see him, so she tricks Hurley into revealing the location. Miles agrees to tell her what he knows if she gives him a minute with Ben. Kate finds out that Ben is under Locke's watch, so she uses Sawyer to lead Locke down to the boathouse where Miles is kept; Miles is gone, moving with Kate back to Locke's, where they break in and find Ben. Miles asks Ben if he knows who Miles is and who he works for; Ben confirms this. Then Miles asks for 3.2 million dollars to lie to his boss and tell him Ben is already dead. He gives Ben a week to come up with the money. When Ben asks why Miles thinks Ben has access to that kind of money, Miles barks, "Do not treat me like I'm one of them!" and gestures to Kate. Miles then confirms for Kate that the freighter people know she's a fugitive. Locke returns and banishes Kate from the compound, then sticks a grenade in Miles' mouth so he can't talk. Sawyer offers to keep Kate under his protection, but she acts weird and ends up leaving for the beach.

At the beach, no one on the freighter is answering, so Jack and Juliet have Charlotte call the secret line only to be used in emergencies. Regina says that the helicopter - which left the previous day - has not arrived. Worried, puzzled looks are exchanged.

In the future, a rather annoying Kate is on trial for her various crimes. Jack is called as a character witness and tells the story of 815 as it was apparently agreed upon - he does say that the plane crashed on a deserted island, but that only 8 people survived the crash, with only 6 making it back to civilization. When asked by the DA if he loves Kate, he says, "Not anymore," though he later claims to her that that was a lie. (Dammit, Jack!) Kate's mom, still alive, is wheeled in to be the star witness, but even though Kate treats her pretty bad, she ends up refusing to testify. Kate gets off with time served and ten years' probation. At the end of the episode, she invites Jack back to her house to see her son, but he won't go - and it becomes pretty clear why, as Kate greets her son with a "Hi, Aaron."

(Astonishingly, there were a huge number of dipshits on the Lost message board insisting that Kate said "Eric," even though the fact that there was a big reveal at the end of the episode should have made it clear that the baby was Claire's even if Kate's pronunciation of the name was a little muddled. This also explains Jack's reluctance to see the baby - whether he knows by then that Aaron is his nephew or not, surely being reminded of whatever happened to Claire is something he wants to avoid.)

By far the most interesting parts of the episode were the fact that the copter hadn't reached the boat (or was claimed not to have), which will be addressed in next week's episode, and the Miles/Ben conversation. The fact that Kate has Aaron in the future is interesting, but Kate's behavior in both the present and future was so generally annoying that I just checked out on her parts of the episode, which was most of it. To say nothing of the fact that I would consider myself a Jack/Juliet shipper and the future seems to make clear that that isn't happening. Bah.

s4e03: The Economist

2008-02-15T12:46:00.002-06:00

It wouldn't be a Lost episode if we didn't have one question answered - usually the one that most people had already guessed the answer to anyway - and five or six more pop up.

On the island, Sayid makes a deal with Frank that if he returns Charlotte safely, Frank will take him off the island on the helicopter. Sayid and Kate, armed, and Miles head off to find Locke. Meanwhile, there seems to be some dissent in Locke's camp, as Hurley isn't sure that keeping Charlotte as a hostage is such a good idea. Locke attempts to travel to Jacob's cabin, but when he finds the ring of powder, the cabin is nowhere to be seen. Hurley, perhaps remembering when he saw it move, looks nervous and suggests that maybe they just took a wrong turn. Locke continues to lead the group to the Others' barracks.

When Sayid and Kate find the barracks, Hurley is tied up in a closet, saying he was left behind by Locke. It turns out to be a ruse, however; Sawyer guards Kate (although she is armed and he appears not to be) and Miles is taken somewhere that we don't see. Kate asks Sawyer why he doesn't want to leave the island and he points out that there's nothing for him in the US, then asks why Kate wants to get off given that a prison term is likely all that awaits her. Sayid is captured by Locke shortly after discovering a hidden room in Ben's house full of clothing, international passports, and various currencies. It's pretty obvious now that not only can Ben get off the island, he likely does so all the time. Sayid and Ben are held in the game room; Ben won't disclose his man on the boat, and Sayid admits to Locke that he doesn't trust the "rescuers" any more than Locke does. He still wants to get to the boat, and trades Miles for Charlotte to fulfill his deal with Frank.

Meanwhile, Daniel has been doing an experiment in the clearing where the helicopter is. He has Regina (from the boat) send a rocket with a clock inside of it. When the rocket finally arrives, the clock is found to be roughly 31 minutes behind island time, which Daniel describes as "not good." He cautions Frank to fly out on the helicopter on the exact same bearing on which they flew in, no matter what. Sayid and Charlotte return, with Kate apparently electing to stay behind and Miles having been traded. Juliet comes back from the beach with Desmond, who demands to know if Daniel and Frank know Penelope Widmore, given that Naomi was carrying her picture. They claim not to, but both look uncomfortable before doing so. Desmond decides to go on the helicopter. Sayid goes as well, and when Charlotte, Daniel and Jack all decide not to go, Sayid suggests that Naomi's body be the third person they carry. The helicopter flies off over the ocean.

In flash-forward, we see Sayid on a deserted golf course in the Seychelles. A man pulls up to him and offers to bet that he can hit the ball closer to the pin with his choice of club. When Sayid discloses that he is one of the Oceanic Six, the man gets nervous and, though he wins the bet, attempts to leave without collecting. Sayid reveals that he knows the man's name (Mr. Avellino) and shoots him dead. Later, Sayid is in Berlin, where he fakes a casual meeting with a German woman, Elsa. Sayid falls for her although his job is to mark her so that he can use her to track her employer, who she claims is an economist. When her employer contacts her, Sayid tells her to stay away, but she shoots him in the shoulder and seems like she was actually spying on him the entire time; he manages to kill her, though he is upset about doing so. In the final scene, Sayid goes to what appears to be an animal hospital to meet his boss... who turns out to be Ben. Ben reminds Sayid that the last time he thought with his heart instead of his gun, something bad happened, and states that Sayid must continue working for him if he wants to protect his friends. Sayid says that now the people on Ben's list will know he is coming after them. Ben stares at him and says, "Good." Logo.

This shakes things up rather a lot, doesn't it? When we saw Jack and Kate meet, or Jack and Hurley, I think we all assumed that the people whose secrets they were keeping were the people on the boat. And maybe they still are? But at least one of the people who gets off the island is in direct contact with Ben, and what's more it becomes apparent that Ben has some travel secrets that we don't know about. There has been speculation among the fans that Locke didn't actually blow up the submarine, but I'm not sure I buy that - given Locke's mental state at the time, it doesn't make sense that he would have a desire to fake blowing it up. So Ben likely has still another way off the island. The time issue, of course, is also a big one, although 31 minutes isn't exactly the difference that many have been positing.

The WGA strike is over and we're getting five more episodes this year. Supposedly, it will run seven, then a six-week break, then six more. So we've got four more to go before the break. The three episodes missing from this season will go into future seasons. Damon Lindelof has said that the storytelling is going to get very compressed in the five new episodes so as to end Season 4 at the same point as it would have; this might not be that bad a thing, frankly. Five new jam-packed episodes? Works for me. Better than nothing, which is what we might have gotten had the strike lasted another month.

s4e02: Confirmed Dead

2008-02-09T13:39:00.000-06:00

We get our first-ever four-way flashback - five-way, even - as we see what Daniel, Miles, Charlotte and Frank, the four people on the helicopter that Daniel dropped from at the end of the previous episode, were doing before they got to the island. The episode starts by revealing the plane in a trench off Bali, as Naomi mentioned at the end of last season. Daniel, watching footage on television, is upset, though he's not sure why. Miles, we find out, is a kind of exorcist or ghostbuster - oddly, he manages to be both legitimate and a bit of a con artist at the same time. Charlotte is an anthropologist who finds a polar bear with a Dharma collar in the Tunisian desert. Frank is a pilot who was, apparently, supposed to be piloting Flight 815 when it crashed, and recognizes that something is off about the wreckage. The four are gathered together to bring in Ben; the team is headed by Naomi, who describes it as "covert ops," and headed by Matthew Abaddon, the sinister guy claiming to be from Oceanic who talked to Hurley last episode. Why exactly they want Ben is not revealed (shock!), although it appears that most or all of them don't even know. Their professions are somewhat telling - anthropologist, physicist, psychic/exorcist; presumably, as Abaddon says, each is intended for a specific purpose in terms of what they might come into contact with on the island.

Speaking of on the island: so Jack and Kate meet Daniel, who is kind of fidgety. He admits that rescue is not concern #1, but they go after Miles' transponder signal before he can say what concern #1 actually is. Miles is the exact opposite - on edge and aggressive, pointing a gun in Jack's face right away. That's because he thinks they killed Naomi, though, due to her final message which was apparently a code. He makes Kate take him to Naomi's body so that he can confirm her story, which he does, doing his ghosty thing, I guess. Then Juliet and Sayid pop out of the jungle and disarm Daniel and Miles, putting the survivors back in control of the situation. They go to look for Charlotte, but Locke has put her transponder onto Vincent and turned him loose to throw the pursuers off (I successfully called this as soon as I saw how fast the transponder signal was moving); instead, they find Frank after he shoots off a signal flare. Frank reveals that he was able to put the helicopter down safely. Miles attempts to call the boat, but George is suspiciously unavailable. Juliet tends to Frank's head wound, but when she tells him her name, he knows - from having read the manifest many times - that she wasn't on the plane. Miles freaks out and demands to know where Ben is, admitting that the freighter is there to look for him.

In the other group, Sawyer has taken to pummeling Ben as a way of withstanding Ben's mind games. Locke says it's important to keep Ben alive, but after they find Charlotte, Ben attempts to kill her; luckily (?), she's wearing a bulletproof vest. Ben explains that he knows the people are here for him, rattling off Charlotte's bio to prove it. As we go to Lost logo, Ben states that he has an insider on the boat.

Clearly, other people are aware of the Dharma projects. But how is that possible? Is this Dharma, or a related offshoot of the Hanso Foundation, coming to exact its revenge on Ben and the natives? And how did a fully-preserved and buried polar bear skeleton wind up in the Tunisian desert? The hint we got last summer about time travel definitely seems to be creeping more into the plot.

What's up with the plane off Bali? Part of a cover-up? (Assumedly, yes.) Who's masterminding this cover-up? Based on the little we've gotten from him, I don't think it's Abaddon, so that probably leaves someone we haven't met yet - another possibility being Dharma/Hanso, trying to distract so no one finds the actual island. But Abaddon can't be both Hanso and not Hanso.

And who, pray tell, is the insider on the boat? I'll give you my guess: Michael. We know he's coming back this season, and given that his name has already reappeared in the opening credits, it's probably going to be soon. There's clearly been more contact between the island and the outside world than previously revealed - where else would that photograph of Ben have come from, since it's clearly pretty recent? So perhaps Ben made contact with Michael somehow (sometime during Season Three in island time), knowing that people out there were looking for him?

Rumor has it the writer's strike will be ending in the next few days. I wonder if there's any chance of more episodes getting produced for this season - could they possibly write and film the remaining eight in a three-month period? Wishful thinking, I suppose. But would they really go 8-24? Any chance of 12-20, even? We'll see.

s4e01: The Beginning of the End

2008-02-01T23:09:00.001-06:00

We're in full-on flash-forward mode, as the show opens with Hurley in a drawn-out car chase; as he's dragged away by the cops, he screams if they know who he is. "I'm one of the Oceanic Six!" So right away we know that only six people got off the island, and we already know who three of them are (Jack, Kate, and now Hurley). Suspicious, to say the least. Anyway. Hurley ends up getting grilled by Ana Lucia's old partner; he claims not to have known her or even met her. (To be fair, the cop's description was a little vague had Hurley only met her in passing. "Dark hair, gorgeous?" Well, there isn't anyone else like that on the island!) Hurley was running because he saw something in a convenience store and fled from it, but he won't say what. The cop ends up offering to commit him, which Hurley gladly accepts. Then he receives a visit from a sinister dude who claims to be a representative of Oceanic; he offers to put Hurley up in a swankier mental hospital. Hurley sniffs out the dude as not really from Oceanic; the guy asks what happened to everyone else. Hurley freaks out and the guy takes off. Later, Hurley is sitting outside when a fellow patient tells him he's being stared at. The starer turns out to be - bum bum bum!!! - Charlie. Charlie tells Hurley he has to go back to the island, but Hurley doesn't want to listen. He closes his eyes and counts to five, and Charlie vanishes. In the final bit of flash-forward, Hurley gets a visit from Jack, clearly not yet the bearded freako of last season's finale. Jack is mostly there to make sure that Hurley isn't going to tell people about... well, it's a secret for now, clearly, but it's obviously the same sort of deal alluded to in the finale (when Jack tells Kate he's sick of lying). The fact that only six people made it back when we know there are dozens alive is, after all, suspect. Hurley says to Jack that he doesn't think they did the right thing. Jack tells Hurley they're never going back to the island; "Never say never, dude," Hurley calls after him.

Back on the island in "present" times, Naomi crawls into the jungle as she thinks Locke hit her with the knife on behalf of the whole group. Kate convinces her otherwise and Naomi conceals the true nature of her injury from the guy on the boat before dying of it, but she manages to fix the signal first and another guy (Jeremy Davies with an oddly island-looking beard) parachutes in at the end of the episode. Before that, the news is broken to everyone that Charlie died and that he revealed that Penny was not connected to the boat before doing so. While walking through the jungle, Hurley stumbles across Jacob's house, where it appears Locke may have been having a conversation; it looks like Hurley was able to see Jacob. When everyone finally meets up, Jack jumps Locke and tries to kill him, but Locke's gun isn't loaded. Sayid and Sawyer still have to pull Jack off Locke. Locke repeats Ben's talking points that the people on the boat are not there for anyone's benefit, but of course people aren't exactly queueing up behind him. Then Hurley gives an impassioned speech about trusting Charlie's final message, and he decides to go with Locke (although when talking to Jack in the flash-forward, Hurley apologizes for going with Locke); subsequently, so do a lot of people, including Claire and Sawyer. Jack also relinquishes Ben to Locke's charge. And then, again, Jack and Kate are hanging out at the fuselage piece in the jungle when Jeremy Davies parachutes in. Jack seems wary; I don't know if it's supposed to be that he's having second thoughts about the whole boat thing, or because Jeremy Davies is kind of creepy-looking (Upham, you bastard!) and has a weird beard going.

I was watching online (sadly, I have class Thursday nights now and my TV isn't working with TiVo at the moment, so I have to watch it Friday online and hope no one ruins anything in the interim) so I didn't get to see the "Next time on Lost," so let's start a new feature wherein I pose the most interesting questions this episode left us with:

1. Charlie admits to being dead and he seems to vanish awfully quick when Hurley closes his eyes, but if he's a hallucination, how did the other patient know that he was there?

2. What kind of deal (or something?) was struck, and why did only six people make it back? If only six were allowed back - we can assume that everyone else is not dead as Charlie states that they need Hurley's help - what happened to the rest of them?

3. Who the fuck is on that boat?

4. Why does Hurley apologize for going with Locke, especially when he seems at that point to fall into the camp of "shouldn't have left"?

There's plenty more, of course, but there always is. I'm really looking forward to this season, although I wish that goddamn writer's strike would just end already so we aren't held to eight episodes. I don't think there's been a bad Lost episode since that stupid Nikki and Paolo one, and if you don't count that since it barely had anything to do with anything, there hasn't been a bad one - bad is maybe kind of strong, but certainly "lesser" - since that "teaser" six-episode block at the start of last season. 16 episodes a year is going to suit this show just fine, methinks.

Dissection/predictions

2007-05-24T21:59:00.001-05:00

I've been turning over the show in my head, especially the last five minutes - really, three seasons have been building to that, haven't they? There's still a ton left to find out about the island itself, but now the question becomes: where is next season going to pick up? It's hardly obvious - the next episode could as easily pick up right where it left off as it could with a Jack eyeball shot on a boat or plane, or for that matter with another flashback or flash-forward - but we can perhaps make a few guesses about the next move based on the events of "Through the Looking Glass."

Jack, Kate, and at least one other person (probably two) get off the island.

I feel safe in assuming that the flash-forwards are somewhat malleable - i.e. they're set at the end of a timeline that the plot is currently following, but Jack may or may not trace his path to that exact point. I would be exceedingly surprised, for example, if the show were to suddenly leap forward and pick up where it left off at the very end of the episode, as opposed to at the end of the "present" time period. Kate's "he" is probably supposed to be Sawyer, since if it's not him it could really be anyone, while the dead guy is most likely either Locke or Ben. (Ben seems unlikely to leave the island voluntarily, but he was tied up.)

Some sort of deal was involved.

Drew first proposed this in a discussion we were having, and it makes sense. Just look at the dialogue - Kate states that "this isn't going to change," while Jack says he is "sick of lying." Well, lying about what?

Remember: there's a plane with bodies in the ocean off Bali, where the real plane would never have ended up. Assuming that the Widmore Corporation is connected with Hanso, has a hugely powerful global reach, and wants to find the island and perhaps has some sense of its history, it makes sense to think that when Widmore heard about the plane crash - tying it in with the electromagnetic anomaly they were apparently looking for - they moved to plant the fake plane to throw rescuers off the scent. Because Widmore/Hanso wanted to find the island again, something they had probably been unable to do since the Purge of the Dharma Initiative, and they didn't want anyone else to stumble across it in the process. Hence why they were so mad about the S1 anomaly being missed, leading to the scramble in the listening station over the S2 anomaly. Penelope probably had gleaned some knowledge of the island from her father's dealings and suspected that Desmond could be found there, hence why she requested that the men in the listening station contact her as well.

This doesn't totally explain why Naomi had Desmond's picture or stated that she was looking for him, of course. Perhaps Widmore knew what his daughter was up to and supplied Naomi with a copy of the photo to throw anyone suspicious of her off the scent.

But okay: fake plane intended to thwart rescuers from getting anywhere near the island so that a Widmore/Hanso team could find it first and perhaps attempt to resume Dharma-like operations (or even something more sinister). Ben does seem truly terrified of the consequences of Jack's phone call; despite many of his actions, it doesn't seem impossible to think that, in many ways, he is going to turn out to be the "good guy" of the story, at least where the island itself is concerned.

So Widmore/Hanso allow people off the island, but perhaps they force them to lie about where they'd been? Ben doesn't want the outside world knowing about the island, so other people aware of its properties could surely feel the same way. Perhaps the freighter could steam over to Bali and pretend to have rescued the Losties there. This would explain Jack's desire to "stop lying," certainly, and Widmore/Hanso holding something over the Losties' heads would explain Kate's vehemence that "this isn't going to change." And of course, it would explain Jack's behavior - perhaps knowing what he allowed Widmore/Hanso to do on or to the island, or to some of the people there, is eating Jack up inside, and certainly his reaction to the death is telling. Could Locke have ended up back in a wheelchair as a result of leaving the island and offed himself, leaving Jack to feel responsible for his death? Could Ben have killed himself (or been killed) after being forcibly removed from the island? The latter seems to fit in a little better with Kate's "Why would I go [to the funeral]?" but it's hardly a given. (There are quite a few people on the island who would be unlikely to have anyone turn up at a viewing for them in LA, after all.)

The biggest question for next year, of course - which means it probably won't be answered until 2009 - is this: What exactly does Jack learn between "Through the Looking Glass"'s present and its future that causes him to feel that leaving the island was a mistake? Why does he want to get back so badly? For that matter, why does Kate "have" to go with him?

Well, there's the thought that, prior to crashing on the island, Jack's life peaked when he saved Sarah and was all downhill from there. On the island, Jack is a hero and a leader; off the island he was a wandering drunk with a failed marriage. That said, his desire to get back seems rooted in a lot more than his own desire to be a hero. They weren't meant to leave? It would be one thing if everyone were suffering off the island, but Kate seems to be doing okay, right? (And, if she's with Sawyer, Sawyer, although I give that a 50/50 shot, really.)

Maybe the bulk of the survivors aren't allowed to leave? (It would create a lot of questions for Widmore/Hanso if they faked the plane crash, claiming everyone was dead, and then more than a handful of people turned up alive, no?) Jack wants to return to what has really become his family - more so than what is left in the real world - while Kate is more willing to cut ties if it means a more normal life? Whoever the other person is who offed himself (assuming that's what happened, but it does seem like the implication) could be having the same remorse/guilt as Jack. This might also explain why it seems like either Kate doesn't want to talk to Jack at all, or why they have been discouraged from contacting each other (which would explain their meeting spot; I kind of got this vibe more so than that Kate herself just didn't want to see Jack).

I may be guilty of overanalysis at this point. But is such a thing really possible with this show? I say no. There's really tons more I could theoretically go over, but I'll hold myself to this for now. It alone may very well keep me occupied for the next eight months. It's funny looking back, because I started this blog having loved the first season on DVD and then feeling pretty disappointed for much of the second season and into the first part of the third season. But the second half of Season 3 is probably as good as television has ever been for me personally. I will be there in 2010, come hell or high water.

s3e22: Through the Looking Glass

2007-05-23T23:39:00.000-05:00

The plan doesn't work quite so dynamite (ha!), and Bernard, Jin and Sayid are taken prisoner by the three Others who aren't killed (Tom, that guy, and then that other guy). Ben catches up with Jack and the rest of the gang and informs him that unless Jack stops trying to make contact with the boat, Ben will have his guys shoot Jack's guys. Jack refuses to give in, so Ben does, except that he really doesn't, which Tom lets us know in the clumsiest bit of dialogue that's ever appeared on this show. Either Ben is not as cold-blooded as he seems or something else odd is going on, not that we're going to find out what anytime soon, if so.

Ben allows Alex to tag along, revealing that he knows she betrayed her. (This is due to Bernard the big fat blabbermouth giving up the details of the plan with Jin held at gunpoint.) After Jack thinks his friends are dead, he beats the hell out of Ben, then drags him back, at which point Ben reveals to Alex that Rousseau is her mother.

Sawyer and Juliet head back to the beach, although not before Juliet gives Jack a big ol' smooch that has only been set up for 22 damn episodes. They're not sure what to do when they get there (good bit of banter: Sawyer: "There's only three of them and four guns!" Juliet: "And there's two of us, and no guns."), until Hurley - previous recipient of the double brush-off for being too fat to help anyone - comes flying in with Roger Linus' van. He runs over one Other, a tied-up Sayid breaks another's neck with his feet - Jesus! - and then Sawyer, in the last we see of him, shoots Tom in virtual cold blood after the latter has surrendered, saying, "That's for taking the kid off the boat." Uh, damn, Sawyer! Weren't you all messed up about killing Locke's dad ten minutes ago?

Hurley radios back to let the Others know what happened, but Jack has the walkie, and everyone hears that our heroes are all alive.

Oh, but then there's Charlie. He's been in the Looking Glass getting his ass kicked. The women there radio Ben, who sends Mikhail over. Mikhail seems kind of perturbed since Ben has been doing a lot of lying. Ben swears that he is not lying now, not to Mikhail, and tells him to kill everyone. Mikhail kills the women, but then Desmond pops out of the back - where he'd been hiding after being forced to swim down when Mikhail first arrived at the beach - and shoots Mikhail with a spear gun. Bonnie, the blonde one, stays alive just long enough to inform Charlie that the code to turn off the jamming device is the tune to "Good Vibrations." Um, okay. Kind of corny there, show, but I guess I'll allow it. Charlie taps out the tune and the light goes off. And then... a transmission comes in! And it's Penelope! And she apparently reveals that she didn't send any boat and that she doesn't know anyone named Naomi. (Although the latter part doesn't necessarily seem odd, since didn't Naomi just say that her company was hired?) And then Mikhail shows up outside the porthole with a grenade. Man, that guy is like Michael Myers! Penny catches that Desmond is there, but then Mikhail blows the window, and Charlie shuts the door to conform to Desmond's flashes, even though he probably could have survived easily. Frankly, I'm a little annoyed with the writers on this one - Charlie was kind of an annoying, crap character for most of three seasons, and then he was suddenly made into a great, noble guy, naturally just long enough to kill him off. I actually liked the Charlie of the last two episodes. Oh well, it probably would have been more annoying if they hadn't done it, and it was a poetic ending to that chapter.

Locke is about to kill himself in the pit when Walt appears to him and tells him that his work isn't done. So motivated, Locke climbs out of the pit, and just as Naomi is about to contact her boat, *spluh*, she takes his hunting knife to the back of the head. Locke threatens to shoot Jack, but Jack uses the phone anyway, and Locke - surprise! - can't pull the trigger, despite Ben's exhortations. Ben continues to claim that Jack is making a mistake and everyone will die if the boat is contacted, but Jack does it anyway. The voice on the other end of the phone tells Jack that the boat is on its way.

And then we cut to the final flashback, where we find out that the episode's flashbacks have actually been flash-forwards. (Drew correctly guessed this fairly early on.) Jack, with a big beard, has read about a death in the LA paper. (Freeze-framing tells us it's a man, found downtown, but no more is given.) Jack is about to jump off a bridge when a car crashes behind him. He saves the woman inside and is lauded as a hero, but Jack has gotten hooked on oxycodone and is all kinds of messed up. He keeps calling someone, though we never hear a voice on the other end. He attends the viewing of the person who died, but no one else has shown up. Finally Jack convinces the person on the phone to meet him at the airport. The low harp string of ominous occurrences informs us of their arrival and... it's Kate. Jack has apparently been bothering her quite a bit, and she doesn't like it. She leaves, saying "he'll wonder" where she went, but not before Jack says that they have to go back. They shouldn't have left the island.

Season.

I mean, great episode. First of all, loved the flash-forward. Second of all, loved they ended it in such a way that there are clearly lots of unanswered questions, but not on a ridiculous cliffhanger that would make me spend the next eight months going "Hurry uuuuuup!" I have no idea where they're going next, and that's not a bad thing.

Things we need to know now:

* If Penny didn't send Naomi, who did? And why were they looking for Desmond? The guys in the listening station last year seemed to suggest that they were working for more than one person ("They're gonna kill us!"), even if we only saw them calling Penelope. The Widmore Corporation, maybe?

* Who is this grave threat to the island? Again, Widmore? The Lost Experience, which I believe is considered canon, drew a connection between Widmore and the Hanso Foundation, which is connected with Dharma... Ben describes the threat as greater than any the island has faced in years, and given Ben's history, Dharma was probably that last threat.

* If Locke really believes, as Ben does, that the island needs to be saved from exterior incursions, why does he just walk away? He was "man enough" to kill Naomi.

* Who died off the island? Could it have been Sawyer, or is Kate supposed to be still with him? Locke? (Jack seems to almost feel responsible for the death, and if he was responsible for getting Locke rescued, and Locke ended up back in a wheelchair and killed himself, I can see why Jack would be so messed up.) Are we likely to see more flash-forwards in Season Four?

* Richard doesn't age and Mikhail doesn't die. Reasons? Also, Jacob is still hanging out there.

* Jack keeps talking like his dad is alive, and certainly no one corrects him when he makes the claim at the hospital, where assumedly they would know. Is this a different timeline? Is Jack just delusional?

* What conclusion does future Jack come to that make him realize they shouldn't have left the island?

Okay, I lied: I can't wait for Season 4. Or 5 or 6. But at least we have a lot to chew on between now and then.

s3e21: Greatest Hits

2007-05-16T23:09:00.000-05:00

I'll be honest: for the penultimate episode of Season Three, I was really hoping for more. This was mostly an hour of setup for the finale, and while I can't totally complain - in some ways it's just a three-hour finale split over two nights - I thought we might get a little more. Instead, we got:

* "Here are the exact specifications of Jack's plan!"
* "Here are the exact specifications of Ben's plan!"
* "Here is a Charlie backstory that serves no purpose other than to convince you he's going to die, even though any reasonable person could have realized that they would never kill him off in so obvious a fashion!"
* "Here are ten seconds of significant interest, just to wet your beaks for next week!"

Really, the last ten seconds weren't even that interesting, by this show's standards. They showed us that the Looking Glass is still staffed. Presumably it's staffed by Others; so what does this tell us? Obviously it's likely to be explained in the finale, but I would assume that there's some kind of "Ben has way the crap more contact with the outside world than he's telling anyone" thing coming. The whole show seems to be trending towards a fall for Ben; there's clearly a faction within the Others that is upset with his leadership and it's not just Juliet, regardless of what was implied by her trial early this season. Whether that's what the "everything will change" tagline means, obviously I don't know, but if I had a couple bucks to put down in Vegas I'd lean that way, especially with Jacob looking to Locke for help. (However, Lindelof and Cuse said on last week's official podcast that Jacob was more of a fourth-season story, so my question becomes: are we even likely to see Locke next week? Maybe near the end of the show? I had read something saying that the season finale would involve a clash between Jack and Locke - which makes sense since Locke doesn't want to leave the island - but that seems less likely now, doesn't it? Unless maybe they run into him on the trek to the radio tower...)

I will say that Charlie's Sydney Carton moment was one of the better single moments for the show in the last two years, so at least there was that. Otherwise, though, this was mostly "an hour that's not the finale." I'm looking forward to those two hours, myself. Let's hope it's better than last year's.

s3e20: The Man Behind the Curtain

2007-05-09T23:31:00.000-05:00

Ben flashback! Ben flashback! Ben has not, in fact, lived on the island all his life. He was born right outside of Portland (hmm hmm hmm hmm), killed his mother in childbirth (the writers do love those fakeout openings, where you assume she's on the island, but then no), and then he and his father - Roger, Work Man of Hurley's van fame - went to the island when he was, I don't know, middle-school-aged, because Roger had gotten a job with the Dharma Initiative, which seems pretty darn cultlike. Roger hates the job and takes it out on his son... who runs off into the jungle after seeing his mother. He ends up running into Richard - buh-wha? - who sure doesn't look any worse for thirty years of wear at this point! Later - at an undisclosed time between 12-year-old Ben and 40-something Ben; he's probably supposed to be in his 30s at this point, though - Ben kills his father just as the "hostiles" kill the other Dharma members. And there's Richard again, looking exactly the same 20+ years later.

In current time, Ben is forced to take Locke to see Jacob - sure he is. Ben never does anything he doesn't want to do, so clearly some larger plan is in the offing. Ben takes Locke to a dark cabin in the jungle and presents... an empty chair. And talks to it! Just when Locke has decided that he's seen enough of the Anthony Perkins impression, he hears a strangled "Help me" from behind him. Locke turns on his flashlight, but Jacob the Unfriendly Ghost doesn't take too kindly to "technology" and tears the room apart. Locke later accuses Ben of putting on a show, so Ben fesses up to being dishonest about at least one thing - he wasn't born on the island like he's been saying. To prove it, he shows Locke the mass grave of the Dharma people, and then shoots Locke in the gut. Locke falls into the pit and tells Ben what Jacob said. Ben says he hopes Jacob will help Locke, and leaves.

In the B plot, Sawyer and Sayid reveal Juliet's deception to everyone, just in time for Jack and Juliet to return and explain that, in fact, Juliet has been working with Jack on a way to thwart the Others, not help them. Okay, Jack, you're forgiven for being annoying. For now.

Next week: the Others are coming, and the castaways are ready. I guess. And Desmond tells Charlie he needs to die this time. Which I'm sure means it won't happen, although according to the producers we're still at least 2-3 deaths short of the promised May total.

Because Lost never opens a window without building three more doors in the house and then shutting all of them, this episode left far more questions than it answered. Below, a small stab at some of them:

1. Um, Richard doesn't age?
We've already established that the island seems to have super freaky healing powers, so presumably it can also greatly extend the lifetimes of its inhabitants? Or at least the lifers? But if that's true, who knows how long they've been on the island - remember, there are also weird old ruins all over the place. But if they have these insane long lives, why would they seem so excited just because Locke's legs started working again?

2. Ben's plan for Locke...
What's the deal here? Does he really want Locke out of the way so badly? If so, why go to all the trouble he did? Because he knew his people were interested in Locke and he needed to get him alone? But if he really wants Locke out of the way, presumably he would have finished the job. He didn't.

3. OMG WTF Jacob
Yeah, I don't even know what to tell you here.

s3e19: The Brig

2007-05-02T23:53:00.000-05:00

Everyone who could not tell from last week's teaser that Locke had his father tied up and not Ben, raise your hands. No one? That's what I thought. Even when this show is being clever, it's sometimes too good (bad?) about telegraphing its next twist. If you can call that a twist.

The twist I did like - Locke's dad is also Sawyer's con-man namesake. I called it before they laid it all out in painstaking detail - "Why yes, I have been to your childhood hometown and used a literary character's name as my pseudonym, why do you ask?" - right when they went to commercial with Sawyer's "Who the hell are you?" Locke's dad is a con-man, he would have something to say that would make Sawyer want to kill him - it worked. I actually liked this twist; it's a nice departure from the characters having inane, tiny background connections that only serve to make people go "Heeeeeyyy..." Not as moving as the Sawyer/Jack's dad bit from the end of Season One, but fitting.

Locke's dad seems to think they're in hell, although as Drew suggested to me, it seems pretty obvious that this is just typical Others-style "go get 'em" activity. Hit by a car from behind and the paramedic smiles at him? Probably Ethan. The B-plot teases otherwise, what with the whole "They found the plane near Bali" thing, but then that doesn't even make sense, since Bali is in the opposite direction from Sydney that LA is. We really don't learn anything new, except that there's some interference preventing the phone from working, apparently. Also, people on this island are not good at keeping secrets, and Jack continues to be kind of an oblivious dick.

Locke's dad is typical Locke's dad asshole guy and Sawyer ends up killing him. Interesting moment for Sawyer there, since the show had spent the better part of a month trying to make him a really great guy. I suppose having him kill a total asshole (and still being sick about it) doesn't necessarily change that, and he already had killed one guy he merely thought was the con man responsible for his parents' murder-suicide anyway, but it's still interesting. I wonder how this might relate to him being a bigger leadership voice in the camp in the last three episodes (see: teaser).

Locke gives Sawyer some anti-Juliet ammo and then takes off, claiming he's not back to join Ben, but then he slings the body of his father on his back, so yeah, he is. (Side note: Rousseau getting dynamite, throwaway moment or daughter-rescuing payoff later on?)

Next time: Jack's still pretty annoying, as he apparently can't believe why no one would trust him for waltzing around with an Other. Everyone remembers how trustworthy Michael was after he came back, Jack! Of course, Sayid and Kate were held captive by the Others too, but they don't want to fuck one like Jack does. Sawyer plays the tape and Jack gets all huffy and Sawyer calls him on his shit. Locke goes back to Ben and sees some stuff, maybe. And there are only three episodes left and I think they're going to be three real motherfuckers. In other news, swearing is fun!

s3e17: Catch-22 and s3e18: D.O.C.

2007-04-25T23:44:00.000-05:00

Travel last week prevented me from watching "Catch-22" until yesterday, so we might as well just combine them.

Desmond gets all future-y again, as the writers tease every viewer by pretending Charlie dies (although you're a total sucker if you fell for that one). (Incidentally, was this first scene directed by Quentin Tarantino? Gory violence and a totally random argument about a foot race between Superman and the Flash? What the fuck?) Desmond somehow convinces Hurley, Charlie and Jin to go tramping into the jungle after something he won't tell them about, narrowly saves Charlie, and in the flashback, we see that he's used to totally copping out of his problems. The parachutist Desmond thought was Penny (as though a rich girl like that is going to be doing her own parachuting) turns out to be someone completely unknown to us, but she does know who Desmond is and has his picture, so it seems pretty clear she was sent by Penny, as we finally start to follow up on the last scene of the Season 2 finale. In the B plot, the writers continue to pretend that Kate is carrying a torch for Jack. I'm starting to care even less about this than about the Charlie/Claire relationship.

In this week's episode, Sun finds out that pregnant women are pretty much hosed if they got pregnant on the island. Thanks to Jin's miracle island sperm, she did. Uh oh. Juliet ultrasounds her, then sneaks back in to leave a tape-recorded message for Ben, though she accidentally hits stop before telling him of her hate for him. Glad we cleared that one up. Presumably this is supposed to set up the resolution to a future conflict wherein Juliet picks the side of right despite the Others' coercion, but we'll see how that goes.

In the flashback, Sun's mother-in-law is even bitchier than the average mother-in-law, demanding 100 grand to spare Jin the shame of discovering that she was a prostitute. This inspires Sun to research Jin's family history, meeting his father, who is totally cool with being considered dead. Those Koreans are really concerned with appearances, man. We also see that Sun was basically responsible for Jin having to become the bad-type he was in the first season flashbacks (although it was really his mom's fault, so whatever), but if you think about it, it's not really all that important now. The only thing that we really get out of the flashbacks is seeing that Sun is willing to go through a fair amount for Jin, though some consolation that is now.

In the B plot, we go back to Desmond and crew. Lady Parachutist is dying of a punctured lung, but then Mikhail shows up (WTF?) and saves the day. Or at least her. He tries to steal the satellite phone that doesn't work anyway and gets caught by Jin, but Desmond still lets him go per their agreement that if he saved the parachutist Desmond would let him walk. So dead people just get up and walk around now? I know the island has healing powers, but that seems sort of extreme.

Parachute girl wakes up and talks to Hurley. He anxiously asks if she's there to rescue them and reveals that he was on Flight 815, to which she replies that that's impossible, because the plane was found and there were no survivors. Uh..... huh?

Next week: Locke recruits Sawyer to kill "Ben" - do you really want to give me odds it's not actually his dad?

I have to say, over the past month or so I've probably enjoyed Lost as much as at any point since I gorged on the first season nearly two years ago. Let's see three more episodes of this, guys. You can handle that, right?

s3e16: One of Us

2007-04-11T23:18:00.000-05:00

AKA "Everybody Hates Juliet." Not that we can blame them.

Nice to see some stuff get resolved, or at least answered. We find out what Juliet was on the island to do, and some of what the Others were doing (although we still didn't really get a good sense for why, or how they manage to extend their tentacles so far - if they're not affiliated with Dharma, how do they manage all the mainland stuff?). We also found out about the Claire/Ethan business (thanks, helpful over-explanatory-for-newer-viewers flashbacks!). Frankly I think we were still left with more questions than answers about the Others - including, what are they hoping to use Juliet for, as we find out in a "gotcha" end scene that Ben and Juliet apparently planned the whole thing. Drew thinks Juliet is pretending to go along with Ben but won't really, and I think that may be right, but Ben thinks she is, and she did the first part of it. I thought it was a good episode up until that last scene, which kind of bugged me.

The teaser was all, "ZOMG last five episodes FTW," so let's do a quick bit of consideration.

1) We know Kate and Sawyer get down, AGAIN, so it's also likely that the writers make some attempt to hook Juliet up with Jack. This seemed to be the plan at the start of the season and then not much was really done with it.

2) Sawyer goes apeshit on Locke. So, why? Does Locke do something first? Does Sawyer think that Locke can get him something? Is this Sawyer actually taking some sort of "leadership" role? This will go a long way towards determining Sawyer's character, possibly for the rest of the show's run.

3) A helicopter? Sure sounds like it, but that barely makes sense, unless the Others have one stashed away. Which I guess is possible. The teaser gave us the old "salvation/annihilation" dichotomy, and based on a gun going off and what looked like some big jungle spear or trap, it's probably the latter. Also, I don't believe anyone but the Others could get a helicopter to the island, so, yeah.

4) Though we didn't see any hints of it, I gotta think the monster comes back. So far this season it's killed Eko and taken photos (I guess?) of Juliet and Kate, both of which are too weird for it to be left alone for another whole year. That could be one of the big late-season reveals. Although do you buy Juliet's claim that "we don't know what it is?" This means that Ben doesn't know what it is, and he's lived there for what, 40 years or so? Whatever the monster is, it sure seems like a bit of technology and certainly not a kind that existed in the 1960s. And how long has the "fence" been there? I don't know, the whole thing seems a little plot-holey to me.

5) Someone probably dies. The writers love killing people for little reason, but this is a good spot (as good as it could be) to bump off someone and have it be somewhat meaningful. I hope it's Charlie.

s3e15: Left Behind

2007-04-04T23:28:00.000-05:00

Plot: the righteous among the Others are called up to Heaven in the Rapture, but Kate, Sayid, Jack and Juliet find themselves... no? Okay, let me start over.

Plot: the Others, plus Locke, take off, leaving only Jack, Sayid, Juliet and Kate. Juliet takes Kate into the jungle and handcuffs them together, apparently in a Benry-like ploy to get Kate to like her (PS: It fails miserably). Meanwhile, Flashback Kate teams up with Sawyer's baby's mama to ask her (Kate's) mom why she called the cops. The answer? Because Kate blew up her damn husband. Wow, mystery solved! That's some nice sleuthing, show! I assume we're supposed to feel bad for Kate here, but I really don't. And if we're not, why exactly are we wasting an entire backstory on it? Whatever. Sucked. Also, enough with the cutesy coincidences. I know Kate's never going to find out the connection between Sawyer and Cassidy, so it doesn't matter, it's just the writers having a laugh. Okay, we get it. People are connected, blah blah. It just feels gimmicky to me, especially when it's never paid off. The thing with Sawyer meeting Jack's dad? Paid off. Ana Lucia meeting Jack's dad? Uh, not so much. Can't we learn from this, guys?

The B plot, in which Hurley convinces Sawyer to be nice to everyone for about two hours, was pretty skippable. It's hard to see this Sawyer lasting (especially when, as the teaser shows us, Juliet's arrival gives him an excuse to be all pissed off next week), so it was kind of a throwaway plot. It was all right, particularly the Hurley-Sawyer moment at the end when Hurley tells Sawyer that he needs to lead them, and the little montage, but eh.

The only really good thing about this episode was that we got another tantalizing glimpse at the "monster." It appears to be a giant photo booth.

s3e14: Exposé

2007-04-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

I managed to get my eyes shut just in time to miss all the spiders, in case you were wondering.

As usual, when characters die we have to suddenly have a flashback for them, so basically Nikki and Paulo are given backstory only to be killed off. It's essentially a mini-morality play within the show; the plot isn't advanced at all, the ending (in which Nikki and Paulo are buried alive because, thanks to spider bite paralysis, they appear dead) is pretty twisted, and the whole thing is a total dead end (no pun intended). They basically just chose the two most expendable characters who had been given names before this point and whacked them for no real reason other than it probably seemed cool when they thought of it. But with the tedious "what goes around comes around" lesson, it was like this episode was written by the Others. Nikki and Paulo are not good people; Nikki and Paulo go bye-bye. But really, who gives a shit? Not me. I guess it was an interesting mystery but it was one wholly invented for this episode. If the writers are going to solve mysteries, maybe they should work on ones that anyone actually cares about.

Now I'm kind of mad. And I didn't hate the episode while I was watching it (even if it was a contrived excuse to get Daniel Roebuck another paycheck), but the entire principle behind it is kind of pissing me off. Next time, solve a real mystery. Jeez.

s3e13: The Man From Tallahassee

2007-03-21T22:56:00.000-05:00

This was probably the best episode of the season so far. I might be exaggerating a little when I say this next part, but I think there's a chance that it was the best episode of the past two seasons - at the very least it's top five in that time period. What made it so good?

1. Meaningful backstory.
Backstory was beginning to feel like a tired gambit that continued to be included in every episode just for formality's sake, but finding out how Locke ended up in the wheelchair - something I think we've all been waiting to see for two and a half years now - is pretty darn important. It's a shame that the CGI in that scene had to be so terrible, but then TV CGI usually is. The whole thing also told us more about Locke's motivations than the backstories usually do; generally the connection is superficial and evident, like "Check out Jack having no respect for other societies" or "Sayid doesn't want to kill this guy because he learned about mercy" or something. Benry spells out the connection for us at the end - part of the reason Locke doesn't want to go is because his con man father can't find him here - but it still works better than any backstory since Season One.

2. Good one-on-one scenes.
The Jack/Kate scene in the rec room was solid, although Kate's repetition of "What did they do to you?" got a little annoying. Better still were the scenes between Benry and Locke, with excellent acting jobs from both Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson.

3. Great cliffhanger.
How long has it been since we had a really good cliffhanger? Mid-Season 2? Longer? All I know is, Locke's dad being behind the door was pretty awesome.

So, quick recap: Kate, Locke and Sayid find Jack. Kate goes in but Jack tells her to leave because he's being watched; Kate and Sayid get captured. Locke goes to Benry's room because he wants to blow up the submarine. Benry acts like he doesn't want this to happen, but it turns out that he actually does (which Alex tells us ahead of Benry actually admitting it - this is also a parallel to Locke's dad, whose plan, you may recall, was to make Locke think that giving him the kidney was Locke's idea). Locke blows up the submarine, preventing Jack and Juliet from leaving. Jack had made a deal with Benry that Kate and Sayid would be let go as soon as Jack got off the island. Sorry, Kate and Sayid. Backstory Locke is much less pathetic than usual, confronting his father after the son of his father's new mark gets suspicious and asks Locke for a reference. The son turns up dead; Locke's dad claims no part in it but then knocks Locke out a window, breaking his back. Then at the end Benry shows Locke "what came out of the box" that supposedly will give you anything you ask for: Locke's dad, who looks MAJORLY freaked out to see Locke. And I guess that makes sense. Could this explain Jack's dad and the horse as well?

Next week: someone dies, apparently, and it looks like some nasty jungle bug/spider is involved - thanks a lot, show. My guess is that it's someone inconsequential - Nikki, Paulo, someone even more faceless - and not Charlie, much though we all want it to be. And then the teaser acts like Sun kills Sawyer, which we all know won't be what happens.

s3e12: Par Avion

2007-03-16T00:24:00.000-05:00

So, is the new trend to reveal secrets that have already been revealed, only we get to make sure that they're true? If you saw "Two for the Road" (s2e20), you most likely already suspected that Jack's dad was also Claire's dad, so while this episode confirmed it, that can hardly be considered a major surprise. Also, while the backstories can still be interesting, I can't be the only one who thinks that they have far too little to do with the main stories these days. I guess Claire's backstory reveals why she has this wild mood swings from lovey-dovey to histrionic bitch? Maybe? Whatever, I could absolutely not care less about the Claire/Charlie plot.

I do still wonder if Jack's dad isn't dead. He's just connected in so much in the past - also, if he is dead, then the fact that he's Claire's father really doesn't mean anything, and is just kind of a dopey connection on the part of the writers. Since Claire never gets his name, it's hard to imagine how she and Jack could find out about this - I guess the Others could tell them, since they probably know in that way of theirs, but why would they feel a need to? It's too bad, because when the connections are done right they can be great. The moment late in Season One when Sawyer tells Jack about meeting his dad was, for my money, the single best moment of the entire series. I'm not kidding.

In the much, much more interesting plot, Locke is becoming kind of a shady character, leading up to next week. He "unintentionally" kills Mikhail by tossing him through the "fence," and then it turns out he took some C-4 from the house, not long after claiming he didn't know that it was there. They all climb over the fence, and then freak out because Jack appears to be playing football and having a grand old time in St. Othersburg. The spike of the ball right at the end made me chuckle.

Next week: a mystery worth knowing the answer to! We finally find out how Locke got paralyzed (at a guess, his dad was involved somehow), and then apparently he has some sort of score to settle with Ben, or wants to know the answer to something, or something. We're on kind of a roll right now - tonight's episode wasn't great mostly because it was a Claire/Charlie episode first and foremost, but the rest of it wasn't bad at all and as Claire/Charlie episodes go, it was fine, I guess. I think next week's episode could be one of the best in a while, although it does mean the return of the most pathetic character in TV history, Backstory Locke. We'll see.

s3e11: Enter 77

2007-03-07T22:50:00.000-06:00

All right, an episode that manages to be good without being wacky! Okay, so the "Sawyer gets his ass kicked by Hurley at ping-pong" subplot was wacky, in addition to completely predictable (Sawyer gets his bravado tossed back in his face? No way!), but at least they hustled through it. As did Hurley (see what I did there?).

As usual, Sayid for some reason knows everything. Maybe it's supposed to be the difference between Locke, who seems to think that a few adventure courses make him an expert, and Sayid, who was in the military and actually is an expert. Yet the show has certainly made Locke plenty of a bad-ass at various points in the past. Not so much this one, though.

Sayid, Locke, Kate and Rousseau stumble onto a house while following Locke's compass bearing. Rousseau huffs off, in keeping with her namesake's belief that man's natural goodness is corrupted by contact with others. Oh, Lost, you are so deep. (Little known fact: Anglo-Irish statesman/philosopher Edmund Burke died on July 9, 1797, of injuries sustained after wandering into the street during a conversation with his ex-wife and being run over by a carriage.) Sayid goes up to the house and gets shot for his troubles.

Turns out the guy in the house is Mikhail, the last surviving member of the Dharma Initiative. Just kidding! He's an Other. And the woman who let Hurley go, Bea/Miss Clue/Klugh/whatever, is hiding in his basement, after having recently ridden a horse there. Sayid, of course, knows all this. After a bunch of fights, Mikhail shoots the fluent-in-Russian Bea at her apparent request. Locke beats a computer chess game and gets access to Dr. Marvin Candle (or whatever his name really is), but is unable to use the satellite dish or sonar, so instead he blows up the house by accident. Jesus Christ, Locke, what did you think was going to happen if you said there'd been an incursion by the Hostiles? Superman would swoop in and save everyone? Stop pressing things! Sayid gives Locke an absolutely withering look for his bad judgment and our heroes troop off into the night. Strong work by Naveen Andrews in this one; no wonder he's getting annoyed at his lack of face time.

Meanwhile, Sayid continues to have some of the most interesting backstory, although an entire episode's worth is spent to set up a single decision by Sayid at the end of the episode - not to kill Mikhail - and then the teaser suggests that it's all a moot point next week, as the group stumbles upon yet another weird-ass thing we've never seen before. It would be nice to know what the Others are hiding such that they constantly seem to feel a need to take it to the grave with them, but clearly this is asking way too much. That's more a Season 5 thing, don't you think?

s3e10: Tricia Tanaka is Dead

2007-03-07T20:48:00.000-06:00

If February sweeps are over, that means it must be time for a wacky midseason episode that's generally fun but tells us nothing. And how better to do that than with a Hurley plot? Hurley finds a car and wants to drive it, and spends the episode bouncing between flashbacks that would make Steven Spielberg proud with their daddy issues and trying to convince Jin, Sawyer and Charlie to help him get the car working. At the end of the episode, they do, and Hurley does some donuts in a field. It was a pleasant episode, and I know not every episode is going to give you many answers, but it seems like this show has left far too many strings hanging to dick around like this, even in midseason. In the first season, when there were fewer questions, character episodes were great. Now they just feel annoying, even when they're good. Aside from the reunion scene, the coda, and the few fleeting references in the middle, this really did feel more like a first-season episode - not that there's anything wrong with that. The first season feels more all the time like the only classic season this show is going to end up generating - it's still interesting from week to week, don't get me wrong, but it's just not the same.

In the only part of the episode that's even remotely relevant to anything else, Kate goes off to find Rousseau (predictable from the moment she strode into the jungle, as if she was going to be off to hunt Cap'n Eyepatch). Rousseau proves just as surly as ever, but mellows out when Kate reveals the "surprise" that the Alex we've been seeing with the Others is the same Alex who's Rousseau's daughter. Oh, really? Thanks for putting that at the end of an episode like it's a shocking cliffhanger, show. I'm more than a little tired of the only mysteries getting answered being the ones that everyone had already guessed the answer to anyway.

The upcoming episode at least looks interesting, but I bet it asks more questions than it answers. Why shouldn't it?

s3e09: Stranger in a Strange Land

2007-02-21T22:35:00.000-06:00

I really should know better by now than to let the ABC promotions department jerk me around every single time. Of course they're going to say that the next episode features can't-miss surprises! That said, "three of Lost's biggest mysteries will be answered" is just blatant false advertising. Unless the mysteries were as follows:

1. What happened to the people the Others took?
I'm not sure this would rank in my top three questions, but I guess it was something. We still don't really know what happened, per se, just that they're alive and evidently still kicking it on the island (or rather, the second island).

2. Do the Others live on the island?
I had thought this was already reasonably well implied, although the shots of St. Othersburg that led off this season suggested otherwise. Of course, if they don't live on the island as Isabel suggests, doesn't that make St. Othersburg a gaping plot hole? Or is that just where they live when they're on the island? Whatever. We still don't know where they do live, except that it can't be that far away since that's clearly not a seaworthy boat. I don't consider an answer that vague to be an answer.

3. How much more shitty backstory can we get?
This one was definitely answered: a lot! Seriously, though, I can't think of a third thing that was answered and the backstory was asinine. Was it supposed to be showing that Jack doesn't have the appropriate respect for other groups of people? Because I think we could have guessed that. Oh, and his tattoo, conveniently, contains a message that describes both his place in Thailand and his place with the Others! Oh, how droll. Come on, Lost - no one considers "what does Jack's tattoo mean" to be a mystery of the show at all, let alone one of the biggest ones.

In other plot "developments" (ha!), Sawyer and Kate snipe at each other and Sawyer encourages Carl to go back for Alex. Which he maybe does and maybe doesn't. Juliet is being investigated for killing Pickett and trying to kill Benry. Benry's stitches are infected, and Jack decides to play his buddy, apparently to make sure he (and Juliet) can get off the island as Benry suggested. And Backstory Jack rightfully gets the crap kicked out of him by a bunch of Thai guys.

I wouldn't go so far as to say this was the worst episode of the season, but it was certainly the worst of the "nonstop season" so far, though that's only out of three, of course. It just didn't tell us much of anything, after promising it would. That's been kind of the constant letdown with this show - even most of the answers are only kind of half-answers, and that's when they come at all.

Sigh. And now that February sweeps are over, I suppose we're looking at a lot of water-treading over the next 13 episodes. Cool.

s3e08: Flashes Before Your Eyes

2007-02-14T22:24:00.000-06:00

Because this show now has more characters than it knows what to do with, prepare to completely ignore Jack, Kate and Sawyer for an episode. Oh, but we get to see Locke and Sayid!... just kidding. They're immediately out of the picture as Desmond runs off to the ocean to rescue a drowning Claire, just after Charlie and Hurley (apparently camp bellwethers) are informed of Eko's death.

Charlie earns - sorry, reaffirms - my eternal hatred by flouncing about as Desmond performs CPR, and then having the sheer balls to say "Charlie's here!" as she comes to. Dude, I know she kissed you (for still no reason I can see) in the last season finale, but you are not Claire's husband. Or even boyfriend, really. Maybe she would like you more if you weren't such an overpossessive twit. Case in point: a couple minutes later when Claire sits down next to Desmond - the guy who just saved her life - for about three seconds, and then Charlie huffs over all, "Where have you been? Aaron's starving." I know, TV time and all that, but come on. She just sat down. Back the fuck up, guy.

Charlie and Hurley are suspicious of Desmond's talent for knowing that things will happen, so they get him drunk and then Charlie - ever with a Napoleon complex - bullies Desmond until the latter tackles him. "You don't want to know what happened to me!" Desmond yells, and then we see what happened.

And honestly, I'm not entirely sure what it was. My leading theory would be that Desmond got a very realistic life-flashing-before-eyes moment, but what was with the old lady who wanted to make sure that things happened the same way? If it was just a flashback and she was in fact a sort of conscience figure, why would it matter if he tried to do things differently, really? He already turned the key. If he was actually traveling through time (or leapt Sam Beckett-style into his own body, whatever), why does a hit from a cricket bat send him directly back to the island? More importantly, wasn't someone claiming recently that the show really wasn't very (or at all) supernatural? And yet here we have either time travel or seeing the future, and there's no real way around it. If Desmond knows the future because he's already lived through this timeline - although that makes no sense since turning the key sent him back before he got to this point - then it's time travel, and that's supernatural. If he knows the future because he keeps getting flashes of it, as he states, then that's obviously supernatural. Either way, I think we have our first confirmed plotline that science cannot possibly explain away, although I think most people would tell you that the show was firmly in the realm of the supernatural long before this point.

The point of all this runaround is that what Desmond keeps seeing is Charlie's future, and Charlie keeps dying, so Desmond's been saving him, but he knows he can't do it forever, and predicts that Charlie is going to die. Hooray! The universe hates Charlie as much as I do! Desmond, quit getting in the universe's way!

In miscellaneous plot news, man, Mr. Widmore is an asshole. That whiskey may be expensive but I doubt a single swallow is worth more than Desmond. Think about what you could get for his kidneys alone on the organ black market! Also, apparently the English pub crowd really loves them some Cass Elliott. And why is the angry guy with the cricket bat there immediately as the game ends? Did the bartender promise him the money would show up magically in his wallet if the team won?

Next week: Forget any of this ever happened, it's back to the Jack plot. Where he had the upper hand a week ago, apparently now he's just another prisoner, and the previously taken castaways are "here to watch," whatever that means. The tease promises answers to "three of Lost's biggest mysteries," which, yeah, I'll believe that when I see it.

s3e07: Not in Portland

2007-02-08T20:57:00.000-06:00

After the lame episode that was "I Do," and the massive hiatus that followed, it's about time we got a pretty good episode that didn't rely on jerk-you-around twists to be interesting. I'm not even sure when the last one of those was, frankly; mid-first season?

The flashback centers on Juliet, who it turns out has not been on the island that long. She used to work as a medical researcher in Miami, and then Dharma (I would assume) got wind of what she was doing (Ethan apparently was in town checking her out) and invited her to Portland. And then they were all, "Well, not quite Portland. More like, Mysterious Island Somewhere in the Pacific." This episode's title is one of the most accurate ever, since nothing in it takes place within 3,000 miles of Portland.

Jack continues to huff and puff around the operating room. Juliet calls his bluff about letting Benry Gale die - Jack, these people have reams of research on you! You don't think they know how much you hate when your patients die? - then orders Pickett to chase down the escaped Kate and Sawyer. And then Benry talks to her and she does the opposite - just as we hit the inevitable Pickett/Sawyer showdown, Juliet shows up and blows Pickett away. Which was utterly predictable because you knew one of those two had to die and it wasn't going to be Sawyer. In other Others news, Alex is all rebellious again and Kate and Sawyer help her pull her gomer boyfriend out of some weird torture device out of A Clockwork Orange. Also, Tom reveals himself to be kind of a puss.

Questions:

1) Why is Benry suddenly cool with letting Kate and Sawyer go? Is he worried that Jack really would let him die if he didn't? For that matter, why is he suddenly cool with letting Juliet go? (Assuming that he's actually cool with it, of course.) And why does letting her go depend on her letting other people go? Has Benry had a change of heart and suddenly thinks everyone should fly the coop? Too many episodes left for that, methinks.

2) So Benry is Alex's dad. Do we think this is literal Dad? As in, getting it on with Rousseau? I'm unconvinced. If Benry has lived on the island his whole life, as he told Jack, then either (a) Rousseau has told a whole bunch of lies about her past or (b) Alex was brainwashed as a youth into thinking Benry was her father. If (b) is the case, why is she so rebellious now? I had thought that much of her behavior was predicated on knowing that she was kidnapped as a child, but now I'm not sure.

If he's her literal dad, this opens up many many cans of worms. For example, recall from s2e14 that Rousseau captured Benry and brought him to Jack and co. Well, if Rousseau and Benry know each other... sort of a problem, yes? And that doesn't really reconcile with Rousseau saving Claire from the Others. I don't think this is the way they'll go, but who ever knows with this show?

Jack stitching Benry up thanks to Kate's tearful recollection of his story from the pilot was probably the best moment of the season so far. There, I said it. Let's hope for more of those in the remaining 15 weeks.

s3e06: I Do

2006-11-24T19:01:00.000-06:00

The Attack of the Pointless Backstory continues. Seriously, this gimmick was fun while it lasted, but can we please just admit that it's no longer adding anything to the story? I almost feel like they're only keeping it in just in case the show picks up new viewers and they aren't yet aware that Kate is a fugitive. Nothing else could possibly account for the inclusion of such a lame-ass backstory. I guess it tells us that even when Kate was happy, she couldn't stop running, and now that she isn't running anymore, she can feel free to get it on with Sawyer and not be all scared that her past will catch up with her. But who the hell couldn't have inferred that from oh, I don't know, the entire rest of the series?

Meanwhile, Pickett really wants to kill Sawyer, which continues to annoy me because dude. You totally brough this on yourself. Trace the chain of events back to the beginning: Others kidnap Sawyer (and Jack and Kate); Sayid, Jin, and Sun give chase; Others raid boat; Sun shoots Colleen. Other than that, Sawyer played absolutely no part in it. So you'll forgive me if I'm not quite buying "this is for Colleen." Not that I think the character is supposed to be sympathetic, but jeez. Annoying. It's almost like a token gesture - why doesn't he chase down the person who actually did it? "No, this is easier. And he's one of them so it's basically the same thing." Wuss.

In plot two, Jack uses his doctor skills to hold the Others hostage by inflicting a wound on Ben that will kill him in an hour if Jack doesn't fix it. I wonder just how many of them wanted Ben out of the way, considering the scrambled response to Jack's actions. Then Jack tells Kate to run and that's the episode. Considering we've got three months before the next one, I was expecting a little more of a cliffhanger.

In the barely-touch-on plot three, Eko is buried. Locke sees a line of scripture on Eko's prayer stick that says to look north, and gets that first-season glint back in his eye.

Next time on Lost: well, a whole bunch of stuff, because in three months we get sixteen straight episodes. Question: do you prefer this way, or if they'd gone the way of 24 and just started in January? Two hiatuses is a little annoying.

s3e05: The Cost of Living

2006-11-03T14:33:00.000-06:00

Maybe it's just me, but I think this episode title is a veiled reference to the moving-violation arrests that preceded the deaths of Ana Lucia, Libby, and now Mistereko. It's like Abrams, Lindelof and Cuse saying to the actors, "You want your character to keep living? Don't do anything off the set that might land you in trouble. No drinking and getting behind the wheel of a car. That's the cost of living, my friends." I guess it actually refers to the "vaccines-for-protection" arrangement from the Eko flashback (by the way, can we officially get suspicious of any future flashback that doesn't feature Jack, Kate, or Sawyer yet? We're now 3-for-3 on characters getting flashback episodes right before dying, with Libby being the only counterexample, but she was also the least fleshed out of the characters to go), but still.

Back in St. Othersburg, Jack tells Benry Gale he knows about the tumor. Benry stonewalls him, but later not only confesses that he has a tumor, but suggests that the entire thing has been a plot to get Jack to do the surgery, as he reveals that he found out about his tumor two days before the plane crash. Benry was trying to set up a scenario to condition Jack to like him and want to do the surgery. And clearly, locking him in a room is the best way to do that. It's revealed that Juliet was chosen to be Jack's minder specifically because she "bears a striking resemblance to [Jack's] ex-wife." A striking yet superficial resemblance? I suppose I can see it a little bit, but then they really had a limited selection, right? Even if she looked nothing like Sarah, she probably would still have done it just because she was blond and a woman. At the end of the episode, Juliet reveals via super-secret video that she and possibly some others in the group (other Others? Ba-dum-pssh!) would like nothing more than for Jack to "accidentally," wink-wink, kill Benry Gale during the surgery. Coup-d'e-freakin'-tat!

Meanwhile, Eko has visions of his brother and wanders into the jungle. Locke, Sayid, Desmond, and a couple of contract players head for the Pearl, so they all end up in the same place. Eko's brother's body has vanished from the plane, and then Eko is seeing very tangible visions of him. In the backstory, we find out that Eko killed some gangsters while posing as a priest, and that the building of the church he was doing was based on something a woman told him, that because he had defiled his brother's church by committing murder inside, he "owe[d] him a church." Why he thought that project was worth abandoning to push the button is never really explained, and now it won't be because after his brother's vision apparently reveals itself as some sort of shape-shifting demon (I have no idea either), the black smoke shows up big-time, forms into a hand, flings Eko around, and EKO FUCKING DIES.

I thought Naveen Andrews was being a bit whiny last year when Shannon was killed off and he huffed about how he thought characters were being killed for no reason, but it seems like we're going that way. What purpose did killing Eko serve? How are we going to learn more about the questions that were raised in this episode? I can't say it makes a ton of sense to me. And he was one of the best characters in the show! Can't they just kill the completely useless Charlie already? Seriously, please. If he makes it to the end of the run while all these other interesting characters get slapped aside, the finale better include a scene of the black smoke wearing headphones and rocking out to a Driveshaft CD.

Oh, and there's some eyepatch-wearing guy in another hatch, although which one or where it is, we don't know. That's the sort of tantalizing clue that's just interesting enough not to be answered for another year and a half. This was at least a pretty well-done episode overall, but it ended with a couple of the most frustrating aspects of the show.

Next week: the fall season finale already. If they have sixteen more episodes to run after this, and they're going to run them in sixteen straight weeks like I heard, that's cool, but on the other hand it means no more Lost until what, late January? Early February? Bring it back for February sweeps and run it straight through May sweeps? That's a long break, even if it means no interruptions for most of the season - I already waited four months for the third season to start, and now after wetting my beak, I have to wait another almost three months for the rest of it? Oof. Anyway, the teaser promises the best episode of the year so far (I'll believe it when I see it). At the very least it'll probably have the best cliffhanger, no? It also has Sawyer's life apparently in danger yet again, a plot involving Benry's tumor, and Kate flashbacks.

s3e04: Every Man for Himself

2006-10-25T23:34:00.000-05:00

Operation Humanize the Others begins, as Juliet drags Jack in to save the woman Sun shot, but he can't, so her husband goes berserk and beats the crap out of Sawyer for having a Sun Number of 1. Kate says she loves Sawyer to get him to stop, but later goes back on it - the Sawyer/Kate dance is getting a little ridiculous at this point, isn't it? Just get them together already. Pretending Jack is part of the love triangle isn't fooling anyone.

Jack seems eager enough to play doctor, perhaps just hoping for a return to a sort of normalcy. Then he displays his awesome doctor powers by diagnosing Benry Gale from a single set of X-rays (next week: special guest star Bill Frist!). Benry Gale has a spinal tumor, and Jack is a spinal surgeon, hmm hmm hmm hmm. The question is why they're jerking him around so much first. Wouldn't you want to placate the guy a little bit before you let him operate on your leader? (For the record, that Benry Gale was X-ray tumor guy was only confirmed in next week's teaser, but Drew correctly guessed it before that anyway.)

The Others con Sawyer into thinking they've put a pacemaker in his heart that will kill him if he gets too worked up. Of course they haven't - look at the hack job they did on Colleen, for crying out loud - but Sawyer isn't as aware of their non-medical skills as Jack ends up being. Benry Gale calls Sawyer out on being hot for Kate - ah-durr - and then reveals that they're not even on the same island anymore, but rather the next one over. Which they got to how, exactly? Whatever. Hot-air balloon.

Meanwhile, in the three-scene Desmond plot, he apparently foresees a rainstorm. So did he gain the ability to see the future, or just Doppler radar? He puts up a golf club as a lightning rod. Why? I'm guessing because he can, since no other reason is evident. I'm sure this will pay off somewhere way, way down the road, perhaps when Penny rides in to save everyone in, you know, Season Nine.

I do have to say that Sawyer episodes tend to be among the very best - both of his first season episodes were stellar, in particular, and last season's "The Long Con" was pretty good although its setup was questionable. This one was kind of more of the same - you think Flashback Sawyer is doing one thing but really he's doing another - except that Sawyer does display a little genuine human emotion in setting up a bank account for his apparent daughter. (By the way, is it at all funny that the woman who got conned called the police when she had originally requested that Sawyer teach her how to con? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) And the scene with Sawyer and Benry looking out at the island was strong.

One other interesting thing: the Others refer to "the sky turning purple," suggesting that they don't know that much about the island themselves - the Dharma people knew about the electromagnetism, after all. But if this is much of a clue, I doubt it will get play again for months.

Next week: Locke and Eko may not be getting along. Some dude with an eyepatch is in one of the hatches observed on Pearl TV. Jack tells Benry he knows about the spinal tumor (this has to be what they're going to be willing to release him for, right? Though knowing Jack, he'll try to haggle them up for more releases). And while it's at best vaguely alluded to, could we finally see a return of the security system? Do you realize we haven't seen it since, unless I'm mistaken, the tenth episode of last season? A little too long, especially considering how much it showed up in the first season.

s3e03: Further Instructions

2006-10-19T01:37:00.000-05:00

I guess this episode wasn't bad, but it had a few negative things going for it:

1. Our third crappy backstory in a row. I suppose it's interesting to find out exactly what the characters did before they were here, but is it too much to ask that those things not be totally disposable? Jack's and Sun's both told us nothing about the characters we didn't already know (and did so in pretty on-the-nose fashion, too), and Locke's barely even makes sense, except that it shows - again - that he's long been searching for meaning in life and keeps having a hard time finding it. Is there a more pathetic character in TV history than Backstory Locke? I say no.

2. A return to my least favorite of the abandoned plot strands, Charlie and Claire. In the first season, these small interpersonal conflicts on the beach were all well and good, but with the scope of the series having expanded dramatically, they just seem trivial and a waste of time now. Plus, Charlie and Claire continue to duke it out for the title of Most Annoying Character, particularly with Michael having sailed off (yes, I know his boat did not have a sail).

3. A totally cheesy plot device: the return of Boone in a hallucinogen-induced dream sequence of Locke's. Barely rates above Jamie Kennedy's cameo in Scream 3 on the list of "Most Forced Guest Appearances Ever." Why did Boone need to show Locke every single other person of concern? We already know he's not going to be able to do anything for most of them. Seemed like a lot of foot-dragging, which has defined the better part of the first three shows of this season, dare I say.

The whole hatch thing strikes me as a little implausible (all the metal sucks in on itself, but the survivors are blown outwards?), and it sure looked like they left a continuity goof in there (what kitchen is Hurley going to get bandages from if the hatch went reverse Big Bang on us?), but I guess I can live with that for now. Desmond potentially seeing future events, however, seems like it has potential to either get unlikely in a hurry or just offer tons of openings for future deus ex machinae.

I suppose it seems like I'm complaining a lot, and I suppose I am. I still like the show - there is, overall, none more compelling on television week to week - but I'm starting to get a little more frustrated with its pacing and general tendency to pad out its episodes with a ton of needless filler when it could be giving out actual info.

Next week: Kate, do you like Sawyer? Check yes or no. The Others clearly either like over-the-top psych testing or they're just a bunch of sadists. Or maybe both.

New blog theme song!

2006-10-18T00:28:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of an excellent video and audio editor on YouTube...

Uh, awesome.

s3e02: The Glass Ballerina

2006-10-12T23:43:00.000-05:00

AKA "Sun is a big fat liar." In part two of the three-part series "Let's find out what happened to everyone after the finale as slowly as possible," Sayid thinks he's luring the Others into a trap, but they sneak around him and take the sailboat, which Sun manages to get off of after killing an Other who was only introduced in this episode. No fish biscuits for you, Sun! We see in flashbacks that there's a lot of stuff she doesn't tell Jin - such as sleeping with Baldy, who might be the father of her baby as I speculated a few months ago - which is paralleled in the present-day plot, where she helps Sayid keep Jin in the dark about his true motives. Except not really, because he's gaining a better understanding of English. So, having accomplished nothing and helped the Others get another boat, the three head back to base camp.

Back at Others HQ, Sawyer makes out with Kate, though it seems like he does it mostly to see how the Others will react and how tough they are. Stone-cold bitch Juliet gets him in line by threatening to shoot Kate. Sawyer explains his whole plan to Kate, not thinking that he might be under surveillance. But guess what?

Finally, Benry Gale goes into Jack's cell and tells him that he can go home if he cooperates with the Others, using footage of the Red Sox's World Series win to prove that the Others have contact with the outside world. (He also answers the question of why they'd still be on the island if they were able to get off when he says that he's lived on the island his whole life. 40 years or so? That predates Dharma, unless he's a lot younger than he looks.) The question is, what will Jack have to do?

One guess: harm/kill one of his people. Bear in mind Jack has known these guys just over two months; could the prospect of getting off the island prove too tempting to resist? (Probably not, if we know Jack, but who ever knows anything with this show?)

I should note that if I had a nickel for every time the show had an episode that treaded water for 58 minutes and then suddenly got interesting in the last two, I'd probably be working on a buck and a half. It's one of the few things that really drives me up a wall about Lost; the tendency of most episodes is to spin the wheels all show and then grab us back with a tantalizing ending. In some respects that's how the seasons have started to go, too - how much did we learn in the entire second season, and then they gave us a whole bunch in the finale? It's a little bit cheap and I wish they could offer more on an individual episode basis.

Next week: Fooled you, Flanders! Made you think Locke, Eko, and Desmond were dead! They're not, though. But you thought they were! But they're not.

s3e01: A Tale of Two Cities

2006-10-05T00:39:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe that it's been four and a half months since the Season 2 finale, doesn't it? It's also hard to believe that after all the punches in that episode, the premiere would be such a letdown, but that was my first impression.

The pre-title sequence was pretty cool - at least, the last minute of it was, while the rest was mostly misdirecting filler. But after that, things kind of go downhill. Far too much of what's becoming a Lost staple, where one character asks a question that the audience wants to know the answer to, and the character of whom the question is being asked says nothing and sometimes just walks away. After a while that stops being mysterious and just gets irritating. The flashback scenes were, as far as I'm concerned, among the most useless in the show's run. (And, again in somewhat typical fashion, a character doesn't just say one sentence that could clear up a misunderstanding. Why didn't Jack's dad just say, "Dude, I didn't sleep with your wife?" Getting flustered and rambling about "letting it go" only makes things worse, guy!)

Still no explanation of what the Others want with Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, of course; some experiments are apparently going to be conducted (maybe?), or at least something that will make Kate's next two weeks unpleasant, but naturally there's pretty much no hint of what that is. Also, the Others somehow have all this information - and apparently it's ridiculously detailed, right down to the emotional state of Jack's ex-wife - yet when do they ever get off the island? And it's in neat little binders and everything so it's not like they have it e-mailed in. Once more, typical Lost - the more things are revealed, the less sense they tend to make. It's a good thing (or maybe a bad thing, depending on how you want to look at it) that I started with last year's premiere and not this year's, because I doubt it would have hooked me at all. But it's too late now.

Next week: Sayid, Jin and Sun attempt a daring sailboat rescue that probably fails. Benry Gale wants the boat (maybe because he gave his to Michael). Probably more happenings in Dharmaville, too, although I don't know that any made the teaser.

s2e23: Live Together, Die Alone

2006-05-24T23:04:00.000-05:00

Ohhh, I've wasted my life.

I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that after all the posturing, all the promises, ultimately what we got in the season finale was a whole bunch more questions - and, by my count, one answer. There were more sightings of the ABC7 severe weather bulletin than loose ends tied up. (Incidentally, that bulletin makes me want to put my foot through the TV screen. Hey, WLS - if I were curious as to what the weather were doing, I would flip over to the Weather Channel. I'm trying to watch the fucking finale of Lost, and now I can't see Charlie's head because you need to show me a thunderstorm watch six counties away.)

I guess that we learned more than we did last season. Last season the Others shot Sawyer and took Walt and blew up the boat, leaving Michael and Sawyer stranded and Jin missing. And Jack and Locke blew up the hatch door, revealing... a tunnel descending into the ground. And that was all we really got.

By those standards, finding out that the electromagnetism brought the plane down at least qualifies as an answer - though again, it was pretty much the only one. (Yes, there's "also, it's not just an experiment," but those are kind of the same answer if you think about it.)

Otherwise, we get plot points that leave questions: Jack, Kate, and Sawyer being taken away (why on earth those three?), Michael sailing away (would it be wrong of me to hope that's the last time we see him on this show?), Locke and Eko MIA (if we're assuming Desmond died, could they possibly have escaped unaffected?), Charlie and Claire all lovey-dovey ("I love you, guy who kidnapped my baby, like, a week ago!" - seriously, who gives a crap at this point), and Desmond's girlfriend apparently using her immense wealth to pay two guys in the Antarctic to monitor electromagnetic anomalies, because for some reason she knows that those are connected with Desmond. (Or maybe she doesn't and she's watching them for some other reason, so there can be some emotional reunion late in Season Three. But I bet it's the first one.)

More things left hanging:

* Sayid, Jin and Sun?
* That statue? Four toes??
* Are we ever going to see the "security system" again, and are we ever going to find out what the hell it is?
* Are the Others Dharma or aren't they?
* Why are everyone's lives so interconnected?
* Is the rest of the blast door map ever going to be used?
* If Inman is a big tough army guy, how come he went down like such a sack of dirt?

A whole season and we learned so little. Lost can probably parcel itself out for seven or eight years at the current rate. Also, J.J. Abrams? Never tell me what is the coolest ending ever again. You've lost your L.A. privileges. And yet I'm totally going to wait four months (also, buy the DVDs the day they release) and then let myself get pulled along again. And if you're still reading this... I'm guessing so will you.

s2e22: Three Minutes

2006-05-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Were the episodes before the two-hour finale this space-filling last season? We got virtually nothing new out of "Three Minutes," if you ask me - we learned for sure what Michael's up to, but it only tells us about 10% we didn't already know. The Eko plot was largely undeveloped. The only thing we really learned about the Others was that, oddly enough, Michael's description of them was largely accurate in terms of what he actually knew. "Three Minutes" is apparently the amount of worthwhile time Michael spent with the Others. Two whole weeks and he was just tied up the whole time? Awesome.

There were a couple nice character moments - Charlie pitching the statues and Locke seeing him do it, and Sawyer telling Jack he's the closest thing Sawyer has to a friend - which, interestingly, were pretty much back-to-back. Also, Sayid is really gunning to take over the #1 spot on the Most Bad-Ass Person on the Island list; Eko's slipping fast and Locke's diminishing faith is turning him back into kind of a wimpy jerk. Oh yeah, and then an obviously not seaworthy boat rolls up.

Next week: a two-hour season finale! Desmond reappears, as does the security system (I'm guessing from the clips). At least some people get onto the boat (was anyone manning it?). The pneumatic tube doesn't go anywhere except to a big pile in the middle of the jungle, so The Pearl is obviously just another hoaxy experiment. The blast doors close again; Locke tries to smash the computer. And according to the voiceover, a number of questions will be answered, including what really happened to the plane. Drew declared that it looked too good to be true, but I'm hopeful. Here's to a few nice answers and a sweet cliffhanger.

s2e21: ?

2006-05-11T13:20:00.000-05:00

My sentiments exactly. For a late-season episode, this one was surprisingly underwhelming, especially since it spent most of its time doing dramatic reveals on things any smart person should already have been aware of.

I'll ask: is there a person in the world who didn't think the button was an experiment from the very first second? Maybe there is actually more to it and maybe there isn't, but The Pearl was largely a waste; if all we learned was that the button for sure didn't do anything, that hardly seems worth all the question mark trouble.

And if you thought Libby was going to make it... no. She did survive, but not even for as long as the marshal did in Season One, and she got even less information out - the single word "Michael," which naturally was assumed by Jack and Hurley to be an inquiry into Michael's condition and not an accusation.

So that was basically the entire episode. Didn't learn much, did we? I imagine this sets the table to some degree for the next two (incidentally - only 23? Or is the finale two hours?), but still. For a mid-May, late-season episode, this felt dangerously close to filler.

Next week: Sayid is smarter than everyone else, and we appear to get another on-island flashback episode in which we see what Michael was up to for... what was it, a week and a half of island time?

Brief speculation

2006-05-09T01:35:00.000-05:00

Jack's dad = not dead?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this theory, but I did arrive at it independently this evening. Consider:

*Jack's dad was directly responsible for Jack and Ana Lucia being in Australia.
*Jack's dad crossed paths with Sawyer in Australia.
*Jack's dad might also be Claire's dad.

That's a lot of connections to various castaways, no? Also consider the fact that we never actually see Jack's dad's body (empty casket, anyone?). Also consider that Jack's dad has shown up on the island - it would seem the island can cause hallucinations, but it's also been hinted that certain things or people may just appear. The horse in "What Kate Did" was certainly flesh and blood as far as could be told.

Also, we know there's a big twist coming at the end of the season. How big would it be if Jack stumbles down some dank corridor buried in the jungle, opens a door, and sees his father standing there in a suit? I can even picture how they'd probably shoot that.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, because I like to be surprised. But if you could bet this stuff in Vegas, and they had "Jack's Dad is 'Him'" at like 20:1 odds, I might lay down a sawbuck.

s2e20: Two for the Road

2006-05-03T23:24:00.000-05:00

Bizarre episode. With the exception of "Henry" telling Locke that he came to get him, 95% of it seemed to be distracting filler designed to keep you blissfully unaware of the ending. Do I have to be suspicious of any backstory that doesn't feature Jack or Locke from now on? Because whenever they kill a character, they always make that character the flashback. Because I like my flashbacks to be wholly, 100% pointless.

Of course, Ana Lucia has always been kind of a dead-end character - her presence on the island didn't really give us much. Even when they threw Jack's dad into the mix, it didn't do a whole lot to make her backstory anything other than self-contained - the same of which was pretty true for Shannon and Boone. Characters like that only exist to affect other characters - Boone affected Locke, Shannon affected Sayid. Ana Lucia - I don't even know. Sawyer, now that they got down? Jack, because that's what Jack does? Nobody, because we all hated her?

The Libby thing is even weirder. Is the goal to turn Hurley into a ball of rage? Would that even work? And why bother establishing the beginnings of a backstory for Libby if you're just going to kill her off? It's like they filmed the rest of the episode and then Rodriguez and Watros drove drunk and the producers were like "Quick, just kill 'em both." Except this episode was probably filmed after that happened.

Anyway, I was at least partially right about Michael - he has to be a tool of the Others somehow. He kills "non-good-person" Ana Lucia, then shoots himself superficially, making it look like Henry shot him and escaped - and this also allows him to stay among the castaways in their confidence, the most effective mole yet. As Drew pointed out, his story about two dozen Others living in tents doesn't really jive with the whole "they aren't really jungle people" thing, which we've already seen. So he's clearly just telling the kind of story that will lead everyone else right to the slaughter - or rather, the metaphorical slaughter, since I guess the Others want some of the people for certain reasons.

As silly as some of this stuff is getting - the Ana Lucia/Jack's dad backstory was pretty ridiculous and appears to have been ultimately pointless in the extreme - the show as a whole probably has me about as hooked as it ever has, because I just have to see where this is all going. Eko presumably does not die next week, so what saves him in that fall? Isn't next week the one where we're scheduled to learn about the door, or is that two weeks? Either way.

s2e19: S.O.S.

2006-04-12T22:30:00.000-05:00

Damon Lindelof recently gave an interview where he described the season's first 19 episodes as the "calm before the storm" of the last five, which might help explain why tonight's episode was pretty blasé. The A-plot and flashbacks recognize the fact that Bernard and Rose are the only major characters not seen in flashback until this point (Libby has never had her own episode, but it's arguable how major she is as a character and she was in a Hurley flashback anyway), by showing that they actually haven't known each other very long. Which I guess explains why they don't get along or seem to have a tremendous amount in common. Whatever. Then we find out that Rose used to have terminal cancer and the island healed her, and she has a little moment with Locke where they basically exchange knowing nods, because Rose remembers seeing Locke in his wheelchair in the airport. Oh, and Bernard is really annoying for the whole episode, bossing everyone around for his S.O.S. sign which Rose hates. When Bernard realizes that Rose wants to stay, he states it very specifically for the two people who couldn't tell from the rest of the episode. "You don't want to leave? Because you think the island fixed you?" Thanks, Bernie.

Also, Alma noted that Bernard's bottom row of teeth are pretty terrible and snaggled. And this guy is a dentist? But let's be fair: maybe he's a dentist in a town with no orthodontists.

In the B-plot, Jack goes to see if the Others will trade Walt back for "Henry," even though "Henry" says they won't. The Others don't show up, but after some Jack and Kate semi-flirtation, Michael does, in a fairly predictable ending.

In the C-plot, Locke can't draw the diagram from the blast door, but then he does.

Next month, probably, on Lost: Michael says the castaways could totally take the Others. "Henry" suggests that that might not be the case when he apparently kicks Ana Lucia's ass despite being tied up; the question is, if he could escape like that at any time, why didn't he before? And some gun-having shenanigans are going down. Fun fact: in island time, Michael's only been gone, like, two weeks. Oh, and you can bet there'll be more with Locke's diagram, though possibly not in the very next episode.

Anyone else wonder if Michael isn't exactly what he seems? He's been gone for a while. Okay, I guess it's exactly like the old Michael to charge into the Others' lair, guns blazing. But maybe he's being used as a lure somehow, even if unknowingly. Someone is supposed to die in the final five episodes - would they finally go with a true "major" character (Jack, Locke, Sawyer, Kate) or would it be someone on a bit more of the fringe (Charlie, Ana Lucia, whoever)? I'm guessing the latter. Guesses as to the inevitable season-ending cliffhanger? I say it probably involves discovering something big about the Others, like some sort of headquarters, or an airplane tarmac, or something. (Speaking of which, shouldn't Jack have been a little more fazed by the revelation that the Others are playing dress-up? Maybe he just didn't believe Kate.)

s2e18: Dave

2006-04-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

In the B plot, we learn for sure that the counter doesn't really do anything when it hits zero. Sure, we get all that blue light, but that's it. Of course, "Henry" could be lying about that (and Locke says he doesn't believe him), but would anyone really be surprised? I always thought it was more or less implied that the button didn't really do anything and Dharma just wanted to see how long people would push it if they were told it did something but not what. It also would seem that the Others are not connected, at least not directly, to Dharma, which is much more interesting. "Henry" also insinuates that some unknown power keeps the island hidden from outside eyes, perhaps suggesting that, indeed, the only people who end up on the island have a purpose there. But what that is... who can say. Of course, since it would potentially offer all kinds of answers to devote a whole show to an interrogation of "Henry," the B plot only gets about ten minutes of screen time.

In the A plot, Hurley goes all Tyler Durden on us. The fact that "Dave" wasn't real was so telegraphed, I called it before we even saw Dave in the hospital; just the way Hurley and his doctor talked about him made it pretty clear where things were going. Still, it was somewhat interesting to watch Hurley struggle with his inner demons, even if at this point in the season I'd have preferred some more plot. I almost feel like this episode existed more to rule out a potential conclusion - the "it's all in someone head à la St. Elsewhere" finale - than anything else. Dave's explanation of the numbers wasn't unconvincing, but you knew they weren't going to go that way in the end - certainly not this early - so it more comes down to Hurley trying to convince himself that the numbers aren't a freaky island mystery. But I guess they still are.

Speaking of freaky mysteries, so that's where Hurley knows Libby from. Of course, this doesn't mean she was never a clinical psychologist, and if Hurley could be released then so could she. She could end up being a crazy Hurley stalker, but that doesn't make much sense, and she certainly doesn't seem unhinged at this point. I guess we'll see. Or maybe we won't! This has all the makings of a "plot point that doesn't get resolved until next season."

And speaking of plot points that need to be resolved, next week Jack goes into the jungle trying to trade for Walt, though "Henry" claims that the Others won't be buying. Then someone (was it Jack?) gets caught in a net.

s2e17: Lockdown

2006-03-30T11:22:00.000-06:00

Just when you think Locke leads the show in bad-ass-ness (though mostly since we haven't had much Eko for a while), we get an episode like this, which features the typically emasculating Locke backstory, plus restores to Jack much of the bad-ass-ness he lost over the first whiny half of this season and gives Sayid a pretty awesome moment at the end of the show.

Can it really be considered a surprise that "Henry" is an Other? Probably not. The writers teased us on this one as much as any plot point all year, but he was always a little too dramatic, too good with names, too manipulative of his captors to just be some guy who crashed in a balloon. I had thought even after last week's teaser that it was possible that "Henry" had simply seen the balloon and built a story off of that; recall how convinced Sayid was that "Henry" would remember the depth had he truly buried his wife with his bare hands. He also had that number sequence a bit too down pat too quickly, didn't he?

But the real question now is this: just who are the Others? Are they a true part of the Dharma Initiative? I honestly can't say for certain just how much we learned about Dharma in this episode, although the apparent parachute of food and the lockdown of the hatch (not to mention Henry's evident ability to reset said lockdown) suggest that there is plenty of Dharma oversight on the castaways.

If the whole thing is just a bizarre social experiment, the lockdown certainly could have been intentionally triggered to give Locke a clue - that strange map, which appeared to me to be a drawing of various bunkers all over the island and a suggestion that they all had connections to a central point of some sort. The Others seem to have taken pains in the past to keep the castaways from getting too curious about certain things, though, so why they'd intentionally provide such a big clue now... I don't know. But then, there are a lot of things I don't know.

One important clue came from the teaser, where "Henry" cries that "He'll kill me" if he tells anything about his people. This is presumably the same "him" who is referenced in "Maternity Leave" when Zeke and that other guy are talking outside the room where Claire is being kept. Zeke himself appears to be the chief Other when they make outside appearances, so presumably this overseer is the big man in charge of either Dharma or whatever else might be going on.

I continue to feel that Dharma is not a sufficient explanation for all that happens on the island, though, and the film's concern with "incidents" would appear to be proof of that. Perhaps Dharma itself is part of a larger, more mystical connection - which might explain the various appearances of the numbers. Dharma may be working with the castaways they were given, but it still seems unlikely that they could have been responsible for bringing them all there in the first place. The various crossovers in flashback - Hurley owning Locke's company after winning the lottery, Sayid meeting Kate's not-quite-dad in Iraq, Shannon's father ending up in Jack's OR, Sawyer meeting Jack's dad in Australia (the only of these coincidences to date that the castaways are aware of, and done really, really well in a first-season episode) - cannot possibly have been driven by Dharma unless Alvar Hanso is also God, and it seems equally beyond their scope to have picked a few people and then tracked down a bunch of others to whom they were peripherally connected (at best) and then somehow made sure they were all in Australia at the same time.

We should only have five or six new episodes left this season (especially if the finale is two hours again, which seems quite possible); I'm hoping for a ton of fun new revelations. "Locke sees the map" is probably this season's "Locke finds the hatch" in terms of being used for a large section of the mystery plot in the final few episodes, but that's just a guess; the unmasking of "Henry" will surely contribute as well, unless Sayid actually just blows him away in the first five minutes next week.

Ach, I'm bad at this

2006-03-22T23:06:00.000-06:00

Timely updating, that is. But here I am on Wednesday night, at least... I just have two episodes to discuss.

"Maternity Leave," the Claire episode, was interesting in a number of ways. First of all, it's the first episode to provide flashbacks that don't leave the island (the only other episode that messed with the main format was, of course, "The Other 48 Days," which had no flashbacks at all unless you count the entire episode). And those flashbacks did tell us a number of things about the Others. The second main thing was that this gave us, by far, our biggest clue about the Others ever. It basically gave us all the info we'd never gotten and then some. Among the things we now know:

1. The Others have some sort of medical facility, or at least they had one. Whatever it was, they were evidently capable of breaking it down in pretty short order.

2. The Others are, well, not the Others. They don't live in the jungle, they don't dress in loincloths, and they don't have real beards. (But they do have plenty of spirit gum.)

This second one is by far the most interesting to me. So if the Others are actually just some dudes in a building, where did they go? Is there a secret tarmac in the middle of the jungle that they use to jet back to Ann Arbor? And does the fact that they only appear to the castaways in the guise of jungle people (when not pretending to be castaways themselves) mean that they are part of some big sociological experiment? And if that's the case, what do they really need with Aaron, or Walt, or anyone they took? (Of course, the answer may well be "nothing, we're just seeing how people react." There's no way the Dharma Initiative is the whole story here, though.)

Meanwhile, Claire reaffirms her title as "Shrillest, Most Unpleasant Character on the Show." I know she's gone through a whole bunch of stuff, but she was always pretty obnoxious.

Speaking of Claire, weird Charlie appearance in tonight's episode, "The Whole Truth." He just gets to hang out with Sayid? I know Sayid is Captain Forgiving (see: Ana Lucia), but Charlie's outcast period sure doesn't seem to have lasted very long.

In the A plot, Sun thinks she's pregnant, and then she is. I really enjoyed the story; we got to see a lot of how Jin and Sun relate to each other and I liked Jin's emotional side coming out more. (His "Daddy-o" realization was really well done too, I have to say. I'm a sucker for little polished moments like that.)

In the B plot, Ana Lucia convinces Sayid (and Charlie) to go find Henry's balloon. Meanwhile, Henry acts as ominous as possible, which of course means he isn't an Other. Stupid TiVo cut off right as Henry has poured some Dharmios and is starting his ominous talk. Alma filled me in on the last minute or so, which was basically exactly what you'd expect - Henry finishing his dark "if I were an Other it would be so totally bad for you guys" spiel and then immediately giving a cheery "But I'm not, hooray!" Then I guess the teaser shows that the balloon is there.

So how is Sun pregnant? Well, there are a couple options.

1. Miracle baby! This one just seems silly, but stranger things have happened on this show. (Well, maybe nothing as strange as immaculate conception.)

2. Jin! Doctors aren't infallible.

3. Baldy! Come on, they were totally setting it up like Sun was going to do it with him. Her look of vague apprehension while hugging Jin could have been "I was lying about not doing it with someone else," though it could have been many other things as well. The one thing that I wonder about here is, not being a woman, I'm not intimately familiar with the potential timeline. Sun's been on the island around two months now - could she really have been pregnant the whole time and only finally noticed it now?

Well, yet more mysteries to unravel. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Previously on failure to update

2006-02-18T17:55:00.000-06:00

Five episodes go by without comment here, and it would have been more if not for the month-and-a-half break over the holidays. Woof. So let's recap it all and hopefully this will jumpstart the thing again.

s2e10: The 23rd Psalm
Eko gets even more bad-ass, as his backstory reveals that he used to be a big time gangster who took over for his priest brother - and evidently did the legwork to be a serious priest himself, renouncing his old ways - after the latter was killed while trying to stop Eko from flying a bunch of drugs out of the country. The drugs? Heroin in Virgin Mary statues. Charlie? So busted. Meanwhile, Locke teaches Michael how to shoot a gun, the prelude to the terminally obnoxious Michael leaving the show for a number of weeks. Way to be, Locke!

s2e11: The Hunting Party
Michael goes all nuts and takes off in search of Walt; this is the last time we've seen him up to the present. Jack charges after him with Locke and Sawyer in tow. They run into the Others, who prove both their numbers and their mystery by lighting a bunch of torches. We also confirm that the guys on the boat who took Walt were definitely the Others. Meanwhile, Jack's backstory establishes the breakup of his marriage - essentially, Jack thinks he can help everyone, so he ignores his own wife while trying a risky surgery on an old Italian guy. The guy dies but his daughter wants to get in Jack's pants anyway; he rejects her but then his wife dumps him anyway. I wonder if he ran right to the airport after that hoping the Italian chick still wanted to do it. In the present, Jack returns from his meeting with the Others asking Ana Lucia about building an army. The Others skunk you every time, Jack! Such a bad, bad idea.

s2e12: Fire + Water
Quite simply the worst episode in the show's brief history. I daresay it isn't even close. Charlie goes all nuts even though he isn't on drugs, having weird dreams and kidnapping Claire's baby on multiple occasions. Ultimately, Locke beats the crap out of Charlie, which is only useful in setting up the following episode's final twist. The flashbacks tell us pretty much nothing as well, or at least I got nothing out of them. In the goofy side plot that must adorn all dramatic but not exciting episodes, Hurley hits on Libby for a while, to no avail.

s2e13: The Long Con
Someone apparently tries to kidnap Sun. Jack flips out and tries to get all the guns. Sawyer tells Locke, who moves them. Then it turns out that Sawyer was playing both Jack and Locke and ends up getting all the guns for himself with the help of (dun dun dun!!!!) Charlie, who didn't even do it for the drugs but because he wanted Locke to look stupid. The spur-of-the-moment rainstorm that makes the Sun not-quite-kidnap easier looks kind of odd if the Others with all their mysterious magical ways had nothing to do with it, though. Maybe Vincent and not Walt is the magical one? That would just be weird. The flashbacks in this episode were also so ridiculous. "Teach me how to con, Sawyer!" After she just (thought she) saw right through one of them? Feh. Sawyer's long con was at least cleverly layered, but what a crap setup for it.

s2e14: One of Them
Rousseau captures someone who might be an Other, but he claims to be some dude from Minnesota who crashed on the island in a hot air balloon. Sayid tries to get answers from him, but doesn't obtain anything concrete (though he maintains that any man who actually buried his wife with his bare hands would know more details about the burial, which hardly seems like a slam dunk). The guy does give one of those looks like the bad guys give on CSI when their guilt is revealed, so maybe he is an Other. The Others have shown a notorious resistance to talking about themselves, though, so does it even matter? Sayid's backstory shows where he learned his torture tactics - ironically (or not), it came from the Americans during the first Gulf War (and a pretty bad-ass Clancy Brown). Commentary on America's apparent pro-torture policy in Gulf War II? In this week's "we have to cut the drama with a goofy side plot," Sawyer convinces Hurley to chase a frog with him. Then Sawyer smushes the frog in his hand, which was both nasty and predictable, because every time the writers make Sawyer seem funny and likable for a while, they have to backtrack by reminding us all that he's a total asshole. How about just deciding one way or the other, guys?

Late in the episode we find out what happens when the timer runs out... nothing! Well, actually some weird symbols start showing up. But evidently they don't lock out the reset button, so it's just another clue piling up. I'm still a fan of the show, but I'm hoping that as we hit the stretch run - 8 to 10 more episodes to go this season - we finally start getting some answers, and not just question after question after question. Next week it looks like we might learn more about the Dharma Initiative's presence on the island... but probably it'll just leave more questions without answering much. We'll see.

And we're all caught up! So maybe now I can get back in the regular groove of post-episode posts.

s2e09: What Kate Did

2005-12-07T20:29:00.000-06:00

What Kate did: Blew up her parents' house with her drunken redneck stepdad inside (who, in a bizarre twist, is later revealed to be her real dad).

What Sawyer did: Apparently became possessed briefly by the ghost of Wayne, said redneck dad. Wayne proceeds to later show up as a horse. To say this was weird and random would be understating it.

What Jack did: Had a drink with Ana Lucia. If you don't think they're getting these characters together, you're nuts - but then we already knew this because there wouldn't have been much reason to introduce her when they did (in the first half of last season's finale) if not to set up some eventual relationship. The fact that she instituted herself as the leader of the tail section tribe is only further proof in this direction.

What Locke and Eko did: Spliced together a missing piece of the film in the hatch's apparent post-production studio, while engaging in a bad-ass-off. The film was, well, a bit disappointing. Okay, it got a little more specific, but we certainly could have guessed that "do not attempt to use the computer *blip* Good luck!" meant something more ominous was missing. I'd say the more important part of this discovery is wondering why someone took that part of the film and hid it in a Bible on the other side of the island.

What Michael did: Used the computer for something other than entering the code. Oh noooooo! Where's Walt hiding, anyway? Do the Others have a cybercafe in the jungle somewhere?

s2e08: Collision

2005-11-30T22:26:00.000-06:00

Not the worst episode, though a bit of a slog for a while. It happens to be an Ana Lucia episode, meaning we're forced to deal with more of her aggravating behavior in both present time and flashbacks. We at least see why she's so reluctant to trust people and, ultimately, I think she comes off okay, though she's still annoying as all get out.

In other news: Kate likes Sawyer (no kidding), Jack stinks at golf, and everyone reunites. For as rough as the rest of the episode could be to watch at times, I have to admit that I was reduced to tears by the slow-motion reunion scene, particularly between Rose and Bernard. Sure, it was obvious they were going to be reunited from the minute we knew there were other survivors (if not from the very minute that Rose announced that her husband was alive, which was way the hell back in like, s1e04 or something like that), and it almost seems like the only reason Rose's character existed was for a scene like this. But it worked on me.

s2e07: The Other 48 Days

2005-11-26T15:33:00.000-06:00

I realize I'm a little behind on this, but the day after this episode aired, Drew went out of town for a week and a half, so discussion is sort of curtailed. Anyway, quick notes on this one:

1. I liked that we saw a little more of the Others. Goodwin gave them more of a face than Ethan did last season, though not much of one. I got a little bit of a "Left Behind" vibe off him, though - Nathan was not a good person, so he was killed, but other people (notably the children) were simply taken away. Kind of odd. With other concerns cropping up, I wonder how long it will be before we actually hear from the Others again.

2. Finally, a little humanization of Ana Lucia! Granted, it was right after she shot somebody, but you could see in this one why she was so sensitive to people running out of the jungle at her. I still hate her character, though.

3. I liked that they just opened it the way they did, as if it were another pilot, rather than doing some "previously on Lost" thing that explained why you weren't going to see any of the normal characters this week, as I had expected them to. Good on them for not being predictable.

4. That said, the format of the whole episode was a bit lame. The "Day x" screens were silly, and the slow-mo overlap scenes at the end were cringe-inducingly dumb. I know they had to get back to the present somehow, but couldn't they have skipped a little, or at least done a few new shots and given us something we hadn't already seen?

5. Drew needs to get his ass back from Europe so I can watch s2e08.

s2e06: Abandoned

2005-11-13T23:05:00.000-06:00

I'm guessing the title of this episode refers to Shannon, post-Boone death (and also in the flashbacks where her evil stepmother steals all her money), which is kind of a curious choice when they were just going to kill her off.

Yes, Shannon dies. It's kind of odd that they would crush that entire angle by killing off both characters, but I guess the case I would make is that the deaths of those characters had larger ramifications on more important ones - Boone's death gave some depth to Locke, and Shannon's looks like it's going to do something major to Sayid. (Something so major they're not even coming right back with it next week, instead spending a whole episode on 1.25 seasons' worth of tail-section survivors' plot.)

What else went down in this episode? Let's break it down in bite-sized form, because you could read a streamlined recap pretty much anywhere:

1. Locke realizes that Charlie knows about the heroin from the plane when Claire mentions that he carries around a Virgin Mary statue. (Though Charlie doesn't appear to actually be using, since he's evidently carrying around an unbroken statue if Claire is anything to go by. Of course, he could just be replenishing his supply constantly. I'm sure we'll find out more about this later.)

2. Fake-out deaths galore, as Sawyer collapses in the jungle and Cindy Lou Whoever vanishes. (When the tail sectioners start calling for Cindy, I muttered to Drew, "That better not be it.")

3. Shannon and Sayid get it on. Then Shannon sees Walt in the tent and freaks out, and gets Vincent to lead her into the jungle. Sayid catches up with her and also sees Walt; Shannon chases after him and gets shot by Ana Lucia. The tail sectioners, along with Jin and Michael, had started hearing the whispers and assumed Shannon running up was the Others.

4. In flashbacks, we learn that Shannon got jerked around by her stepmother after her father died (thanks partially to Jack's decision to operate on Sarah instead; the brief shot of Jack walking past Shannon in the hospital is also all we get of him in this episode). Boone tries to help but she ends up telling him she can manage on her own. (Of course, as we found out last season, this "management" largely involves her tricking Boone into giving money to guys she's sleeping with, so I guess she never really got settled.) On the other hand, what does any of this matter now? They're both dead.

That's about it. It was a pretty good episode; Drew noted that some of the scenes near the end provided more genuine tension than just about any this season; it's hard to disagree with that. Certainly not since the first episode back, I would say.

So... Walt. I think we all assumed that Walt's appearances to Shannon were hallucinations on her part, what with the backwards talking and that he could apparently show up anywhere at any time and then vanish again. (Plus, we've already seen this sort of thing with Jack's dad in S1.) But since Sayid saw Walt, that would seem to confirm that Walt is, in some measure, real.

So how can he move so easily without being detected until he appears in front of your face? A couple possibilities here:

a) He has somehow been drawn into whatever the Others use to move as silently as they do (see s2e05), as a result of his abduction by them.

b) It's some sort of shared hallucination inspired by the island's strange magical powers.

c) The writers are just jerking us around to make Walt's appearances seem more mysterious than they actually are.

I don't buy that last one, largely because there's enough crazy crap going on that I don't think the writers need to turn the pedestrian into the mysterious as well. I like (a) myself. It could also explain the backwards whispering - the suggestion behind Ana Lucia's shout of "Run!" is that the mysterious whispers in the forest signal the presence of the Others. So Walt's ability to walk softly and carry a big backwards-whisper stick could be indicative of a connection to the Others... what, I don't know, but of course we should eventually find out, if that's the case. (I mean, yes, he was presumably abducted by them - not that we know for a fact that the boat people and the Others are really the same people, we just assume - but how exactly would he get these "abilities" from them?)

Shannon's death appears that it may be a turning point in a way that Boone's, frankly, was not. The look on Sayid's face alone suggests that he will never in a million years be able to coexist with Ana Lucia, and possibly by extension no one in that party (certainly no one in the tail section).

I wonder if this coming week we'll see anything current, or if it will all be flashbacks. (I hope they don't use a cheesy "here's what happened" framing device, at least.) Previously on Lost: ker-blooie, there goes the plane... and I guess they'll probably have to throw in a couple scenes like the one in the pit where Michael says to Ana Lucia, "You were in the back?" because otherwise casual viewers will be all, "Why don't I recognize anyone on Lost?" At least I expect that's how it will go. And then come back next time for more important stuff. Because unless there's a big revelation about the Others coming, I'm not sure I care what Ana Lucia and Mistereko and Bernard and Libby have been doing for seven weeks.

The Lost s2e06 Death Pool

2005-10-21T22:59:00.000-05:00

ABC has promised us that one character will die in the upcoming - three weeks hence - episode of Lost. So... which character might it be?

Shannon - 2 to 1
Someone on a forum I read pointed out that killing off Shannon wouldn't make much sense, because it would mean that Shannon and Boone were totally useless characters with an arc that didn't go anywhere. I think that that sounds about right. Every other major character has had at least two episodes; Shannon and Boone got one stuck together, and then Boone was killed off. For her part, Shannon has proven to be both pretty useless and just generally unlikable, so why wouldn't they kill her off, really? Of course, I don't think she would even have occurred to me if I hadn't heard a rumor that she was going to be the character. But she wouldn't have occurred to me because she's so uninteresting, and this show has a history of killing off faceless and/or uninteresting characters (Boone wasn't setting the world on fire either). So that could work too.

Libby - 4 to 1
Another character I probably wouldn't have thought of - mostly because she's had about three lines in two episodes - but she was shown in the group of people in the teaser, and again, this does work with the faceless aspect. I mean, when Ethan threatened to kill a castaway in the first season and then did so, who was it? Steve. A guy so faceless I don't think he even had a line in the show; even Arzt got to be annoying for a couple episodes before he turned into kibble. It seems too early in the season for any character with a serious arc to get whacked, so if it's not Shannon, it's probably someone who doesn't matter.

Mistereko - 10 to 1
I doubt it highly - if anyone goes from the tail section, it's got to be Libby - but more likely Shaft than any of our heroes. The fact that he made it into the opening credits suggests that he's probably not going anywhere, though; if he were only going to be around for four episodes, presumably they wouldn't have bothered. Ditto for Michelle Rodriguez's Ana Lucia, who I'm certain isn't going anywhere, so I won't even bother including her.

Sayid - 30 to 1
Not much has changed with this guy lately. He gets a brief foray into the hatch in two episodes, but otherwise we've barely seen him all season. Could his reappearance be linked with a tragic accident? Part of this whole thing, I think, depends on why you think the people are on the island. If the island is, in some ways, making people atone for previous mistakes, then Sayid should still have some part to play and should not logically be killed. If it's not something that far-reaching... well, then theoretically anything goes. The fact that his trail has otherwise gone a bit cold - something he has in common with love interest Shannon - could be a warning sign... or maybe they just haven't gotten back around to him yet. (You can bet that if Shannon does bite it we'll be hearing from Sayid in some way.)

Another faceless character - 50 to 1
It's this high largely because I think they're making too big a deal for it to be this cheap, and I don't think they're mean enough to kill off Bernard. If it's anyone "new," it'll probably be the disposable Libby.

Sawyer - 100 to 1
No matter how often he's shown collapsing in teasers, I'm not buying this one. He seems too important and popular of a character to be dispatched in this way.

Jin - 500 to 1
I'm throwing him out there as a possibility, mostly because he's out there in the jungle with the Others. But I don't think it will happen. Too much potential for that character.

Michael or Walt - 1,000 to 1
Nah. But again, near the Others. So I guess you at least have to think about it.

Any of the other main characters (Jack, Locke, Kate, Charlie, Hurley, Claire, Sun... I'm not forgetting anyone, am I?) - 5,000 to 1
I don't remember if any of these characters showed up in the teaser, but even if they did, I don't think it's happening. Certainly not the first three, can't see it with Charlie and Hurley, I don't think they'd kill off Claire with the baby, and Sun would just be a bad choice to dump, for any number of reasons.

So there's my thoughts. Who's your money on?

s2e05: ...and Found

2005-10-20T23:22:00.000-05:00

Kind of a wimpy title. I guess one of the plots is about Sun losing her wedding ring, but nothing else of any significance is really "found," is it?

In what I guess is the main plot, the supremely bossy Ana Lucia decides that Michael, Jin, and Sawyer are going to head across the island to find our heroes' camp. Michael, however, just takes off to find Walt. Jin and Shaft (whose name is apparently "Mr. Echo," however much sense that makes) take off after him. Ana Lucia, Sawyer, Bernard and a couple women whose names I don't remember keep going the other way. In the end, Jin and Mr. Echo catch up to Michael after seeing the feet of the "others." They manage to convince him that he will find Walt, but that the others won't be found if they don't want to be, and everyone just sort of walks away.

In the other plot, Sun loses her wedding ring and flips out a little. We see in the backstory how they met - Jin's friend reads his fortune and tells him love will be colored "orange" for him. He gets a job at a ritzy hotel as the doorman, under strict orders not to let in anyone common like himself. He does anyway and decides to quit. Meanwhile, Sun thinks she's starting to date the heir to the hotel chain, but he really just wants to be friends; he's using her to get his parents off his back before he moves to America and marries someone else. Walking along after quitting, Jin sees a woman in a skimpy orange dress pass him. He turns to watch her go, and when he turns back runs straight into Sun. It's apparently love at first sight.

Finally, as Drew mentioned, it is confirmed that Kate likes Sawyer. Whoopty-freakin-doo. You do have to wonder why she would, but let's bear in mind a couple things: 1) Kate is something of a dangerous character herself; 2) Sawyer does reveal a heart of gold from time to time. He really feigns aloof but comes through when things are actually on the line (just as he did by stomping out of the house when he saw the kid back in S1).

Did I forget anything? Probably not, but even if I did, there wasn't much worth mentioning in the whole episode. I know that in 22 episodes or so they can't all be loaded with plot, and I like a lot of the character-driven episodes, but this one was nothing special - Sun and Jin's backstory is like a condensation of a schmaltzy romantic comedy, and aside from the fact that they don't wear shoes and there is apparently a kid among them (Alex, perhaps? It didn't seem to be Walt), we really didn't learn anything about the "others." If there's more than about fifteen seconds from this episode used in, cumulatively, every single "previously on Lost" for the rest of the season, I'll be shocked.

ABC appears to be justifying the three-week hiatus with the promise that someone will be killed off in the next episode. The teaser wants you to think it's Sawyer, which means it is almost certainly not. A few other people were flashed as possible candidates. I heard a rumor from a loud guy at work (who was talking to someone else, but loudly!) that it was...

DO NOT READ ON IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO IT MIGHT BE! SPOILERS!!

...Shannon.

And I mean, good riddance. Boy, do I hope it's her. Talk about the worst character of the entire first season (though if you ask me, Ana Lucia will need some deepening to avoid challenging her for worst in the show's run), for several reasons. First, she almost never does anything useful - aside from the French in the pilot. (After that, she really only assists in the French translation as a means to get into Sayid's pants.) She's a totally self-absorbed bitch, and this never actually changes. If that weren't enough, we see in the finale that she sent the airport security after "this Arab guy" - aka Sayid - basically just to prove to Boone that she could be a total bitch and get away with it, or something. It's just a shame he doesn't manage to remember that she's the one he asked to watch his bag. But yeah - useless, whiny, annoying, self-centered, and just plain uninteresting. (As far as backstories go, Shannon and Boone's has to have been the worst.) Boone at least got some depth before he died, but Shannon hasn't yet and I doubt she will. I'm not going to miss the character, if indeed it's her. If not... well, I guess it will just be a big surprise, then.

3 more weeks? Are you kidding me?

2005-10-20T11:05:00.000-05:00

So, we have to wait three more weeks to get another "Lost." This might be understandable if last night's episode had been at all gripping. The fact is, the episode did positively nothing to advance the overall plot. If Flax had come home after missing the show and asked me what had happened, I would have simply shrugged my shoulders and said, "nothing." If there was one key takeaway, it would be that we found out for certain that Evangeline Lilly's character has the hots for Sawyer. And if you watched Season One you effectively already knew this, because when Kate is forced to give Sawyer a kiss in order to get information from him while he's tied up, she proceeds to spend about 30 awkward, unnecessary seconds engaged in a make-out session.

Overall, it was another "character episode," which was odd because last week's Hugo episode was one, too. Yesterday's plot centered on the respective pasts of Jin and Sun. Basically, it's a "meddling Asian parents" meets "plucky young poor kid tries to get to the top." The fact that the backstory is in Korean doesn't make it any less cliche. Maybe it's just because I knew a lot of Korean Americans in college, but the whole "arranged marriage" thing is a little overdone for my taste. At least the writers are able to make fun of it in some playful dialogue between Sun and the man her family has set her up to meet. I do feel that the backstory was unsurprising, but Abrams and company apparently felt they could get away with an uncreative plot and dialogue because they filmed it in another language. I expected more.

The B story takes place on the other side of the island. It also takes place, mercifully, in the present. Basically, a lot of the other passengers from the tail end are missing. Ana Lucia decides the best of course of action is to go to the other camp where Sawyer, Michael and Jin came from. Problem is, when they split off to find food, Michael realizes where "the others" come from, spazzes out and jets off to find his kid, Walt. Presumably, "the others" have Walt. Jin and Mr. Echo decide to go after Walt, but Ana Lucia assumes Michael's a goner and leads her party onward to the other side of the Island. Sawyer, injured and horny, goes along with Ana.

Now, imagine you're a jobless, caustic Southerner who's washed up on an island somewhere in the Pacific. You have a choice: You can either follow a surly Hispanic chick and her waifish, uber-white cohorts off to unknown parts of the Island, or you can go along with your Korean fishing friend and a ripped, shirtless 7-foot tall African dude with the deserted island-equivalent of a monster maul, and a convenient knowledge of jungle vegetation. What would you do? Personally, I'd take my chances with Shaq and my Asian gangsta buddy. But Sawyer? No, he travels with Ana and the gang, for no real reason.

While we follow Jin and Echo, we get a brief introduction to "the others." Echo and Jin hide under a bush, and they watch from an obscured view as several people (I'll have to watch again, but it seems like there may have been 8 of them) traipse by silently. Sadly, we learn nothing from this, other than the fact that "the others" do indeed have legs. We also see a teddy bear, but it isn't Walt's polar bear teddy. This scene, intended to be creepily scary in that "we only show you part of the whole to build tension" sort of way, fails to be captivating. Watching the first season on DVD, every time someone went into the jungle, I was convinced something frightening was about the happen. This season, they seemed to have lost some of that suspenseful charm.

At the end of the episode, we're basically back where we started. How come we didn't see even a glimpse of the vault? Where is the major hook that's supposed to keep us guessing for three more weeks? Why the hell does Kate like an asshole like Sawyer?

ABC is hyping the next episode as the best of the season, so I'm hoping it will live up. But, based on the way the past few episodes have been going, the writers don't seem to feel a need to reveal too much. It makes you wonder if they're sitting at home thinking, "How the hell are we going to explain all this shit?"

s2e04: Everybody Hates Hugo

2005-10-12T23:32:00.000-05:00

Again, spoilers.

Better episode than last week's. They finally decided to settle things down and move back into what made last season so great - the character-driven episodes. Better still, this one fleshed out Hurley a bit, giving him something to be concerned about other than all numbers, all the time. (Though it's a little plot-holey to watch him pressing the button with bored unconcern, isn't it?)

We start with, oh guess what, a dream sequence. Why Jin needed to show up here I don't know - perhaps it will pay off later? It could just be a call-back to Hurley telling Jin about the rumor he spoke English last season... or it could just be Abrams and Co. intentionally messing with our heads. Either way, I'm officially embarrassed to have devoted an entire post to it when it was such an obvious fake-out. (I do still wonder if Jin doesn't at least understand English a little better than he lets on, though.)

In the main plot, Hurley is put in charge of doing inventory on the food and then not giving anyone any. Because everyone on the island is good at having secrets but terrible at keeping them, Charlie finds out about the food and makes Hurley feel like a jerk. Hurley brings Rose into the hatch and then, remembering how winning the lottery and lying about it cost him a friend, decides that everyone is going to hate him no matter how he tries to parcel out the food, so he plans to blow it up (yeah, no one will hate you for that!) before just deciding to hand it all out in one big go, so that everyone can just kind of have a good night.

(For the record, do we think there's anyone in the world who wouldn't immediately run out to collect 114 million dollars? Odd behavior on Hurley's part here. I understand the idea - he's a big loser, so he needs to know who his friends are before he cashes in and everyone wants to cozy up. But he couldn't tell DJ Qualls? How was it not obvious already that this guy was his friend?)

In the other plot, sulky Sawyer eats up some time. Finally everyone comes out of the hole and go to another bunker where the tail survivors are holed up. Supposedly there are 23 of them, but it ends up being more like six. The woman who gave Michael the 23 number seems as surprised as he is. (By the way... 23, eh?) One of them is Bernard, Rose's husband - everyone who didn't see that coming, raise your hands. (I'd better not see any hands, people. Come on.)

Oh, in still a third plot, Claire finds the bottle with notes from the raft washed up on the beach. She and Shannon have a little freak and decide to give it to Sun (I guess because she's the only one on the island with connections to someone on the raft). Sun buries it at the end of the episode.

On the next Lost! Sun is tired of everyone saying the raft is fine because she knows it's not! (I know something you don't know, Sun.) Meanwhile, Sawyer flirts with Ana Lucia because who doesn't love a dirty, scowly, hairy Southern dude? And we finally get a glimpse of The Others and their handiwork as Michael goes in search of Walt yet again.

This was a good episode. It was definitely emblematic of what I love about the show but so many people dislike - the plot takes a backseat for an episode (for the most part) while character development hits the forefront. Yeah, we didn't learn much about anything, but it was a very nicely-done episode in giving us some Hurley background, and you had to be touched by the ending. I'm glad they're finally reining themselves in after giving us probably too much information in the first three weeks.

English as a second language

2005-10-06T22:19:00.000-05:00

Drew and I went back to look at the Dharma Initiative film sequence today and ended up watching several other parts of the episode. Of particular note once we stumbled across it was the sequence with Michelle Rodriguez in the pit, after Sawyer brings out his gun. There is a brief shot of Jin - seemingly unprompted - where he looks between Sawyer's hand and Rodriguez... it's hard to explain in this context, but it really looks not only like he thinks she is going to steal the gun away, but that he fully expects her to and is actually anxiously awaiting her move.

Note the following things.

1. Jin was separated from Michael and Sawyer for quite some time after the raft blew up. But he was apparently never under shark threat and had seemingly been on the island for some time already when they made their way back to the beach the next morning, which had to be a time difference of at least a few hours. Could he have somehow grabbed the side of the boat belonging to the "others" and made it back much quicker?

2. As I noted yesterday, when Jin comes out of the jungle to meet Michael and Sawyer on the beach, he is tied up. But when they are taken back into the jungle, they are not tied up - they are thrown into a pit from which, one presumes, Jin alone would not have been able to escape (certainly not if he had also been tied up). This leaves open the possibility that Jin knew, to some degree, his captors.

3. In one Season One episode, Hurley tells Jin there is a rumor that the latter speaks English. This is, of course, mere speculation on the part of the survivors, but it must have come from somewhere - remember that Sun got busted by Kate because she gave a knowing smile after something Kate said; Jin could have had similar looks at times if indeed he did speak or understand English.

4. Of course we have now seen Jin speak English. The common belief is that this is part of a dream sequence, but I'm not so sure. For one thing, he's in a place with artificial light and it doesn't look much like any place in the hatch (though to be fair, we don't get much of a look at it). That being said, why would any of the characters have a dream that takes place in such a location? Why would a dream on this show be so seemingly stoic? Yes, it's annoying if the promo people blew such a huge development if it's real, but when have we ever known promo people to be good at keeping secrets?

Possible theories:

1. Perhaps Jin simply speaks English and has been hiding it like Sun. He didn't seem to have much of an accent in that one line - I daresay he seemed downright American - but maybe he has a little bit of one. Sun's accent isn't very strong either. So why didn't Jin ever bust it out before now, at a point where it could have been useful? One of the following theories might explain that.

2. Perhaps he is connected with the project somehow, if the project is indeed connected to the castaways' ending up on the island. As someone whose inability to communicate well and general reticence would help him maintain a low profile, he could perhaps be observing and/or trying to exert a certain level of control over the proceedings.

3. Perhaps he stumbled upon whoever this other group of people is (at least partially Flight 815 survivors) at some earlier point, and formed an alliance. Note that for much of the first season Jin desires to keep separate from the other survivors, yet he still manages to join with them at crucial times even though he is most interested in his own survival and seems to think he can assure it himself. Why? Perhaps he is trying to move things in the direction that will most benefit him - i.e. helping this other group of people that may be better equipped to get him off the island.

Or maybe it's just some sort of dream sequence. The problem with the other explanations is that I have a very hard time conceiving of a way for them to be satisfying. Even if they exist, we're probably waiting two weeks - I have to figure that if it's not a dream, Jin's English will be one of the last things we get next week (though if that's the case, the promo people dropped the ball even worse than could have been expected). And I just don't know how this question could be answered and keep things reasonable. Though Lost thrives on its mystery and twists, getting too crazy could be a death knell, particularly for my interest. We've got a long way to go this season, though - 19 episodes or so - so there are still plenty of things that could happen. I just hope Abrams and Lindelof don't dig too deep a hole for themselves.

Personally, I'm hoping right now that it's a fakeout. It would explain the prominent promo placement - this show has been known for juking in the past, be it the hallucinogenic paste or... well, that was the big one, but certainly things on the island aren't always what they seem at first glance. And if this is what it seems, the questions it raises are far more problematic than the English-speaking itself. For the sake of not having huge, ugly plot holes, it either needs to be a fakeout, or the answer needs to be really, really, ridiculously good. Good to a degree that I'm not sure actually can exist in this dimension. If Jin does speak English and the explanation is not 100% mind-blowingly outstanding, it's going to become obvious that the shot of the shark circling in the second episode was meant to show the thing the show was jumping. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Don't get me wrong, it could be a cool twist, but if it doesn't work just right it could also be devastating.

(For the record, yes, I'm aware that this blog has started off on kind of a negative foot. Hopefully this won't last, but it's sort of up to the show. Seems like I didn't pick the best episode after which to start.)

The "Lost" Generation

2005-10-06T09:50:00.000-05:00

A disclaimer: I never thought I would be posting on a blog, and I truly never thought I'd be posting on a blog that discusses exclusively a show I started watching two weeks ago. I really don't watch that much television anymore, aside from sports and The Daily Show, but I stumbled upon the "Lost" season premiere and became immediately, and unabashedly, hooked. The show is fascinating, suspenseful and cinematic, so it doesn't really have the feel of regular television. After watching all of Season One on DVD, and then catching the first few episodes of Season Two, I'm looking forward to speculating on what's coming next. I'll basically be the Ed McMahon to Flax's Carson. So don't look for anything too interesting from me. But do look for Publisher's Clearing House fliers in your mailbox.

"Orientation": In response to Flax's post - this past episode was indeed underwhelming. It managed to go into a lot of detail on back story that wasn't particularly interesting to anyone. The most intriguing part of the episode would have to be the Orientation film that Jack and Locke watched. So, the bunker under the hatch is part of the "Dharma Initiative" - some kind of odd scientific/psychological experiment, that could well explain most of what's been occurring at the island. The film mentions studying meteorological events (which might explain the turbulence and subsequent plane crash), zoology (here the video shows footage of a polar bear, which could, in theory, explain the appearance of those animals on the island), psychology (is the bunker and its secret code just a bizarre game designed to test the limits of the mind?) and electro-magnetism.

This last one is the most interesting. Certainly, the huge magnetic ore deposits underground in the bunker explains the malfunctioning compass that Locke gave to Sayid mid-way through Season One, but could it also lead to clues about why radio contact was lost in the plane before it crashed? Could this be some type of enormous super magnet that sucks various wayward vessels toward it? Perhaps this magnetic deposit attracted the Black Rock ship, the boats that Desmond and Rousseau crashed, the Nigerian drug plane, and of course Oceanic Flight 815. Why is it necessary to type in the code every 108 minutes? What happens if the program isn't executed? Perhaps if the power of the magnet is unleashed, the island goes wild and starts sucking everything near to it closer and closer to itself, like some kind of tropical black hole.

But who knows? The rest of the episode, like Flax said, is kind of fluffy stuff. I had thought previously that "the others" storyline was less interesting than the hatch, but considering we got our fill of that hatch in the 10/5 episode, and it wasn't that great, I'll be looking forward to continuing the "others" subplot next week.

s2e03: Orientation

2005-10-05T23:13:00.000-05:00

Spoiler warning. Please note that this will be implied in pretty much every future post, so I don't want to hear any whining.

So, this episode... not the greatest. The season premiere was awesome, the second episode had its moments, but this... it seemed to have "filler" stamped on huge chunks, like the writers really only had a couple things they wanted to squeeze in there (Jack and Locke coming to an understanding, how Locke came to be this way, starting the "fate of the tail" plotline) and had to fill up the rest with Jack being a nearly insufferable boring ass. Locke's backstory was pretty slow too, and the appearance of Sayid and Hurley felt all but perfunctory. It would not at all be exaggeration to say that the coolest moment by far was the revelation in the teaser for next week that Jin apparently speaks English. (Not only English, but unaccented English at that, which raises further questions.) It's a shame they had to blow something so potentially huge, but you can see how they'd need to pull everyone back in who might have been annoyed at this episode's relative crappiness.

I don't think there's an episode from the first season that doesn't hold up in one way or another - those that are slower on advancing the overall plot at least work in a lot of decent backstory. There are a couple of relative clunkers, but even a bad episode of Lost isn't awful and I'd rather watch it than much of what's on TV, so I'll grant that. Still, this early in the second season I would have hoped for a little better, not a stopgap episode, which is how this one felt.

We open pretty much exactly where episode 2 left off, continuing this season's trend of leaving virtually no second unchronicled (and a number of seconds chronicled far too many times). Jin has run out of the jungle, tied up, as Michael and Sawyer come ashore - he gasps, "Others!" As we open here, the huge black guy beats the crap out of Sawyer, and they all get dragged off and thrown in a hole. (Why this didn't happen to Jin the first time is unclear.)

Back to the hatch. We have to see parts of things AGAIN, which is really unfortunate since the editor appears to have gone on a bender and completely changed the order of the dialogue from the previous episodes. Anyway, Kate goes to hit Desmond with a gun, his gun goes off, and the computer gets hit. Desmond has a spaz and tries to fix it, but ends up making things worse. Meanwhile, Jack is even more obnoxious than usual and it finally seems to get to Locke a bit, explained by his backstory in which it's shown that he used to be just as bad at letting go of things as Jack has been shown to be. We also meet Helen, the name Locke later (earlier) uses with the phone non-sex worker. Gee, I wonder how this ends.

Michelle Rodriguez shows up! She gets dumped in the hole and it's revealed that she was on the flight. Then she kicks Sawyer's ass (not a good episode for him), takes his gun, and is hoisted up out of the hole, because she's either one of or in cahoots with the people who seem to be the "others," which probably means they're not them.

Jack and Locke watch a film stamped with the same seal we see around the hatch and on the shark - it belongs to the Dharma Initiative. The film is vague but seems to suggest that the whole thing is some sort of social experiment. Jack says as much to Desmond. Desmond's response is "Yeah, but what if it's not?" Jack doesn't really have a comeback for that.

The computer seems unfixable so Desmond takes off running. Jack follows and confronts him. Desmond finally recognizes Jack and inquires about Sarah; hearing that they were married but now are not, Desmond is apparently satisfied (that makes one of us) and leaves. Welcome to Plot Hole Island. I assume they have to call this back at some point.

Sayid and Hurley are brought by Kate. Hurley sees the food that will apparently get him in a lot of trouble next week. Sayid fixes the computer apparently by waving his hands around, and then Locke convinces Jack that he has to press the button because Locke doesn't want to be alone in having faith that something larger is going on. Jack waits until the last possible second and then presses it. Locke declares "I'll take first shift" (since the counter must be reset every 108 minutes) and... we're done! Are you as bored as I was?

So we learned basically nothing about the Others. Next week it seems like we will, and if we don't at least there will be some character development in the form of Hurley doing dumb things or what have you. I'm most interested in this Jin thing, though.

Onto the bandwagon.

2005-10-05T23:03:00.000-05:00

It took literally one episode - the first of the second season - for me to get on the Lost bandwagon, and once my first season DVDs arrived I devoured them in a weekend. I daresay I now know as much or more about Lost than most people not named J.J. Abrams, but there's no need to be competitive here - we're all allowed to like Lost, and we should. Why? Because it isn't just gimmicky cliffhangers and weird plot twists, it's an excellent character drama (although it could stand to get back to that; it's been stifled a bit so far this season in order to answer the questions it set up for itself). It didn't win the Emmy because of some hatch.

So what are you going to get here? Episode recaps. Speculation. Perhaps general chatter if my roommate takes up my offer to make this a multi-author blog. Either way, know starting out that I'm doing this as much for myself as anyone else, so keep the snark to yourself. That's my job, where called for (and there will be some; the show isn't perfect, God knows).

Anyway, that's the premise. Catch on quick, because this entry is soon to be buried.