LOST: A Tale of Two Drafts

After days of conversations with everyone from internet people to people on the streets, this is where I stand on the subject of LOST.

The internet seems to have split into two camps about LOST: people who wanted to mysteries explained, and people who really liked the final message that it was the people who mattered so forget about all the mysteries. I think the camps are limited. One camp says that if you hated the end of LOST you will hate 2001 but love the Phantom Menace (because The Phantom Menace "explains" the force). But I do not think either of those are fair comparisons. I did not want the mysteries of Lost "explained" -- I wanted them unified, related to one another. Still mysterious, but connected. 2001 has some very mysterious scenes but it only asks me to accept one: the obelisk appears at moments of major cosmic evolution, and the movie shows us one from the distant past, and one from the near future. The willing suspension of disbelief works awesome for the obelisk, but when I am asked to accept many unconnected mysteries I find this harder to do, if you are claiming you are telling one story. One of the many mysteries on LOST was the ghosts, but even that "one" mystery turned out to be several: some ghosts were actual ghosts, some where a shapeshifter impersonating the dead, some were maybe psychic projections of the living or something like bi-location (Shannon seeing Walt covered in water on the island when he was captured by the others at the same time elsewhere), some were hallucinations (like Hurley seeing his friend from the institute), and some remain inscrutable ("taller Walt" meeting Locke and the end of season 3 -- can't be the Man in Black because he can only take the form of the dead, can't be a ghost because Walt is alive, it is hard to see how it could actually be Walt projecting himself psychically from far away or something, and to say it was a part of Locke's subconscious seems like a stretch).

The people who agree with the creators that the characters have to be the main thing are right; this is a principle of screenwriting. But equally important to screenwriting is the resolution of implicit promises to the audience (that, say, the statue had something to do with the weirdness elsewhere on the island). And frankly, it was actors like Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson that made the characters compelling. Juliet's sudden change of heart about the bomb at the end of season 5, very convenient for the writers but not especially compelling from her point of view, hardly suggests that they are taking character as seriously as they claim, though they are not without some tremendous ones. The characters are great at times, but no one is going to confuse this with The Wire, where everyone in the first four seasons is a fully realized human being, and never a device for a writer's agenda.

So how to make sense of LOST. Here is what I think happened. Not a ton of evidence, but it explains a lot of what I wanted explained.

LOST started out as a show about a plane that crashed. Everyone on the plane died.

Lost Season 6, Episode 17 and 18: The End

[Spoilers. I wrote this RIGHT AFTER the show ended. I wrote it during Jimmy Kimmel. I sent it to Smartpop at like 2am but now the day is over and they did not post it, and I have not heard from them. There is a book expo in New York the Smartpop folks are at so maybe that accounts for it. Anyway, here it is. Look for Jason Powell's X-Men post Wednesday.]

Wow what a deeply WEIRD show.

I was going to start off here with a gag about that Chekov line where if you have a loaded gun in the first act you have to have it go off in the third, and I was going to say something about how Lost has a small arsenal of unused weapons. I was also going to talk about how much I love Kill Bill (the two volumes as one movie), and how I wanted one ending (BIG FIGHT SCENE), and got something totally different (The Bride and Bill did not even get out of their chairs) -- and was totally satisfied. I want to see plots reach their natural conclusion, but I can also be convinced to care about something else. I feel like Walt, and Aaron, and Dharma, and time travel, should mean something -- I don't want to feel like Jin time travelled and Sun did not for no reason other than the writers thought it would be more dramatic to keep them apart. (Don't tell me Jacob did not time travel her because she is a mother: so was Kate and he offered her the job.)

I have no idea what I think about the end of Lost. It is going to take me a while to think it through. I at least three quarters liked the episode. The whole series is going to take me longer to figure out. But I gotta write so here I go.

The summary. Jack and Locke get Desmond and send him down into the light, where they bet on what the result will be. They end up being both right: Jack is right that when he guesses disturbing the source it will allow him to kill the Man in Black, but the Man in Black is right that it will destroy the island -- except it turns out it can be reversed. Jack and the Man in Black fight and both mortally wound each other. Hurley becomes the man in charge of the island with Ben as his second in command -- and their first order of business is to get Desmond back. Kate and Sawyer make it to the plane in time to join Richard, Miles, and Lapidus as they leave. In the alt universe everyone remembers and in the big twist of the night the alt U turns out to be a kind of pre-heaven. In the end they are all ready to let go and move onto whatever the afterlife has to offer.

Obviously we are not supposed to care about a lot of the mysteries. I can live with it a bit. That we are not supposed to care what happens to Jin and Sun's kid is more troubling. That feels like it is going to continue to bug me for a long time to come. My friend Brady points out that the baby is not a character and thus I should be fine with not returning to her, but I am not convinced. Nothing to do with mystery being better as mystery: you can't introduce a abandoned baby three episodes from the end and just leave it there. Or maybe you can. I don't know.

Lost, Season 6, Episode 16: What They Died For

My Smartpop review of Lost is up. Here is a sample. Click for more.

One thing the second to last episode of a season of Lost does well is ANNOUNCE stuff. They say they are going to do stuff, and then they DO it in the last episode of the season. “We have to move the island.” “Let’s set off a nuke.” “I am going to kill Jacob” and now “I am going to destroy the island.” (I am probably forgetting similar pronouncements from the end of seasons 1, 2, and 3: “I am not going to push the button” maybe?). The moment was a little undercut tonight, the only flaw in tonight’s fantastic episode — as a friend pointed out, earlier in the episode The Man in Black told Ben he could have the island if Ben would help him, presumably help him kill Jack (and maybe the others if, now that Jack has become the new Jacob, they still even matter). He tells him in the end he is going to destroy it — so what exactly is Ben’s motivation again? I got a little lost there.

I noticed a lot of people bothered by the campfire scene, where Jacob tells the four of them any of them can have the job if they want it. I was fine with it. I think the problem the writers ran into here was it was pretty clear how the candidate was being chosen -- everyone else was dead. They needed to do this now and in this way because they don't want Kate, Sawyer and Hurley dead just to make Jack the protector of the island.

Jacob here joins a long list of fictional characters who take FOREVER to actually die after they are said to be dead.

One thing I would like cleared up that I feel is not going to get cleared up is how "the rules" work. "Rule" is a word like "law" -- there is ambiguity if it is what you should do (like civil law) or what you must do (like the law that nothing can go faster than the speed of light). In one of the best episodes of season 4 we were told Widmore "broke the rules" when he had Alex killed, and another rule kept Ben from killing Widmore in that episode -- but not from trying to kill his daughter. I guess these rules went out the window when Jacob died, but it seems weird and I feel like it might mean nothing.

One more thing I want to know is about the babies dying. We still don't know what caused that and with the birth of Ethan Rom in the 70s it is clear something happened after that to cause it. I hope this one gets answered. I can live without the other half of the outrigger shootout -- which was clearly supposed to take place in What They Died For. But there are some things Lost needs to land. What do they need to land for you.

Lost Season 6, Episode 15: Across the Sea: One more thing

Spoilers Alert. Also undercooked random thought alerts, though you don't normally announce that.

One aspect of Across the Sea I did not see discussed (though I did not look that hard: mostly AV Club and Slate) -- One aspect of Across the Sea kind of dawned on me in the last few days. Back when the Richard episode aired people said "Lost always does this. You always think 'the Desmond episode' or 'the Ben episode' or 'the Richard episode' or even 'the Dharma time travel years' will finally give us the answer, and each time the answer is the same -- the guy you thought had all the answers is as caught in this mystery as anyone else. Desmond does not know what is up with the hatch, Ben lied about being born on the island, Richard is just another castaway who happens to be immortal, the Dharma guys know nothing. The Jacob and Man in Black story was no different. You thought these were going to be like the "original guys" but they were just castaways, like Jack and Locke. Like the idea from early this season that the whole show is about finding a candidate to replace Jacob, people died on the way to Jacob being the candidate. Across the Sea really is just LOST in miniature. Even Alison Janney said (though she does tell lies) that she was got here like everyone else, by accident. Everyone is a castaway. There are no natives. Across the Sea just told the story of the most recent time in history a new candidate came forward to protect the island -- it just felt like more because it has not happened in a long time. Though I am a bit aggravated with some things, I really do like that Jacob and the Man in Black are castaways like everyone else, flawed people with dark pasts. It makes it easier to sympathize with them than if they were merely supernatural forces with all the answers. And maybe it muddies the waters of the finale to make the Man in Black so sympathetic, but it is also ALWAYS better to be able to sympathize with a character than not, always better to be able to say "you know, if I were that guy in that situation, I might have done the same thing." Satan in Paradise Lost being a great example. And it is perfectly Ok for Jacob to not be very sympathetic: he was punished by being killed at the end of season 5, and the whole thing is about replacing him anyway. His suckiness sets up part of the need for the new guy.

Lost Season 6, Episode 15: Across the Sea

Spoilers. My blog about the most recent episode is up at Smartpop. Here is a sample you can click to read the whole thing:

The episode works by taking the elements of Lost and transporting them back to a smaller story with fewer characters in the distant past, suggesting they all radiate out from that source. The rivals, bad parents, stolen kids raised by someone not their parents, being special, not being special, outsiders landing on the island by accident, ghosts, magic power sources underground, guarding the island, wanting to leave the island, wanting not to leave the island, mysterious “Others,” people “researching” the island’s mysteries by digging into it, passing the torch to a new guardian of the island. Like Battlestar Galactica the idea is that all this has happened before and will happen again. There is a gag at the beginning where Janey tells Claudia, the mother of the boys, that each question leads to more questions and to just stop. So we are not to wonder how Janey got the job of guarding the island. We just go back this one (pretty big but still) step. Battlestar Galactica wanted to say stuff literally happens over and over. This is just a suggestion here, a kind of non answer. It sort of unifies a lot of the stuff — it all happened to a handful of people a long time ago. But it does not explain why it happens again.

Today, I am less sure how I feel. Basically I liked it but did not love it. I know at one point I wanted the island to balance the spiritual and scientific since keeping both elements has been a big part of the show's success. But like Battlestar Galactica it ends up being all spiritual.

More things in the category of "This has happened before and will happen again": the slaughter of the people digging in the ground looking for answers, waiting for a replacement, choosing the wrong destiny (both Locke and The Man in Black were supposed to be something else), the single mother crazy in the wilderness.

Brad was talking to me about how as the show winds down it motifs come back more and more quickly, and this seems to be where it was headed. If Claire is the new Rousseau, than Rousseau was the new Allison Janney.

It all points back to Aaron again, because he was the kid that like Jacob and the Man in Black was born on the island (though like them he was conceived elsewhere). Is he the chance to unify the power split in Jacob and the Man in Black?

At first I thought that messing with the Light explained not only why the dead could come back but why babies can't be born on the island - -but Ethan Rom was born there in the 70s. He is not a magic baby. So I have no idea what could have caused the baby problem after the 70s.

It is also interesting to realize that the two men we saw playing a board game in this episode are both dead -- and that The Man in Black was killed by Jacob before The Smoke Monster, assuming the form of Titus Welliver and then John Locke got Ben Linus to kill him. The Smoke Monster is as much Titus Welliver as he is John Locke, which is weird to realize because you think of him as being really Titus Welliver in the form of John Locke (not giving a name for the Man in Black makes this very hard to discuss because both before and after he gets tossed into the Light he has no name -- so there is no good way to make clear the change from the first incarnation to the second).

And a good point by Gawker of all places:

To me the most interesting aspect of the episode was that everyone pretty much sided with Esau, right? I mean, other than killing C.J., what he was doing sort of made sense. He was working with other people, trying to explore the outside world, not taking on blind faith what one lady (one lady who killed his mom, btw) told him. Jacob was the wimpy little mama's boy, he's the one who seemed to follow things on blind faith. In the show's long-running Faith v. Science theme, Science typically tends to be favored, and last night was no exception. But isn't it kind of a cop-out to kill ancient Science and switch him out with evil Smoke Devil so we sort of have to, by default, side with Faith? Obviously it's the show's prerogative to force our attention, our loyalties, to one side or the other, but the debate seemed to go pretty one-sided last night.

A twist should be surprising yet inevitable. I think the reason I am so-so on this episode was that the twist was certainly not inevitable -- and it probably could not have been given that they thought of this much later than season 1. But taking that into consideration, that was pretty good.

One More thing about Lost Season 6, Episode 14: The Candidate

Spoilers. Some people have been complaining about a major scene in the most recent LOST episode, and I wanted to give a brief reply. This is a typical mode -- trying to argue that the element people hated was actually a strength. Every time I do that, I feel like I loose "points" with folks for trying to justify something they see as just bad. Over-reading never makes anyone happy. But I feel compelled to give it a go anyway.

Here is the scene on Hulu, if you are in the US.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/146619/lost-the-candidate?c=2113:2234

Here is what I said about it on Smartpop

It was a really beautiful scene, in spite of the fact that it was a little silly that Sun got trapped like that (watching it with friends someone asked “what is she trapped by” and the answer was “a device … a plot device”). My first reaction was that there was something really off about watching two parents die together when one could have been saved — should’t there be some kind of “our child’s future is more important than your not leaving me”? But upon consideration I think it adds to the moment. It becomes really hard-core. He promised they would never be apart again. And so they won’t. I found that really powerful BECAUSE he knew what he was leaving behind. One of the most emotional scenes in Lost I feel like. Except for that plot device pinning Sun.

(I will also add that of COURSE they should be talking in English. Not only because Jin has not spoken Korean in 3 years, but for the more important reason that this is a big emotional scene. If the audience has to read they are looking away from the faces. Speaking Korean makes a kind of logical sense but that does not make it the right choice for this scene. Also, I don't know how familiar the actors are with Koran but they might do such a powerful scene better in English.)

Here is what Seth Stevenson said about it on Slate

After following the ins and outs of Sun and Jin's relationship for six seasons, I should have been riveted by their last goodbyes. Instead I was bored. Here's my faithful transcription of their tragic parting:
Sun: "Save yourself."
Jin: "No, I'm going to get you out of here."
Sun: "Please go."
Jin: "I'm going to get you out of here."
Sun: "Please go."
Jin [in subtitled Korean]: "I won't leave you. I will never leave you again."
Jin [switching back to English]: "I love you, Sun."
Sun: "I love you."
I want to care. I want to be wracked with sadness and moved to streaming tears, as Hurley and Jack were. But how can I surrender myself to emotion when the script is so jarringly flat? I'm sure the writers are trying hard, but this scene reads like zero effort was put into crafting specific, memorable dialogue.

Here is what my friend Katie said about it in the comments

I am not at all convinced there is a mother in the world who, when faced with the choice of dying alone or orphaning her child, would choose orphaning her child. But even if there were, that mother would at least, like, MENTION it in the "should you die with me or not" discussion. That it doesn't even come up is the writers willfully ignoring the issue because it would ruin their sad little scene.

Stevenson is right that the dialogue is jarringly flat and Katie is right that someone should MENTION orphaning the kid. But that explains the scene right there. They love each other so much, and don't want to leave each other alone again (she does not want to die alone; he does not want to leave her to die alone) that their dialogue is flat BECAUSE neither wants to mention that kid, the thing that should so obviously make them split up at this moment. Each waits for the other to do it, until it is clear they have a kind of silent understanding not to mention it. It happens on her part when he goes down to try to free her one last time -- you can see the look on her face as she struggles not with the realization that she is probably going to die, but with the realization, kind of horrible as Katie will agree, that she is not going to mention their daughter because she is scared, and really does not want to die alone. He makes the decision not to mention the kid when he speaks in Korean -- speaks to her as he did before the kid was born. The final "I love you"s are not examples of flat dialogue -- because each one carries the force of "thank you for not bringing up the obvious reason I/you really SHOULD die alone underwater."

Lost Season 6, Episode 14: The Candidate

My review of the latest episode of LOST is up on Smartpop. Here is what I said. Click through for more. Then come back here for some stuff I thought of after I wrote that.

We also discover why the Jin-Sun reunion was so lame. Because you can’t have two episodes in a row with HUGE emotional beats for those two characters. And they got a huge one here as they go down with the sub. It was a really beautiful scene, in spite of the fact that it was a little silly that Sun got trapped like that (watching it with friends someone asked “what is she trapped by” and the answer was “a device … a plot device”). My first reaction was that there was something really off about watching two parents die together when one could have been saved — should’t there be some kind of “our child’s future is more important than your not leaving me”? But upon consideration I think it adds to the moment. It becomes really hard-core. He promised they would never be apart again. And so they won’t. I found that really powerful BECAUSE he knew what he was leaving behind. One of the most emotional scenes in Lost I feel like. Except for that plot device pinning Sun.

Some more thoughts:

They killed 3 minorities. After all the dissing women, we are going to be left on Yelling White Dude Island.

I am really feeling the Old Testament stuff coming together here. Obviously I am not the first to mention it but maybe because I am teaching Paradise Lost it is hitting me really hard now. Is the Island just Eden? The Adam and Eve skeletons are actually Adam and Eve? The daddy issues stem from the daddy issues in the garden? The energy is some spark of God's original creative force? The light haired and dark haired kid ghosts we have seen, one covered in blood are Cain and Abel? Cain is immortal, cursed, frustrated with his brother -- like the Man in Black? The garden is guarded so people can't get back -- the island is hard to get to? Dharma is silly because science cannot explain God? Childbirth is hard on the island because hard labor was part of the original punishment in Genesis. You have to go to Exodus a little randomly to explain the Egyptian iconography (connected to the biblical Jacob), and I have no idea if Jacob and the Man in Black can be easily identified -- the man in Black has been called Esau (Jacob's brother), but could also be Cain or Satan (he is a smooth talking warrior who corrupts people and makes persuasive arguments for freedom over bondage to destiny-god) -- or the serpent. Lost is ... Paradise Lost?

I know I complained about Battlestar Galactica's religious angle, but BSG was too sentimental (everyone lives happily every after) where Lost is killing folks, and I feel like the specificity of an Old Testament story would be so much better than the general spiritual junk in BSG because Genesis can be about Story and Character in a way just pointing to "God" as the answer was not enough.

Lost Season 6, Episode 13: The Last Recruit

My latest LOST blog is up at Smartpop. Here is a sample. Click for more.

Even Jack’s son — who looked weirdly like his mini-me here, in a suit like his dad’s — has my attention. The kid is just too intense looking, with that rich dark hair, for such a young actor. At times he reminds me of Malachi in The Children of the Corn almost. It makes me think he is going to do something crazy, like be the Man in Black. It now looks like the thing that is going to bring everyone together at the hospital will be the birth of Claire’s baby (maybe Sawyer and Miles, with Kate tagging along, will let Sayid see his brother one last time). That would be pretty satisfying — especially if there turns out to be a connection between the dark haired and light haired cousins Aaron and David, Jacob (light hair) and the Man in Black (dark hair as Titus Welliver), and the light haired kid and the dark haired kid we have seen on the island. That could be a really great moment. Plus ending a show with the birth of a kid is just classic television. It can’t be a minor thing that that kid is left to wander the hospital while his dad is in surgery: the hospital is where everyone is. And we still don’t know who his mom is. Pregnancy and generations has been a big thing on this show — this is how to end it surely.

I am still not at all understanding the whole -- once you talk to him you are already compromised thing. Anyone have any thoughts on that.

Lost Season 6, Episode 12: Everybody Loves Hugo

My LOST review is up at Smartpop -- here is a sample. Click it to read the whole thing.

On one level this is Lost at its most classical — dramatic without making a lot of sense, but you forgive it because it is all fun. If you have to carry unstable dynamite, why jump around so much, and also why not give it to the immortal guy to carry — they guy who in an earlier episode proved he could not be blown up by dynamite? And how, you know, on Earth, could Hurley have gotten so far ahead of the group — enough to get into the Black Rock, and set a fuse, then get far enough away to not die and also before anyone else was close enough not to die — without anyone noticing? Don’t chuck your enemy’s wildcard down a well: I know it looks like you are getting rid of him, and I also enjoy the irony of Desmond once again being alone down in an underground place on the island accessible by a deep shaft, but surely you have just chucked him down to somewhere interesting where he is going to bite you in the ass — especially if this is anything like the other well. By the way: The well, we are told, is so old it was built by people who had no tools — because they wanted to know why their compasses were going crazy. They had compasses but not shovels?

In the morning light I see that to say the wells were dug by hand just means without modern construction equipment, and maybe Locke was not trying to get rid of Desmond at all -- we don't know what his motivation was, I guess.

If Hurley, Desmond, Faraday and Charlie all remember the Alt U because of Love it is going to be interesting if Jack and Locke remember because of EACH OTHER. Start your slash fiction now. (A note to my mother -- you can put "slash fiction" into wikipedia, but I don't recommend it).

Oh and more cute revisions of love cliches along the line of The Constant's "I have to have your phone number of I will (literally) die" -- Libby's "don't I know you from somewhere." The Main U of course.

Lost, Season 6, Episode 10: Happily Ever After

My review of the most recent LOST episode is up at Smartpop. Here is a sample; click to read the wholet thing.

Just like The Constant, Happily Every After anchors an insane science fiction story in some pretty basic and cheesy ideas about love. Like the Constant it got to have its cake and eat it too, using all the cliches of love but using the sci-fi to reinvigorate them. Love is beyond time and the only thing that can save our lives — literally true in The Constant. Love happens at first sight — because you knew that person in an alternate universe. Love is so powerful you will faint with joy — because it is time for your mind to return to the machine that propelled you into another world. Love inspires musicians — to write quantum mathematics. The mother of the woman you love will stand in your way — because she has some mystical sense that the universe cannot allow Penny and Desmond to meet.

You have to be impressed with a great LOST episode that manages to be great in spite of a total lack of Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson.

Lost Season 6, Episode 9: The Package

My post about the latest episode of Lost is up. Here is a sample: click it for the rest.

For me the problem with the last episode was not that Richard did not have lots of mythology to show us, but that a lot of the story was uneconomical, and so slack on conflict — we knew so much of it already, and it was more powerful hinted at, and much covered ground we had already seen such as the attempt by the Man in Black on Jacob using a surrogate, or the theory that the island is Hell. My problem here is similar. I appreciate that the final season is the time to bring everything back, to appreciate the return of people and places. But so many Lost episodes this season have relied on that final punch of BAM — Widmore’s Back! Claire’s Back! Jin’s Back in the Alt U! plus all the little “everyone is someone” gags — that when Desmond is back! some of the necessary force is lost. Same with the way everyone in the ALt U is ending up at the hospital with Jack. The surprises need variety — the 5th time the magician does the same card trick I stop being so interested.

With seven broadcasts left, and so much to do, including a huge number of returning cast members coming back for multiple episodes if the reports are to be believed, it is hard to see how this wraps up in any kind of a satisfying way. Right now I am doing the same thing I did during BSG: saying to myself, well that was not the best episode, but that must mean the remaining ones will be unbelievably packed with awesome. We all know how that ended, but you never know. Part of the fun is seeing how the writers are going to get themselves out of what appears to us to be a corner. It is just like that magician again.

Lost Season 6, Episode 9: Ab Aeterno

My post about the newest LOST episode is over at Smartpop. Here is a sample; click for more.

But a lot of tonight’s episode felt like filler, and I think it would have even if I had not been lead to expect more with such a juicy focus at the halfway point in season 6. A lot of it had been implied before to great effect, like how Richard came to the island as a slave in the Black Rock. Some of it we had already been told, like Jacob making Richard eternal. And some of it did not really add much, like Richard’s accidental murder of a doctor to save his wife. The story of a man who wanted to kill himself but cannot, and who tries to redeem his earlier crime of murder, told with an unusual structure for the show (one massive flashback bookended by two scenes in the present) — I already saw this when Michael did it in season 4. The theory that the island was hell and everyone on it is dead had already been raised by fans AND incorporated (and dismissed) on the show when Locke’s Dad claimed it back in season 3, and when Naomi told Hurley that the rest of the world found flight 815 and everyone was dead.

One thing I did not mention there was how I was not real clear on how dramatically interesting it is to have The Man in Black successfully get someone to kill Jacob at the end of season 5, THEN show us a failed attempt in this episode, especially since we already had a sense that the successful attempt was the result of trying. And just as the Alt U is getting this repetitive structure (adventure of one player ending with that person bumping into some other member of the cast), the island U is also repeating s structure where people are picking sides every episode -- Team Jacob or Team Man in Black.

Also I don't know what to say about it, but I feel like I have to acknowledge my friend Katie's point that the women who used to be interesting strong characters, have less and less to do. Charlotte last episode being a particularly egregious example. She was like a super scientist linguist and now she is just another notch in Sawyer's formidable bedpost (along with Kate, Juliet and Anna Lucia). On a show where pregnancy is a big issue it was bound to happen; BSG destroyed Kara at the end (she SLAPS Baltar? really? Like a Dynasty character?).

Lost Season 6, Episode 8: Recon

My review of the latest episode of Lost is up on Smartpop. Here is a sample -- click it to read the whole thing.

First off, and this has nothing to do with anything at all, the Last time Widmore was putting a crack team together he got Miles, Charlotte, sexy Naomi, Keamy (the most evil man in the world), the dude from The Wire, Fischer Stevens and Zoe Bell (who didn’t have much to do because of the writer’s strike, but still) and Jeremy Davies. This time he has a poor man’s Tina Fey, and Chip from Kate and Allie and yoghurt commercials (seriously, check imdb.com). Widmore is going to have to make up with Michael Emerson to even think about having a team with the acting chops to take on evil Terry O’Quinn.

One thing I thought of after the show ended was that The Man in Black tells Kate that Aaron now has a crazy mother, and he knows from experience how bad that is. It feels like he is justifying someone other than Claire raising Aaron -- something the psychic told Claire never to let anyone do, or bad things would happen. It will be interesting to see how baby Kwon and Aaron will figure into the show, what with them both being off island.

Lost, Season 6, Episode 7: Dr Linus

My blog is up at Smartpop. Total spoilers. Here is a sample. Click the sample to read the whole thing.

And I DO. NOT. CARE. how many times we have done the slow-mo-long-lost-castaways-are-reunited-on-the-beach-to-Michael-Giacchino’s-score thing. They get me every time, and Giacchino won an Academy Award a few days ago FOR A REASON. This one was no exception, and we have a Sun and Jin one on the way to look forward to. (Lost knows everyone liked the tension of Desmond and Penny separated: I think it was kind of cheap to just do it again with Sun and Jin, but whatever. I can get over it.)

I thought it was hilarious that the unique page URL for this week's Smartpop is http://www.smartpopbooks.com/616 -- all this talk about alternate universes, and the number 616 is how we identify this post. (A note to my mother, who now reads by blog now -- "616" is how Marvel Comics identifies their main universe of Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America and the X-Men, as opposed to other universes where say, all those characters are Zombies because history went different there).

One thing to add here, also for my mother: I forgot to mention what a beautiful moment of Christian forgiveness is shown to Ben in this episode: to not forgive him is not just cruel but puts his soul at hazard (in McCarthy's words), as he will have no choice to side with the Satan figure of The Man in Black (if that is where we are going with this, which is by no means clear, or desirable).

Lost Season 6, Episode 6: Sundown

My spoiler-ho review of the latest episode of LOST is up at smartpop. Here is a sample you can click to read the whole thing.

The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie for a pretty obvious reason: as the second act of the story, the bad guys are winning. As Dante learned writing the Divine Comedy, it is always more fun to hang out with bad guys than good guys. This far into season 6 of Lost we are clearly in the second act of the final season, and, right on schedule, the bad guys are in glorious form. I can only assume that while I am writing this a series of Youtube clips are being thrown together, scoring the final moment of “Sundown” — The Man in Black’s bad-ass slow-motion walk away from the temple with his crew — to any number of songs, including “Damn it Feels Good to be A Gangster” and “Little Green Bag” from Reservoir Dogs.

Something I did not say over there:

Neil has a theory that the Alt-U is not a different timeline but the result of some time travel mojo that has yet to happen -- that basically we are witnessing how everything will resolve for our characters, the ending engineered for them by Jacob and The Man in Black after the events of the island play out. The fact that a late episode is called "Happily Ever After" supports this, as does the fact that Sayid is in the thrall of The Man in Black, and his Alt U story does not take such a happy turn as the others have. A punishment perhaps, and an appropriately ironic one: the Man in Black said he could see his true love again, and indeed he does -- in the arms of another man.

Lost, Season 6, Episode 5

My post about the latest episode of Lost is up at Smartpop(Total Spoilers). Here is a sample -- click it for more.

One of the things Lost has been about from the beginning is bad parents, especially for “Candidates” (did everyone notice the sign in front of the piano audition said “All Candidates Welcome”): Jack and Claire and their dad, Kate and her mom and dad, Locke and his dad, Sawyer and his parents, Sun and her dad, Walt and his parents, Hurley and his dad, Ben and his dad (and surrogate father figure Jacob), Daniel and his parents (Mrs Hawking and Widmore), Desmond and his would be father in law Widmore, Miles and his dad Chang, Claire as a bad mom, Kate as a bad adoptive mom (with Jack as adoptive dad). Just as the alternate universe gave us a chance to see a place where John Locke could be happy, we also get a world where Jack can break the cycle started by his dad, and be a good dad for his son.

One more thought that I had after the show ended: in the season opener, I felt like Dogen hit so many cliched "Asian" stereotypes: he knows martial arts, and does bonsai, and hates English, and so on. I am not sure how much weight I want to put on it; Lost is after all a genre mixing show, and these are things movie Samurai do. But it is maybe interesting that in the alternate universe Dogen rejects the stereotype Asian dad role -- he says to Jack the child musicians are under too much pressure, when the cliche teaches us to expect him to pour the pressure on. It would not be significant, except for the fact that it is another, minor way, that the alternate universe gives us good dads where the main U has bad ones.

Lost Season 6, Episode 4: The Substitute

My review of Lost for Smartpop is up. Here is a sample - click it to read more. Total Spoilers.

John Locke episodes are always the best ones, and this was no exception. This was the episode where I really started to feel like Lost is serious about answering some questions, and this episode featured all the human emotional anchoring I was looking for in LAX. (To be fair, it may have been in LAX, I just did not appreciate it because of the 8 months I had to wait to watch it). And our final story arc was advanced and clarified. I may be overstating it because it JUST ended, but I feel like this may be one of my favorite Lost episodes ever. Not top 5 but top 10.

Extra stuff:
-Because we still don't know the Man in Black's name, that means the name itself must be a spoiler. Interesting.

-Did anyone else think, a spit second before the revealed the wall of names, that Evil Locke was going to reveal some fantastic technology?

-You may know that my wife Sara has a tumblr blog called "Monsters with Sandwiches" which features drawing of exactly what it says. Here is the one she put up today:

Lost Season 6, Episode 3: "What Kate Does"

Spoilers. My blog on Lost is up over at Smartpop. Here is a sample from that post, which you can click to read more.

I was worried that the third episode (it turned out that LA X parts 1 and 2 were the first two episodes, not the first only) would be a bit of a slowdown, but “What Kate Does” kept the momentum going. For starters, we pick up right where we left off — with what the resurrection of Sayid means. That in and of it self should not be remarkable, but this is LOST, where cliffhangers are often not returned to for 3 episodes or more, as we jump between various divided groups on the island for full episodes. Old LOST would have focused nearly exclusively on Kate going after Sawyer and left a different episode to cover Jack and Sayid. New Lost lets us know pretty quickly that Sayid is “infected.”

I have not had a ton of extra thoughts on this episode, but one thing I like that I did not think about till this morning is how Claire is the new Rousseau (wild woman with the gun and maybe traps and without her baby), or a version of Rousseau if Rousseau had become infected. It is a nice bit of recall and revision.

My friend Lucas is watching LOST with a different group of people, one of whom felt that the temple thing is just a variation on the cages thing -- that as much as the writers claim season 6 is like season 1 it is more like season 3. Lucas feels that the plan is to leave folks in the temple and they will slowly bump into all the answers. I don't feel that way, but there is a danger of stalling on the island as we slowly move the alternate universe forward. Something to keep an eye on.

One thing I recalled this week was that the creators said that all would be revealed in the final episode. This is important because it means that this is not a show where we get the big reveal of who the Man in Black is (and if they did not tell us at the top of 6 is must be a big one) and then spend a season or half a season on the consequences of that twist. The show will be almost 100% mysteries with a big reveal as the FINISH, not as the penultimate act break. BSG was like that and it was a mess, but I think LOST will do better (Mostly because I think BSG added in irrelevancies like the Final Five BECAUSE of Lost, and not as a consequence of the story they were trying to tell, which was at least one reason why it was so bad).

And I am obsessed with counting down. Only 14 broadcasts of Lost left, ever.

Lost Season 6, Episode 1: LA X

Major Spoilers

Smartpop asked me to cover all the season 6 Lost episodes for their site, and I agreed. Every week I will link from here to my post over there. But because my review for them has to be written in the like 90 minutes after the show airs, I expect to find myself with more to say when I wake up in the morning, as I did today. So when I do link there, I will also give some slightly more cooked thoughts here.

In my review of Lost Season 6, Episode 1 "LA X" I wrote the following for Smartpop (click the quote for the rest)

"As Lost continued, the normal story began to wear away, revealing the sci-fi fantasy comic book underneath more and more. People’s tolerance for the show depended on what their tolerance for this kind of material was. The show often felt like it was designed to slowly indoctrinate people naturally resistant to sci-fi fantasy comic book insanity to creatures made of black smoke, nonsense electromagnetism, four footed statues, moving islands, and alternate universes. A sister of a friend who stopped watching around the opening of season two was appalled to learn years later they were traveling through time."

Random extra thoughts not on Smartpop

Brad said to me that the real John Locke has to return in the island universe to save everyone. I thought -- maybe he will be the only one to escape the Parallel Universe into the island universe. That would be a cool way to kind of redeem that character, who died a pointless death after so much struggle.

LOST Season 5 Finale (Major Spoilers)

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I really enjoyed the cold open, which did a great job of opening up the conflict to the next, and maybe final, level -- Jack and Locke's Free Will v Destiny debate was enlarged with the Ben v Widmore conflict and now that appear to be transumed by the Jacob v Dude from Deadwood conflict that appears more cosmic in nature. Like Widmore and Ben there is some strange rule that prevents Jacob and his nemesis from killing each other. The ancient past always appears too clean or something on Lost -- every time they are in a temple I always get shades of Hercules or something, but I still liked it.

The John Locke twist was the other thing in the finale that I was really impressed by, though Stephan Delatovic's partner pointed out that that means Locke's story may have ended in a dirty hotel room. (There is always the possibility that Locke's resurrection goes back farther than that -- did Jacob bring him back to life after the fall that paralyzed him?). That reveal was shocking in the way I want Lost to be shocking. And I adored Jacob's intimation that someone was on their way. That is also what Lost does well.

I also loved the Fade to White, which was used as well as it was on the second to last episode of Sorkin's West Wing. When you are used to ending on black, ending on white is really striking. I loved that the perspective was just one woman crying in a well alone. I liked how cramped that view was as the end.

There were some interesting echoes to past seasons -- especially from finale to finale. Juliet in the shaft echoed and complemented everyone looking down the shaft of the hatch in the season one finale, both final shots. Also from the season one finale Jack with the nuke in the backpack echoed the dynamite they carried from the Black Rock (which appeared at the opening of this finale). The blast from that position echoed Desmond in that same hatch turning the key, the finale with also revealed the foot where the other part of this took place. The dumping of the real Locke's body on the ground echoed the discovery of Locke's body at the end of the four finale -- even the same camera work over the box. The AV Club pointed out that three of LOST's finales end with Sawyer on a vehicle that just can't leave the island and 3 with Lock in a coffin.

I was pleased to see Bernard and Rose dealt with, but it seemed to me that the writers did so reluctantly. I think they wanted the audience to forget all about them, and when they didn't had to put something there.

Frank's line that the people who go out of their way to tell you they are the good guys are usually the bad guys was nice, and echoed some of the things ben has said.

But Jacob visiting the major castaways did not add much to the overall narrative. We did not learn anything about the people who know what lies in the shadow of the statue or where they come from. Widmore was nowhere to be seen, nor was the smoke monster (though to be fair the monster already got a lot of play in the most recent Ben episode). The nuke needing to be hit with a rock when the shaft did not work was lame. Magnetically flying around junk always looks goofy to my eye. Chaing was weirdly ineffective -- that guys was for so long hinted at in early seasons he has been a real disappointment now that we get to spend time with him in season five. Desmond, Penny, their kid not in evidence. No Christian or Claire.

And a large chunk of the finale insisted we be very invested in the Jack-Juliet-Kate-Sawyer thing, and I am not, at all, except that this season did a surprisingly good job making me care about Juliet and Sawyer as a couple. When she was the one who was maybe too conveniently caught in the chains, I was not that happy -- If that means she is out, then we are left with the same triangle we had in season one, which is unfortunate. Juliet and Sawyer felt like progress, a chance for a reasonable happiness. I was also especially disappointed that Juliet got a non-Jacob flashback that served only to rationalize her sudden change of mind about Jack's Plan: the format of the show was broken for no reason than to make it seem like the shift the writers wanted Juliet to take made sense. We are to believe that just at that moment she realized that people can love one another and still not be meant to be together. I almost like the sentiment, it just felt shoehorned in badly.

Mostly my problem with the finale was the directness of it. They said they were going to kill Jacob and set a nuke off at the swan and that is exactly what happened -- and the season ended before we got even a glimpse of what either of those events could possibly MEAN, just as in season one the hatch was open and then it was all over. Except this time it is more "see you in ten months for the final 17 episodes. I expected 2 minutes after the nuke so shock us with the new status quo.

All in all, good not great. Season Six is going to be jammed if they even try to answer half of the mysteries they have set up.