26 May 2010

The End

So I'm still formulating my thoughts on the finale; I go back and forth on it. It was an awesome ending, probably would have been a lot awesomer if the Alt had been introduced much later in the season. Imagine a 6th season where everything on the Island happened the way it happened, but the flashbacks were the history of the Island, until the 3rd or 4th to last, when we would see 815 landing at LAX and a much shorter version of the "awakening."
But I want to like it because the action was awesome and I finally didn't think Jack was acting like a total d-bag.
Anyway, I got this quote from a blog comment; the poster credits someone over at New York Magazine. I don't necessarily disagree, I maybe would be a lot more measured about my reaction:

"knew this was the ending we would have THE MINUTE that damn recap show started. When the producers started babbling on and on about "how this show was really about these characters and the relationships with each other and not all this other stuff" I went "Oh SHIT. No one is going to explain anything tonight but we sure are going to see a lot of crying and people telling Jack not to 'go'". Yup.

Also, those dumb "Goodbye Lost" messages said a lot. We're not the people they wrote this show for...us who were fascinated by the time travel, mysterious numbers, looping dimensions, concepts of good and evil, ancient mysteries...nope.

They wrote this show for the people who took time out of their day to write "I'll be "Lost" without Jack!!" and "This show will always have a 'Locke' on my heart" emails. The people who think "Jack and Kate" are "super hottt!!".

When I saw those messages, I knew the finale was fcked."


Next up: Lost, BSG, and spirituality...

23 May 2010

The End is frakkin' nigh...

I don't really have a lot to say about it, surprisingly. I've enjoyed watching these last chapters unfold, and I know I'll have a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts, a lot of work to do to put together all the pieces, but for now I'm content to let it just happen without too much theorizing.

Quick hits:

1) Don't call them Darlton. What are you, 13?

2) Don't call it New Otherton; it's the fucking Barracks.

3) The Man In Black is not called Esau. You just made that up. Ditto Smocke and Flocke.

4) I really hope that Ben is running a con on MiB.

5) Will we see in the closing scene a layer of reality stripped away, the world on the other side of the Looking Glass?

6) Am I the only one who thinks that sweaty, greasy, I've-been-wearing-the-same-shirt-all-season Kate is SO much hotter than shampoo commercial Kate?





















7) Richard? Frank? Miles?

8) Would it kill them to tell us the Others' backstory, even in three lines of dialogue?

That is all. I leave you with this snippet of a poem by Glados; it seems oddly appropriate.

This was a triumph!
I'm making a note here:
"HUGE SUCCESS!"

It's hard to overstate
My satisfaction.

Aperture Science;
We do what we must,
Because we can.

For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.



10 May 2010

"Charlie! Do you know how they got the hatch door open?" "No, but if you hum a few bars, I can pick it up."



So here we are. There are 2 episodes left until "The End", which, I can tell you without fear of spoiling you, is the name of the last chapter in the story that has had us all so wrapped up for the last 6 years. (5 years for me, really. 9/22/04, in my timeline, was a scant number of weeks after a certain harpie had ripped out my heart and stomped on it, and I was too self-absorbed that fall to start a journey like that. I rented the DVDs of season 1 when they came out, bought the set after I had seen the whole thing, and by the time season 2 premiered, I had seen season 1 through twice.)

Jin is dead. Ditto Sun and Sayid. Kate has been shot, and Hugo cried, good ol' funtime Hurley. I don't know why I believed MIB when he said he needed all the candidates to be with him on the plane; everything else he said was so obviously lies and manipulations. Of course he double-crossed our survivors. Better, he conned them into double-crossing him so he could get them all in a confined space together where he could get them to blow themselves up. James should have listened to Jack and left the bomb alone. I guess that makes them even for Juliet. (Season 2 was fun times. I had just turned 30, I was dating a girl I wasn't in love with, who was, prophetically, named Ilana, and we had some fun. Starbucks was on the rise, and so was my career with them; this was before the coffee giant hit the skids and started really putting the screws to their "partners." Dr. Marvin Candle and the Dharma Initiative really fired my imagination, as did the Button. The Button was everything: it was work, it was blind faith, it was social science and politics, it was a bit of civilization in the wilderness, it was isolation, and it was the canvas upon which was painted the stark conflict between the Doctor and the Hunter, the Man of Science and the Man of Faith.)

It all has to come back to the Swan eventually. Our survivors caused it to be built, and the system failure 27 years later caused the crash of flight 815. Locke's crisis of faith not only destroyed the Swan but made the Island visible to the outside world, allowing Penny and probably her father to find it. Desmond's role in the Swan's destruction turned him into a time-jumper and probably made him capable of whatever feat he was brought back to accomplish. All of this and we still have the big question of exactly what happened after Juliet hit a bomb with a rock at Swan Ground Zero. (Season 3 was good times. I was single and loving it, the Others had a book club, Tom was gay, and it was awesome. Kate, Sayid, and Locke trekked to the barracks in the second half of the season, and it was a grand adventure. They met Mikhail, had some iced tea, they blew the place up, and when they arrived at the sonic fence surrounding the barracks, they gave us the porno tree. See for yourself:


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.)

Electromagnetism, love, deception, loss, redemption, free will, destiny: this is what we have to work with. And history. Please, history!! BSG was kind enough to devote an entire episode to two conversations that revealed the entire backstory of the Cylons and the Final Five. I'm sure we won't see that, but I want at least one long scene where a character explains everything, maybe like how Dumbledore explains the prophecy to Harry at the end of book 5. Interesting analogy, that. Dumbledore made a point of saying that the prophecy was meaningless until Tom Riddle believed it and made it true. (Harry Potter, season 4: the year I fell in love with a Potternerd. She was a coworker who wanted to be in on all the Lost conversations at work, so I invited her to the house to watch season 4. 2 years later, we are living together and hosting our friends every week for Lost. Aside from that, season 4 was a blast. They found 815 at the bottom of the ocean? They're all dead? The doctor washes up on the beach with his throat slit hours before he is killed? Daniel, Frank, Charlotte, Miles, the survivors splitting into 2 camps under Locke or Jack, and O MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FREAKIN' ISLAND?!?

Photobucket)


The Others, I want more about the Others. What is their work, what is their governing ideology? What is their relationship to Jacob? Was he conning them? Did they only exist as obstacles for our survivors? What do they call themselves? One thing's for sure, after the Richard story, they are not indigenous to the Island as they have claimed. Everything else: the glass eye, Radzinsky and the Purge, Libby, I know we aren't going to get answers. Someone is eventually going to come along and write a book filling in all those gaps, but I want the Others to be explained. (Season 5 , jumping through time. Wicked unhappy at work, hands on fire, love my girl, hey, we're in the 70s, everybody! Oh, and the Oceanic 6, they were just kidding: they haz to go back. Locke is dead, then he's alive, then he's in a box, and, my god, if he's lying dead here, who's in there killing Jacob?!?)

Which brings us to season 6, the final battle between light and dark. If you haven't seen the extensive theory over at Lost is a game, do yourself a favor and check it out before the finale. It's the most extensive theory I've read, and it has a lot of potential. There's a bit of a stretch, and his timeline is a little off, but there's always been a 2-day discrepancy inherent in the timeline, anyway: remember the calendar on the boat? Strap in, hold on tight, the ride will be over before you know it.

Quick hits:

1)I still believe Kate is a candidate. Her name was not crossed out on the lighthouse wheel. Kate is The Mule in this scenario. (The Mule=the unpredictable element, the variable.)

2)Miles is pretty useless. I wonder if he's gonna do anything meaningful before he dies. If he had only accepted Bram's offer back in season 5, maybe he could have been somebody.

3)Why is MIB keeping Claire around? Like Voldemort, I don't believe he is capable of caring about someone, and Claire may have been useful in recruiting the other survivors, but he's probably gonna kill her soon.

4)Prediction: the mother of Jack's son in the flash-sideways is Juliet. She looks just like her.

5)As the only person I know who doesn't hate Kate, I really hope she makes it.

6)I am going to have so much fun this summer and fall watching it all again on Blu-Ray disc.

7)Ben needs some closure for his big feud with Widmore. I hope they get to face off. Maybe they could have an Old West style duel, y'know, 10 paces then turn, draw and fire. My money's on Ben.

8)Unrelated: 24 is also ending its run this spring, and, man, it has been so exciting this year. Katee Sackhoff has been a great villain, and Jack Bauer has finally gone off the deep end for real. He is out for blood, and he's gunning for a former president. I don't think it's going to end well.

That is all. Bon Appetit!

09 May 2010

I love my ma!

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

The Candidate

I've been a bit off, blog-wise, the last couple of weeks, but I assure you I have been keeping up; this week's "Across The Sea" promises some answers, and I am positively frightened about the penultimate episode, which I won't name, as you'd probably think it rather, well, spoilerish.

Anyway, I guess they've been doing these videos for a while now, but this is the first I've seen. It's a recap of last week's episode by a muppet version of Dr. Pierre Chang. High-larious!