Category Archives: Kurt Vonnegut

Lost, In Space: In Defence Of Prometheus

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(WARNING! Massive spoilers for Prometheus and all six seasons of Lost. Contains inessential footnotes that can be ignored if you want to leave this page with your sanity intact.)

It took about thirty seconds from the end of the first public screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus before co-writer Damon Lindelof shared this tweet from an Alien fan:

And there were many more to come, which he “kindly” RTd to his followers. Those quote marks are there because Mr. Lindelof’s Twitter behaviour often feels like a self-flagellatory performance piece, as he attempts to engage with the many aggrieved fanboys who despise him for Lost, the Star Trek reboot and now this. With Lost at least he created his own accusatory and gallumphing anti-fanbase, but by working on the other two franchises he’s surely leaping into the path of endless butt-hurty bullets. I can’t help but respect that kind of courage. It’s testament to his inner nerd, that he would risk the barbs and complaints of the most easily-irked subcultures on Earth just to work on the things he loves. [1]

Going into Prometheus last Friday, days after it had aired for many of the critics I follow, as well as in some European countries, there were already rumblings that it was a failure, or a partial failure, or a “waste”, as Mr. Beaks from AICN bluntly put it on Twitter. I didn’t look any closer as I didn’t want to spoil the movie any more than the obscenely spoilery trailers had already done (wanna give a fuck you shout-out to Fox’s promotional campaign which effectively stripped every bit of mystery from this movie in a way even Robert Zemeckis would have considered extreme), but my concern was that even if there were legitimate concerns about the quality of Prometheus, some of the criticisms were evidence that the boring old rift between Alien and Aliens fans was being reopened.

There are many nerd debates that will never be resolved. Marvel vs. DC, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Hunger Games vs. Twilight; none of them are as boring as the Alien wars. There are factions within the Alien fanbase who prefer the long, slow takes and exquisitely-paced suspense of the first Alien movie to the bombastic, militaristic rollercoaster of James Cameron’s sequel, and there are vicey-versa types who think Cameron’s beautifully structured sexy machine of kill is better than Ridley’s hesitant original. There are those who think David Fincher got close with his mangled but bold third installment, and there are even those who think Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sensibilities reinstalled some of the original’s perversity back into the series. I’d like to think no one believes the two Alien Vs. Predator movies are on the same level as even the fourth movie. [2]

So was the initial burst of grumbling about Prometheus borne of the scars caused by this war, one that should have been ditched the moment Paul W.S. Anderson stepped behind a camera on the AVP set? Because seriously, fighting over the deckchairs on the Titanic while the iceberg that is PWSA’s monolithic ineptitude, crossed with the desperate short-sightedness of Fox, gets us nowhere. Alien and Aliens are different approaches to similar material; the very simple template for this series – space monster terrorises humans – is blank enough to be used as a canvas for experiments in differing tone and narrative approach. AVP, on the other hand, was a blunt knife that stabbed right through the canvas so nothing could ever be painted there again.

Even if this would end up fueling a new round of arguing about which approach was better, it would at least mean an objective viewer might enjoy Prometheus; the alternative was that the complaints were justified. Sadly, as the fans said, Prometheus has problems, mostly caused by its attempts to connect to the franchise, but there is still much to like in it, most significantly that it definitively removes the AVP movies from the canon. Even if Prometheus isn’t as innovative and beautifully-wrought as the original Alien, fan predictions that Scott would restore dignity to the Alien universe have proved true, just by excising the banal AVP and idiotic fratboy b-movie AVP: Requiem like a surgeon removing a tumour. For that alone, Prometheus should be lauded.

What else is there to love? Certainly some of the lead performances, especially Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the most resilient human being since John McClane, who spends much of the movie in either extreme emotional or physical turmoil. It’s arguable that her character is sidelined too often to act as a real centre, and her relationship with atheist Logan Marshall-Green isn’t as developed as it could have been; surely some room could have been found for it. This is a shame as her damaged faith, shredded by ill fortune and nauseating, psyche-shattering body horror is meant to be one of the central planks of the movie’s structure, but even if she’s not given enough screentime, she’s still good enough to be memorable.

Michael Fassbender is arguably even better as David, the Weyland Corporation android who tends to the crew of the Prometheus. As with Ash and Bishop in the other movies, David’s agenda is mysterious, setting up many of the movie’s most interesting moments and calling back to one of Lindelof’s finest creations, Ben Linus, as well as the infamous AI Hal 9000. Is David malevolent? Mischievous? Innocent? Vengeful? Badly programmed? It’s likely that much of the forthcoming debate about Prometheus will focus on his motives. Lindelof has a real talent for creating such ambiguous characters and situations which, if the tenor of his treatment online and elsewhere is anything to go by, annoys many who want certainty from their fiction.

The rest of the cast are fine enough, though many of them have little to do. Nice to see Red Road‘s Kate Dickie here, though she generally just imparts exposition, while Rafe Spall plays another eccentric. His reliability is a bit of a coin-toss, and for this movie we sadly got the “tails” that gave us his excruciating performance in One Day, and not the “heads” of The Shadow Line. Fans of DJ Big Driis will likely enjoy his performance as Captain Janek, with his accordion, scamp-like charm and fine habit of standing on the bridge, legs akimbo, like a big sexy legend; classic Elba typecasting. Guy Pearce is also in it, buried under so much latex I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I think I found him amusing? Certainly incongruous. A perpetual snarl on Charlize Theron’s face is also in it. Make of that what you will.

On a technical level the movie is astounding, as you’d expect from the infamous stylist and detail-obsessive Sir Ridley, though the creatures in the movie are a mite disappointing, looking like waxy and unimaginative first drafts; passable in any other movie but unacceptable when sharing a universe with HR Giger’s nightmarish vision. One particularly annoying design failure has Noomi’s disgusting squid baby connected to her by an umbilical cord that juts out of the side of its head. The lengthy sequence in which Shaw gives herself a grisly automated abortion is unarguably the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t stop looking at that stupid dangling umbilical cord. Who signed off on that distracting touch?

That said, the horror is already undercut by the confusing threat. Is the crew of the Prometheus threatened by a deadly virus? Zombies? A Lovecraftian Old God? A mutated version of the Trash Compactor monster from Star Wars? All of those things are upsetting on their own, but by not settling on any one thing it dissipates some of the tension as the viewer tries to match them up. Here’s where the Alien comparisons do the most damage. The elegant and rigorously thought-through reproductive cycle in Alien is now muddled, evolving from some ill-defined matter to become the Apexiest of Apex Predators, though it’s perversely pleasing to think that at some point in the evolutionary timeline of the Xenomorph, one of the most diabolical and primally terrifying creatures ever imagined, is a devout human woman struggling to hold onto her faith in the face of indescribable horrors.

There’s also the fact that this movie feels so familiar; something noted by Daisyhellcakes as we left the IMAX. [3] That’s mostly due to the central conceit regarding our origins that’s been used in other movies or books; At The Mountains of Madness, Chariots of the Gods, Stargate etc. have dealt with the same idea in differing ways. Additionally, David’s impenetrable behaviour evokes memories of 2001; not just his HAL-like unreliability but early scenes with him puttering around the ship and busying himself with chores resemble Dave Bowman’s relaxed moments on Discovery One. The weird alien special sauce that dooms the crew is, of all things, reminiscent of the organic meteor matter in Ivan Reitman’s Evolution. Its purpose is the biggest mystery of all. It accelerates evolution? It breaks down DNA?

Further muddying the waters, the Alien movies are overtly referenced throughout, thus making it hard to separate this from the previous films no matter how hard we’re told not to. The look of the movie directly reflects the other films, with the (remarkable) production design by Arthur Max evoking memories of Syd Mead’s work, but the script is where the main resemblances occur. Lindelof has peppered familiar scenarios and lines of dialogue from the previous Alien movies throughout Prometheus; so much so that Sir Ridley’s comments that the movie “shares Alien‘s DNA” is a wry comment on the DNA / RNA manipulations in the plot as well as an acknowledgement that this often feels like a rehash. The structure, apart from some significant diversions, is identical to the other movies:

Discovery of message > waking from cryo-sleep > introduction of characters > arrival on planet > visit alien object > find unpleasant things > attempt to return during storm > things go wrong on the ship involving unpleasant births > android / corporate stooge has shady agenda > chaos ensues > lifepod ejects in which a showdown with the antagonist occurs.

It’s worth noting that Prometheus also borrows thematic material from Blade Runner, to such a degree that for a confusing moment I wondered if Blade Runner also occurred in the Alien universe, and Weyland Corporation’s androids were merely following in the footsteps of Tyrell Corporation’s replicants. Prometheus feels more like the third part of a thematically-connected series a la Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy than the fifth/first part of a franchise, thanks to these concerns. The main characters are searching for answers to questions about their origins, and Weyland is also looking for extended longevity, just like the replicants in Scott’s other sci-fi favourite. The showdown with the Engineer is as disastrous as Roy Batty’s encounter with Eldon Tyrell, with a popped-off android head and some vanilla butt-kicking replacing Tyrell’s crushed noggin.

And what answers do the team find? Nothing satisfying, of course, because nothing can truly satiate the whole audience, even if the movie ended falling either on the side of Shaw (faith) or Holloway (science). Those of us who forgave Lost its “trespasses” will recognise Lindelof’s approach. Prometheus asks the question, “who made us, and who made the race that made us?”, but instead of God or benevolent celestial beings we’re given the possibility that we might be the subject of an experiment, the organic components of a long-played terraforming operation, or the accidental biological waste product of a botched suicide by an alien trapped on Earth after missing his ride. That Carl Sagan line, “We are all made of star stuff,” is only half right here. We’re also just clever human-shaped sludge. (In fact Prometheus is the anti-Contact. They’d make an interesting double bill.)

Viewers of Lost were led to believe that its central mystery – what the hell is going on with this crazy island, and what has it got to do with these chosen ones – would be answered by one of the regularly introduced characters who seemed to have the answers. This was not to be.  The Oceanic survivors, especially poor Locke, expected answers from the leader of the Others – Ben Linus – but he too was in the dark. So the audience waited for his mentor Richard Alpert to provide answers, but he had none either. In fact, as a result of a time-travel accident he thinks it’s Locke who has answers; a brilliant joke played by Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, highlighting the point that we make fools of ourselves for looking to others — Messiahs — for answers.

After Richard we expect Jacob has the answers, or the Man in Black, or their “Mother”, but none of them had a clue. They only had their own humanity, for better or worse. The layers could be peeled back forever, and all we would ever find were more confused, stupid people bringing their own baggage to the mysterious island, which contained a glowing thingy that was basically a magical Maltese Falcon. Over the course of six seasons Lindelof and Cuse could fully explore this idea, and some people even seemed to get it, though most complained that with no answers the show was a failure, instead of the slyly subversive success it actually was. Prometheus, with a running time of only two hours and a lot of info to get through, can only suffer in comparison.

So why ask these questions if you have no interest in answering them? Because there are other things you can dramatise with these questions, and the late-movie revelation that the Engineers were actually on their way back to Earth to eradicate our species using toxic goop wrong-foots the audience in a way that is reminiscent of Lost‘s games with expectations, as well as being a nicely mundane counterpoint to the grandiose first half of the movie. This resembles the way Lost teased epic and supernatural answers to its mysteries that were almost always caused by trivial but recognisably human things like confusion, venality, greed, delusion and the hilariously panicky reactions of characters who feared that they would soon lose their tiny allotment of power. [4]

The juxtaposition of the importance of the questions and the triviality of the human drama was one of the most pleasurable aspects of Lost, creating an unexpected frisson that transformed what could have been a simple mystery show into a Vonnegut-inspired treatise on the absurdity and arrogance of the human quest for knowledge it cannot handle. Prometheus does a similar thing, but that comment on the futility of our quest for truth is wrapped up in the tropes of a horror movie, which threatens to overpower the cosmic joke. Perhaps there’s another story they could tell that fits squarely into the sci-fi genre without the need to adopt Alien‘s horrific genetics, giving that commentary on our hubris more room to breathe and/or be recognised.

That said, the thought that humanity is a mistake that needs to be eradicated by beings more powerful than us is a chilling one, and the atmosphere of existential dread experienced by the Prometheus crew as they realise they have have been rejected by their creator is its own reward. It even thematically matches the responses of David, daily reminded of — and seemingly disgusted by — the flawed nature of his creators. Does he poison Holloway because he wants to punish his creators, as Shaw does re: the Engineers in the film’s final moments, or is David hurt by Holloway’s dismissal of his sentience? The fact that he invades Shaw’s dreams suggests Holloway’s racist behaviour arrived too late to affect David’s actions. David may have been broken all along.

Is this a consequence of his programming by Weyland or Vickers, a flaw in his construction (as suggested by Burke in Aliens), or that he has manifested a dark soul of his own accord? [5] These questions are as interesting now as they were when first asked in Blade Runner, and are given extra power by Fassbender’s brilliant work and Lindelof’s commendable restraint in explaining things away. I’d expect nothing else from the man who created Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, though I wonder if pointing out that Prometheus is yet another tale of children struggling to understand, placate, or wreak vengeance upon their fathers will make former Lost fans turn against this as fiercely as they turned against the island show.

It can be argued that Prometheus strengthens Lost and vice versa. It’s easy to assume that Lindelof truly is the bad writer of popular myth, a man smart enough to ask big questions but too stupid to answer them. Some ugly exposition and leaden dialogue does little to dispel that argument, though this could be down to necessary editing choices. There are other complaints ready to be levelled at the filmmakers that don’t fit within my forgiving parameters, and my defence is not meant to be a blanket dismissal of reasonable, non-trolling complaints, or an excuse for the film’s flaws. But what if Lindelof’s actually smart enough to know there’s no satisfactory way to settle the science / faith debate, to understand that drama that aspires to profundity demands that these questions be asked despite the inevitable disappointment that follows when the answer given falls short of expectation?

The drama here isn’t resolving “Why?” It’s in showing how people react when given a chance to find the answers. Lindelof’s done this twice now. Why is it beyond the realms of possibility that he’s not just some idiot who doesn’t know how to end a story, but is making a point about the ineffable mysteries of the world, and the possibility that matters of great significance are actually mistakes or trivial events that show up the absurd randomness of existence?  [6] Vonnegut and Philip K Dick would enjoy the cosmic jokes of Lindelof’s worldview, and how he uses the gulf between our expectations and the truth to illuminate the failings of humans when they believe that they are in the position to acquire the greatest commodity of them all — truth — showing us up as cowards, fools, villains or, occasionally, noble heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent the extinction of what they love.

Most other creators would be given a break at this point but ill feeling towards him for not ending Lost the way people wanted [7] will probably follow him forever now (check out this terrific, revelatory interview where Lindelof reveals he suggested to Scott that they make the ending clearer as he was “still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost“). As a result Prometheus is viewed as a mistake, with him taking all of the blame; convenient that he gets all the flak when Sir Ridley is notorious for changing the direction of projects and, if that interview is anything to go by, was developed with much input from the great director who was, never forget, considered for the longest time to be the only one who could save a franchise sullied by pretenders to his crown.[8]

What a shame that this couldn’t be a blank slate, to be approached with open minds [9], instead of being a failure for not being an Alien movie, a failure for being as inconclusive as Lost, a failure for appropriating beloved sci-fi tropes and treating them with a populist’s unsubtle touch, a failure for lacking the beautifully judged stillness and artistic tableaux of Blade Runner, a failure for not being as classically-wrought – or as gloriously obscure – as 2001; I’m not dismissing these points as automatically wrong or worthless but I don’t think they qualify as sufficient reason to reject a movie which should be considered on its own terms. It doesn’t matter. Fans love a big raging debate, and given years of practice arguing over the merit (or lack thereof) of each Alien film many will launch themselves at Prometheus with great hunger. New flesh to tear apart! Why isn’t this Alien? How dare they? Sellout Ridley! All movies suck now! I hate 3D! At least it’s better than Robin Hood I suppose! Etc. etc. ad infinitum.[10]

Hopefully this will all settle down and people will eventually engage with it without baggage. Maybe further editions of it – and maybe even sequels, if its apparent success inspires Fox to fund more – will provide a clearer idea of Lindelof and Scott’s vision, and improve what even I, a fledgling defender of Prometheus, think of as an imperfect project that nevertheless doesn’t deserve to be thrown out of an airlock. The breathtakingly spoilery trailer also shows a moment in which Shaw prays after her grisly abortion scene. The film is already ill-served by the conflict between its lofty thematic goals and the need for distracting, grotesque horror; perhaps that scene – or other scenes about religion / science – would have unbalanced the film further, and maybe for the better.

But these possibilities, and the new battles over Prometheus‘ worth, are at least an evolution of those long-running skirmishes mentioned earlier. The fighting over the previous movies feels like quibbling over the individual threads in the tapestry of this surprisingly diverse franchise; Alien is classy/cold, Aliens is tacky/exhilarating, Alien 3 is uncompromising/cruel, Alien: Resurrection is inept/stupid, Alien 3 should’ve been the William Gibson version, Aliens should’ve been made by Ridley, Newt should’ve lived, Ripley should’ve stayed dead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet should not be allowed to direct movies ever again… The arguments are only about the movies as cinematic artefacts and not as narratives with metaphorical purpose, spats that are only of interest to cineastes, to be futilely rinsed-and-repeated forever, accomplishing nothing, changing no minds.

Prometheus, on the other hand, offers up a text that can be interpreted and debated on its own.[11] Sure, fans of the franchise are raging about it, whether it should’ve been made or not, whether to build a guillotine for Lindelof, whether the design is a failure as HR Giger was not asked to participate, whether it’s just total shit and a shallow insult to the ambitious speculative ambitions of genuine hard sci-fi, etc. But, as with Lost, there are mysteries within the film that can be discussed by even those who don’t agonise about that loathsome fantasy, the “childhood raped by the uncaring creator”.[12] Dear God/Grouchy Space Engineer, how do we impose a moratorium on that insensitive and ridiculous sense of entitlement?

Whether even those mysteries are worthy of discussion is another debate to be had, though as someone who greatly enjoyed thrashing out theories about Lost with fellow fans I think my mind about Prometheus is already made up, but it’s worth noting that Scott and Lindelof have intentionally given us something different than The Greatest Space Monster Series Of All Time; a puzzle box that may or may not become more complex and more interesting as time goes by. As Mr. Lindelof himself has said…

Dude, have a rest. You’ve earned it.

Return 1. Who knows what Sir Ridley thinks, as he doesn’t have a Twitter account, shockingly. I assume his response to the kind of abuse Lindelof is getting would be a pithy, “Go fuck yourselves”. I believe he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Return 2. And yes, I admit that these paragraphs, were they to appear on Wikipedia, would be covered in “Citation needed” warnings, but these wars are fought as much in pubs and nerd gatherings and comment sections and forums etc. as they are in scholarly publications or blogs. Stick two nerds in a room together and there will come a moment when this debate begins and immediately descends into acrimony and deeply-held opinion blurted out as fact. This paragraph, which asks you, the reader, to just go with me on it, is my tribute to that ephemeral dark cloud that hovers over fandom. [13]

Return 3. Warning: never sit in the front row for a 3D IMAX performance; the miserable trailer for The Amazing Reboot Of The Spider-Man was a black and red blob wiped across my eyeball, and the ickiest bits of Prometheus were thrust aggressively right into my face as if I was being assaulted by a cross between a drunken football fan and Yog-Sothoth itself.

Return 4. There are other aspects of Prometheus that seem familiar to a Lost fan. The black toxic sludge, when seen within its ampoule, floats within a green fluid; when tipped up it floats down like a black cloud. This substance must never reach Earth, much as the Man in Black, aka The Smoke Monster, must never escape the island or he/it would cause an event that would signal “the end of everything good”. Jack sacrifices himself to prevent this, as Holloway, Janek and, to a lesser extent Shaw, also do. Meredith is obviously horrified to think her father, Weyland, considers his mechanical son David to be more of an heir than she does, much as The Man in Black is jealous of Mother’s love of Jacob. Holloway and Shaw are a man of science and a woman of faith; Lindelof choosing to make them lovers here may be his way of getting some unpleasant Jack/Locke slash out of his system. I’m sure there are dozens of other parallels between the two tales.

Return 5. And does this evolution within David echo our own development beyond that which the Engineers had planned, thus prompting their decision to destroy us? What does the Engineer’s reaction to David mean? Is his burst of violence triggered by David’s use of his language, proving that we have the potential to become a threat to them?

Return 6. On this point, I’d like to stress that yes, it could be argued that this assumption — that Lindelof has no idea what he’s doing and is bluffing his way through these stories like a faker —  is valid if you consider Lost‘s finale on its own, but the show made this point over and over again throughout its six season run, so we have enough evidence for this theory to at least consider it, instead of dismissing it because of Occam’s Razor or something. We’re talking about one of the main themes of the show, not just a couple of incidents. Who knows, perhaps if we look back through his other TV shows we might find further evidence for this theory, though somehow I can’t see Nash Bridges being a treatise on the unknowability of the great questions pondered by philosophers and scientists of times past, no matter how potent the chemistry between Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Return 7. Here’s yet another fantastic interview with Lindelof, who seems to be one of the most approachable and friendly of creators despite the torrent of bullshit that keeps getting poured over his head. Lots of good stuff there, but the comments made by the interviewer, asking why all the characters in Lost had been dead all along [14], and his hypothetical argument that a concrete answer at the end of the show along the lines of, “they were being experimented on by aliens all that time,” would have been more satisfying gives a depressing insight into the extent to which many of the show’s naysayers were prepared to engage with it. Seeing the interviewer talking about gadgets on a recent edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon made me so pathetically angry I pitched an undignified shitfit and nearly threw one of our cats through the TV.

Return 8. Note that Jon Spaihts, who was the original writer on the project, is also free from opprobrium, at least as far as I can see, even though he’s already been treated like a mound of bear scat by sci-fi fans for making the not-well-liked alien-invasion movie The Darkest Hour. That’s how much people hated Lost. Seriously, admitting that I love that show in public often makes me fear that it’ll trigger a flurry of movement and then suddenly everyone will be pointing a gun at my face like they do in the movies.

Return 9. I include myself in this assessment. Watching Prometheus was a horribly confusing experience as my own expectations kept getting in the way. Much as I’m frothing away throughout this epic post about the — as I see it — unfair criticism Prometheus is receiving, I can’t honestly justify my anger at fans for judging this movie in relation to the others, as the promotional material and the unconvincing statements by Scott and Lindelof did little to prevent the growth of these assumptions. There are no words for how inept the marketing onslaught of the past few months has been, though I can’t figure out a way they could have promoted this without making the same mistakes.

Return 10. Funny that Scott includes footage from Laurence of Arabia, in what is one of the movie’s most endearing moments. For a while it might have seemed that a filmmaker with such a feel for composition and epic scale, indeed a man who made Kingdom of Heaven (which is heavily indebted to David Lean’s movie), might be the next in line to claim Lean’s crown as King of Classical British Cinema, even despite beginning his days as a lowly commercial director, but that seems far less likely now, and some of the criticism of Prometheus is that it’s not as restrained as Alien. Perhaps not, but it’s made with commendable skill, and now he has more money that he can use fill the original movie’s money-saving suspenseful longueurs with cacophony and event, for better or worse. I guess once Jerry Bruckheimer’s had his claws in you, you can never go home.

Return 11. Three months after Lost finished, once I had recovered from the dehydration caused by my uncontrollable sobbing, and removed my black armband, I wrote these three posts — part 1, part 2 and part 3 — which outlined my theories about the show’s ultimate meaning (i.e. as a primer for atheists about what it is to experience faith in something for which there is no proof). In the midst of that was my rather pompous, meta-fanwanky description of the show’s “plotholes” as “interactive plot gaps” (yes I did, and I’m very serious about this being a real and good thing), which are basically intentionally positioned blank spaces within a story which can be filled in by the audience with theories and / or non-meta-fanwank. Prometheus has plenty of these holes, which have this week been the focus of much of the ire of those viewers in my Twitter timeline who were appalled at the movie’s “mistakes”. As I said earlier, there are plenty of things wrong with the movie that deserve censure, and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being wrong for holding a negative opinion, but I do think what some see as errors or first-draft fuck-ups might be something more interesting and justifiable on second viewing.

Return 12. How about this for another take on the film. Is it also a sly commentary on the inevitable sense of dismay felt by the fanbase, as humanity / Alien fans return to the source of their existence and find something there that doesn’t live up to expectation, causing all kinds of aberrant behaviour? Maybe this is all just Lindelof’s response to the long-running anger directed at him over Lost, and his experience with being verbally assaulted by the angry former fans is akin to wrestling with a Lovecraftian proto-Facehugger and then getting an inseminating tentacle shoved down your throat, leading to the birth of a proto-Chestburster, which in the case of this strained metaphor would be Prometheus.

Return 13. I also appreciate that this post reads like a very direct assault on pretty much anyone who has ever held an opinion on the Alien movies, and might even seem like a declaration of war against anyone who didn’t like Prometheus, making my concerns about the creation of a new front in the Alien Wars seem rather cheeky. That’s not my intention at all, especially as I have spent literally years of my life arguing the toss over the first two movies.[15] The inspiration for this post, the thing that has compelled me to write over 6000 words (my God!), is not so much the criticism of Prometheus, much of which I agree with to some extent or another, but the increasingly hostile attacks on the filmmakers for daring to sully something as perfect as Alien. We fans all bring baggage to this movie no matter what we say, and anyone else’s reactions are not necessarily invalid even if they dare to be different to my perfect opinion, obvs (joke). What galls me is that we are now in a post-”wow Internet” period, where the use of the net has become such a familiar way of life that we can finally settle down and inspect our behaviour. Unfortunately this means we’ve found that many people here are so badly brought-up that they feel it’s acceptable to direct untold splenetic rage and disgusting hatred upon others for putting their hearts and minds into creative endeavours. What’s most upsetting is that many of the worst offenders are those I would ordinarily consider my Nerd Brethren, people whose passion I can understand on some level, but whose love of these cultural objects and events has mutated until they become compelled to bombard a guy with cruel messages when all he did was, at worst, write a movie that isn’t as good as another movie. He didn’t rape any childhoods (yuk), he didn’t erase all copies of Alien, he didn’t mock the fanbase or set out to diminish the originals in any way. He just wrote something, with the input of some other people, that he thought was cool. He doesn’t deserve to be hunted across the Internet like a rat, for fuck’s sake. And that goes for George Lucas too. I don’t like the Star Wars prequels either but they didn’t ruin my life in any way.

Return 14. I mean really? There was a VERY CLEARLY EXPRESSED SPEECH by Christian that made it VERY CLEAR that the events on the island, everything we had seen outside of the season 6 afterlife HAD HAPPENED exactly the way we saw it, that they had NOT been dead all along, that nothing we had experienced as viewers was rendered meaningless by some moronic final St. Elsewhere-esque twist. This is why I’m continually spouting off about Lost, and why I decided to write this ridiculously long review of Prometheus, that will most probably only be read by about 12 people, many of whom will think I should just get over this and move on instead of having a serious of life-threatening embolisms over something that almost everybody has forgotten about by now, because if fans such as myself don’t take the time and effort to restate facts about stories that are rushed past by storytellers who don’t want to belabour a point for fear of burdening their work with extraneous explanations that would take more attentive audience members out of the story-experiencing spell they have worked so hard to create, then we end up with the “official” take on something being, “You haven’t seen Lost? Oh man, don’t bother. They were dead all along. How lame is that?” or, “You haven’t seen Prometheus? Oh man, don’t bother. They don’t really explain how the Xenomorphs were created. There’s just a bunch of plotholes and then it ends on this weird inconclusive note because the writer is some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand how to tell stories.” When did it become unfashionable to surrender yourself to a work of art? To have faith that maybe the creator has a greater awareness of his or her work than someone experiencing it for the first time? To just go with the flow and stop with the, “Well, I’d have done it differently because I know these things more deeply,” thoughts until the work is over and you’ve had time to process it? Jesus Christ, sometimes it feels like we have to retrain audiences to just shut the fuck up and absorb something in one go without thinking that any plot event that isn’t identical to a million other plot events from a million other stories is a mistake or evidence of “ignorance of storytelling rules” (my own personal bugbear), instead of an intentional choice to tell a story that’s different to all the carbon copy stories cluttering up the world. [/crazy rant over]

Return 15. For the record, just so you, the reader, can better frame my feelings about this franchise, my favourite of the two is Aliens, but the difference in preference between the two is infinitesimally small, like, a micron thick, and the only reason I argue so vehemently for Aliens against the literally psyche-changing cinema-shaking brilliance of the original is because many of the arguments against the sequel — it’s garish and manipulative and stupid — are arguments used to dismiss many of my favourite films, and I just happen to like movies like Aliens that wear their heart on their sleeves, especially as I honestly believe that those criticisms are wrong. Aliens is as hard as nails. It has a beautiful structure used in other notable action movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, 13 Assassins, and even future beloved classic The Avengers. It is also very loud, but it has an emotional charge more powerful than about 99.999999% of movies made to date. Loving something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat screaming at characters to move faster even though I’ve seen it 100 times is not a problem for me. I also don’t think James Cameron is the enemy of cinema that many others do, mostly because Aliens is perfect so there INFINITY no comebacks. #Iwin

What I Cried For

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During the penultimate episode of Lost the main character — Jack Shephard — quietly makes a choice, accepting enormous responsibility with a quick and resigned “I’ll do it.” No one questions him, there are no histrionics. He makes his choice, and that’s that. Daisyhellcakes — who has accompanied me on this island journey – was distracted from this moment by the sound of sobbing coming from the other side of our uncomfortable and cat-clawed sofa. I was in a figurative glass case of emotion, devastated by that choice. Though it’s not the first time I’ve cried at Lost – you should have seen me at the end of the fifth season — this was the first time I seemed to be crying at something that didn’t seem that emotional on the surface. Why the hell did I cry?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been experiencing a wave of sadness that it’s almost over, but it’s not just because my favourite show — in fact possibly my favourite ever story — is about to end. Part of it is the sense of occasion: as I said to ace tweeter @iambags on Friday, this final week feels like a royal wedding, though it’s not just localised to one country. All across the world people are dealing with this in their own way, either by doing what I’m doing with this post, or by getting really creative. This fan-made trailer has it right when it calls the finale “The Most Anticipated Episode In Television History”…

If that wasn’t enough to choke me up, this nearly finished me off: a superbly edited and written love letter from The Injustice League, featuring enough clips of iconic moments to reduce any Lost fan to emotional blubber.

To outsiders (or, as that song correctly identifies non-Lost fans, Others) this post is going to seem like an absurd perspective-free joke, but Lost has been a big deal for me since the first season, which I caught on DVD while going through some stressful events five years ago. It really helped me get through the tumult, and then did the same again, earlier this year, during which we undertook The Great Lost Rewatch. It has helped me out mentally, and probably spiritually as well. As an atheist I only have the word of believers that faith is a quantifiable and recognisable part of their mental landscape. I’m probably going to unintentionally insult many by saying this, but the only event in my life (other than the experience that the humans refer to as… love?) that has given me an insight into what it is to give yourself over to something even though it could well turn out to be a mistake is the commitment I’ve shown to watching, debating, and pondering Lost.

Yes, that’s a mighty bold claim to make about a TV show, even one that I have considered to be an emotional balm, and anyone reading this who doesn’t watch it — or really love it — will think I’ve taken leave of my senses, but for many fans, sticking with the show and defending it from the tedious criticisms of people who abandoned it early on or didn’t bother because “it just looks stupid” has demanded more than the usual level of fan commitment. From the amazing pilot onwards the show has rested on certain mysteries that prop up the entire narrative structure, and in fact the show itself has not just been about faith and belief in a mysterious purpose, but is also about maintaining an air of ambiguity and mystery that demands the audience has faith and belief in the mysterious purpose of the showrunners. Just as the flashback-laden plot structure was echoed by time-travel events in later seasons, the events in the show and the fan’s relationship with the show has grown to echo each other. Our brains (Jack) say it’s just a TV show and is destined to fall apart at the last hurdle: our heart (Locke) tells us there will be a satisfying ending that will justify the wait.

For the record, I’m not comparing God to a bunch of writers who used to work on Deadwood, Buffy, and Nash Bridges, and I’m not saying my experience with Lost is comparable with someone’s experience of God (whatever that might feel like), but I am saying my enjoyment of the show relies upon my belief that it will all have been worth it, and for the most part the show has felt coherent enough and complex enough that I have been able to hold forth about it against unbelievers with great confidence and even greater obnoxiousness. Nevertheless, the sixth season has seen the largest backlash against Lost since the beginning of the third season, where the wheels seemed to be idly spinning a bit too often. This year, as every episode passes without explaining what the Hurleybird was, or why the Dharma Initiative were playing around with Skinner boxes, my fellow Lostians have become angrier and angrier.

Two of my favourite TV critics –AV Club writer Noel Murray and AVC/HitFix/LA Times blogger Todd Van Der Werff — have been objective but also thrilled by the narrative boldness on display, but other critics have not been so kind.  Heather Havrilevsky made me laugh (and froth at the mouth) earlier this week when she criticised the show for letting her down: amusing considering I have never — never in the last four years at least — read a review from her that didn’t complain about the show not being fun enough. Why anyone would rather the show had been little more than an adventure romp in the jungle ending each week with a freeze-frame of the characters laughing in their cave hidey-hole instead of featuring scenes with the consciousness of a beloved character being blasted into another universe by an electromagnetic shed is beyond me.

I gather Maureen Ryan has been vocally angry about it, especially the very contentious episode Across The Sea, but I can’t even look for her recaps for fear of bursting a blood vessel (here is a post in praise of Across The Sea from Overthinking It: essential reading). I’m still pissed at her for calling out Cuse and Lindelof in an interview for daring… DARING… to include a time-travel season in THEIR show. That, and blindly defending the chaotic end of Battlestar Galactica, and spoiling the end of Mad Men in a tweet several months ago, which resulted in my angriest unfollow yet (that showed her!). Earlier this week Alan Sepinwall posted an interview with Cuse and Lindelof that made the showrunners seem like testy assholes. It’s true, they do seem to lose their tempers, but seeing as Sepinwall pretty much asks the same question (“Why is the story going in the way that it is going and why are you not doing what is expected?” or thereabouts) in 15 different ways, I’d lose my temper too.

But then I’ve found myself getting increasingly annoyed by all of this to a degree that is scaring me. I won’t lie: this season has been a rollercoaster for me too, testing my faith far too often. Seeing other people allow their disgruntlement to completely turn them against the show has been exactly the kind of thing that makes me question my own feelings. Am I fooling myself? Some critics and hardcore fans I once allied myself with have jumped ship, and I’m left behind with no life-jacket. After the amazing season opener, there have been numerous moments where doubt has crept in. The temple scenes were mostly a bust (seeing John “Sol Star” Hawkes wasted as the pointless translator Lennon really pissed me off), some of the character deaths were fudged, and some of the answers have had their effect blunted by being hinted at before they are fully answered: deadly when a fanbase will pick over every line to the degree that it does, meaning the eventual reveal comes too late.

The negativity surrounding the final season has taken a toll on me (cue violins). I couldn’t help but feel deflated when What They Died For finished, even though I had been moved on an emotional level. With only a couple of hours to go there was still too much to be explained, and no time to do it. That said, this wave of panic feels more like an intensification of the perfectly natural faith-testing doubt I already had. What galls me is that I had already tried to avoid this, and it was all for naught. I began pre-emptively ejecting questions I wanted answered even before the season started, hoping to prevent any disappointment. First to go was, “What is the source of the electromagnetic energy?” I’m happy to accept that the island is a special place with a special thing on it that makes weird shit happen. Unless Cuse and Lindelof invent a new element — Mysterianium — there is no way a concrete answer would work. It’s magical stuff, either God’s Blood or supermagnetic 4D anti-matter. In my head, that’s fine.

Nevertheless, other questions (What are the rules that Ben was talking about in The Shape of Things to Come after Alex was killed? What is the nature of the corruption that allows The Man in Black to control people? How did MiB visit Jack in LA as his father?) are being scratched off my list as well, and soon I’m going to be left with nothing. That would be fine, but this week I’ve felt like the guy who throws every bit of luggage, seating, and extraneous material from a plane running out of fuel, but we’re still going to crash into the mountain no matter what.

It’s not like Cuse and Lindelof are unaware of these concerns: apparently the DVD/Blu-Ray of season six will have a feature where they explain things that have been left out. Their common defence whenever a critic has asked why we didn’t get to see Alvar Hanso and Gerald De Groot in front of a whiteboard covered with equations that explain everything have often said that it’s the characters that matter the most, and I’ve held onto the belief that they get that right even while my concern has grown, and for the most part this season has proven me right. The sideways world has featured many satisfying moments, such as Jack letting go of his anger at his father by bonding with his own son, or Sun and Jin becoming a happy couple without Jin’s corrupted values and paranoia getting in the way.

I have no doubt that the character’s arcs will all work out: my concern with the answers to the mysteries is that I will end up trying to answer them after the final episode has aired in much the same way I railed against BSG fans when their finale left dozens of loose ends: by explaining away inconsistencies at such length that it stops being fanwank and ends up becoming fanfic. I’ve already been taking solace in the fact that a lot of questions have already been answered but people kept bringing them up because they thought the answers were so unsatisfactory that there had to be something more there (e.g. Ben’s comments about the “Magic Box” and his subsequent abrupt about-face: guess he really had been pulling Locke’s leg after all). There is a very good chance I will be waving away concerns in the next few weeks in a way I found insufferable in BSG fans. I’m dreading it. I’ve bought some crow pie just in case Lost ends up fluffing it as badly as that show, but I don’t want to eat it. Crow tastes all nasty, like.

Debate about the meaning of the show is one thing, and will follow on naturally from the discussions that have formed so much of the Lost experience over the last six years. Once it’s all over, and the final DVD has come out, we’ll all be in a better position to assess what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, I worry that we will be trying to connect dots that aren’t meant to go together. During the Great Lost Rewatch we were pleased to see some mysteries made more sense once we applied knowledge from later seasons, with my favourite being Locke explaining the rules of Mouse Trap in season one, foreshadowing the events in the shadow of the statue at the end of season five. This gives me hope that in the minds of the writers there is a concrete answer to almost everything, but how will we know what is on the right track and what is an error of comprehension, and how much of our own explanations will be an entirely new story that we invent ourselves that misses the point of the show?

And yet despite all of these concerns, there are some things that give me hope, and make me believe we were right to commit to the show all along. Many of the complaints have been aimed at two of the most daring episodes: Ab Aeterno and Across The Sea. Ab Aeterno ruffled some feathers by showing us a Richard Alpert that had no answers of his own, in contradiction to what people had expected (i.e. he knew everything, and his flashback episode would reveal tons of new information), but most people responded to its incredible sweeping romantic moments and thought it was probably the highlight of the season so far (an opinion I share). However, I wonder if the free passes handed to it were only because the Jacob/Man in Black episode was coming up, which would surely answer everything, right?

Wrong. The sight of two confused and very human characters stumbling through the earliest years of the story and not giving anything up other than some vague information about the Mysterianium was the final straw for many, who hilariously and melodramatically vowed not to watch the last three episodes in protest. I’ll be honest: the thought of these two characters — who many assumed were God and Satan, or thereabouts — as just a couple of confused boys who fell out over a difference of opinion is so pleasing to me I want to hug the show all over again. For a long time I have been comparing the show to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, a magnificent book which features huge events over a large period of time, but all in the service of making a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing happen (no spoilers, as everyone should read it). When Lost seemed to be introducing two demi-gods, that little absurdist element from Vonnegut’s book vanished, and I was sorry to see it go.

Happily, even though the stakes on the show have been revealed to be world-destroyingly vast, at the heart of it is still this mad idea that everyone who has been on the island has just been a normal, flawed person who has gotten in over their heads. To those who complain that the Dharma Initiative ended up meaning nothing (a viewpoint that I find absolutely baffling: the show could not have progressed without these hippie mad men in the background), I say this: they were just guys with too much money on their hands who came into contact with a magical island and made the same silly mistakes as Jacob and The Man in Black and back beyond them, probably to the dawn of thought itself. It was another iteration of this point: we’re insignificant, and vastly important, both at the same time.

Our troubles and misunderstandings shape us as much as these events of enormous scope, and though we are fools, we are also potential saviours. This aspect of the last few episodes is one of the things I have loved most about the show so far, and What They Died For continued that by having possibly the most momentous scene in the entire series be a chat during which all of the expected fireworks and melodrama were reduced to the tiniest of character moments, and what had been treated by fans as something as immutable as the carvings on the Ten Commandments tablets was “just a line of chalk in a cave.” This beautifully refined balance between the epic and the mundane is surely enough to give the show a break for almost any crime. Other than killing off Frank Lapidus. I think that’s going to annoy me no matter what happens. (We miss you Frank, you beautiful bastard!)

So it’s not all agonising for this doubting Thomas. As this week of worry has progressed, I’ve found myself taking consolation in my previous state of mind, that the story has been told so well so far, and has given me so much pleasure, that it is only fair that I forget about judging the finale as a success or a failure, and just accept whatever Cuse and Lindelof throw at me. As O.C. showrunner Josh Schwartz says in this Vulture post, when asked what advice he would give the Lost showrunners about their finale:

There is no advice that I can give to those guys. What they’re doing is on its own level. Anything goes, and I’m along for the ride. I will watch any way that they want to end the season at this point. No rules apply to this show.

He’s right: after all of this joy, how can I turn on them? I want to love the finale, so I’ll bloody well love it and that’s that. I wanted to love the end of BSG but to be honest I’d given up on it and become increasingly more annoyed by it about four episodes before the end of the second season, and only the New Caprica episodes gripped after that. Lost has never let me down, and my dip in enthusiasm this week was more to do with my worries about the imminent finale. The episode itself was great, with my favourite character Ben Linus getting to be the coldest badass he has ever been, and the scene with Jack that hit me with such force. This is a show that I don’t actually know how to hate. I just don’t know how that is possible.

So I can rationalise away my fears, and crystallise what I have loved about it, but what about the grief? And believe me, there will be grieving once the screen goes black (or white, as in the fifth season). Perhaps I can take solace in the knowledge that the show will almost certainly live on after it is over, as the debates rage. When this is all over, there will be happy fans and grouchy former fans who think the show failed, but I’d hope that everyone who has taken this journey feels it was worthwhile, if only for the mental workout it has given us. I feel bad for anyone who decides to give the show a try after the final episode airs, because they will have missed out on the slow build and the conversation between viewers and creators alike. I’d almost argue that we have all become “creators” as we watch and theorise, interacting with the show to an extent that it no longer qualifies as passive entertainment.

When I tell people one of my hobbies is watching TV I feel this swell of shame for admitting to enjoying something that doesn’t involve kayaking, but loving Lost leads to debating, interacting, studying. How telling that the final Lost ARG is Lost University: the community of like-minded people who have expanded their knowledge of the world just because of this TV show has made me feel as connected with humanity as I once felt while trapped on a small campus in the middle of the country, many years ago. We were in it together then, and bonded en masse. This feels much the same, but without the excessive drinking. It’s been humbling to see how many Lost fans are out there having the same emotional response as me; hundreds of thousands of fans on message boards, showrunners and writers and chat show hosts. Those of us who have metaphorically been touched by Jacob are in this together, and knowing I won’t be alone in feeling like crap tomorrow. Somehow the thought of a choked-up and bereft Jimmy Kimmel makes me feel better. Sorry, Mr. Kimmel.

So why did Jack’s decision make me cry? On some level I was crying because it’s almost over, but also because, maybe subconsciously, my faith was strengthened by the show’s confidence in bringing us to that point in such an emotionally satisfying way. In the face of a potentially calamitous final episode, there was a moment of quiet, perfect grace in the middle of all of this tempestuous attention, all of these end-of-season articles, complaints from former fans, and relentless promotion from ABC. Cuse and Lindelof told us the show was about character, and we all say yes, yes, what about the mysteries? But when Jack stood up to meet his destiny, the argument-for-character-drama won out. As much as I want questions answered, I know now that Lost doesn’t necessarily need two hours of exposition about every single mystery still hanging. It will win out if the Man in Black is defeated, Sawyer meets Juliet in the sideways world, Jack is redeemed in both worlds, and my boy Frank Lapidus somehow thrives. I don’t know that these things will happen, but I do know more tears will be shed, and for the first time this week I’ve been able to expect that they will be tears of joy. I’ll see you on the other side, brothers.

The TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS Box of Incomprehensible Mysteriousness

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WARNING! Spoilers for Richard Kelly’s The Box, and semi-sort-of-not-really spoilers for John Sayles’ Limbo…

Richard Kelly is now three for three. In terms of bad movies pretending to be thought-provoking artistic statements marrying SF, philosophy, pop culture, and visually uninteresting motifs, that is. His notorious and oft-lauded feature debut was Donnie Darko, a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS SF thriller about a boy, a weird rabbit, and something about time-travelling through an Einstein-Rosen bridge, all wrapped in pilfered Lynchian atmospherics. It also featured the line “Go suck a fuck”, which annoyed me so much at the time I think it made my brain come unglued in my head. That said, it also featured some interesting ideas.

Kelly was smart enough to take the filmmaking capital he earned with that movie and instantly spend it on Southland Tales, a love letter to Los Angeles that doubled as a hyper-stylised satire of the political state of America post-9/11, with surveillance culture running out of control and alternate fuel technology creating some kind of instability in the space-time continuum. Seeking to comment on every hot-button political issue at once, it ended up saying nothing. It didn’t help that Kelly couldn’t keep his imagination-dick in his brain-pants, and thus saturated the movie with dozens and dozens of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS events that remained unexplained by the time the credits rolled, even if you read the bewildering graphic novel he wrote as a prologue. It was a 21st Century Wild Palms, only 3000 times more self-indulgent and, regrettably, not co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

It was a critical and commercial disaster, premiered in rough cut at Cannes to an audience that hated it and then unleashed on a world that just didn’t care about it. As with any visionary SF movie a cult sprung up around it, but even though I have been known to champion all kinds of flawed but ambitious projects, Southland Tales made me livid. Kelly tantalises us with yet more interesting ideas, but these are left unformed or unexplored, leading to a finale of desperately opaque meaning. Either Kelly created an intentionally vague movie to cynically provoke discussion, or he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. This interview features a telling paragraph:

As “Southland Tales” was going down in flames at Cannes, Mr. Kelly was still sorting through the details of his back story. He wrote the first book before the shoot and completed the second just before Cannes. He wrote the third while re-editing the movie. Working on them simultaneously helped clarify the big picture. “I needed to solve the riddle in my own mind,” he said.

I’ve heard most writer-directors say they figure out what story they are telling during the editing process, but I always thought that was a metaphor. This disjointed, sprawling nonsense – Short Cuts, as directed by a cross between Philip K. Dick and Cartman — is the work of someone with no concept of discipline. His magnum opus turned out to be little more than a bloated Pez dispenser filled with dreary hallucinations, alt-rock standards, and misunderstood quotes from T.S. Eliot. Other than entertaining performances from Seann William Scott, Amy Poehler, Wood Harris and (especially) The Rock, it was worthless.

And yet I’ve been desperate to see The Box ever since it was announced. During a recent Twitter conversation about Donnie Darko, I said that what had disappointed me most was that it was exactly the kind of movie I would make if I had been given a camera and lots of money when I was younger, but seeing it onscreen showed me that my ideas were too woolly and unformed to be committed to celluloid (be grateful I’m just a blogger with a bug up his ass, film fans). Nevertheless, you can tell Kelly has a restless mind, and if he could focus that energy and that imagination into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, we might get something truly special. As The Box is based on a classic Richard Matheson short story (“Button, Button”), it seemed like Kelly had learned his lesson and was going to tell a simple but effective SF story with a philosophical dimension.

Sadly, that simple story has been expanded to become another intentional vague and melodramatic conundrum, this time about aliens, the afterlife, and bad 70s wallpaper. As with Matheson’s story, struggling parents Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) are offered a chance of a lifetime by a mysterious stranger, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella, with a CGI hole in his face). This chance comes in the shape of a box with a red button on it. If pushed, someone they do not know will die, but they will be given one million dollars. Wracked with uncertainty about their future, Norma pushes the button, and instantly they both regret this decision. What happens next is certainly challenging, but ultimately silly, baffling, and emotionally empty, no matter how hard Kelly tries to convince the viewer otherwise.

That said, The Box did give me an insight into Kelly’s filmmaking style. Or should I say, artistic sensibility, as he once called it at the bottom of this article in Variety. There are ten simple rules to making a Richard Kelly movie:

  1. Make everything in the movie look as ugly as possible. Film in grey and orange exclusively. A complex palette is your enemy.
  2. Overlight every shot. No shadows. Shadows are for those other film directors who have no artistic sensibility.
  3. Hipster music is essential. It will either lend flat scenes an energy they don’t deserve (Southland Tales) or will totally overwhelm your visuals (Arcade Fire‘s soundtrack for The Box).
  4. Direct your female cast members as poorly as possible (see Diaz and Celia Weston in The Box, Mary McDonell in Donnie Darko, and Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nora Dunn, and Cheri Oteri in Southland Tales).
  5. After your first edit, remove five scenes at random to create the illusion of mystery in your story.
  6. Include visuals about water and bland CGI space-time tunnels or vortices or something. These are your THEMATIC CONSTANTS and are TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS!
  7. Cast Holmes Osborne in a supporting role. He’s an okay enough actor, but it’s fun to have someone be in all of your movies. Proper directors do things like that.
  8. Quote clever people like Eliot and Sartre. This is what artists do.
  9. If David Lynch does it, it’s okay to do it too (e.g. have people standing around staring like zombies, or slowly zoom in on people cackling). That bit in Lost Highway with Robert Morse telling Bill Pullman he is in two places at once? Do a pastiche of that. Lynch won’t mind. He obviously enjoys putting TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS things in his movies for no reason and everyone loves him.
  10. If you’ve spent more than a couple of weeks editing your movie, you’re doing it wrong. Just slap it together. The audience enjoys puzzling this shit out. Anyone who demands more coherence from their movies is a fraud and an imbecile.

These concerns are mostly surface annoyances with Kelly’s stubborn adherence to a set of stylistic tics. Even a humbling experience like Southland Tales‘ reception couldn’t dissuade him from reusing them. Nevertheless, it’s also worth breaking down the narrative dead-ends, holes, and ambiguous complications in Kelly’s “plot”, as they provide evidence that he has no idea what he is doing. Certainly he squanders that fantastic, thought-provoking central premise: would you press the button even though it would kill a stranger? Matheson certainly uses this starting point to make a wry comment on whether we ever really know anyone, even our loved ones, and Kelly addresses this original ending in a hilarious, poorly written philosophical debate between our protagonists (he also alludes to the alternate ending from the Twilight Zone episode that Matheson disowned).

Of course, Kelly — who has never written a recognisably human character when he can create a thinly-sketched caricature with a wacky name instead — is never going to make a movie that truly ponders that question, not when he can throw in “creepy” shots of mind-controlled humans standing around being “creepy”, or repeatedly cut to a poster of Edwin Austin Abbey’s Quest of the Holy Grail which also features Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. That only seems to have been included to allow Kelly to add all sorts of visual splurge with the excuse that hey, it’s alien and advanced so it can look like however I want. He can also add a reference to Purgatory because then he’s making challenging movie about aliens being God and this plane of reality being a form of punishment, or something. Because, you know. Deep.

Yes, Kelly can’t just tell a morality tale. He has to tell a morality tale with added aliens. Again, this is worryingly close to the sort of hare-brained nonsense I sometimes think would make for good drama when drifting off to sleep. As far as can be deduced from Kelly’s maddeningly tortuous plotting, the button is created by an alien intelligence, one that has arrived via lightning to take control of Arlington Steward’s dead body to test the morality of humans by giving them the opportunity to chase instant gratification at the expense of another’s life. As he’s doing this one couple at a time, with a large group of brainwashed minions who gawp and haemorrhage through their noses (a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS visual image, that), it suggests this alien has the patience of a saint. Why test us? If we fail, we are obviously on a slippery slope to destroying ourselves, and therefore the aliens will annihilate us. Why can’t they just leave us to it, then? It’s hinted that it’s because of our exploration of Mars, but as this is not stated outright, this is mere conjecture.

Norma and Arthur’s decision to press the button sets in motion a series of ill-defined yet terrible events (including the pretentious graffiti shown above) that hint they are being punished for their decision, just as many others have in the past. That’s pleasingly neat, though it does make explicit something the Twilight Zone adaptation only hinted at, to greater effect. However, the initial morality test only really works if you believe pressing the button will kill a person. Norma and Arthur have no reason to believe it does, simply because it’s an empty box given to them by a stranger with half a face, and that belief that the button will do nothing seems to inform Norma’s decision to press the button. What happens next seems awfully cruel considering they did it half-thinking they were the butt of a joke.

The chain of bizarre events that follows lead to a heavily telegraphed finale in which Norma and Arthur’s child Walter is kidnapped, though with one unexpected development: the alien intelligence renders Walter blind and deaf. They are then given another choice. If Arthur shoots Norma in the heart, their child will be cured. If not, he will remain impaired. As Norma suffers from a deformity and what seems to be a fear of disability, the choice is easy to make. Arthur shoots her at the same time another couple presses the button, as happened earlier in the movie. It has the air of being very well thought through, though it’s rich to try to turn the movie back to being about wrenching philosophical quandaries when the middle section of the movie sees Arthur travelling through water-portals and Arlington’s brain-controlled minions stalking Norma or congregating in sinister groups. That are “creepy”.

Any emotional charge that the final scene could have conjured up is dissipated by the nonsensical plot convolutions, untied loose ends, and dreary effects sequences that brought us to that point. As with Russell T. Davies on the recent Torchwood: Children of Earth mini-series, Kelly has come up with what he sees as a fascinating moral quandary (how far would we go to protect our children?), but to get to that point has to mash any plot together. Again, the end result is a plot that resembles a blob of Silly Putty squished in a fist instead of rolled into a nicely linear sausage. Without a sturdy narrative framework to give these characters a believable reason to face this problem, it has zero heft, and the tearful, super-dramatic finale is not earned.

The issue is muddied further as another button is pushed by another woman at the same time Marsden fires. Are we to assume he has no free will? If so, where’s the tragedy? If not, and he fires of his own accord, then the button has nothing to do with the killing, and Arlington is potentially skewing the results of this game so that he can report back to his “employers” that we are doomed, and then justify their plans to destroy us. This is the most interesting idea thrown up by the film, and one that makes me think Kelly is actually onto something. Arlington even seems fond of Norma and Arthur: his final scene is riven with regret. In that case, maybe he has already made his mind up that humans are beyond saving, and Norma and Arthur are unfortunate casualties of this. If that is the case, I like the movie a little more.

However, these moments are less than ambiguous, and more like inconclusive, and this explanation has a whiff of fanwankery. Am I constructing a coherent explanation from clues left by Kelly? Or writing an alternate explanation using supposition and exaggeration from my own misinterpretation of the plot “tea-leaves” Kelly has swirled around the bottom of the teacup that is his movie? I’m all for pondering the meaning of a vague ending, but only when I think the writer or director is using inconclusive plotting to muddy their otherwise clearly expressed intentions. Compare any of Kelly’s endings to one of the truly great unresolved endings ever: John Sayles’ infuriating but brilliant Limbo. That movie has no concrete ending because Sayles is making a point about how real stories and lives have no satisfying ending. It invites speculation from the viewer, but offers no hints. It’s just the mystery of the next moment of our lives rendered in more dramatic — and humbling — style. (See also several open-ended Coen brothers movies.)

Kelly’s endings tend to mean less than nothing. Not “Oh the world has come to nothing and we must bear witness to the pointlessness and randomness of it all”. I mean “there is no ending as I couldn’t think of one. But there are a lot of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS things that have already happened, so mix-n-match those until you have something that seems logical. Jane’s Addiction roolz!” We’re not given enough concrete information to make up our minds what is happening, and so we can spin hypothetical explanations until the cows come home. A great way to keep your movies in the minds of your acolytes, but a boring and frustrating experience for those of us who think Kelly is a fraud who would rather namecheck Kurt Vonnegut or Jean-Paul Sartre than finish any of his potentially interesting ideas.

For example, Darko ended with a Christ-like sacrifice from Donnie, but left the reasons for the events unclear, though eventually explained by Kelly as a form of gibberish about Tangent Universes that seem to be describing a movie he made in his head while making an entirely different movie in the real world. Southland Tales ends with the return of Christ being thwarted by a disaffected asshole with a rocket launcher while two alternate versions of Seann William Scott create a portal that will something something. I think the world was doomed. Again, I had to finish the story for Kelly, coming up with my own interpretation. Same with The Box. Arlington’s actions make sense when I make them make sense, but then a bunch of other events make that interpretation false. Perhaps further viewing will make this interpretation clearer.

Nevertheless, this is the kind of faux-intellectualism that appeals to stoners who have read A Brief History of Time and Slaughterhouse 5 and think the universe is looping in on itself so that time is just space turned into a twelfth dimensional gas, man. In a way that could be appealing or forgivable. Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void (one of my favourite films of the year, and one that has a couple of similarities to the inferior Donnie Darko) is woolly-headed and naive, but it is such a mesmerising and beautifully rendered rush of sound and image that any silliness is forgiven. Kelly doesn’t have the technical skill to pull this kind of thing off, relying instead on dispiriting compositions, eye-scorching overlighting, bombastic music, and indifferent art direction. Imagine Altered States made by the director of a straight-to-DVD sequel to American Pie after he’s eaten a bad batch of ‘shrooms. That’s what this feels like.

Even worse, he doesn’t know what to do with his actors. Diaz gives yet another terrible performance as Norma, overplaying her big scenes, underplaying her quiet ones, and speaking with an accent oozing with so much Southernness I spent much of the movie waiting for her to raise a lace-gloved hand to her forehead and bellow, “Well ah do declayuh!” She’s never been good at doing anything other than be goofy (she was likeable enough in the first Charlie’s Angels movie), but after her unforgivably bad, tension-killing overacting here and in Nick Cassavetes’ disastrous My Sister’s Keeper, hopefully now filmmakers will stop casting her in dramas. Shades of Caruso favourite James Marsden fares better, probably because he’s a much better actor, but every so often a ludicrous, over-written line of dialogue will defeat him. It made me want to rewatch his triumphant turn in Enchanted for the ten millionth time, just to remind me of happier times.

Frank Langella’s impressive work is no surprise: the man is usually the best thing about every movie he is in. Though he is an eerie presence for much of the movie, even he is undone during a scene opposite Diaz in which she proclaims something about how “you wey-uh yo pay-un uh-pon yo fay-uss!”, and Langella’s look of regret is either brilliant acting showing Arlington’s sadness over the effect of his test, or Langella momentarily revealing his horror at Diaz’ continued employment. He is similarly unable to save a terrible, pretentious speech triggered by an NSA agent asking him why the alien morality test involves a box, which sounds like Kelly anticipated some confusion from the more curious members of his audience. Unfortunately his rationale is that we live in boxes, drive in boxes, watch boxes, and end up in boxes, so why not? Langella intones this monstrous wodge of contrivance as if he were playing King Lear, but the outrageous profundity-lite still reduced me to amazed giggles.

It would have been nice for Kelly to pose more questions about his authorial decisions, either to provide more amusement or to actually explain why anything happens in the film. How many people are in on Arlington’s plan and who why? How culpable is the government in this? Are they working with Arlington or against him? Why is it only women who ever seem to press the button? Why is there a rehearsal dinner and wedding in the movie? Is it just to get our characters in large groups where they can be menaced by creepy teenagers who laugh creepily? Why does Arthur travel through a portal in the middle of the movie? How much of this was just mood-setting, and how much necessary to the plot? Why is disability so important to the plot? Etc.

Actually, there is a potential answer to one question that threw me: why does NASA feature so prominently? We know Kelly’s father was a NASA scientist, and the movie is set one year after his birth, so is this somehow autobiographical? I’d be much more interested in it if that were the case, and that would certainly make the movie more than just a mixture of The Quatermass Experiment, The Astronaut’s Wife, and the pulp SF that gets namechecked in a mid-movie segue. For the first time we would see a connection to humanity amidst these dreadfully self-conscious exercises in intentional vagueness and poorly orchestrated atmospherics. The fact that all of these movies feel of a piece with each other, sharing similar motifs and concerns, make me wonder if Kelly is trying to tell a single story and failing no matter which direction he attacks it from.

It’s as if he once had a dream about water and tunnels and time travel and is constantly trying to figure out what it meant by telling different stories. Who knows, perhaps there really is a coherent story being told here about Living Receivers and how water is a Fourth-Dimensional Construct but he has yet to figure out how to make the pieces fit together. It’s this suspicion that brings me back to his movies even though I dislike all three of them. Perhaps one day Kelly will figure out how to tell this one story coherently, or to create some kind of key that makes all of the stories fit together, or just learn to modulate his glaring and annoying lighting scheme or find out that just referencing religious themes is not the same as fleshing out an SF story with a spiritual dimension. Either those revelations or he will get over his weird phobia of water. It’s just liquid, not a portal to the Nth dimension where the Judgemental Dream Aliens live, you crazy son of a bitch.

At that moment I will give him a break, and happily take back every negative thing I have ever said about him. Hard though it may seem after this lengthy rant, but I’m really rooting for him. I want that alternative explanation for Arlington’s test to be true, not just because it would justify spending money on his previous movies, or the countless hours I will inevitably spend pondering his ill-defined ideas, but because it would show Kelly has improved as a storyteller and has managed to hide a jewel of an idea at the centre of a tedious labyrinth. The tragedy is that, after sitting through so much uninspiring and downright exasperating chaff, I cannot believe Kelly has managed to pull off that feat. It’s a crying shame.

Lost – This Place Is Death

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::Disclaimer: Yet again my efforts to post this before the US transmission of the next episode failed due to work constraints, so this post about This Place Is Death (episode 5:05) is going out after the US broadcast of 316. I’m well aware that some of this may be already rendered moot, but for the benefit of UK readers, I’m posting it anyway. How committed am I to doing this post properly? Last night I could have watched 316 but chose not to so as not to contaminate this post. Instead, I played Rock Band with Canyon. OMG jumping to medium drums and then stupidly trying to complete Run To The Hills and Vaseline without preparation? Bad move.::

Last year popular internet opinion held that the Juliet-centric episode The Other Woman was a low-point for the show, with flashbacks detailing her time on the island, her affair with Goodwin, and the vengeful nature of Ben. Perhaps it was the melodramatic race-against-time plot that annoyed fans, or the Jack-Juliet love story, or just apathy towards the former Other. Whatever the criticism, it was super-wrong. The Other Woman was misunderstood; not as good as The Constant (which preceded it), but still delivering some fine moments and valuable insights into Juliet and Ben’s relationship. In my humble opinion, last season’s lowpoint was Ji Yeon, and again, even that wasn’t without merit.


Funnily enough, considering some have branded This Place Is Death a disappointment and momentum-breaker just as they did The Other Woman, this episode was written by the Ji Yeon team of Kitsis and Horowitz, and this Lost fan reckons it’s nowhere near deserving of the criticism, making up for their previous clunker with some bravura setpieces, great character work, and much-needed answers.


Not that it was perfect. The LA scenes continue to drag, even with Ben at his spikiest. Though the reunion of the Oceanic Six originally struck me as contrived, seeing them split up was equally frustrating. At first it was a pleasant “How will they resolve this fine mess?” frustration, but with Eloise Hawking’s announcement that they hadn’t needed them altogether after all, it seems the flapping about trying to get everyone together was for nothing. The best thing about these scenes was Desmond coming face to face with Faraday’s mother, aka Eloise Hawking, and seeing his reaction. It was only a short scene, but the sense it gave me that seismic events were happening on the show, bringing things to a conclusion one piece at a time, was hugely important.


Actually, even taking that great moment into account, I shouldn’t be too hard on the LA scenes. As I said, I’ve not seen 316 yet, so I don’t know how events in that will affect these musings, but there’s a possibility that the whole group was never needed to trigger a return to the island, but it was necessary for Ben to gain access. Now that it looks like only Sun, Jack, and Desmond will be returning, perhaps the island is sated but Ben will be left to seethe, exiled from the island forever. Frustrating for Ben fans, but it would at least save the show from looking like the past few weeks have been a waste of time. (More on that later.)

Even with some award-worthy fanwanking, these scenes were nowhere near as exciting as the island shenanigans, especially when the big reveal was hearing that Ms. Hawking really is Faraday’s mother, as fans have suspected for a while now. That’s fascinating stuff, and promises to make Faraday the most important character on the show, but it’s not a surprise anymore. We’re all beginning to tie the disparate story threads together now, and connections are being made between every newly introduced character and the established ones.


That doesn’t matter too much, as the show still throws curveballs. Charlotte’s revelation, that she had been visited by Faraday during her childhood on the island, was a headfuck, though it makes her affection for him seem kinda creepy. She didn’t have a strong memory of it, so it must have been repressed until her time-jaunting wrecked her brain, but subconsciously she has been acting on it. On a show where characters are haunted by the people from their past, this makes sense. Ben has a fixation either on his mother or the mysterious Annie, which explains his obsession with Juliet. Kate has a problem with bad boys, hence her attraction to Sawyer, but also tried to overcompensate with good men (see her marriage to Nathan Fillion, as well as her post-island fling with Jack). Even Faraday’s affection for Charlotte is informed by his guilt over poor Teresa Spencer, which makes Charlotte’s death all the more tragic.


Yes, just as the Island Six becomes the Island Seven with the return of Jin, the team cruelly reverts back to six as Charlotte succumbs to the brain-melt that killed Minkowski. Just as I had started to like her, too. It’s fair to say that Faraday will now be compelled to infiltrate the Orchid station to try to alter the timeline and save Charlotte, even though he knows this is futile. Here are Charlotte’s tragic final moments, her mind skipping through time, with Michael Giacchino doing his traditional excellent job.

In the past, Lost fans have suspected that Les Besixdouzers were killed by the same brain-melt that killed Minkowski, as Rousseau’s description of their death (from all the way back in season one) was vague enough to be explained by any number of things. This episode, we found out… Well, nothing and everything, really. In a bravura sequence that left us both gasping for air, Smokey returned and terrorised Jin and his French companions, dragging Montand into a group of ruins with such force that his arm is pulled off (a detail from Rousseau’s stories that I had forgotten about), and then, from its shadowy lair (aka a Cerberus vent per the blast door map), imitates Montand’s voice in an attempt to draw in the rest of the group. Here is the awesome scene.

Or is it an imitation? Jin leaps from that period to a later date to find Les Besixdouzers almost all dead, with Rousseau and her lover gripped with paranoia, convinced that somehow each is a threat to the other. Lindelof and Cuse have, in the past, said that we find out something new about Smokey each time it appears, but this time it’s hard to be certain what is going on. Is Smokey imitating the group or possessing them? Rousseau kills her lover after he tries to kill her, but is his failed attack caused by Smokey possessing him, or is he just mistakenly convinced that it is Rousseau who is possessed? This is the type of mystery that causes schisms in the Lost fanbase, though at least that will be conducted with some semblance of courtesy, and not at gunpoint. Lost fans are better than that.


The attack by Smokey was a superb setpiece, opening with our favourite insubstantial otherworldly Rottweiler stalking Les Besixdouzers in long grass, burbling as it crawls into a flanking position. In previous encounter is has used brute force (or mere curiosity), but here it’s a predator. Of all its appearances, this was the creepiest.


The sequence continues with much hectic violence, and a startling maiming, but that wasn’t the most shocking moment of the episode. Locke’s long-overdue descent into the frozen donkey wheel featured a shot of a compound fracture that upset us so much we had to pause the recording while we recovered. I have a serious terror of broken bones, so this was no fun.


How fucked up has Locke been his whole life? Shot twice, thrown out of a window, broken back, stolen kidney, bullied as a kid, compound fracture, and soon, somehow, death. All because he wants to be a leader of men. It’s like he’s been on twenty hero’s journeys at once. Poor bastard. And then to find out that Jacob meant for him to be exiled from the island instead of Ben. Or was he? Does Jacob even exist like we think he does? Or is this further proof that Jacob is Future Locke, that his exhortation to move the island (by proxy through Christian) was Future Locke’s attempt to alter time by getting himself off the island earlier so as to thwart fate?


Of course, Locke’s trip down the well echoes Locke’s descent into Swan station, not to mention his fall from the eighth floor, his drop from the cliff under Yemi’s plane, and his close call many moons ago, when Smokey tried to drag him into a Cerberus Vent (at the end of season one), except this time he’s falling into light and not darkness. Also, the time-sealed well was reminiscent of the burial of Nikki and Paulo from Kitsis and Horowitz’ Expose. Even better, it was just a chilling visual.


So yeah, the island stuff has been golder than gold, which is bad news for the non-island scenes. The LA scenes have been especially annoying as we’ve spent a long time in murk, waiting for some clue as to what is going to happen next for the Oceanic Six. The scenes in Ben’s van, though they feature a lovely moment with an exasperated Ben flipping his lid at Sun, have been too gloomy to enjoy. Seriously, I can’t even see what’s going on in some of these shots. Is Jack crying? There’s not enough light to reflect off his many many tears.


Still, I can appreciate they’re meant to be a mirror version of the scenes on the island. While Locke descends through light into a place of darkness and further confusion, Jack and the others go through gloom to end up in a place of light and, hopefully, revelation.


Certainly the otherwise expected news of Eloise Hawking’s family ties is still more illuminating than Christian Shepherd’s speech to Locke, with his cryptic comments about sacrifice (plus bonus snark about Ben’s untrustworthiness).


Outside the Church of the Sinister Old Physicist is a large statue of Jesus, which is apt considering it follows one of the most religiously resonant moments in the show so far. Inside the frozen donkey wheel chamber Christian doesn’t help Locke walk to the broken donkey wheel, but convinces Locke he has to do it himself. Obviously this is typical religious allegory, making the lame walk (and not for the first time). However, this time it’s Locke using his willpower to do it, after prompting by Shepherd. Just to drive the point home, Locke’s struggle with the broken wooden wheel echoes Christ’s struggle carrying the cross.


No mysticism is necessary to make this allegory work. Locke triumphs because he has to, with the added plot point that it’s probably because Christian can’t touch him. That seems to be implied, especially as he is unable (or unwilling) to touch the donkey wheel. That doesn’t explain why he can use a lantern on the wall…


…but I’m sure there’s some fanwank that can resolve that. Special kudos go to Terry O’Quinn, who has been given less opportunity to shine in recent episodes, partly a consequence of the focus falling on the many other characters. For us Locke fans, that was frustrating, but his scenes at the well – bargaining with a terrified Jin, accepting a deal with him to lie to Sun, and generally being resigned to his pretty crappy fate – were wonderful.


Even better, his acceptance of the price he has to pay to do the right thing was beautifully played, realising that he was never meant to inherit all of the things he thought were his, and that his legacy, as wretched as it was, was stolen from him by Ben. Yet again Locke realises he is not the man he hoped he was, just in time for Christian to tell him he believes in him.


So, according to Christian, Ben was lying when he said Locke was supposed to stay on the island. Why would he do that, considering he obviously dreaded leaving it? Admittedly he wanted to terrorise Widmore after he killed Alex, but I suspect Ben always knew he could get back to the island with the help of Miss Hawking, and thus took Locke’s place. This would explain how he can get back to the island and thus sate my Ben fandom (this, in particular, is liable to be proved wrong by 316).


Of course I really want all of them to get back to the island, because seeing them mope about LA is trying my last nerve. The gulf between the incredible island scenes and the prosaic real world stuff has never been wider. When people bitched about the flashbacks in the previous seasons, I guess this is what that felt like. It’s a bit harsh, as the previous off-island was rarely this devoid of incident (at least now Sayid’s not periodically killing people with miscellaneous objects). It will pick up, I’m sure, but for now, it’s becoming a real drag on the show’s momentum.


That said, there was a very interesting moment when Desmond arrives, and Ben’s reaction was one of what seemed to be genuine surprise. This leads me to believe that, yet again, my Sirens of Titan theory is being strengthened, albeit only slightly. In the past Ben has seemed to have been completely on top of everything, but here he is seemingly caught out. Considering this is a man who has only been surprised once in his life (when Bastard Keamy killed Alex), he seems to have an amazing knowledge of what events are going to happen in the future. I’ve always believed he has been able to manipulate people so well because he has seen the future and knows how to move people into position using the things they care about as leverage.


For a long time this has worked, but in the last couple of episodes it has seemingly gone awry. Kate and Sayid leave in a terrible huff (has Sayid discovered that Ben killed Nadia, which is looking more likely with every week?), and Sun looks ready to kill. Only Jack is following him willingly at this point, but then he is on the verge of insanity by now. Unless 316 proves me horribly wrong, has Ben lost his mojo because now he’s off the island he has no way of finding out how best to manipulate people into position?


Then again, this season appears to be about things falling apart. Ben’s plan’s are going awry, and time itself has become a maze for the Island Six. The worst consequence (so far) of this terrible temporal disaster is the sad death of Charlotte. Funnily enough (well, not funnily, but you get my meaning), this week I finally started reading Slaughterhouse 5, by Vonnegut, aware that this season was referencing that book far more directly than before. It is, of course, superb, but one passage in particular made me smile. Last week I talked about Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Dr. Manhattan’s comments about time being a crystal. Seems he cribbed that from Vonnegut. This passage, from a letter written by Billy Pilgrim concerning his encounters with denizens of the planet Tralfamadore (also featured in Sirens of Titan), is obviously one of the main inspirations for Lost.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and once that moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that someone is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”

Though we’re about to see something like that as Faraday goes into Charlotte’s past to give her that futile warning, I doubt that Billy Pilgrim’s comments about time will be any comfort.


Right, time to wrap this up, by going on and on about a bunch of disparate things, as is tradition.

Jin’s trip through the island interior with Les Besixdouzers brought us to what could be a new location, or one we’ve seen before but not like this.


Are these the Ruins that the Others talked about? What with Smokey hanging out there, surely not. Who would want to go here and risk being yanked about?


Smokey’s hiding place, an ominous split in the ground, looks like it was created by some kind of earthquake. Or maybe I’m just mouthing off.


At the end of the first season, when it tried to suck Locke into the ground, it seemed to make the ground open somehow. That was what I assumed was a Cerberus Vent, the mysterious features listed on the blast door map. This looks nothing like that. Did something happen to release Smokey from the depths? Or should I say, Underworld?


At least, that’s what I thought these heiroglyphs on the side of the building were saying, as that was what the countdown timer in Swan station said. This set of heiroglyphs seems to be saying something else. Something about health. Irony! Speaking of mysterious symbols, what is this on Jin’s t-shirt?


Maybe that’s just what it looks like, but it’s weird anyway. Is this the tinest reference to Communist Russia ever? For what purpose? Someone on this board suspects it’s a costume department thing, and then they make comments about Communism. Yet again I’m way too slow.

Another anagram, a bit more Hoffs-Drawlar than Ethan Rom. Canton-Rainier becomes Reincarnation.


It also become Air Train Nonce. That doesn’t sound so apt. Mind you, it also becomes A Creator In Inn, which is ironic, as it’s sitting next to a big statue of Jesus (obviously a more direct reference than Locke’s imitation earlier), the son of a creator who was born next to an inn. I’m sure that’s what they were getting at.

Is this the first time Jin has smiled like this? I don’t remember him smiling this much when Sun announced she was pregnant. My God, the pretty! It dazzles!


Mind you, even Wrathful Sun could crank out a smile of her own prior to her very short rampage.


See previous comment about dazzling. Are they the most photogenic couple on TV? I cannot even begin to explain how happy I am now that Jin is back. It means there will be a lot less of this nonsense…


…which, while dramatically interesting, shrank Sun’s future plotlines into, “Avenge Jin.” Okay, I’ll admit part of the reason I didn’t want that to happen was that it would rob me of my beloved Ben, but also because Sun was one of the few characters who had managed to survive with no blood on her hands, even if she had seen some terrible things (her lover’s death and Jin’s moral compromise spring to mind).


Yunjin Kim has been great, but I miss the old Sun. Seeing her soften upon receiving Jin’s ring from Ben was wonderful, especially as this deceptively happy moment was in fact a betrayal of Jin, as Ben uses her affection for her husband to manipulate her into doing his bidding against Jin and Locke’s wishes. Oh Ben, you delightful bastard!


Daniel Dae Kim got a couple of lovely scenes as well. His panicky realisation that Locke’s plan would jeopardise his wife who, as far as he knows, is still pregnant, was brilliantly played. Even better, the downcast expression on his face as Danielle and Robert Rousseau discuss their unborn child was heartbreaking. Kudos to the showrunners and writers for engineering that parallel, and also to episode director Paul A. Edwards for the image.


Speaking of lovely images, this establishing shot of poor Charlotte in her final moments was breathtaking.


It wasn’t all pretty foliage and hotties smiling, and not just because Charlotte’s death was so drawn out and traumatic. Rebecca Mader is already pale, but the makeup experts managed to make her look even more deathly. It was horribly upsetting to watch her deteriorate in Faraday’s arms.


On top of that horror, was this the most bloodthirsty episode since the pilot? We’re still not sure how many of the Losties died in the season opener (though it did seem like almost everyone), but this week we saw Charlotte die, Montand ripped apart, Robert Rousseau shot in the head, and two corpses with the same problem.


And poor Nadine died and fell out of a tree. Poor Nadine, whoever she was.


Smokey’s last rampage, when he went to town on Keamy and his bunch of evil mercs, was less deadly than this. Maybe Smokey has mellowed since the 80s?

It’s no secret that I think Juliet is a terrific character, but is she an angel? Her tolerance of Sawyer’s (highly entertaining) meltdowns makes her seem like a saint, but this week her benificent smile prior to Locke’s descent was the calmest thing that happened throughout the episode.


And then, just to seal the deal, she glows!


Is she an angel (by which I mean an actual messenger of a higher being)? Is she dead and we just didn’t realise it? There’s something going on here, I’m sure. Didn’t Cuse and Lindelof say they were going to have a Juliet-centric episode soon, or at least give her more to do after she got sidelined last season?

Speaking of sidelined, is Miles ever going to get to do anything interesting again?


Sure, I get that with the large cast, some characters are going to be sidelined (see also: Juliet, Jack, Kate), but someone as mysterious as Miles needs more to do. It’s a waste of Ken Leung. Of course, having him be bitchy with Sawyer around would be redundant, but then Sawyer has become far more cuddly just lately. If you don’t believe me, check this out.

From grumpy (but secretly lovable) asshole, to the Prom King. As I was saying to someone the other day, every time an episode ends and he hasn’t died, I offer a prayer to Jacob. May my lovely Sawyer get everything he wants, even if what he wants is Kate, this week seen having a real snit just because Ben convinced her she was going to lose Aaron.


Oh God stop overreacting! Ben had good reason to totally con you into a state of huge panic. I think someone needs to head back to the island to get some of that sweet sweet Sawyer-Sugar. They can totally have polar bear sex again! I think we can all get behind that possibility.

In his testy AV Club review Noel Murray complained that the time-jaunting was not used to show us more of the island’s history. It’s rare I disagree with him, but he’s way off here. To be honest, the convenient “landings” will only be forgivable if something is guiding them, so a break from that was a relief. Anyway, the jumping in this episode was obviously meant to show how quickly the situation was deteriorating for our heroes, with the slowly brightening white light now a torrent of crashing imagery and agonised reactions.


Surely this is self-evident, especially when we see that the frozen donkey wheel is obviously flapping about off its axis (and even though this concept seemed to be verging on ludicrousness before, I now totally accept it. Weird).


That said, we still got some sense of how things were progressing early on. The first time we see poor Robert Rousseau, he’s clean-shaven.


The next time we see him, after Jin has jumped away, he’s got a beard. Or is this Smokey disguising itself as face fuzz?


How long was the jump? A couple of weeks? And everyone is dead? In the words of Ron Burgundy, “Boy, that escalated quickly!” And how far into the future have they gone here, with the Orchid station broken down and dilapidated?


Twenty years? Thirty? Will we see interlopers on the island with Gauss guns and jetpacks? If not, can we please?

Not much Sayid this week, but we did get this.


Even in the murky darkness of Hawaii LA, you know you don’t fuck with The Jarrah.

Now that the Island Six have leapt to a new time period, I guess this is the last we’ll see of the young, non-grungy Danielle.


The Melissa Farman fanclub, the one that sprung up very very quickly through the internet, is in mourning, I’ll bet.

At last! I’m calling that done. Now I can watch 316 and see just how far off the mark I am. Rock Band will have to wait.

ETA: Having now seen the excellent 316 (a good Jack-centric episode; a real rarity), I’m considering renaming this as “Lost – This Post Is Wrong.” I really was off the mark, wasn’t I.

Lost – The Little Prince

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With every new episode of Lost, my early concern looks stupider and stupider. The Little Prince might have been a Kate-centric episode (which means expectations are best kept low), and it might have spent too long going back and forth in LA between the miserable Oceanic Six, but even if you could happily write off 15 minutes of the show, it was still utterly magnificent. The travails of the Island Six are so fleet-footed, so odd, so suspenseful and loaded with dread and adventure, that I’m tempted to say these moments are the best thing that has ever happened to the show. Better than the reveal of Swan station’s purpose. Better than Ben’s arrival. Better even than Juliet’s arrival (!!!!). When they’re onscreen, the show flies.


Of course, The Little Prince also featured the long-awaited visualisation of Rousseau’s backstory, and we finally see that she was indeed pregnant with Alex. Of course, this has long been established as fact, but after suffering through Ben’s obfuscations and double-talk for so long, it was hard to say what was true and what wasn’t. As happens a lot with this show, the audience was kept up in the air about this issue by having a terrible liar and a mad woman giving differing versions of the truth, meaning we couldn’t figure out what to think, but now I can unequivocally say that Ben Linus is less reliable than a crazed woman. That’s a hell of an indictment.


But that’s not even the best thing about this amazing episode. I don’t think it has ever made me yell as loudly as it did when the French characters (who I have been thinking of as Les Besixdouzers after their boat, itself a reference to The Little Prince) found a man floating in the island. Remember when I bitched about characters having these relentless slow reveals a couple of weeks back? Man, I really should just shut up, because this reveal was one of my all-time favourite Lost moments. Jin lives! Jin! His return surely deserved more of a musical sting than the pitiful “blurp” he got, compared to the Trumpet Fart of Doom that heralded the totally predictable Rousseau revelation at the end of the episode (it’s a French woman with curly brown hair. I wonder who she could be?!?!).


Jin’s return is so great I’m still reeling a week later. Canyon is totally vindicated after months of maintaining he wasn’t killed in the Kahuna explosion. I just didn’t see how it was possible, what with the enormity of the blast and the fact that the boat was so far away from the island, but obviously her theory (that being at the back of the boat meant the blast threw him into the boundary of the island’s influence) was correct. I have been gorging myself on crow pie ever since.


This news is great for many reasons, mainly because we love Jin, but also because it makes Sun’s move to the darkside way more interesting than it had been, not to mention a bit clearer. I wasn’t sure whether we were meant to be rooting for her or not, but now I guess we all just want her to team up with the rest of the Oceanic Six and travel back with them so that we can get a big reunion, and forever banish Sun’s terrifying Face Of Righteous Vengeance.


I say I didn’t find the LA sequences interesting, but I’m merely exaggerating. I doubt the show could ever truly bore me, even if I’m not really bothered what happens to Kate and Aaron. Though Kate sitting in a car watching paint dry a lawyer go for a trip is not the best use of Lost‘s ever-shrinking supply of time, the reveal that her tormenter is not Claire’s mom was nifty, if a little contrived. It also gave Jack a chance to get stressed out. I’m sure him and his martyr complex were thrilled.


Luckily, it wasn’t all baby angst. In the final LA scene we find out that, shock of shocks, Ben is responsible for driving the Oceanic 6 to a fateful rendezvous at a dock, having manipulated them all into thinking they were under siege from Widmore or some other unidentified bad guy. His brilliance at manipulating the Oceanic Six is such that I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s helped Sun out, knowing she is trying to kill him but gambling on talking her out of it before she can do it.


The possibility of this manipulation was always likely, Ben being Ben, but it lingered in the back of my mind as a probable scenario more because it plays out the Sirens of Titan theory in microcosm than because Ben is a shady creep. If the island, or the forces that serve the island, have been manipulating the lives of the Oceanic survivors in order to do its/their bidding and thus keep time flowing correctly, it makes sense to see this play out in this manner, with a few weeks of traditional Ben Linus horseplay driving everyone to the same place. It makes me even more certain that that’s where the show is headed.


That said, some of the events from Jughead concern me. As we saw, Alpert is given the instruction to visit Locke by Locke himself, which means Locke’s life wasn’t interfered with by Alpert. I had thought that Alpert’s appearances were proof that he was involved in Locke’s ascendance, but now that I think about it, this only happened indirectly. Young Locke didn’t give a damn about Alpert’s first two attempts at directing him towards the island, though perhaps his foster mother’s insistence that he is special was borne of Alpert’s interest. The only person who does get Locke to travel “towards” the island (in that he got him to try to embark on a walkabout) is Matthew Abaddon, and he seems to have more to do with Widmore than Alpert. Perhaps all of this talk of Widmore and Ben being opponents mean nothing, and in fact they are both pawns of Alpert. That would be amusing: two boys fighting over the time-lost estate of their “father”.


So is this further proof that the SoT theory is correct? Or not? Alpert’s frustration with Locke, and belief that he is on a mission when in fact he’s following dubious words from a man with a weird God complex, tend to suggest the web of time and space that has been woven is accidental, that there is no thought behind it. That would be similar to the SoT theory, but deeply ironic. Vonnegut would approve.

So, Lost continues to give my brain a workout, but for the first time this season it also went all out to ravish my eyes. The first three episodes were as beautifully made as ever, but this week was something special. With my favourite Lost director Stephen Williams back behind the camera, this episode was even more beautiful than ever, daytime island scenes featuring lovely sharp colour contrasts…


…fun compositions…


…and even a shot that Sergio Leone would have approved of.


The night scenes were particularly interesting. The Island Six have no means of lighting their way, and neither do Les Besixdouzers, so those scenes are as dark as they can be without being black. The scene where they rescue Jin was as close to blackness as I’ve seen a show get.


All of the island characters are barely visible in these scenes, coming across as dark blue shapes within the murk. With the situation of the Island Six (now seven) becoming progressively worse, it’s an apt lighting scheme.


Ah yes, the terrible illness of our heroes. All of these nosebleeds are turning the island into a verdant Royston Vasey. With the amount of time on the island being the thing that determines who gets ill and who doesn’t we’re given a vital clue as to Miles’ background, as he falls sick after Charlotte and before Juliet. Those internet theories about him being Dr. Pierre Chang’s son seem more plausible by the minute.


At first I thought this explains how Faraday could be healthy enough to be sneaking into the Orchid station in the season opener, as he is the last person to get to the island, but of course he should be immune to all of this as Desmond is his Constant, and has moored his brain in time even as his body flips back and forth. The question of what he will do once he is there is one of the ones I want answered most this season. Does Faraday’s interference with the exotic matter in the frozen-donkey-wheel chamber bring about the incident that Swan station holds in check? (Looking at that ridiculous sentence makes me realise how much I love his show.)


That said, even if I do love the show, I find it really really hard to muster any enthusiasm for Kate’s arc. It’s not that I don’t like Evangeline Lilly; I think she’s just fine, but she rarely gets anything interesting to do. In the first season she was like the cranky Spock to Jack’s grumpy Kirk, busting asses in his name while he took the moral high ground. Now she just sits in a car for the majority of an episode, and when action is called for Jack rushes off for her, though that’s got more to do with him needing a quick heroism fix.


Her passiveness also makes a mockery of one beautifully composed shot early on in the episode, with her staring at a giant metaphor for her life, and the crossroads she finds herself at.


Will she even be able to muster the energy to make a decision about her life? She’s been played so completely by Ben by now that she’s not even consciously doing anything about her fate, and is just going through all of her old behaviour patterns. Her rush from her house a couple of weeks back was just reflex, and barely even qualifies as a choice.


Dang, I’m being hard on Kate. It’s unfortunate that, of the main characters, her arc is the least interesting, especially now Claire has gone. There is one thing Kate does very very well indeed, however, and that’s give Sawyer someone to pine for, and anything that gives Josh Holloway a chance to do his thing is fine by us. Though Kate’s flirting with Jack annoys me greatly, that love triangle remains interesting simply because Sawyer’s yearning is so damn heartbreaking. The Little Prince showed that pain at maximum strength, as the Island Six took a trip back a few months to Aaron’s birth. Not only did it elegantly remind us of the bond between Kate and Aaron (momentarily making me feel something for Kate and her fears for her adoptive son), it also made Sawyer’s sense of loss even more acute.


I have no shame in admitting this, but Josh Holloway’s performance here made me blub yet again. Sawyer’s heartbreak, his desire to break the already bent laws of time to be with the woman he loves, was conveyed with full force. As I said earlier, the reveal of Jin is one of the greatest moments in this show’s history, but this scene, from Sawyer’s discovery of Kate and Claire to his flustered avoidance of nosy Locke, is right up there as well.


Luckily for all of us, he still manages to get all of the best lines too. His reaction to their narrow escape was priceless.


Love Sawyer, love Josh. Anyway, enough of the gushing. Usually I have more to say about the latest episode, but this week I have to admit all I could squeeze out after seeing it was, “Jin! Sawyer! Jin!”, so I’ll move onto the obligatory “Putting comments on my leftover screencaps” thing.

Love Stephen Williams, and love his terrific work on the show, but Williams should have learned that if Michael “Super” Mann couldn’t make a rowboat chase exciting in Last of the Mohicans, he’s not got much chance here where there are no waterfalls, homicidal Wes Studis, or hotshot colonial battle heroes from “Kan-tuckee” to liven things up.


I know that it is standard for life-rafts to have an octagon shape, but I’m equally sure it’s no coincidence that the life raft used by Les Besixdouzers resembles the Dharma logo.


This is easily the most relaxed Sayid has ever been. Of course, this is merely a ruse. Underneath this calm exterior is fury incarnate, seething like the stormy seas from which Jin is rescued.


Thirty seconds later, and he’s throttling this guy with the IV cannula he just pulled out of his arm.


This goes on the list of most badass Sayid moments ever. Just the thought of pulling an IV out of my arm makes me want to vomit, faint, and go into a coma just to not think about it anymore, but Sayid does it, chokes a bitch, and then let’s him have it point blank with two tranq darts.


And what’s Jack up to this week?


That’s not sweat from exertion like the last time we saw him, believe me. He’s just wet. From the rain, I mean. Does he have penis envy when Sayid is around? Okay okay, Sayid is a former Republican Guard ninja, and Jack is a spinal surgeon, so you’d expect Sayid to be more of a hardass, but hey, Juliet is a fertility doctor, and she is a mean gun-toting mama and no mistake.


Jack has no excuse.

Speaking of Juliet, I get the feeling that her and Sawyer aren’t getting together after all. Her treatment of our rugged romantic hero was particularly tetchy this week.


Though yeah, he wasn’t at his most charming either. Let the doctor inspect the haemorrhaging lady without yelling and being all sexy and that, James.


Excellent visual callback to season one episode Deus Ex Machina.


Even better is Locke’s admission that he realises that his belief in the light as some kind of sign was a big mistake. Perhaps meeting Alpert and realising that his destiny turns out to caused by his time-travelling and not by some supernatural force has not disappointed him. After all, he got what he wanted (control of the Others) even if it was only for a few minutes before they all got unstuck in time.

Earlier in this post I made out that I suspected that Ben was behind the tribulations of the Oceanic Six, but even so, bringing Claire’s mom back as nothing more than a contrived red herring still worked.


For a little while after seeing her in the previously, I really did suspect she was involved in terrorising Kate. Kudos, showrunners (yes, even co-writer Brian K. Vaughan, who is still on my shitlist after the last five issues of Y-The Last Man made me sob like Jack Shepherd jonesing for one woman or another).

How far into the future is the trip taken by our heroes that left them at the mercy of a bunch of gun-having, camp-wrecking bastards? It can’t be that far, because surely far in the future we’re rid of damnable non-degradable water bottles.


And what is Ajira, other than a cool viral thingy.

Fun fact: the sign that the guy is holding up in the quick flash frame at 0:05 says John 3:16, Easter Egg fans!

Sticking Hurley in jail seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to reuniting the Oceanic Six prior to returning to the island. I entertained visions of prison breaks, usually featuring King Badass Sayid creating his special brand of Jarrah-Havoc, but no, it’s all resolved with a quick lawyerly intervention. So, this was just a way to keep Hurley out of the way for a couple of episodes?


At least it worked, I guess.

Tonight, on US TV, airs the fun-sounding This Place Is Death. Here’s hoping it maintains the high-quality of the last two episodes, and keeps that rocket-like momentum going.

Lost – Before You Left / The Lie

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The return of my favourite show of the last five years that doesn’t feature a team of corrupt cops in LA or a foulmouthed barkeep in the Wild West is normally a cause for celebration. Proper Bacchanalian celebration with enough fireworks to blast the moon out of orbit. And yet, this week’s two-episode season premiere happened with barely any fanfare on this blog or in my brain. Partially it’s because, as I said in this post, I’m busy and distracted by unavoidable and unpleasant RL stuff, which has dampened my usual enthusiasm, but it’s also because Lost, a show whose main attraction, certainly for a lot of its fanbase, is its willingness to spin plates and tease us with answers to questions that turn out to be questions themselves. It’s been thrilling to go on this journey, but we’re approaching the end, and those questions will now be answered with answers, and my confidence in the show’s ability to excite me faltered during the hiatus.

Certainly that is not the only reason to love it, but it’s what makes Lost more than just an entertaining sci fi show. The speculation is half of the fun, and as someone said a while back, as we find out more about the central mystery, options for possible answers collapse like eigenstates, leaving us with what will eventually be a much more conventional story than some of us have expected. In the past I’ve tried to keep my own theories conservative, but even so, and even though I love the show like crazy, I don’t expect anything out of leftfield any more. Other than an hour of shirtless Sawyer.


That said, I’ve been expecting that shift for a while now, and thought last season would feature a closing down of possibilities, but it actually featured even more pleasantly obfuscating craziness than I had expected, including Ben’s summoning of Smokey, Richard Alpert and Matthew Abaddon’s interest in Locke’s childhood, the frozen donkey wheel, and Claire’s internment in Jacob’s shack, to name just a few. This season, however, I had a suspicion that we would see the show become a little more conventional as the WTFs get addressed in a less mystical manner, and the two episode season opener didn’t dissuade me from that belief.

Part of it is the possibility that some of the theories will turn out to be correct, meaning some of our expectations will be satisfied instead of confounded. Lost may be the only mystery story told where the fans will become increasingly frustrated by a story resolving itself with answers (note that I said fans, by which I mean the Lostpedia-surfing hardcore, not the majority of fans, who will almost certainly be thrilled). One theory thrown about that seemed likely was that the whispers heard on the island were from the survivors, that some time-travelling weirdness had thrown them back in time, so that they were observing what was going on and commenting on it from a nearby treeline.


This opener strengthened that theory, though it had the added twist of showing us Dharma activity that we would otherwise never have seen. That was a great use of the time travel dynamic, and the showrunners seem committed to keeping continuity on the table and paradox off it, but then, just to piss me off, we also had Faraday meeting Desmond during his Swan station tenure, which lead to his conveniently timed memory flash back in the present (i.e. three years after leaving the island), which smacked of contrivance.


Why did that memory return at that point? The only reason is because the story needed it for full dramatic effect, which either means some uncharacteristically shoddy plotting on the part of the showrunners, or the satisfaction of the audience has suddenly become a variable in the Lostverse. I know I’ve said before that I love how the showrunners have made the fans’ speculation part of their storytelling process, but that would be a step too far.

To be honest, that part of the show is in danger of running amok. Too many fan in-jokes and winks at the audience cluttered these episodes, which were otherwise committed to rattling off as much backstory and plot as possible. It was a bit cutesy, and while that might have been a corrective against too much downbeat atmospherics, the show drew attention to itself in a way it hasn’t done before. That’s not to say I didn’t find it funny. Ben and Richard Alpert had some funny moments, for instance, and Neil Frogurt’s death by flaming arrow jolted a laugh out of me even while I thought it was a bit of a laboured gag. Even so, it was already hard to take Sayid’s lengthy incapacitation seriously, in that it seemed like a contrived way to keep Sayid out of the picture while Hurley wrestled with his demons, as well as giving Hurley space to get arrested at the end.


Add to that the absurd sight of him being carted from one location to another like, as many have already stated, Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s, and the traditionally broad Hurley-centric episodes written by Kitsis and Horowitz did a good job of dissipating the suspense of Cuselof’s opener (it feels wrong to add that movie to the list of works of art that have influenced this show). Perhaps aired individually the episodes might have worked a bit better, though we wouldn’t have had the phrase “Then God help us” uttered by Chang and Hawking at the beginning and end of the two-parter respectively. That’s a touch I didn’t pick up on first time around. (Check out the candles framing Miss Hawking’s face. Lovely.)


Of course, it wasn’t all bad. Having the remaining survivors a-bippin’ an’ a-boppin’ through time removes one of my concerns about season five; that we would see the Oceanic Six get exclusive screentime for a couple of episodes before heading back to the island, where we would then have flashbacks of what had happened on the island during those three years. That could have been confusing, as we would be getting on-island footage from two time-periods at once, which has never been a problem before.

Also, after having the show’s format shaken up last season, the possibility of on-island flashbacks would have seemed like a step back even though the content of those flashbacks would have been exciting. Instead, we’ve got the entertaining twist that the characters are now experiencing those flashbacks firsthand, participating in them and commenting on them. The best parts of this two-parter were spent trying to figure out what was going on and where everyone was within the chronology. The off-island stuff didn’t excite anywhere near as much, especially Hurley’s long-drawn-out crisis of confidence, which seemed contrived and inconsequential despite some terrific work from Jorge Garcia. I especially liked his Flying Hot Pocket of Death maneuver.


In terms of “what the hell is going on?”, my Sirens of Titan theory (scroll down) is still viable, though it is hinted here that it’s not time agents trying to maintain the temporal status quo but time itself, which brings back nostalgic memories of Sapphire and Steel, where Time was sentient and evil. Here it seems like it is somehow patching itself up when damaged by the obnoxious actions of humans who are either trying to harness the power of the Frozen Donkey Wheel Chamber, or are unstuck in time like the few remaining Oceanic survivors.


In fact, just a quick look through the online speculation about the most recent “revelations” (can anything on this show ever be considered definitive enough to be referred to as a revelation?) shows that many people consider this season to be more in debt to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, with its timelost protagonist Billy Pilgrim skipping from time period to time period. As I’ve yet to read that, I can’t comment, and so will stick with my main theory for now. Certainly, that amazing opening sequence, with Pierre Chang being shadowed by Faraday, suggests there is going to be a lot of the back-history of the show caused by our protagonists.

But, as I said, any satisfaction I will get from correctly predicting what is going on (if indeed I am on the right tracks) will be tempered by my frustration at not being surprised by the mystery. I’d much rather be caught out by something than suss it out. Puzzle narratives often frustrate me, even though I love them. I remember desperately hoping that Gabriel Byrne really was Keyser Soze, as postulated by Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects, as I’d figured out it was Kevin Spacey early on and wanted to be proved wrong.


That’s why Lost‘s emotional drama is the thing that will separate it from the usual puzzle narratives. Whatever the mystery turns out to be, the truly important answers will concern the fates of the characters. Is Charlotte doomed to die in horrible pain like Minkowski? Will Penny be murdered by Ben? Will Jack find peace? Is Jin alive? Is anyone actually dead? What’s going to happen to Walt? Is Locke really going to lead anyone at any point, or is he doomed to be throwing knives from the bushes for the rest of the series? I’m sure when the final episode airs non-fans will be carping that the final revelations are not that impressive, but to the fans, that won’t be what we take from it. We care about these characters, and we’ll be alternately happy and upset depending on who prevails and who dies. Knowing that the final mystery revealed is the identity of Adam and Eve, I expect there will be tears.

A lot of these concerns have been rattling through my head for a while now, and a lot of it is pointless worry that will be rendered moot as the show progresses. However, the two episode opener was still a little disappointing on first viewing, though a second viewing and reading fan feedback on the net has made me fonder of them. My upset is obviously a symptom of my current malaise, as I took some silly things way too seriously, allowing them to fester in my mind until they all added up to proof that the show had finally gone off the boil. ::sigh:: This is all because I got depressed upon hearing Drew Goddard had left the show to make Cabin in the Woods with Whedon, you know.


So what were the things that bugged me? There’s an absolutely terribly written and performed newscast at one point that shocked me, for one. It always amazes me how often news broadcasts in shows or films come off as unconvincing facsimiles of the real thing. There’s a template for news pieces that anyone with even the most fundamental knowledge of journalism could emulate, but so often it doesn’t happen. For Crom’s sake, the news-speak on The Day Today is the best example of a fake news programme sounding just like a real one, even though that features news stories about John Major beating up the Queen and a horse infestation in the London underground. Why can’t anything else get it that right?

Sorry, personal bugbear. There was also some dreadfully on-the-nose dialogue, which might have been a consequence of the show rushing through so much plot, but even so, something like Charlotte responding to Faraday’s enquiry into her health by cheerfully commenting that she had forgotten her mother’s maiden name fell from our screen with a dull clang. Hurley’s sudden obsession with the truth and his vow to never help Sayid again (prior to seeing him help Sayid) was another example that irked. Though, as I said earlier, it’s tempered by my respect for Garcia, especially during his tearful confession scene, which was one of the highlights of the opener.


Some plot mechanics were equally contrived. Considering Hurley is supposed to have killed three people, the police did a lousy job of looking for him. The visit to his house was awfully polite, with a bit of a chat with Cheech Marin before leaving without turning the place upside-down, and again, later letting Cheech drive away without searching the car, or getting someone to tail him. Of course, if I turns out they are agents of Widmore I take it back, though surely they would be even more ruthless.


Also annoying was the show’s sudden over-reliance on last minute reveals. A door opens. Someone pulls Hurley over and… It’s Ghost-Ana-Lucia! WTF? Kate says hi to someone who is not facing us and… It’s Sun! Dun dun duuuuun! Someone gets some beer out of a fridge. He walks up some stairs and… It’s Frank! OMG! A man gets out of bed, listens to some Willie Nelson, gets ready for work, walks in front of a camera and… Holy shit, it’s Dr. Pierre Chang! Outrageous! By the end of the second episode it was getting ridiculous, even though the reveals of Ana-Lucia, Ethan Rom, and Miss Hawking were surprising (less so for Michelle Rodriguez, as her appearance had been spoiled for me a while back). If the show is going to rely on this kind of silly delay-and-reveal stuff for the rest of the season, I’ll be seriously pissed.


Speaking of Pierre Chang, aka François Chau (who, bizarrely, played Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze), he sure as hell delivered his dialogue at an outrageous acting volume. Until now he’s only been asked to intone Dharma info for the initiation videos, but here he gets to bellow warnings about dangerous time-energy leakages. It was hardly subtle. But enough of this carping. There was much to praise, as there always is. If Chang was performed at an inappropriately hysterical pitch, the performances from the huge main cast was invariably spot on and filled with character.


Kudos especially to Yunjin Kim, who only had a couple of scenes but performed them brilliantly. Her transformation into creepy angel of vengeance is complete, her conversation with Kate brimming with barely suppressed rage. Her role in the outcome of this story is completely up in the air right now, but if I were Jack, I’d be worried. And probably crying about something or other.


I’m now completely over my dislike of Jeremy Davies and his seemingly bottomless bag of acting tics. He grew on me in the fourth season, and in these episodes, trying to keep his scattered brain in check and presenting a face of calm to the survivors even as Charlotte’s fate becomes unclear, he was fantastic. Seeing him hanging around in the cave that will become the Orchid station will be remembered as one of the great Lost WTF moments, though I suspect this means he’s doomed to do something incredibly bad in order to save Charlotte. Some online speculation has brought up the possibility of his actions bringing about The Incident, even though that seemed localised around Swan station, not Orchid, though it’s telling that Chang is filming his Arrow orientation video while wearing a Swan coat.


There’s talk this is a continuity flub, but I’m not so sure. Time will tell. (Geddit?!?!?)


Terry O’Quinn had some great moments too, abruptly left alone only moments after inheriting control over the Others. His terror was especially affecting, as even the visit by Alpert could do nothing to calm him down. Only a spot of murderous knife-flinging in the final scenes seemed to restore his equilibrium. Now that he’s saved Juliet and Sawyer I think I can forgive him for killing Naomi. Speaking of Locke, his scene with Alpert was surprisingly unambiguous, but has thrown up several interesting questions about where Lost is heading, and it all revolves around a compass.


Lostpedia maintains that this compass, that Alpert gives Locke to give back to himself at a later date, is indeed the same one shown to Young John Locke by Alpert in the episode Cabin Fever, though it does look a bit different so who can say, but of course, if this compass is indeed the same one, then Locke will probably go back in time to before that moment, hand the compass over to Alpert, tell him who he is, and then disappear again. Following that, Alpert will track Locke down, and show him this compass in the hopes that he will recognise it. That struck me as odd at first. Wouldn’t Alpert realise that Young Locke has no way of recognising an object that he doesn’t yet own? However, it’s entirely in keeping with what’s going on, and only confused me because I’d been so distracted by the connection between the multiple choice question Alpert asked Locke and its similarity to the ceremony used by Panchen Lamas to find the next Dalai Lama. It was actually a very straight question; Alpert thought Young Locke already had a compass like that one. Instead Young Locke just picked up a knife because… what? He wants to be an adventurer? He’s a potentially violent guy with serious issues? Who knows.


The suspicion among Lost speculators is that Locke was visited by Alpert because he is somehow destined to be leader of the Others/Hostiles because the island willed it to be so. Instead, mysticism is not part of it at all. Alpert had already met Locke, and was chasing him down to find answers to this peculiar riddle in his past. That’s all. At least, that’s how it seems right now. This is the first time in a while that the idea that the island is somehow sentient, something speculators had been taking for granted, is off the table. Are we now entering a period when we visit the idea that the scientific anomaly that lies within the island has inspired different kinds of religious awe in the gullible population? Do the Others and the Dharma Initiative represent the battle between religion and science for the minds of the world? Seeing Miss Hawking doing very complicated maths in the basement of a church suggests there is maybe a reconciliation between the two.


It strikes me that these two episodes, despite featuring a lot of new information, didn’t leave as much room for speculation as usual. They were pretty straight forward, which is probably why I have been complaining about how the possibilities are closing down. Instead of the curious meandering that has thrilled me and a number of other crazed fans, it delivered more pace instead, either through expositiony dialogue, which pissed me off, or with action, especially a thrilling night attack with flaming arrows, of all things.


Anyway, I’m not really that worried about the show, especially after seeing the first two again. It’s just where my head is at right now, tainting almost everything I watch with sour emotions. Hopefully I can get myself together and properly appraise this season as it unfolds. Word has it the next episode, Jughead, is a corker. I hope so. Before then, some observations about miscellaneous moments from the opener.

Kinda weird to find out that Ben’s League of Time-Travelling Commandos includes a butcher. Later on we see Miss Hawking surrounded by candles. It’s only a matter of time before Ben visits a baker and says something cryptic like, “The yeast is rising. If we’re going to stop Widmore, I need you to make a batch of Death Ciabatta. Or some Maim Bagels.”


I didn’t see the credits on this episode, but I was wondering if anyone was listed as Jack’s Sweat Wrangler.


Perspiration Spritzer? Withdrawal Emulation Expert – H2O? A shot of his back made Canyon speculate on how stinky Jack is right now. I didn’t need to be thinking about that. Kate is very upset to find out that she is no longer the stinkiest person on the show.


I love how Hurley’s house is full of absolute crap bought using his winnings. A lovely touch. I could have shown about twenty screengrabs of that location, all cluttered with horrible out-of-place tat.


Awesome cameo work from William Mapother as everyone’s favourite anagrammatic Other, Ethan Rom. His hair was also very entertaining. It looks about ten shades darker than it did before. Real life vanity? Or just a way to try to make him look younger?


Would you buy a used chance-at-redemption from this man? Look at that smile! It’s more insincere and unconvincing than Gwyneth Paltrow’s efforts to portray herself as the upper-class white Oprah.


Yay it’s Frank! They got him back for this episode, so hopefully that means we’ll get more of him. If not, the United Brotherhood of Frank Lapidus Fans (UBFLuFf) will have something to say about that.


Is everyone with me on the, “OMG Sawyer, Juliet is a way better fit for you than Kate!” thing? Look at them! The combined hottness is almost impossible to comprehend.


Though Sawyer really needs to cool down. His barely suppressed fury over what he thinks is the death of his beloved Kate was a sight to behold. It’s a testament to Josh Holloway’s evolution as an actor that he managed to be funny, scary, and tragic, all while wearing nothing but a pair of jeans.


Cheer up Desmond and Penny! It might never happen, though if it does, there’s always a chance you’ll have to experience it twice, what with all the time-travelling and whatnot.


Who the hell is Jones? And how did he like having a Locke-rock right in the chops?


In the “previously on” we see Sayid with his post-island straight hair, which looks like it took a long time to style. Look what happens once he’s killed two men using gravity and a fully-loaded dishwasher; instant Jarrah curls.


Yet again Locke falls off something, and is rendered unable to move, though thankfully it wasn’t an eight-storey drop this time. I guess the show will still be having echoes of echoes even though the original format has been ditched for this meta-format.


Is Sayid the baddestass badass in the world of TV? Okay, so Jack Bauer beheads pedophiles, breaks people’s necks whilst having a heart attack, and enjoys snacking on terrorist-throat, but Sayid kills a man – using a dishwasher! – after being hit by two tranq darts. I think that counts for something. If he had the chance, Sayid would eat all the throats, I bet.


Speaking of badasses, there is evidence that Juliet is becoming a badass. What evidence I hear you ask? Here is a picture of her with a gun.


That is all.

Lost – The Shape Of Things To Come

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Rather embarrassingly, last Thursday morning Daisyhellcakes had to remind me that my beloved Lost was returning after a short hiatus, much to my surprise. I had been thinking that the gap between episodes that the strike had caused would be much larger, so when she told me I was wrong, it made me a) doubt that my love is as strong as I make out (surely I would have known it was coming back if I cared as much as I say), and b) scream for joy because it was back early yay! It was like waking up on the 16th of December to find Christmas had been moved up a week.

After seeing it, I was unsure what I could write about it, other than the words, “HOLY SHIT!” several thousand times. Cuse and Lindelof had said that the truncated season necessitated an increase in pace, but I don’t think anyone expected something as hectic and shocking as this. Story beats that would have carried over for weeks are being dealt with in no time at all. Who would have thought we would find out how Sayid joined forces with Ben so soon? (N.B. How great was Naveen Andrews again this week? Yet more of his patented vulnerability and badassery, just the way I like it.)


The hostage situation with Alex would have previously lasted half a season. Here it barely lasted half an episode, and was resolved in the most sudden and upsetting fashion.


There was barely any time for the setups for the next episode, with the death of Doctor Ecklie and Jack’s appendicitis, which made him grouchier and more pathetic than ever (again, kudos to Foxy for being willing to play someone so easily crushed by fate). What is most apparent from all of the excitement is that even with a hectic shooting schedule and on-set frustration at the time spent hanging around waiting for the strike to finish, Michael Emerson still managed to crack out a performance that, seriously, has got to be recognised at the Emmys later this year.

How can I join? Is there a People’ Choice award for Most Awesome Actor Ever? Can I vote a million times? He’s been great prior to this, but the range of his performance in this episode was staggering. Though this week saw action, explosions, death, time-travel twists, revelation and (its natural twin on Lost) deepening confusion, spending time on the internets looking at popular opinion about The Shape Of Things To Come shows everyone is pretty much in agreement; the highlight of this most incredible of weeks was Ben staring out of a window for about a minute. It was heart-breaking, devastating, confusing. That it gave way to one of the most exhilarating moments in Lost history was the cherry on top.

Of course, Ben was the focus of the episode, and ace director Jack Bender knew this, using the visual template employed by Stephen Williams a few weeks back, placing Ben in the centre of the frame as often as possible. It’s probably redundant of me to say it, but I’ll go ahead anyway; the directors are working together to establish a consistent tone and visual language from episode to episode, and Ben is the most obvious example of that. For example, in these two shots Ben is like the apex of a triangle of people, the focus of their attention and the one in control of the situation even when, in the second picture especially, he seems not to be.


We’ve become accustomed to the fact that Ben is always in control no matter what happens, and that is shown via his location within the frame. This week went a little further, and sometimes had him in the foreground while other characters bickered in the back. They were out of focus, and therefore superfluous, while the real drama lay in what Ben would do next.

There were only two obvious moments when this was not the case. Firstly, when he shares the frame with Locke in this shot. It’s not because Locke is his equal; he’s pretty much following along and pretending to be in control of events, something that he seems to come to terms with as the episode goes along.

The other times were, of course, during his attempts to save his daughter from the evil Keamy. As the scene progresses the camera closes in on his face as he struggles to contain his emotions, swearing to his daughter that everything will be alright for no other reason that somehow he knows that nothing bad will happen.

We have no way of knowing what he knows, but we (I speak for most people, sadly without proof, but I know how we felt) think that everything will be alright. Ben has been a thousand steps ahead of everyone else this season, and so it seemed logical to assume that he had some plan to save her.

We were all wrong, though. When Alex is shot (by a seemingly reluctant Keamy), he falls out of the centre of the frame (knocked from his moorings by shock!)…

…and then sits in the shadow of the curtain, his face fixed as a mask of horror, while Sawyer and Locke run around off camera, yelling at each other in panic. The camera closes in on Ben, keeping him to the side, but as he comes to and realises his nemesis has “changed the rules”, he makes up his mind about his next course of action, and stands, towering over us, back in the middle of the frame.

He is even more imposing when entering his Incredible Closet of Secrets, in which he summons Smokey.

From then on he remains in front of everyone, right in the centre. Of course, this is during the incredible scenes of carnage as Smokey goes apeshit on a bunch of mercenary asses, as shown in this YouTube clip, which also features Michael Emerson’s Emmy reel.

In contrast to Ben’s isolation within the frame, when scenes focus mainly on him, the other characters appear either in the background or, if Ben is not included, paired up (perhaps this is a visual representation of their solidarity). It gets more complicated back on the beach, where we got some lovely group shots, either when fishing mysterious time-lost corpses out of the ocean…

…sending a message using morse code (with Desmond’s lightning rod acting as an antenna)…

…or, in one of my favourite shots of the episode, standing around chatting.

Jack Bender’s compositions are superb, some of the best on TV right now, pretty much single-handedly putting an end to this nonsense about TV shows not being a valid art form. If something as complex, through-provoking, and visually arresting as this doesn’t count as art, then art can go fuck itself. If you’ll excuse my language.

A lot of speculation has surrounded Ben’s comment about “the rules”, and whether the antagonism between him and the dastardly Charles Widmore is nothing more than a game they are playing against each other. Certainly Ben has been manipulating people like chess pieces throughout the season. Games have been a common motif throughout the show; this week started off with a game of Risk. There’s not much else to do on a island while hiding from murderous mercenaries, I guess.

This theory certainly makes sense, and within this episode we saw Ben expertly playing Sayid, now grief-stricken with the death of his wife, Nadia, who has been popping up as an Easter Egg for a few seasons now (I feel a bit bad referring to someone as an Easter Egg, but you all know what I mean). Was she really killed by one of Widmore’s men? We don’t know enough of his machinations yet to come up with a proper plan, but it’s possible it was just Ben playing games. I mean, look at the smirk on this guy! I will confess, this made me giggle like a baby, even taking into account the dramatic power of that moment.

The only proof he had, after all, was a photo of Bakir driving away from the scene of the crime, but there was nothing on that photo that made it seem like he was in the US. For all we know, Ben took a photo of him driving around Tikrit a couple of hours before. He does like taking photos from rooftops, after all.

Whatever Bakir and Widmore’s involvement was, Ben certainly manipulated poor Sayid into joining his cause, but what’s most interesting is that, even acting on information that might have been compromised or false, Sayid chose to join Ben. It’s like an initiation ceremony, similar to Locke’s. To join Ben’s group he had to kill his father, though that might just have been Ben putting an obstacle in Locke’s way that he couldn’t surmount. Here, Sayid kills, and chooses to work with Ben. Oh, and can I say it one more time? Sayid is such a badass!

Of course, that’s all very ironic considering how much he hates Ben and is angry at Michael for doing something similar, but the key thing is that it’s important to Ben that Sayid makes the decision himself. Perhaps because that puts him in a stronger position, or possibly because Ben is all-knowing and is concerned with maintaining the illusion of free will in a world where there is no such thing.

I think Widmore is the same. He puts obstacles in Desmond’s way, stopping him from getting together with Penny for what seemed to be a very empty reason. His obstruction made Desmond choose to sail around the world, and we know that was important on a cosmic level as knowledge of the future made him consider changing his choice, which was enough to get the mysterious Timecop Ms. Hawking to intervene, thus causing much talk of free will and predestination. So, from the shocking finale of this episode we see a vengeful Ben setting his sights on Widmore’s daughter Penny (cue many outbursts of shock and awe from us), which would be horrible, obviously. The tragic possibilities are too much to contemplate. Even more tragic than this horrid haircut.

However, we’re spending so much time dealing with Ben’s amazing ability to prepare for whatever happens next that we have yet to consider whether Widmore is the same. He may not have control over the island, but he too might be able to predict what is gooing to happen, and plan accordingly. The only thing we have seen him do on this show before now is obstruct Desmond in a way that makes him act out by sailing around the world, bringing him to the island and servitude within the Swan station. It was his choice to do that, but only because his most desired option is withheld from him. Now I’m wondering if Widmore maneuvered Desmond to get him to the island in order to protect Penny, knowing that Ben would eventually target her. All of that seemingly pointless nastiness was just to get that chess piece onto the board, and perhaps stop Ben from fulfilling what he now sees as his mission. Bear in mind, Ben and Desmond have yet to meet. When they do, perhaps Desmond will change the rules of the game once more and off our anti-hero. Oh God, I’m hyperventilating at the thought of it!

The reason I’m so stuck on the idea of Ben and Widmore manipulating events to serve their own ends is that I recently read The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, the first book of his that I’ve tried. Though the shows have referenced Slaughterhouse 5 in recent weeks, I haven’t got a copy of that lying around, so in the midst of a terrible mania recently during which I could only read sci fi, I figured I should at least read something by him.

I got lucky. While many try to add Slaughterhouse 5‘s plot to the Lost theory pile, The Sirens of Titan provides just as much food for thought. It concerns a space-faring multimillionaire, Winston Miles Rumfoord, who has been spread throughout time and space after flying into an astronomical anomaly called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. He simultaneously exists as a wave phenomenon on a spiral vector traversing our solar system, meaning he appears on Earth every 59 days for one hour only,while existing on Titan as a constant presence, accompanied only by his faithful dog Kazak and a shipwrecked alien called Salo, who is originally from the planet Tralfamadore.

Rumfoord’s peculiar condition also allows him to know everything that happens in the cosmos, and as a result of his omniscience sees that many of the events that shape the future are the result of his actions. Over a period of years he manipulates the actions of thousands of people in order to shape history, merely to get three people to Titan; his wife, a trust-fund industrialist, and their child, who has in his possession a piece of metal that allows the Tralfamadorian to fix his vessel. Oh, and the name of the industrialist? Malachi Constant. I think it’s fair to say the book is an essential part of Lost lore. OMG! Miles is as astonished as I am.

Though I wasn’t crazy about Vonnegut’s prose style, the book is, nevertheless, amazing. Addressing the problems surrounding the issue of free will, Vonnegut’s absurdist take satirises the military, religion, inheritance, and humanity’s inability to see beyond its own solipsism. That lack of perspective is often what dooms us, though of course even omniscience doesn’t free Rumfoord, instead trapping him even more in the role of world-shaper. Even without its apparent connection to the world of Lost, it’s a superb, thought-provoking read, and comes highly recommended.

It was only after finishing it that I became convinced that it holds the key to what Lost will ultimately be about. I’m not the only person who thinks that the show will ultimately be about how history is being shaped either by the island or someone connected to the island, but it was only after finishing Sirens that I saw how well that theory fits the show.

From Ben’s startling arrival in Tunisia, as well as his curiosity about the date, it seems obvious he has travelled directly from one part of the world to another, and almost certainly through time as well. Also consider Desmond’s mindtrips and the presence of the doctor’s corpse; it’s beyond question that somehow the island exists outside time as we know it.

Once you add time travel into the equation, even if it is constricted by rules, we can then accept that Ben’s seeming omnipotence and ability to manipulate every circumstance to his benefit is a consequence of his travels through time. He knows more than anyone on the planet (except maybe Widmore), and is either using that knowledge to alter events to his own advantage, or is operating as a time agent in the same way that Ms. Hawking is.

There are arguments for either theory. Certainly Widmore’s statements that the island belongs to him suggest a petty squabble over power between him and Ben, and if he is little more than an aggrieved power-hungry jerk then, if the visual coding linking him and Ben together is anything to go by (see following images for incontrovertible proof), Ben is probably the same. Note their faces are lit in opposite ways, but the background lighting in is in the same place, meaning they are opposite sides of the same coin.


That said, Ben has often acted as if he is fighting for a greater good, so perhaps he is trying to save the world from the machinations of an unscrupulous asshole who would use the immense power of the island for his own petty ends. However, we’ve seen Ben’s youth, and his stunted emotional development. He may be an absolute badass and all-round Macchiavellian genius, but omniscience doesn’t equal moral perfection. For all we know he was chosen by the island because he was able to help it rid itself of the threat posed by the Dharma Initiative and not because he was in any way blessed. His insistence that he is the good guy might just be him framing his role in the game from his point of view, and not because of some higher calling.

Of course, though Ben and possibly Widmore have been manipulating those around them to do their bidding on the “gameboard”, there is also the possibility that the island itself has been manipulating everyone for years. The format of the show, featuring flashbacks to events prior to the arrival of the Losties, has long been criticised by insane haters who think the meat of the show has long been the island moments, and the flashbacks are a distraction from that. According to Cuselof, next season will feature another perspective change, perhaps on the same scale as last season’s flash forward introduction, and I’m beginning to believe we will see the flashbacks return, but this time we will see those events from the point of view of the island or the agents of the island who have pushed our heroes’ lives until they end up on Oceanic 815. There is a rumour the island is already intervening more than we thought. Claire may have been saved from this explosion, as a deleted scene apparently features her hallucinating, which is a sure sign the island is showing an interest in her.

For the island to survive the machinations of Widmore (and possibly Ben), it needs “players” to get to the island in a certain frame of mind and with particular types of psychological baggage, which means they will be easily manipulated into doing what is necessary to help whatever the island is, in much the same way that Rumfoord and the Tralfamadorians manipulate humanity in order to help Salo get that part for his ship. Of course, Vonnegut’s novel shows that all of human history is based around an absurd alien goal (Salo needs to deliver a pointless message from Tralfamadore to another race, and we humans exist only in order to facilitate that), but the ultimate goal of Lost will almost certainly not be something so trivial, unless it has an absurdist streak we have not yet witnessed. That said, it’s odd that Doc Jensen’s latest theory in EW mentions that he believes Smokey is an alien who is trying to leave Earth. Perhaps he’s finally caught up with Sirens, and is being influenced by it.

Of course, I could be very wrong, but this is the first theory of the show that I’ve come up with that I’m really really confident about. The format of the show suggests the history of the characters is not only interesting in a narrative sense, but is crucial to understanding the ultimate destination of the show. Everything these people has done in their lives has led them to the island, and though Cuselof have said in interviews that the connections between the characters are mere coincidences, I don’t believe them at all. It’s the whole point of the show.

Okay, I doubt I’ve said anything new, but I feel better for putting my cards on the table. Time will show if I am on the right track, and hopefully the imminent introduction of the Orchid Station with its time machine (maybe) will answer more questions (prior to posing about fifty more). Time to make random comments about the episode in general, as is my way. Firstly, who is Kate fooling?

Her come hither looks were hilariously inept and obvious. And no, that’s not just my pro-Kawyer/Jackliet, anti-Jate bias talking. She was just being really crap at it. It was quite endearing, actually. Way to hit on a guy while his appendix tries to explode, Kate! I guess it was inevitable she would make a move soon, and I’m not actually upset about it, no matter how often I go on about it. I’ve seen how Jim/Pam fans lose their minds and ruthlessly slander innocent daughters of Quincy Jones when talking about The Office. The troubles of fictional lovers interest me solely as fictional characters. I am able to maintain some perspective, even when talking about Lost.

Speaking of Juliet, she keeps hanging around in the background looking bored. It’s very odd. She got one line of dialogue this week, asking Faraday about his sat-phone project. Also getting one line was CS Lewis, who similarly hangs around looking annoyed whenever the Losties figure out their evil plans. I’m still pissed at her for beating up Juliet (again with the proviso that yes, they are fictional, and I’m not crazy, okay?

Holy shit! Sayid might not actually be the show’s top badass! All along it was Ben, either whipping out a shotgun at the mere mention of a weird code denoting imminent invasion…

…or using someone else’s AK-47 to blast some brigand off his horse. I guess he doesn’t have qualms about getting his hands dirty after all.

What pleased me most about his desert encounter is that it was a perfect example of him using his feeble exterior to hide a warrior heart. His sneaky ploy to draw in his prey was brilliant (note the collapsible baton, possibly a nod to writer Brian K. Vaughan’s also-badass Y-The Last Man character 355, as many internet commenters have noted).

Good to see Miles turning up again, though his arrogant demeanour has obviously taken a knock not just from Keamy’s brutality but also the arrival of Smokey. It’s a shame he didn’t go to Jacob’s Moving Shack with Locke, Ben and Hurley, as it would have been interesting to see what he thought of that ghostly figure.

One of the things I enjoyed most in this episode was the number of random heroic moments littered throughout. The Losties have often seemed morally compromised and eager to follow their own shady motivations at the expense of others, but this week, with death and ‘splodey and gunfire all over the place, their altruism shone through. Most notably, Sawyer ran through lots of picket-fence-shredding gunfire…

…all to save Claire from certain death. His efforts to do the right thing without cynicism are all the more appealing knowing that once he was the jerk who barely ever did the right thing, but has been cured of that failing since killing Anthony Cooper. I’m not suggesting everyone will become a better person after throttling someone, but it obviously works for some.

Hurley has continued to be the moral centre of the show, looking after Aaron and standing up to Locke in order to stop the crazy violence, even if it means he has to go Jacob-hunting.

Even though Locke turned into a bit of a dick at that point, he pre-redeemed himself with his expression of sympathy over Alex’s death. He might still hate Ben, but he has enough humanity to understand his tormentor’s pain.

It was a small moment, but it might have been my favourite of the episode (next to Michael Emerson’s aforementioned award-worthy scene at the window). Locke’s quiet nobility was more charming than anything else he’s done this season, and seems to suggest he is coming to terms with his place on the island. Or maybe it’s because his frustration after finding out that Ben’s seeming lack of knowledge about Smokey was in fact yet more subterfuge. Perhaps Locke knows he is closer to the answers he seeks than ever.

Speaking of answers, remember when the snotty psychiatrist Harper commented that Ben was interested in Juliet because she “looks just like her,” leading many to assume she was talking about either Annie or his mother? Is this a picture of his mother (which seems likely, considering the likeness)?

That looks as much like Juliet as anyone else. It’s a bit murky so I can’t tell, but the similarity to Elizabeth Mitchell struck me as notable.

Is this the most exciting non-pr0n swing set in history?

It’s seen gunfire, death, captivity, ghost hauntings etc. I guess now the Barracks have become a charnel house for the millionth time in its history, we won’t be going back there, at least for a time. Bye, Swings of Excitement!

Check it out! Ben was in London! The actual real London, according to reports.

Jack Bender and Michael Emerson flew over here just for one scene? That’s dedication to the cause. Or maybe there is more to come. Who knows?

Of all the revelations of the episode, my favourite might have been the news that Doctor Ecklie is alive on the boat while dead on the island. That said, how is the sat-phone working? The time differential stuff is already making my brain hurt trying to understand it all without that complicating matters. Though it’s a useful bit of gear to keep the show going, I really hope they don’t fluff the reveal of how it works, though I can’t imagine they will spend too long explaining it. I do expect to find out it was designed by Faraday, though.

It’s a pity we didn’t get to see more of the amusingly named Ishmael Bakir, played by Faran Tahir, soon to be seen in Iron Man. Perhaps we will get to see whether he was indeed responsible for Nadia’s death in future. Or perhaps I’m just blowing smoke out of my ass.

Speaking of actors departing the show, sad to see Tania Raymonde leave in such an unpleasant manner. I was never really sure what to make of her character, but her final scenes were heartbreaking, and not just because Michael Emerson really acted the shit out of them. Raymonde was great too, really selling her fear.

I was glad we didn’t get to see her face as Ben told Keamy he wasn’t her father. The scene was already too raw for me to have coped with the sight of her hearing that information.

Right, time to wrap this up, with the next episode about to air in the US. I’ll leave you with this, Sawyer in full on action effect bitches! Check out the multiple redshirt deaths, and Sawyer’s hilarious efforts to save them.