"Pruppets Are Little People Who Can Talk."

"It’s as if it’s 4:30 in the morning he had snuck into the studio to make this show without getting permission. It’s bare bones. Lots of technical problems. Just a mess. The whole thing is a big mess. A big beautiful mess." – Tim Heidecker to Entertainment Weekly

You wanna know what show I love to bits? Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule, that's what. It's like the most bizarre, depressing and hilarious thing ever. For example, here's the good doctor interviewing his "brother," Stan Brule, who loves "preetzas," and has 500 skateboards:



And is also just a fantasy because Dr. Brule always wanted to know what it would be like to have a brother. Funny and kinda dark, right?

This show, it speaks to some sick part of me. I love it like a lot. You should too. It's a lot more focused than it's parent show, Tim & Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! which started off as bizarre/kinda wrong/hilarious and then ventured off into bizarre/makes you wanna barf/is unwatchable. You can watch all six episodes of Check It Out! over at the adult swim site. You won't be sorry, you dingus.

Soft-Boiled Wonderland & the End of Lost

First off, this is a long one. Also, it's about Lost. And S*P*O*I*L*E*R*S, too. You have been warned.



Okay, so I had this thing written about the finale of Lost and it was gonna be all about misplaced expectations and letting it end on its own without getting in its way and how Lost was a drama with mysterious elements and not a mystery with dramatic elements and all this stuff. I had extended and shaky metaphors about apples and oranges and answers and questions and all this stuff. It was pretty highbrow ish.

And then I read Geoff Klock's post on his problems with the finale and man, this dude is totally right. You should really go read it. I'll wait.

.......

His theory that the endgame of Lost was retooled (and eventually shunted into the Sideways World/Afterlife Construct/Purgatory we've seen over the last season) once the show became popular and their rather intelligent and rabid fanbase pegged the ending pretty early on totally explains some of the more nagging problems people have had in getting everything to lay down just right. And I can understand their frustration with its inability to do so. Human beings like order. But by its nature as a televisions series – as art in service of commerce and tight deadlines – Lost just isn't going to come out perfectly no matter how much we'd like it to.

As I said in the comments thread on the post, TV is a messy medium, especially network TV. When all is said and done, a network television show is a work of art created as a shell for advertising and, hopefully, syndication. It's created solely to make money. If some art sneaks in with that money-making; fine. Whatever. But let's not kid ourselves. The fact that any of these dollar-vessels achieve any sort of success beyond that purpose (and I think we can all agree that a lot of TV shows don't) is a small miracle. The ambition of Damon, Carlton and their production and writing staff is to be applauded. They took a fairly disposable, unappreciated medium – the television drama – and set out to say something about humanity. Now, whether you feel that they were successful or not is another thing entirely and that's between you and the universe. As I said, I think they were successful, despite the best efforts of fate.

Being as this is a serialized drama with real actors and real-life constrictions, both monetary and otherwise (for example: Walt having to leave the Island because the actor playing him hit puberty, Ana Lucia/Libby being killed off because of DUI charges, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's Mr. Eko character being killed because he was bored with the show, large swaths of the third season that exist solely to kill time while the show was retooled to work for another three seasons), sometimes stuff gets tossed out. Sometimes bad ideas find their way into the mix and end up forgotten once calmer heads prevail. ("Stranger In A Strange Land," anyone?) Sometimes opportunities get missed. Somebody somewhere in the Internet said, derisively, that Lost was just a glorified soap opera and yesyesyes, it totally is, but does that mean it's devoid of worth? Like I said, it's messy and the fact that this show managed to pull this much off while still remaining fairly popular is a small miracle.

Which is why I am prone to cut this show some major slack. Its ambition overpowers its shortcomings, in my opinion, but then again, I really respect ambition. I'm more inclined to overlook little incongruities and misfires if the artist/author/et cetera aims high and falls short. It's like this guy says about an even more flawed series and finale – Grant Morrison's noddle-cooking ending to Final Crisis – it's flawed, but still ultimately succeeds solely because it's trying so hard. Does everything about Lost fit together like some Swiss grandfather clock, immaculately designed and constructed and built to run for lifetimes? No. Is it still one of my favorite TV series and, in my opinion, one of the better ones in recent memory? Absolutely.

Because where else are you going to see a TV drama focusing on the debate between free will and predestination? Or if we can ever overcome our past? Or the importance of community and living together? I know it's sort of a cop-out to say "Lost has always been about the characters, not about Jacob and his brother or time travel or whatever so shut up, dude on the Internet." I know that it's a cop-out, but it's also sort of true. I was always more invested in whether Jack could overcome his need to control Every. Little. Thing. or if Locke could stop being angry with his dad or if Kate could stop running from catastrophe to catastrophe or if Hurley would embrace his destiny or if Ben could really not be a creepy, manipulative creepoid.

So here we are. A month or so later. Everything that happened, happened. And it only ends once. Everything else is progress. Our Castaways found some sort of peace in a non-/multi-denominational afterlife (the Sideways World) after struggling through their problems on the Island. It was pretty beautiful, when all was said and done and all those unanswered questions, they don't matter so much any more. And besides, we all knew they weren't going to be answered to our satisfaction, which is why a lot of them were left dangling. Because a lot of Lost's appeal has been sussing out just what the heck is going on and now we can debate this stuff forever if we're some sort of weird shut-in or something.

Sure, it seems slapped together in retrospect. Because it was. Sure, the Final Boss Battle™ between Jack and Flocke was really uninspired and sort of hackneyed. But it's a TV finale. And the giant magic plug is a little silly, but when we're talking about a show whose main conceit is it's a magic, time-tripping island, well, you don't really get to pull the "Silly Card." Sorry, them's the rules.

In the end, we got a dramatically satisfying, happy-ish ending for all the people we've watched for the last six years. And that final scene with Jack stumbling wounded through the bamboo field, his side pierced like another Shepherd, laying down in the same spot he awoke in the pilot as he traced the path of the Ajira plane as it finally, *finally* escaped the Island? That was pretty dang perfect.


*******

And now, your questions: (did you think I forgot?)

Dave asks:

So, were they all dead when the plane first crashed? I don't know if I was just so wound up in it being the end that I didn't understand it well or what. If they were all dead from the start I don't understand the significance of the no-crash dual story line this season.

Also, what about when Jacob touched them all way earlier in life. How does that work?
Yeah, that was a bit of a problem. ABC has since clarified the reasoning for the Oceanic crash set playing through the finale credits. You can read their reasoning here. Kind of dumb, but there you have it.

As for the Jacob-touch, well, we now know that that happened earlier in their "afterlife," as the Flash-Sideways all took place in a kind of Spirit Prison/Purgatory mental construct.


Chanel asks:

1. How would you think the Hurley as "#1" thing plays out?
We'll find out when ABC releases the Complete Series boxed set later this year which contains a 12-minute vignette, according to Entertainment Weekly.

2. Did the plane make it from the island?
I think so, yeah.

3. Why were certain people like the pilot not there at the end? I mean I get the whole being ready to move on, but that guy seemed just totally left out for having such a big role in the end.
I'd imagine after all the trouble the Castaways caused him, the last thing Frank Lapidus wanted to do was hang out in the afterlife with them.

4. My take on the end, on my blog, if you get a chance to read, I am "getting it" right? I mean it is actually really deep stuff, which I am DYING to hear you GO INTO DETAIL on how you see it all.
Hopefully this is "in detail" enough. Cuz I don't think I can say anything else about this show. Oh, who am I kidding? I could keep going, but man, who's even reading this?

Until next time, kids.

The End

So … that's it. The end. Aaaaaand I loved it. But what did you all think? Any questions? Now's the time to ask 'em.

Vote "Yes" On Knope

New Parks & Rec tonight! Are you stoked? Cuz you really should be. Seriously, Thursday nights are a joy, aren't they?

Parks & Rec In the Heezy

Hey dudes, new Parks & Rec tonight. Obviously, I'm excited by this.

It's the Mustache

Ron Swanson is my hero. I'm just sayin'. New Parks & Rec tonight. Holla!

Lost Talk

First off, SPOILER ALERT. If you're not caught up on Lost or are planning on watching it all after it's wrapped or whatever, please don't read any further. You have been warned.

So I asked you to ask my Lost questions. Because I am a nerd and a glutton for punishment. So let's try and figure all this out, shall we?

First off, Alli asks:

do you think libby is david's mother? since her old husband's name was david before she gave david's boat to desmond?
If I were a betting man, I'd wager that David's mom is Juliet. And that her and Sawyer are gonna be meeting for coffee sometime soon. They'll go Dutch.

does it matter?
Maybe?

will jack ever cut his hair?
I don't know. But has anybody else been sort of distracted by Jack's hair this season? Does it look weird to anybody else with that slight Superman spitcurl he's got going on? Has he always had that?

why is the island underwater?
Two possibilities.

1. If Jack's plan worked and the hydrogen bomb went off in 1977, that may have caused the Island to sink.

or, 2. It's because of something that we haven't seen yet and this guy's theory is totally right. (Hint: I think this guy's theory is totally right. I've been trying to say what he's said in that post all season – that the "flash-sideways" is the castaways' reward for … something*, and that it's their second chance to get things right post-purgatorial Island tour of duty – but we'll see. Every time I think I have this show pinned down, they pull the rug out from under me, roll me up in said rug and then throw me down a hill.)

I still think that Jack's season five explodo-plan was what caused "The Incident," referred to in those Dharma videos and that Daniel Faraday was being a good time-cop to the end when he talked Jack into nuking the Swan station.

Did that help?


Next up, Rose says:

you already answered some questions (thank you) but i have more!
walt is in NY, right? but where is he in this story? didn't the others say he was the chosen one? did that story already resolve itself and i just forgot it did?
Oh man, Walt. I think he's one of those things, like Libby or Ana Lucia, that were intended to be a whole lot more for the show but due to physical realities – ie. the actor who portrays Walt growing radically over the first two seasons, the actresses who play Ana Lucia and Libby getting busted for DUI – had to fall by the wayside.

The "in game," No Prize, response to this is that Ben kinda sorta gave the producers a way out when he let Michael and Walt go by saying that Walt was more powerful than they thought, so they were glad to be done with him. My feeling is that the "OMZ, Walt is soooo like powerful and stuff, dudes!" plotline is dead and that our little glimpse of him in season five was his send-off, his "happily ever after," as it were.

fake john locke (smoke monster, whoever you want to call him) was chasing that boy. that's jacob, right? why could sawyer see him?
My money would be that that was some sort of a manifestation of Jacob, though why he appeared to Flocke ("Fake Locke." Get it?) as a bloody little boy in weird Bible pageant robes instead of the way we've been seeing him is anyone's guess. I definitely got a Cain and Abel/Jacob and Esau vibe off of that whole thing, though.

As far as why Sawyer could see him and not, say Richard earlier in the episode, maybe it's because Sawyer (or "Ford," I guess) is a Candidate?

and ditto on the island being underwater. why?
See above.

And she had some more after this week's totally kick@$$ episode, "Sundown":

how are the smoke monster dude and jacob tied to the island?
I theorize a little further down. Look for the * under the questions.

why was jacob looking for candidates? is he just looking for one candidate?
See answer to above question.

who is coming to the island? who was jacob waiting for?
I think Jacob has who he's been waiting for. I think the Lighthouse trip was a ruse to get Jack thinking about why Jacob would be interested in him and his little crew.

why is everyone connected to the island?
Fate, as Charlie wrote on his knuckle wraps. The Oceanic passengers are "ka-tet," to borrow a phrase from one of the show's influential texts.

did ben make a deal with the smoke monster dude?
We're not entirely sure what happened to Ben after the fracas at the Temple, right? He was unaccounted for, if I remember correctly. Ben'll find some way to survive, though, don't worry about that.

what happened to richard alpert?
We shall see. My guess is that he was either a captain or a slave on the Black Rock, another group of people brought to the Island so that Jacob and Flocke can play their giant Backgammon game with them, each unwilling to concede to each others' point regarding the true nature of humanity.

will jin and sun be separated in the flash sideways story as well?
Jin and Sun as characters seem to be important only as they relate to each other spatially. Half of their stories have been them trying to get back together, either physically or emotionally. And since Jin was in Sideways-Keamy's fridge, I'd say that their story in this world is also going to be "How do they get back together?"

***

And that's that. Anybody else want to play? Comment away.

_______

* Maybe Smokey wins. Maybe he's the "good guy" here (or as close to a "good guy" as this show gets) and they sink the Island to protect it/destroy it. Maybe this is what Jacob wants, a la Jack's lighthouse tantrum. Maybe this sets both Smokey and Jacob free from whatever's chaining them to the Island. (Not unklike how their tenure on the Island will hopefully set the Oceanic passengers free from their personal demons, right?) Maybe neither of them is pure evil or purely good. (It wouldn't be the first time this show has set someone up as the ultimate evil only to find that they're just misunderstood, right Ben Linus?)

Maybe they're both cursed and trapped on the Island, in Purgatory, waiting to be freed. Maybe this group of castaways has just the right mix of people to set them free this time, to be the ones who finish the game whose end they've been progressing toward. Maybe I'm also full of crap. Only time will tell.

Let's Get Lost

It's been a while since we did one of these, hasn't it? So let's do this. What questions do you have about my favorite show and yours, Lost, now that the Final Season's upon us? Leave your question in the comment section and in my next post, I'll answer your questions to the best of my limited ability.

Remember: there's no such thing as a stupid question. Well, okay, there is, but I promise not to make fun of you too much if you should happen to ask one.

The Beginning of the End

Damon Lindelof: But it makes you understand why some people go to church every Sunday and some people are atheists. Some people need Lost to have a scientific explanation for everything, and that's why our viewership now is what it is – because the people who needed there to be a scientific explanation for everything stopped watching. They were like, "Okay – the show has now proven my theory wrong." This is another joke masking a true terror for us – we're doing the last season of the show now, and this season is where you get your answers. And we're not waiting until the last episode – the answers start coming fairly fast and furious right out of the gate. But in a lot of ways, the storytelling this year is just us telling people that they were wrong. They've built up theories for five years. When a show like this gets to a certain point and then it's "Oh, man, we were canceled," people get to bring their theories with them to the grave. With us, it's basically like, "No – you're wrong." And some people may have been right. Who knows?

From GQ's Geekdoom's Council of Elders round-table discussion with the Bad Robot team. Part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

As long as we're discussing the last season of Lost here, is anybody else sort of terrified by the prospect of this show ending? Or am I just too emotionally invested in this thing? Because I truly love this show and I worry that there won't be anything to satisfactorily replace it once it's gone.

Prison Food

Here's my one-word review of the AMC remake of The Prisoner:


Look, I knew going into this that it wasn't going to stack up, but, like I did with the US version of The Office or Beck's remake of the Velvet Underground's self-titled debut, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and accept it on its own merits.

That said, this was teh suck.

In full disclosure, I only watched the first two episodes and sort of watched the second two, so maybe it all of the sudden got to be something I'd dig, but from what I watched, I just didn't get it, "it" being "what the heck was the point of it all."

I could spend days talking about how Jim Caviezel was too wimpy to match the macho sneer of Patrick McGoohan's #6; how having a #2 who was a real person with like, a family and feelings and stuff and not a revolving set of people, each as interchangeable and soulless as the last (it's called subtext, people) was wrong-headed and small-minded; how the sense of feverish paranoia has been surgically removed from the show, replaced by messy jump-cuts, flashbacks, unnecessary interpersonal relationships and half-baked unexplained phenomenon.

I think the most telling thing about the remake is the fact that the AMC site has a map of the Village. This right here tells me that the people don't really "get" what makes the source material engaging. (This isn't to say that the original Village wasn't mapped, just that it was never important to the show that it was.) The Village isn't a real place. It's a paranoid state of mind where your dreams can be turned against you, your memories can't be trusted, your personality can be transferred to a stranger and no matter where you run, you can't escape it. Part of what makes the original feel so weird is that you never have any reference point for how big the Village is, where things fit in relation to each other, etc. It's not a place you can map, whereas The Island on Lost *is* that sort of place, it's in the Myst-ian roots of the show to explore this mysterious place full of deserted stations and strange hatches. Not so for the Village. It just is.

And speaking of Lost, this seems less like a remake of The Prisoner and more like a weak, five-years-too-late rip-off of Lost. Let's do the math: a mysterious place that you can't seem to leave + flashbacks to how Six ended up on the Islanderrr uh the Village + weird phenomena like the holes or the glimmering towers or the anchor and seagulls = yeah, you're doing Lost, not The Prisoner. And the fact that this is a post-Lost remake of The Prisoner, it starts to get a little chicken-eggy all up in here because Lost itself borrows heavily from The Prisoner. I mean, if Ben watching Sawyer and Kate in the bear cages in his room full of TVs doesn't make you think of #2 in the observation room, you're not paying attention. It's sort of like if Akira Kurosawa decided to do a samurai remake of The Magnificent Seven, itself a cowboy remake of Seven Samurai; you know what I mean? Snakes eating tails.

It's a shame, because with the NSA/CIA/Insert Yr Favorite Acronym Here looking over our phone records, intercepting our e-mails, security cameras on ever corner and the TSA making you feel like a criminal every time you walk on an airplane, the world is ripe for a paranoid thriller about the dehumanization of people in an age where you can't even trust your neighbor, or, to get all weird on you, even yourself. That's what The Prisoner is about: being confronted with a world where everybody's watching and manipulating everybody else for some invisible machine whose motives and allegiances aren't at all clear and saying, "You know what? I'm not playing this game and you can't make me. I'm a free man. I will do as I please."

[sigh]

I wanted to like it. Really I did. But the smallness of it got in its own way. I think Matt Fraction summed it up best when he Tweeted: "I made it all of 4 minutes into new PRISONER and thought, […] I could be watching old PRISONER."

Amen to that.

Keeping Afloat

There's plenty of dumb stuff to talk about.But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about cool stuff. You know, stuff that makes you want to tell other people about. This is the kind of stuff I want to talk about. So, here goes: Cool Stuff I Want To Share With You, My Friends On the Internet:

*****
B O O K S

I've been reading Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland And the End of the World and man, this is the business right here. It's one of those books, like Cat's Cradle or The Crying of Lot 49 or VALIS or Pattern Recognition or Seaguy, where I feel like it was written just for me to read. Which I know is totally narcissistic, but still.

It's the story of a Calcutec - a human computer - who is processing some very sensitive information for a secretive, possibly insane scientist. And it's also about a guy who lived in a strange city (which may or may not be the physical representation of the Calcutec's mind) who reads the dreams from the skulls of unicorns. So yeah, this is right up my alley.

I also checked out Betrayal, the first of the Legacy of the Force book series. Yes, that's a Star Wars book. And yes, I know this is not a good thing, that this will only end in shame and disappointment. Don't judge me.

*****
M U S I C

Man, there's been some good music this year. I'm thinking about my "Best Of" mixes* for 2009 and there are a few albums I know will make the cut for sure. Monster Head Room by Ganglians, the Flaming Lips' Embryonic, Isnalds' Vapours and the album pictured at the left, the Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca.

The first couple of listens gave me a mild sense of vertigo, but once this album hooked itself into my earholes, it hasn't let go. It's dizzying indie mutant blue-eyed R&B. Highly recommended.

*****
T V . O N . D V D

Been watching a lot of The Prisoner, which really doesn't need me to tell it it's awesome, but man, it's awesome. I seriously can't believe something this nutty and flat-out subversive ever made it on the air. It's really weird stuff and totally worth your time if you haven't seen it yet. Sure, there's gonna be the AMC remake, but I have a feeling it'll be too neat, too linear, not fever-dream enough to really capture the vibe of the original. I would be happy to be proven wrong, though.

We've also just watched the second (and final?) series of Flight of the Conchords. Dude, that show ... it's great. The "Prime Minister" episode with Art Garfunkel? Genius.

*****
C O M I C S

Just read the first volume of the Vertigo series Air. It's really good, intriguing stuff. The art's sort of rough in parts, but the story's solid and, hey, it's a Vertigo book; the art is *always* crappy in Vertigo books. Except for The Losers, but even that sort of fell apart once jock left. But anyway, Air. It's about a flight attendant who's afraid of heights. And, uh, teleportation, forgotten countries and secret societies. And Quetzalcoatl.

There's a fair comparison with Lost in that it's a big, weird thing wrapped in a somewhat standard package, so yeah, I'm on board. I was a little worried about it getting canceled before it really got enough story out of the way, but again, it's a Vertigo book. They published Lucifer for like, ever and it was never in the Top 20 or anything, so hopefully, it's safe for a while.

I'm also loving the heck out of Batman & Robin. But then again, I'm totally retarded for Grant Morrison so maybe I'm a bit biased, but it's dang good dayglo superhero comicbookery.

And now I ask all y'all comic nerds out there: what else is really good right now. And if any of you say Blackest Night, I will throat-punch you. You have been warned.

*****
T E L E V I S I O N

NBC's really got Thursday night locked down, right? Dang, that is one satisfying night of comedy. I mean, I'm sad as hell that Kath & Kim is gone (I think I was literally the only person in America who thought that show was good, but oh well), but from Community to Parks & Recreation to The Office and finally 30 Rock, it's a string of really great television.

And yeah, you can argue that The Office has jumped the shark and it hasn't been the same since Jim and Pam got together and blahblahblah, but let's be honest, The Office has always been just pretty good. I mean, I think a lot of people were just surprised that it worked, what with being based on the much funnier and impossible to replicate British version. So when like, the wedding episode sort of fell apart at the end or that episode after that one where Jim and Pam were on their honeymoon and it sort of just wandered around for a half hour, I don't get all worked up because it's not like it hasn't had a good run, you know? And even if it's not perfect, it's still way funnier than something like Three and A Half Men.

But yeah, I'm loving Community's (it's like Stripes: the College Years, isn't it?) and Parks & Rec's getting better every week and 30 Rock ... oh, 30 Rock, you had me at "chuckle hut."

And yeah, I like Glee. Why? Why does this show work? I don't know, but it does. And okay, let me just say this and hope one of the producer's is reading: The more Jane Lynch, the better the episode. That's just science. And you can't argue with science.

*****
M O V I E S

If you're looking for a good indie adventure/comedy, go and Redbox The Brothers Bloom. It's not perfect, but it's a fun little film, well-acted, well-written, well-directed. It's sort of like if Wes Anderson directed a con man movie written by the guy who wrote Harold & Maude, if that makes any sense. See it. I mean, it's Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachael Weisz. What more do you need to know?

*****

And that's what's getting me all lathered up these days, pop-culture-wise. How about you?


* How about those? Are they worth it? Should I do it the same way this year, with a Top Ten Favorites and an Honorable Mentions? Let me know.

In the Meantime

So yeah, anyway, enjoy this, which is probably my favorite Kids In the Hall sketch ever:



Oh, and also, I think I may have uncovered the secret origin of HoboDarkseid, who is still, in my estimation, the best thing bouncing around the tubes of the Internetz right now. Hopefully I'll get around to scanning and posting it in the midst of the craziness.

I Like It When Hurley Says, "Dude."

So, lots of Lost stuff coming out of Comic-Con. Pretty mind-blowing stuff, actually. Suffice it to say that if you're not caught up on the show yet, there are definitely some ¡¡¡SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

You have been warned.


The first thing is the introduction of the Lost University ARG (Alternate Reality Game) at ABC.com which seems to be tied to the season five DVD release in September. Offering classes like "HIS 101: Ancient Writing On the Wall," "PHY 301 SEMINAR: New Physics With Jeremy Davies," (who plays trippy-dippy scientist Daniel Faraday on the show) and "SCI 201: Jungle Survival Basics." Needless to say I'll be enrolling on September 22, even though I have pretty much sucked at all these games.

ABC.com also has kicked off a series of webisodes from a fictitious 80's show called Mysteries of the Unknown similar to that one show that Leonard Nimoy used to host. You know the type, where they interview people who saw Bigfoot and show some blurry photos and end it all by saying, "Does such a creature as Bigfoot exist? Could he be the missing like between ape and man? Only time will tell. Tune in next week for tales of alien abduction!" I loved those kinds of shows. Anyway, so this clip of the fake show unlocks the mystery surrounding the Dharma Intititive. Watch it here and check back for more installments. I'm not expecting anything earth-shattering, but it might flesh out the Dharmites a little more.

Then there's the wealth of stuff that hit at Comic-Con. First up is the promo shot featuring 26 (!!!) characters, some of which are - or well, were - dead. Paul Scheer of the comedy troupe Human Giant has launched a Lost-centric blog called "Damon, Carlton and A Polar Bear," where he's posted the image and has the characters appearing on it. He has them listed as follows: Faraday, Boone, Miles, Michael, Ana Lucia, Charlotte, Shannon, Desmond, Eko, Kate, Jack, Sawyer, Locke (with his back to the camera), Ben, Sayid, Libby, Sun, Jin, Claire, Hurley, Juliet, Charlie, Frank, Richard, Bernard and Rose. So yeah, basically everybody ever except for Nikki and Paolo. Poor Nikki and Paolo. Also, no Walt. Why no Walt love, guys?

Next up is the Comic-Con panel. The Lostpedia blog has posted it here. It's really a fun panel, with taser-guns, polar bear paintings and some fun banter between Michael Emerson (Ben on the show) and Jorge Garcia (Hurley). Oh, and also, a special appearance by everybody's favorite Hobbit/dead rock star, Dominic Monaghan (Charlie). "You all, everybody!" indeed.

You can see Michael Emerson's genius Hurley audition here, because for some reason, it's cut out of the Lostpedia panel footage.

But that's not all that's missing from the Lostpedia footage. The most mind-blowing stuff is the most spoilery stuff which you can see here. Go watch them and then come back. I'll wait.

...

Did that just blow your mind? Are we dealing with an alternate timeline here or what? Hurley's had nothing but good luck since winning the lottery. Oceanic's been accident-free since 1979. Kate didn't kill her dad by blowing him up in his house, instead she mistakenly blew up some other dude at her dad's plumbing business. WTH?!

Matthew Fox did mention earlier this summer that the show would be dealing with "two timelines," for a portion of the last season, but I assumed he meant 1997/2007. But who knows now? Feel free to speculate here or over on Opening the Hatch.

Final Answer

So I mentioned a few posts back that I wanted to audition for the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The version with that lady who used to be on The View. So, I registered for NYC auditions last month, but ended up not getting an appointment for whatever reason, which was sort of a bummer, but it saved me from taking an 18-hour round trip drive to the City. So, yeah, it evens out, I guess.

Recently their site announced that they'd be holding video auditions, so this weekend I pulled together a video telling the producers why I should be on their show:



Thoughts?

*******
PS: A big "thank you," to Sadie for being my director, Candace for running the camera and Claire for being crabby when she woke up from her nap.

Blank Generation

Some friends and family and myself have started a Lost discussion group. We'll be re-watching (or just plain old watching for any first-timers) every episode of Lost before the season six premiere next February and posting our thoughts on each episode. It breaks down to three to four a week, so it's not impossible to do. Right now, we're doing it via a Facebook group, but I will also be posting my recaps on this blog.

If anybody's interested in joining in the discussion or writing recaps, contact one of us and we'll send you an invite to the group. We'd love for anybody even remotely interested to pop their head in and share their thoughts, even if you're not going to re-watch, although that would be ideal.

Anyway, so this is my "recap" of Season 1, Episode 2: "Tabula Rasa." Enjoy.

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Tabula rasa. That's Latin, by the way, not a delicious Middle Eastern dish. It means "blank slate," or basically, that we come into the world blank and are slowly filled in with experiences, etc. You know who's credited as the guy who coined the term? That'd be 17th century philosopher John Locke. So yeah, no coincidences in this episode or this show, really.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this episode's focused on what makes us "us." It opens with the Federal Marshall with the shrapnel in his guts waking up and telling Jack not to trust Kate, that she's dangerous and that Jack needs look in the Marshall's jacket pocket for proof. We see Kate's mugshot, which Hurley ends up seeing but when they talk about what to do about it, Jack decides that he's willing to let it go, that Kate, by virtue of surviving the crash, deserves a new start. Jack seems to have bought into the idea of a tabula rasa, but it's a flawed idea, because as we're reminded throughout this episode and this series, we're tied to our pasts.

The fact that the Marshall survived the crash proves that it's not as easy as saying, "Three days ago, we all died. We should be able to start over," as Jack does later in the episode. We know the Island brings people to it for a purpose, so why did the Marshall survive as long as he did? What purpose does he serve? If they get a fresh start, if they can cut themselves free of their past lives, then why didn't the Island let him get sucked out during the crash?

I'd submit that the Island put the Marshall there to remind these people that unless they reject their impulses, they'll continue to do the same dumb things that every other group that's been drug there has done. They'll continue to (as we see the "away team" do re: Rousseau's message) hoard their information, guns, power and fight within themselves. They'll continue down the path laid out by the Man In Black in the season five finale. They won't win the game that way. Unless they turn away from who they were, confront what they've done, they'll continue to be the broken people that they are.

When Jack's scouring the fuselage to look for antibiotics (best Hurley line: "But the bodies are in there and they're all ... dead.") cuz he just *has* to save the Marshall even though it's hopeless, he runs into Sawyer, who's looting the overhead compartments. Jack asks, "Did you do this back home?" It's an interesting position, this demarcation between pre- and post- crash life, between then/there and now/here and despite what he says later, Jack knows they're stuck there for a while and that they need to act like a society if they're going to survive. Live together, die alone, right?

Unfortunately he's naive in thinking that just because you say you want to get rid of your past means that it's so. We see time and again how Jack falls back into his defaults of "gotta save everybody and be the boss," or "if I just stand really still and do nothing, maybe I won't screw this up," mentalities (in fact, as I re-watched the Pilot I was struck at how little his character had changed from the beginning), or in other words, how much his past is informing his present, and ultimately, his future.

There's been a lot of talk since the show began regarding the idea that the Island is, either literally or figuratively, a Purgatory. (Most notoriously is the anagram-named author of "Bad Twin," one Gary Troup who is, according to legend, the dude who gets sucked up in the engine before that black shape swoops down from the sky and the engine explodes) I think there's some merit in this idea, that it's a holding cell for these people who need to decide if they're going to be bossed around by their past or if they're going to change, evolve, progress. We have lists of "good people," judgmental smoke and avatars for darkness and light, all fighting to get the Castaways to perform in a predictable way.

The characters that are left are, for he most part, the ones who still haven't made peace with their pasts, who haven't chosen a side. (If I were the actors who play Jin or Sun, I'd be hoping they never get back together because we've seen what happens to characters who complete their dramatic arcs, haven't we, Charlie?) I wouldn't at all be surprised if in the final season each of the characters are put in a place where they have to act in complete opposition to their instincts, where they have to choose a path beyond what they've chosen in the past. It's not only narratively satisfying, but it fits the themes of the show as well.

The Island knows their pasts. The Forces at play know which buttons to push to make the castaways move in any given direction and until they decide to stop listening to the voices that have led them down the paths they've been trudging along, they will continue to make the same dumb mistakes that landed them on Oceanic 815 all miserable and conflicted in the first place. Their slate is full of stuff they've accumulated over time. A plane crash doesn't wipe it clean. It just makes another mark.

Surreal American Heroes

I like weird stuff. Whether it's the mind-bending comics of Grant Morrison, the multi-layered time-trippery of Lost, the borderline insane novels of Philip K. Dick or the trippy-dippy sci-fi of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And while stuff like Star Wars, Transformers and He-Man fueled a lot of weird childhood daydreams, I would have to say that it was G.I. Joe that took up a bulk of my headspace for very many years.

I remember my first G.I. joe figure. It was Rock N Roll, the blond-bearded machine gunner. My dad was pretty furious my mom bought them for us, thinking the whole toy line was some mind-control plot hatched by the Reagan administration to make kids want to go fight commies (and who knows, it may have been). But the truth is that G.I. Joe was pretty apolitical and, as I will illustrate, pretty weird. I mean, unless the Commies sided with, I dunno, an underground race of mutant snake people, I wasn't gonna enlist.

Then there was the cartoon, which informed the line in a lot of ways. And while it was at times a shameless half-hour (crappily-)animated advertisement for the figures, playsets and vehicles, there were some pretty awesome stories being dropped on my pliable young brain at the time. As I said, the Joes fought much more bizarre foes than Commies, they fought Cobra, who was just as likely to be found creating a device to block out the sun as something political like, I dunno, destabilizing developing nations to create panic or whatever. Cobra's plans were always half-baked and pretty gonzo. It was the weird fringe, the feeling that there was a weird world of stuff that the Joes were keeping us safe from that really attracted me to the toys. (From what I understand, the comics were a bit more grounded, but what's the fun in that?) Looking back, I can see how this little toy line of crappy Chinese-made figures has informed a lot of my popular culture decisions.

And there was one (well, a two-parter, but whatever) episode of the TV series that I remember as being reeeeally seminal, really epicentric to my eventual nerdiness. It's entitled "There's No Place Like Springfield" and it's pretty much the Rosetta Stone of my love for weird stuff. Written by Steve Gerber who is famous for his bizarre and cultured 70's Marvel comics like The Defenders, Omega the Unknown and Howard the Duck, it pretty much blew my mind to pieces. I realize now that it's pretty much a rip-off of The Prisoner, but still, to rip that off and feed it to kids is really awesome and pretty messed-up, so yeah, thanks Steve. You won another weirdo.

You can watch the episodes below. It's four parts, each about 10 minutes long. I rewatched it the other day and was still floored by the straight-faced bizarreness. Keep in mind this is a show for kids primarily designed to make them want to buy toys. How a two-part existential thriller fulfills that edict is beyond me, but I'm really glad it exists. Whoever greenlit this should either be locked up or given the Nobel Prize for Face-Melting Radness.

Enjoy:

Mine's Not A High Horse

You know what bugs me? Unprovoked self-righteousness. You know what else bugs me? When people disparage "the media," without qualifying it at all, like it's some big multi-headed monster that needs to be spoken of in disdain. I like "the media." I like TV. I like TV a lot. Some of it's garbage, but so what? And I dislike even more this idea that "the media" tells us what to do like we're mindless robot sheep devoid of rational thought or free will. Pisses me off.

So imagine my chagrin when I'm cruising Facebook and I see that a friend of mine has posted a pretty (I thought) conscientious question regarding the marital health of Jon and Kate of that one show where there are like a million kids all crying a lot and the mom emasculates the dad like all the time, Jon & Kate Plus 8. For those of you not suckling at the teat of pop culture like me, Jon was basically caught cheating on Kate recently. He denies it, but come on, we all know he did it, right? I guess they're still doing the show regardless. I'm not sure if they've filmed this season pre-cheat or not, (and to be honest, I have never really seen more than 20 minutes of the show as we have no cable) but in any case, they're having troubles. On TV.

So my friend asked if anybody else was "sincerely concerned" about their marriage. As I said, I thought this was pretty great. I mean, these are real people here, with real emotions and real souls and real feelings and real children - eight of them! - not cartoon or sitcom characters or the kids on The Hills. These are real people whose marriage is flying to pieces like the fiberglass shell of a NASCAR, uh, car in front of a crowd of sweaty spectators, all hooting and hollering while the thing just burns. Sarah at least had the empathy to ask, "Is everybody okay?"

The responses to Sarah's concern ranged from refreshingly honest (one lady admitted that "We watch the ... shows together and discuss how stupid they are. Then we feel so good about ourselves :0)"), to sort of sad ("They chose fame and money from TV. What did you think would happen?"), to downright mean-spirited. ("Kate's a b***h. She treats him like crap. She's worried about her 'job' which is the show. I do not like that woman and I don't feel sorry for her at all." Ouch. Tell us how you really feel, man. Don't hold back.)

And herein lies the problem with reality TV. See, we all know it's more "TV" than "reality." Anyone who has watched more than, say, two hours of the stuff knows that what we're seeing is not even close to any semblance of reality. For one, these people know they're being filmed and eventually watched and therefore their reactions/comments, etc. are filtered through that knowledge. And we as the viewer know that what we're being shown is edited and, in some respects [gasp!] scripted. (A dirty little secret that came out during the recent WGA strike.) The illusion of reality is thin at best and consequently, we begin to relate to these people as we would the cast of Friends: they're just characters, and in some cases, caricatures. Reality TV, more often than not, is just "regular" TV with worse actors.

So it's easy to think that we know these people definitively enough to say, "They asked for it," or "They knew what they were getting into," or worse, "They deserve it." And you know what, that's fine, I guess. As somebody who spends a lot of time worrying about fictional characters and places, (the characters of Lost, the Star Wars universe, the plight of Seaguy, etc.) I really can't begrudge anybody else for doing the same for their semi-fictitious reality show characters.

For example, American Idol. I don't get it. But a lot of people love that show. Personally, I think it's responsible for some pretty rotten music and is a blight on pop culture. It makes me feel crazy when I watch it because I just look at the screen, listen to what's coming out of it and say to myself, "Do people actually like this music? Really?" (Although I'm self-aware enough to know that the show is more about the drama of it than the actual music. It's like a sporting event spread across a season.) But what do I know? Same thing with J&K+8. Never seen more than a bit of an episode, but I can see that attraction, especially for moms. I can see how the exploits of a family of 10 can be of some entertainment and educational value and I can see how one could get wrapped up in the storyline surrounding such a sideshow.

Apparently, there was one commenter that couldn't see it. Allow me to quote:

"seems to me there is a lot of free time on our hands if we can sit here and pick apart this failing marriage. This country is in deeeeep sh!t if we will continue to allow the media to show us what we should be concerned with. The best that could be done, is to shut all of this crap out of our lives and homes, and to put more focus on our own families."

For those of you who don't speak Condescendo, the lingua franca of Piousland, let me translate:

"seems to me there is a lot of free time on our hands if we can sit here and pick apart this failing marriage." means: "I am better than you because I don't waste time on such trivialities as a TV show. And come on, I can't believe that you would actually think or talk about what you watched. That's just crazy. Why would you care about figuring out where this marriage went wrong? How could that help your life at all? I mean, how can watching and discussing another couple's marriage help you in your own marriage? What could you possibly take away from that? That's just crazy. Obviously, entertainment can serve no purpose beyond wasting time and defiling our minds."

"This country is in deeeeep sh!t if we will continue to allow the media to show us what we should be concerned with." means: "We are all sheep and have no control over digesting what we ingest media-wise. I mean, if you see something, you obviously believe it, right? We all know this. Why would you ever question or dissect or filter what you watch, especially if people like me just call you time-wasters for doing so? Also, the media is evil and is secretly trying to turn us all into gays. My neighbor watched an episode of Will & Grace and three months later turned into a gay. The only defense is to be paranoid and self-righteous at all times and to wear this nice tin-foil hat."

"The best that could be done, is to shut all of this crap out of our lives and homes, and to put more focus on our own families." means: "The obvious reaction to things I don't agree with is not to confront them or try and understand them, it is to cloister myself up in my own little bubble and look down on everybody else cuz that's how I roll. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a hermetically-sealed bomb shelter packed with cans of Pork N Beans that I must get back to. The sun. It burns us."

Obviously, I'm not being fair. And if the person who wrote that comment were to read this, I'd feel bad because I'm sure they mean well, but man, why would you go out of your way to tell somebody that, basically, they're dumb for liking and discussing something that they like without at least leavening their statement with a little understanding rather than contempt? Here was my response:

"I'm as guilty as anyone of being sucked in by this kind of stuff (I've watched my fair share of baaad reality TV), but doesn't it start to feel like highway rubbernecking on a societal scale after a while? All of us craning our necks, saying, 'Is anybody hurt? How badly? Is that blood? Was that a foot?! WAS THAT A FOOT!!! Oh man, I'm sure glad that's not me.'

"Like I said, I'm not gonna get all pious here. America's Funniest Home Videos is a family staple in our house, and that's pretty much human pain and misery set to funny sound effects, so I will cast no stones about your J&K+8 fascination."

But I just did what pissed me off, didn't I? I totally just got all high and mighty and said, in not so many words, "I'm better than you because I'm so fair-minded and you're so paranoid and pious," didn't I? I just fought self-righteousness with self-righteousness. [sigh] Dang.

Anyway, so yeah, I blogged. About Jon & Kate + 8. Surely the end is nigh. Also, did anybody actually read all of this? And did I come off like a total condescending jerk or what? Just curious.

Lost - "The Incident"

"Two sides: One is light; one is dark," - John Locke
Pilot episode, part 2

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

And so here we are. The endgame. And it's all laid out in front of us, the forces that have been nudging the pieces around the whole time. We're introduced to Jacob and his nemesis (who the internet has dubbed "Esau") who seem to be engaged into some sort of game, using people as their pieces. Jacob believes people are inherently good. Esau, not so much. He also wants Jacob dead. So there's that.

We're shown Jacob moving through our castaways lives, meeting them at key moments in their lives (and physically touching them in each case). But to what end? Did this already happen (which, given that Hurley showed up on the plane with a guitar case whose contents are still a mystery), or is Jacob doing something like Faraday did with Desmond, which is to say inserting himself into their pasts and changing the course of their lives in the process? No clue.

We're led to believe that Jacob is benevolent, but while I was initially on board with that, I'm not entirely sold. I sent the following message to Huston:

"Okay, so I'm reading Doc's Lost analysis and thinking about Jacob & Anti-Jacob/Esau. what if Jacob and Anti-Jacob's relationship is like someone else's we've seen? What if their relationship is similar to what we've seen from Ben and Sayid? And what if, at the end of all this, those two are damned to roam that island in perpetuity? Can you see Sayid and Ben, sitting on the beach, Ben's munching on fish and Sayid looks over at him and says, 'Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?'"

Basically, Jacob's the good guy because he has Anti-Jacob doing all the dirty work, disposing of the people that don't fit with his idea of "progress," either through use of Smokey or something. Just thinking out loud. This show's full of evil twins, mirrors and repetitions, so it's not really all that far-fetched. I mean, just think about Rose and Bernard's (more on them shortly) reaction to the castaways plan when compared to Jacob/Anti-Jacob's outlooks. Hmmm?

Add that to Lapidus' comment that people who go out of their way to convince you that they're the good guys usually aren't, and you've got enough to cast a shadow of doubt on Jacob's righteousness.


Aaaand another thought re: the "Candidate"question: So if Ilyana and her group is, basically, a Jacob cult, and if Ben has - in theory and to the best of his knowledge - been following the orders of Jacob, then is this candidacy similar to the Others' "good person" list-making we've seen? And wouldn't that (sort of) put the Others and Ilyana on the same side with Widmore as a dissenting faction under the same umbrella? Did I just blow your mind?

And before we switch gears to the castaways, let's address the Statue. Was that a crocodile head? If so, it was possibly Sobek. Here's some stuff from that Wiki reference that caught my eye:

"...Sobek also came to symbolize the produce of the Nile and the fertility that it brought to the land; its status thus became more ambiguous. Sometimes the ferocity of a crocodile was seen in a positive light, Sobek in these circumstances was considered the army's patron, as a representation of strength and power.

"Sobek's ambiguous nature led some Egyptians to believe that he was a repairer of evil that had been done, rather than a force for good in itself, for example, going to Duat to restore damage done to the dead as a result of their form of death. He was also said to call on suitable gods and goddesses required for protecting people in situation, effectively having a more distant role, nudging things along, rather than taking an active part. In this way, he was seen as a more primal god, eventually becoming regarded as an avatar of the primal god Amun, who at that time was considered the chief god. When his identity finally merged, Amun had become merged himself with Ra to become Amun-Ra, so Sobek, as an avatar of Amun-Ra, was known as Sobek-Ra.

"In Egyptian art, Sobek was depicted as an ordinary crocodile, or as a man with the head of a crocodile. When considered a patron of the pharaoh's army, he was shown with the symbol of royal authority - the uraeus. He was also shown with an ankh, representing his ability to undo evil and so cure ills. Once he had become Sobek-Ra, he was also shown with a sun-disc over his head, as Ra was a sun god."

This Sobek doesn't have an uraeus though, he has two ankhs. Doubly able to reverse evil? Maybe. Very interesting, no?

If that's a hippo head, then it's some sort take on Tawaret, which is interesting if only because her husband is Apep, who was Ra's big enemy.

But yeah, Jacob. Got stabbed and thrown into a fire, which was pretty awesome. But not before sputtering out "They're coming." Who's coming? We all know, right? I'm pretty sure he's talking about our merry band of people who blow stuff up: the castaways.

So yeah, Jack & Co. are busy trying to blow some stuff up to avert a catastrophe which, as Rose points out, seems to be what they're always doing. Did anybody else really love seeing Rose, Bernard and Vincent? Cuz I sure did. (Also, I still have money on them turning out, somehow, to be Adam & Eve. Either them or Des and Penny. Who knows.)

Anyway, so they're gonna blow the Swan in hopes of negating the electromagnetic energy stored there which will mean that they will never crash there. Or at least not in 2004.


The way I see it, there are three ways this can shake out for our castaways:

1) It works. They manage to negate the EM energy which means there is no Swan station, hence no button, hence no neglecting to push the button, hence no crash of Oceanic 815. Which means the the castaways we've been following for the last half decade are, effectively, gone. Sort of like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, when he starts to disappear, y'know? Which is not to say that they all couldn't find themselves on another plane in, say, 2007 that crashes on the Island.

But this option has its problems. If they collapse this time stream, then how did Ben get back to the Island? His only brush with the castaways would be in 1977 (which, according to Richard, he wouldn't remember) because that castaways time stream ends in that year with the Incident, right? And John wold still be alive, right? It pretty much all falls apart with this option unless they Powers That Be make up some random magical explanation to fix the paradox. Seems too messy to me. You?

2) It doesn't work. Whatever happened, happened. As Mils points out, maybe what they're doing is causing what is referred to as "the Incident." In this option, Faraday lied and was just working to maintain the status quo. Which would explain why he waltzed into the Others camp waving a pistol and making demands: he knew he had to die and planted the "blow up the Swan," and "these dudes are from the future, you have to evacuate the Island," ideas into the heads of Jack/Kate and Dr. Chiang respectively, before getting capped by his moms.

In this scenario, our castaways will have to time-skip to the future somehow. Maybe the Incident is supposed to set this off? If so, it'll be some great pseudo-science to do so. This solution's a lot less messy and brings the castaways to the future with their experiences intact. This one makes the most sense, but we've got eight months to change our minds on it.

or, 3) Something nobody can foresee and is totally crazy but somehow works. I'm putting my money on this one. Seriously, why do I even try and guess where this show is going? It's not like Fringe, where every twist is mapped out in advance and comes at you like a drunken old man taking a swing at you: By the time he's followed through, you've dodged it and you're setting up for his next go, sort of laughing but having a good time. (Don't get me wrong, it's an enjoyable show, but it's not even in the same league as Lost. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.) Lost, on the other hand, totally blindsides you every single week, darting around the ring while you stumble after it, flailing your arms while you pray your vision stops blurring.

And so here we are, staring at the white closing screen, a perfect inversion of the ending of every other episode's ending. And we wait.


"Suddenly, everything has changed." - The Flaming Lips

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Lets discuss. Leave it in the comments section, peeps.

If You Haven't Watched "Namaste," Yet, You Should Probably Not Read This

* I like Frank Lapidus.
* "Dude, your English is awesome."
* Carlos is awful eager to start exploring the Hydra Station, don't you think?
* Sun: "Where are you going?" Ben: "Back to our island. Wanna come?"
* ETHAN! THE BABY'S NAME IS ETHAN! AAAAAAH!
* "I vote for 'not camping.'"
* What is it with Hurley and dog-themed apparel?
* Aaah, the old "Oar to the Back Of the Head" trick. Well-played, Kwon.
* "Based on your aptitude tests, you'll be doing janitorial work."
* Duh! Why did it take me like half of the episode to figure out where I'd heard the name "Radzinsky"?
* Also, Radzinsky's a bit of a jerk, isn't he?
* That wreckage on the docks is from when Locke blew up the submarine.
* Dude! Otherville is haunted by Christian Shepherd! Who can pick up stuff, so is he not an apparition or whatevs?
* Okay, ABC, you got me curious about The Unusuals. Shut up now.
* "I'm sorry, but you have a bit of a journey ahead of you."
* What's Sawyer reading, I wonder.
* Jack is such a b-hole. Srsly.
* Basically, Sawyer is rad.
* Awww, look at little Ben, bringing Sayid a sandwich.
* I love this freaking show.

Actors Whose Involvement In a Project Piques My Interest

1. Nathan Fillion
2. Simon Pegg
3. Patrick Warburton
4. Bill Murray
5. Any Wilson brother: Luke, Owen or Andrew
6. Sam Rockwell
7. William Shatner
8. Emmanuel Lewis