ABC/Mario Perez

by Sarah Carbiener

Finally!  They’re blowing up stuff (both characters and major set pieces)! We’re down to the final hours of this epic series, and there’s still an enormous cast to burn. Not every statue, Ajira passenger, mid-eighteenth-century shipping vessel and candidate can survive the last stretch of the last season.  Hurley (Jorge Garcia), always the wry voice of reason, knows that the body count is about to start climbing, and he’s the first character this season who seems to be truly concerned with keeping everyone alive.

Hurley has always been one of my favorites, and I’ve found his character arc to be one of the most satisfying in the entire series. An episode from one of the first few seasons had him on the verge of committing suicide, convinced the entire island is in his head. This came after weeks and months of seeing him play the funny guy with the great one-liners about polar bears, Others, and hatches. He’s still the guy with the greatest observations—his conversation with Miles about Back to the Future from last season comes to mind—but now he’s a leader and brave and just plain awesome.

One of the reasons Hurley came off so well this week was because there was a little less conversation and a little more action. Last week, with the notable exception of Charlie driving Desmond into a lake, we had a lot of characters talking about what was really going on, that there are these other lives they’re meant to be living. Hurley and Libby actually struggled with what that means.

Libby approaches him when he’s waiting for his blind date (did anyone else’s heart break when he asked for another basket of tortilla chips?) and she tries to explain to him how they’ve met before.  Even though he has no idea what she’s talking about and sees her dragged back to the mental hospital, he seeks her out anyway, writes one fat check to gain access to her just so they can talk, and finally shares a picnic with her on the beach. When they kiss and their lives on the island come flooding back to him, it was an amazing, touching moment because Hurley had worked hard to get there even though he didn’t believe.

But while this made for a pretty good episode, it would have been an amazing hour of television had it been episode three or four this season. If the season had started off with the Richard Alpert episode, which really got to the heart of what the series is about, and gotten to last week’s Desmond episode and this week’s Hurley story sooner, I really think we would have had a sixth season more worthy of the first five.

I’ll finish up with a theory of sorts that may not turn out to be literally true but was certainly true thematically and plot-wise this episode: Desmond is the new Jacob. In the side flash, he’s going around to other Oceanic passengers and touching their lives somehow. In a sense, he’s driving them to seek out the truth, bringing them together, and driving them to the island. Maybe this is why on the island, the Smoke Monster was so upset by Desmond that he had to shove him down a well.  Although, side flash Desmond more than returned the favor when he plowed his car into wheel-chair-bound Locke. A car has a much greater impact on a person than a candy bar, that’s for sure.

While everybody does love Hugo, who doesn’t love Ben as the history teacher who chases off potential pedophiles? And did anyone else feel like they blew up Ilana not simply because the island was done with her as Ben said, but because the writers were done with her and wanted to use her death for shock value rather than tie up her storyline in a meaningful way? I mean, she’s the one who helped Ben join the good guys. She deserved better than Arntz.

What did you think? Happy to see Libby again? What is Des up to?

Courtesy ABC/Mario Perez

by Sarah Carbiener

“I want to punch Damon Lindelof in the face.”

“Get in line.”

“I miss when the show was about polar bears.”

Clearly, a few of my fellow viewers were not fans of tonight’s episode even though it featured everyone’s favorite constant, Desmond Hume. I don’t know that I was as consistently and vehemently disappointed as the rest of them, but tonight’s episode, “Happily Ever After,” moved at a snail’s pace for me. The direction of each scene was immediately obvious, and yet everyone took their sweet time getting there. This is particularly disappointing as there were some really interesting, satisfying moments buried between the suspense-less hypothetical speeches where everyone took way too long explaining things we already know.

Because I don’t want to get in line to punch Lindelof in the face (while I could take Lindelof, the frighteningly tall Carlton Cuse would end me), let’s start with the good. One of my all-time favorite parts of Lost is the relationship between Desmond and Charlie after Desmond survives the hatch explosion. In large part because of Desmond, Charlie grows up. He becomes a man, the man Claire and her baby need him to be, and he willingly sacrifices himself to save them all from Widmore’s men. Desmond reluctantly gets close to a man he knows is doomed to die and tries to save him anyway. The scene in tonight’s episode where Charlie crashes Desmond’s car into the water to show them their other lives on the island, and the shot-for-shot recreation of the moment of Charlie’s sacrifices were an enormous and thrilling payoff.*

Everything around this payoff, however, bored me to tears. Lost’s love triangles and romantic troubles are a study in extremes. They’re either gut-wrenching in the best way or annoying as hell. If you’re Desmond and Penny or Sun and Jin during the first four seasons, you’re in a gut-wrenching relationship.  If you’re Kate or anyone who loves Kate, you’re annoying. But those relationships can only be one way or the other when the action revolves around the relationships and not hypothetical conversations about love at first sight. There were three long scenes where characters essentially asked, “Do you believe in love at first sight?” That’s not drama. That’s killing time until Desmond puts two and two together and decides that the rest of flight Oceanic 815 needs to know about this other amazing reality they’re missing out on.

Desmond is important. Desmond is aware of more than one reality at once and has the ability to slip through time and space. Desmond loves Penny more than anything. Desmond is not going to die between some big electromagnets because he survived the hatch explosion. Knowing these things, I thought it was incredibly obvious where everything was headed tonight. I love that they’re using Desmond to bring the sideways reality and the events on the island together, but this should have happened sooner. It doesn’t make up for all that time I spent not knowing why I should care about what was happening off the island.  Besides, no matter how relieved I am that the sideways flashes aren’t simply an epilogue in advance, I expect more from my Desmond episodes.

Maybe I’m holding a grudge against this episode because of all the terrible ones I’ve sat through leading up to it. I feel like Lindelof and Cuse are going to bust down my door in the middle of the night and scream, “What the hell do you want from us?”

To quote the little boy on the tricycle in The Incredibles:

“I don’t know. Something amazing, I guess!”

*In five seasons, weren’t there enough moments like this to mirror in the sideways flashes prior to this episode? Seriously epic things have happened on Lost. Why did they wait this long to do something this awesome in the sideways flash?  WHY?

Disclaimer: This was one of eight episodes left in the final season of Lost.  At this stage of the game, avoiding spoilers is nigh impossible. You have been warned.

I’m incredibly conflicted and frustrated after watching this episode, and it’s not because I didn’t enjoy it. I did. I think…It was the Richard episode. Something I’ve been looking forward to since we learned he doesn’t age and his eyeliner never smudges! It’s not that my expectations were so high that it was impossible for me to enjoy it. Season six up to this point has done plenty to lower my expectations, and I had very few preconceived notions as to what Richard (Nestor Carbonell) was about because he’s always been so mysterious.

There were things I absolutely loved. They dropped the sideway flashes in favor of one continuous flashback in which we learned exactly what Richard went through to get to the island. They didn’t splinter the forty-three minutes between so many characters that each ends up with too little to do. Richard is in almost every single scene, and these scenes take place over a hundred years before the rest of the gang was born.

Since we spent so much time in the mid-nineteenth century, there wasn’t a lot of, “Tell me what’s going on!”  because it was obvious to a Catholic like Ricardo (Richard’s given name). He died and went to hell. Not only is that a brilliant nod to one of the earliest, most prevalent Lost theories,* but it’s so true to Richard’s character that it doesn’t feel cheap. The guy is literally old school.

I also really enjoyed the way they built up to Richard’s immortality. After he accidentally murders a man, he asks a priest for God’s forgiveness. The priest cruelly tells him the only way to regain God’s grace is through penance, and because he’s going to be hanged in the morning, he doesn’t have time for that.

Then there was the scene on the beach where Jacob laid it all out. This episode answered a lot of the mythology, and while some of it was about the set dressing (how Black Rock ended up in the middle of the jungle and how the statue on the beach became a four-toed foot on the beach), Jacob gave us a pretty major answer. He brings people to the island to prove to the Man in Black that, of their own free will, people are inherently good.

I don’t mind at all that this is coming down to a battle of good versus evil. In fact, I think that’s the most satisfying place a series this sprawling could go. I don’t know, though, if I can stomach Jacob crashing planes and ships, bringing people to the island and letting them watch their loved ones die in their arms, just so the Man in Black can see how kind they were to their fellow man before they kick it. I mean, really?

When Jacob asked what would be the point of his telling people to do the right thing, I absolutely love that Richard countered with, “But if you don’t, he will!” Jacob obviously hadn’t considered this, and that’s how Richard got his job as the man who tries to convince people to do the right thing on behalf of Jacob, the Jiminy Cricket of the island.**

Maybe I just need to sit down and watch the whole thing again. Was anyone else as torn as I was? Want to chime in on the wine bottle, the boar, Isabella, and the dozen other things I glossed over?

* It reminded me of the Hurley episode where he’s convinced he’s back in the mental institution and everything is happening inside his head. Another Lost theory intelligently disproved in a great episode.

** In this economy, anyone who can create a position for themselves is to be appreciated.

“Wait, when did that plane crash?”

“It was like two days ago because the second half of last season was all one day, and the temple stuff was just the day after that.”

“No, it’s been at least a week.”

“What about Jack’s ugly scar thing on his face?”

“It doesn’t tell time; it’s just inconsistent make-up.”

This is a snippet from the confused, hilarious conversation that ensued at my weekly Lost viewing party once the credits rolled on this week’s episode, “Recon.” While I was thrilled that this was an episode about Sawyer, another of my favorite characters, this conversation points out everything that was wrong with this week’s show. If it had been a genuinely good Sawyer story, my friends and I would have been babbling somewhat incoherently about how amazing and brilliant he was, and wasn’t “Locke’s” new nickname hysterical?

Although the first fifteen minutes were great, seriously great, as in the off-island scene **SPOILER ALERT** where Sawyer starts to run his usual con on a woman he’s just bedded and when she pulls a gun on him, he reveals that he’s an undercover cop! And his partner is Miles! Sheer brilliance!

But then this whole reveal off-island is wasted as it just drags out Sawyer telling Miles something we’ve all known for years: Daddy shot Mommy and then killed himself and Sawyer will murder the man responsible. All the off-island scenes were literally Miles telling Sawyer that he could tell him anything, or demanding Sawyer tell him the truth and then Sawyer being a damaged, obsessed guy hunting down the actual, um, Sawyer. (No wonder Lost fans sound insane to people who don’t watch the show.)  **END SPOILER ALERT** While the off-island scenes run on auto pilot, the home viewers have time to worry about the convoluted timeline of the past few seasons.

The island scenes weren’t much better. Unlike last week’s episode, where I had no idea what Ben was going to do in his incredibly life-threatening, life-changing situation, I could foresee all of Sawyer’s moves this week. He’s a con man. He’s done with the others and Jacob and the Dharma Initiative so he’s looking out for number one and the select few he still gives a damn about. And that’s exactly what he does in the most predictable manner ever, and he doesn’t even coin any awesome new nicknames doing it!

The only surprise this week, other than the previously mentioned spoiler, was that I didn’t hate Kate. She was the closest to being outright murdered that she’s ever been and, though I was initially disappointed that she didn’t bleed out, I actually enjoyed the rest of her scenes. Go figure.

Would you trust this man?

I loved, loved, LOVED this week’s episode, and not just because Kate was nowhere in sight. “Dr. Linus” reminded me where the bar should be and, in retrospect, last week’s episode has lost all its luster.* It’s not just that Michael Emerson is absolutely mind-blowing as Benjamin Linus and completely rocked this episode, but the show was about the characters this week, not the answers! I feel like I have been rewarded for putting up with Kate all these seasons.

It’s incredibly clear that the series is gearing up towards a big battle between good and evil. Characters are knowingly and unknowingly choosing sides, and quite a few bodies have hit the jungle floor. Up until this week, however, I forgot why I should care about a big battle on a mythical island that attracts planes and polar bears. The answer is the fallout; it’s always been the fallout. From the first time they crashed onto the island, the best episodes have been about the characters sorting through the wreckage, making decisions, and dealing with the horrible consequences one way or another.

Ben has made a lot of bad decisions with some really horrifying consequences. This week on the island, we get the biggest and best payoff ever with his character. He faces up to everything he’s done and what it’s cost him, and then he makes another choice, a new choice. It tangentially relates to the mythology, the answers, and the big battle on the horizon, but it’s incredibly powerful because the focus is on what Ben and Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) are suffering through as human beings, independent of all the symbolism and callbacks and statues on the beach.**

Also, in the off-island scenes, Ben was put in a situation parallel to one of the most traumatic events his character has experienced so far. This made the comparatively lower-stakes off-island stuff feel so important. I knew exactly why I cared what happened; I don’t know why it hasn’t been that way in every off-island storyline this season. If it’s because they’re saving the really extreme parallel storylines for the main Oceanic 6 later on, that’s seriously lame.

It felt like the show’s creators flipped a switch this week and suddenly the whole series is back on track. Like Alan Sepinwall, I even enjoyed the Jack scenes this week. They had the classic montage at the end where a bunch of people were reunited on the beach. My heart, it was warmed.

What did you think? Are you also holding your breath to see if they’ll keep up this momentum? Did you notice the two Real Genius alumni in the off-island scenes?

MILDLY SPOILERY DISCUSSION QUESTION:

If someone had you at gunpoint, would you dig your own grave?

*Spoilers from last week’s episode

In last week’s “Sunset,” there were a few good scenes with Sayid. However, the baseball backstory, the horrible exposition—Sayid’s brother telling Sayid that he was a torturer for the Republic, something I’m pretty sure Sayid knows already, and the anticlimactic end to the temple (yes, I think the smoke monster is fairly anticlimactic at this point)—all made for a pretty eye-roll-inducing episode. I think I was just distracted by all the violence after the week before where in “Lighthouse,” Jack drank, felt sorry for himself, and smashed stuff. Mirror make Jack MAD!

**More spoilers!

At the end when Ilana asked Ben why he would go with Locke, and Ben said, “Because he’s the only one who’ll have me,” that is what this show is all about: the real, human reasons the characters on the island do what they do. I need to re-watch that entire scene immediately.

As part of the WGA Foundation’s fantastic Anatomy of a Script series, I had the pleasure of hearing Matthew Weiner talk about the pilot script for Mad Men. Luckily for me, the three-hour talk evolved into a discussion of his writing career as a whole, how he runs his show (and make no mistake, it is one hundred percent his show), and his obsession with tarot cards. Okay, maybe he didn’t go on at length about his obsession with tarot cards, but it did dominate the first five minutes of the discussion.

The thing that shocked me the most about the pilot that started this amazing series is that no one would read it. That is not hyperbole. He was working on the pilot while writing for Becker (the Ted Danson sitcom where he played a cranky doctor to prove he wasn’t just a laid-back bartender) and no one would read it. He was hired by David Chase to write for The Sopranos and still no one would read it. And this was, is, one of the best pilot scripts of all time, in my opinion.

So when against all odds, he got to shoot the pilot, and then against even higher odds, he got to make the show, Weiner decided to be uncompromising as all hell. He rewrites every episode, demands the show be shot the exact way he wrote it, and doesn’t apologize for any of it. I’ve heard similar stories about showrunner-creators and usually been more than a little disappointed to learn that my idol is a tyrant. Weiner, however, said something that had never occurred to me before: He “doesn’t want to waste it.”

The odds of getting your own show on television are greater than the odds of an airplane crashing into the room where you’re sitting with your computer right now (his expression). Since the impossible happened, he’s going to take full and complete advantage of it. He works, lives, and breathes all things Mad Men, knows it better than anyone, cares about it more than anyone, and so why shouldn’t the shot of Betty looking at the camera be shot the way he wants it?*

As for the pilot itself and its genesis, he dictated the whole thing to someone he paid to type for him. He spent the money so that he would take the endeavor seriously. He hired a researcher, read books, worked for years on the concept, and then literally spoke the whole thing out loud over the course of nine days. Granted, it played on a culture and time that he’d been obsessed with since a child, but still. Nine. Days.

Someone asked if his experience writing his own pilot made him want to change how pilots are developed now. The short answer is yes; longer answer is don’t develop pilots at all. Write them for free, for yourself, because letting a guy in a suit tell you to make the doctor a personal trainer isn’t going to make for a great script.

He also insisted that The Sopranos was a comedy. After he explained that the episode he won the Emmy for was about Tony realizing a guy was a rat because he said Tony looked like he lost weight, I see Weiner’s point. From working on that show, he learned “Don’t talk everything to death,” meaning at a certain point, the room full of writers agreed on how humans behaved and didn’t need to logic everything to death. For example, when are people the most self-destructive? When they’re on top of the world.

Finally—I know this post is running long but trust me, I’m cutting it short because the man talked for three hours—he said one of the truest things about being a struggling writer I have ever heard. Quoting as best I can from my scribbled notes:

“Struggling to make it, everyone thinks about it as the rejection of a finished work. No one will read you, no one will hire you, and that’s part of it. But struggling is really about all the time you’re wasting and not hating yourself for what you haven’t done yet.”

So don’t hate yourself for the scripts you haven’t finished, do your research, don’t assume that because no one’s ever read you that they never will, and never bring a tractor to Madison Avenue.

*He never denied that he appreciates the team behind him. He said over and over that his wife is responsible for half of what you see in the show, giving her advice, support, and opinion on every aspect of it. In fact, she is directly responsible for a speech in season 2 that left me sobbing twenty minutes after the episode ended. He said he couldn’t do the show without the room full of writers fleshing out the stories and characters each episode, but yes, he does rewrite them.

Lost has almost lost its hold on me, to the point where the clunky dialogue nearly ruins the show. Some may call me a writer Nazi (ahem, @xoxoGG), but no character on this show should ever ask another character, “What’d I miss?”

This was one of the better, if not the best episode this season, and that one line almost ruined all forty-two minutes of it for me. One of my absolute favorite things about this show from the beginning is how everyone who crashed on Oceanic Flight 815 has been in the audience’s shoes because they didn’t know what the hell was going on, either. The mystery was revealed to them at the same time it was being revealed to us, and I was glued to the television for hours and hours because it was almost never expositional or heavy handed.

I know they all ask “What?” a lot (check out video below), but this year, one character will ask another, “What happened?” right after we saw exactly what happened! Kate says, “What’d I miss” as if she took a bathroom break without the benefit of a DVR.

Anyway, this episode was all about Sayid, and given that he is a man of action—ultra-violent action—it was a whole lot more about moral ambiguity and a body count than about getting any answers. I know the ABC promos promised that this week was the one for answers, but they lied once again. And frankly, that’s okay with me.

During last week’s episode, I realized why this season hasn’t been resonating with me the way the first five did. Up until now, I’ve always felt that the mythology was secondary to each character’s journey. Sure, the mythology drove a lot of the action, but the subtext was always Jack’s God complex, Locke’s myopic desire to fulfill his destiny, or Kate’s constant squinting. This year, mythology and character arcs have traded places because it’s all about answers, but if I stop caring about the characters you can bet I’m not going to give two shits about the answers.

Thankfully, this week’s episode ignored the ABC promos, and we got to see Sayid try to deny his nature. No matter how good he tries to be, he’s still a killer. Jacob, the black smoke monster, and whom Kate chooses to sleep with all took a back seat to one of the main characters wrestling with impossible choices on and off the island, which made for riveting TV.

Now if Kate would just keep her stupid mouth shut…

What did you think of this episode? Did you want more answers?

I was first inspired to watch Lost by hearing someone recount a Locke (Terry O’Quinn) episode from the first season. After getting the play-by-play of the first Locke-centric episode, where he tries to go on his walkabout, I knew I had to watch this show. Six seasons later, he is still the main reason I keep tuning in. After the shocking reveal at the end of last season, I’m very happy the character and the actor are getting the treatment they deserve.

The biggest difference between this week’s episode and last week’s is obviously that the “flashbacks” were so much more meaningful. They were entirely believable and, even though there were no guns or fugitive shenanigans, everything felt like it mattered more. Even when Locke has nothing left to lose, as is often the case, he still fights like he has everything at stake.

I find that in episodes where the writers don’t heavily broadcast what they’re trying to get across or what they may or may not reveal (unlike episodes where Jack demands answers over and over again) are the most riveting. This week, it’s never entirely clear what exactly we’re going to figure out by episode’s end, and so when we do learn something new, the impact is that much greater.

Locke episodes are great, but man, are they exhausting. Watching him struggle against the terrible hand life has dealt him over the course of an hour really takes it out of me. I sit there, tense, willing good things to happen for him and they almost never do.

Locke makes it worth renting Season 1 and starting the whole series from the beginning. But if you’re going to do that, you’d best catch up before the series finale in May. I’m guessing spoilers will be even more rampant than the spoilers for the final Harry Potter book.

What did you think of this episode? Were you exhausted like I was afterwards?

There’s only one thing I hate more than filler episodes of Lost, and it’s filler episodes that revolve around Kate (Evangeline Lilly). Even after learning of the episode’s title, “What Kate Does,” and lowering my expectations for it, I was still pretty disappointed by the final title card.

Most of my frustration was derived from the “flashbacks” to Kate the fugitive. (Those of you caught up on the show know why flashbacks is in quotes. Those of you who aren’t should be intrigued…) To me, Kate the fugitive was never half as interesting as Sayid the torturer or Charlie the has-been musician or even Jack the spinal surgeon with a god complex. In all the ways that the season premiere reminded me why I initially loved all these characters, this episode served as a reminder of all the reasons I didn’t love Kate. Despite that, the little details, hints, and callbacks in the flashbacks were really fun to watch for, and I wish there had been even more of them.

Back on the island, even in the scenes without Kate, they repeated other aspects of the show I grew tired of several seasons ago. Over and over again, the Oceanic survivors demanded answers from a group of mysterious captors who ignored their pleas for information. Thankfully, the episode did end with a mysterious, powerful figure being straight with Jack, and although it was a juicy reveal, it was too little too late.

This episode did set a lot of character dynamics, mysteries, and plot lines in motion for the rest of the season. If you plan on watching it all on DVD, you probably won’t even be bothered by how little happens here because the next episode won’t be 167 hours away.*

If you love Kate and Evangeline Lilly, I look forward to reading your comments defending her and her tracking skills. If she frustrates you like she does me, let it out!

*This observation would have been so much cooler if there were, say, 158 hours between episodes. Or 1623. Or 4.

by Sarah Carbiener

The Lost final season premiere felt like an effort to not disappoint any one segment of its fans and thus risked disappointing all of them. Showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse seemed determined to have their cake and eat it, too, but that was all right with me.

Of all the shows to write about, this is possibly the hardest to discuss without spoiling it. Any scene reference, almost any single line of dialogue, is enough to give away something huge. This has always been a show where every detail matters, even if it never makes sense or never ties back into the overall plot. So, know that I’m going to do my best to keep it spoiler free but read on at your own peril if you are several seasons (or even an episode) behind.

The fifth season ended with Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) detonating the bomb at the bottom of a chasm that in the future would be the swan hatch that Locke broke into and Desmond later blew up. OR, the fifth season ended with more time travel, with all the main characters leaving the 1970s and those crazy hippies running the Dharma Initiative behind in the past and reentering the present timeline. We don’t know what happened because the whole thing flashed to white and we were made to wait many months until Groundhog Day 2010 to find out what actually happened.

The season premiere gave us many answers to that cliffhanger question, and what I liked most about the eventful—sometimes stressful—two hours was that it reminded me of all the reasons I enjoyed Lost in its first season. I was reminded of who these people were before they crashed on the island, and all the reasons I had to root for them and their happiness. Furthermore, the direction in which this season seems to be going doesn’t negate everything we’ve seen in the last five. It’s building on all the pain, suffering and beautiful moments these people have had together over three years, thirty days, and impossible lengths of time because of so much time travel.

I don’t know if the creators will be able to pull off eating their own cake all season, but I’ll be glued to a television set every Tuesday night, hoping that they do.