Last Lost: "The Last Recruit"

by Ryland Walker Knight

I.

X never marks the spot

II.

Go on, tell her

III.

Hipster hair, sneer

IV.

Smokey ringing loud

Last Lost: "Lighthouse"

by Ryland Walker Knight

After seeing four by Dorsky (more later, non-Lost fans), helping my bud Brian haul some keyboards, and fixing a supremely late dinner sandwich, I settled into the couch with the DVR for what amounted to a pretty basic episode with very few answers. But I guess I can't expect the show to live up to the promos, cuz that's what promos do: they whet the whistle. In any case, this lighthouse was cool, but hardly a revelation. Just another component in Jacob's all seeing all knowing apparent benevolence. Okay, so Jacob's been watching these "losties"—in particular Jack—for a while now; not too big a surprise given we've seen Jacob alive (and seemingly well) in the days of man'o'wars and unstylish smocks. Nor should it surprise that Jacob wanted the lighthouse inoperable after all. No, the biggest scare was: Is Jack going to fuck up Hurley?

Of course Jack wouldn't hurt Hurley. Lindlelof and Cuse don't want to lose even more good will with their audience. Besides, Hurley's got to stick around to talk to Jacob's ghost or spirit or whatever. What made the scene shake, though, was how uncool Matthew Fox was: he really got wild eyed. He really sold Jack at the end of his rope. But you'd like to think a dude who was willing to admit he came back to the island because he was broken and was wrong about just about everything since that return (and knows it) had already hit rock bottom. But no. The pile-on continues. Jack's almost a Job. (I don't want to admit the links between Shepherd and who in the bible was a shepherd, or simply what a shepherd is, just yet—but, there, I gave the thought a thought.) And don't get me started on the off island junk of this episode, though there were wrinkles in the otherwise cornball "dad issues" plot. —The main wrinkle, of course, being not Jack's memory problems, and that mysterious scar on his torso, but Dogen showing up at the recital hall; but that was too vague to draw any conclusions from at this point.

Another bit of obvious was that Claire's really and truly off her rocker, now friends with Dark Locke, and convinced (poisoned against) the others, or the temple people, as those responsible for Aaron's disappearance from the island. The best thing about that reveal was the line reading of, "Oh, that's not John, that's my friend," while Terry O'Quinn just smiled. Otherwise, those few scenes were just Emilie De Raven doing her usual thing, you know, and coming off as the least believable murderer around. Put otherwise, I was bored by her reversal. More interesting was Jin telling a lie about the truth only to lie some more in order to save his skin. It's easy to forget, now that he's so sweet and altruistic about finding Sun, that Jin spent a lot of his adult life before the island as a henchman, as a killer, as somebody who knows how people are manipulated and manipulable. But those were flashes inside a pretty predictable bit.

Sorry if this bit of blogging seems too blasé, but, well, the episode didn't wow me. Part of this is because I was tired, and I'm tired now as I type this; part of this is because I had all kinds of angles on light and shadow and color and different registers of gravities still piling in my head; and part of this is because the episode lacked any real urgency. What made seasons 4 and 5 so great was their hurtling through plot. Each episode made a claim on a character. There's nothing new here that needed a full episode to unravel. The really daring thing to do would've been to get the lighthouse broken and Dark Locke's appearance into this week well before half-time; after all, all I did seeing these things happen was wait for what would come next. In that, it's great television, designed to addict. And Lost has always gotten the medium: in a lot of ways, ways that I know very little of, the show is about, or at least seems interested, in various television histories as part of its own mythology. I can sense this, and I've never seen an episode of Gilligan's Island, or very much Star Trek (in any iteration), let alone any other adventure shows I'm sure it references, like cartoons. Ed Howard mentioned comics in the comments on the season premiere, and that seems apt, too, of course, though I don't know which comics, exactly, would come into play here (I read Batman and Sin City and then-newly-formed Image comics almost exclusively in middle school). Basically, though, it's about the broader "sci fi" or "adventure" genres (and their sometimes overlap) as media in themselves, how they appropriate and redeploy certain tropes or myths to prove, among other things, that good and evil exist to fight.

So, yeah, here's hoping that when these bad people we once thought pure raid the temple in next week's "Sundown" we get a few more dead bodies that matter. That's basically what I want to see at this point: who do they have the balls to kill off? And will Sayid's infection swing him into line with Claire and Dark Locke after all? Or can Dogen speak enough Japanese to confuse everybody? And, really, is Jack that important? Is he really going to take over? Are he and Kate truly destined to rule the island, away from the world, while Sawyer finds his way back to it? Maybe, though, we'll just be lucky enough to get a few more great compositions like those around the mirrors. Those shots, and that scene, showed what they get right on Lost sometimes: marrying outsized structure to a few images, and this season seems all about reflections and refractions, so what better way than beaming back into the world? And what other reaction can you expect from a broken dude who breaks everything? He doesn't see straight anyways, much less in a mirror, and we saw that in the first episode of the season on the alternate plane.


Also, I kinda just want to stop talking about Jack every week.

Last Lost: "LA X"

by Ryland Walker Knight

[FYI LUNCHTIME UPDATE: These weeklies will be posted weekly over at the new and improved House Next Door as well. We encourage comments at either joint, though I'd be fibbing if I said I wouldn't miss your eyes and words here especially.]

Though we got a glimpse of how good things would get early on with Jack looking into the mirror, tipping a hand to doubles, the real money came after that CGI plunge to reveal the foot, after the first commercial break: Kate, midair, hanging off a branch. There's even a wide shot to show her in a space of branches, the frame all a zig-zag of lines around this lady. After last season's record-skip start that saw our principals shuffled through time across the island's 20th century, here we get time as a tree. It's gnarled and knotty and nutty. It's branching, manifest in the title of the episode, too, with that "X" sitting apart from the "LA" as a clever signpost of things at a cross, or overlaid, or collapsed yet separate. Every turn's effect depends on a few different histories, including yours. Like any good soap opera, you've got to have your stories straight—and catch up is near impossible in the space of one episode. That fearless game of "stay with me" is what keeps amazing me with Lost. This show trusts its audience. However, it also asks a lot.

Yet my biggest complaint of the first night wasn't the speed of plot—that's the fun of the later seasons—but, call me crotchety, the frequency of the commercials. Were I not prone to front line fandom (I saw Avatar on opening day at the first IMAX 3D show possible after all), I would only ever watch Lost on demand/DVR. It's such a compelling chiasmus—both twining and untwining the plot; that X goes along two lines—that I, like so many, get impatient and anxious. I need to know!

—Home?
That said, it's all falling into place in a lot of fun ways, most particularly with this new Locke, or as I am going to call him from here on, Dark Locke, after his Man-in-Black heritage. (Guess we could call him Johnny Locke, or Cash Locke or some silly combo, too, but Dark Locke sounds like Darth Vader and I dig that more.) The scenes in the foot centered around the "reveal" of Dark Locke's identity were some of the best tête-à-tête match ups of the show between its two best (here I mean compelling) characters and character actors. Terry O'Quinn, in particular, kills it. He's got most of the best moments of the show, of this episode, and he seems to know it; there's an actorly glee about him when he says, "Sorry you had to see me that way," after, well, killing a cadre of Jacob-followers as the so-called smoke monster. (He also grins through, "Let's not get into name-calling.") This Dark Locke's more than vengeful: he's that great villain archetype of one part tyrant (unstoppable, apparently immortal) and one part sadist (I think the character, not just O'Quinn, is having fun toying with these pawns).

If it wasn't clear last season that we've left Sci-Fi for Fantasy, it should be doubly discernible at this point. I'm sure there's some physics I don't know behind the branching-universe (and -time) ideas at the core of this season's apparent structuring, but all the plot hanging on those limbs, like Kate, is wholly preposterous in the best ways possible. Put otherwise, there's no science to ghosts. Ghosts are an element of the fantastic, an interpretation of the real, not so much virtual as imagined, somehow. That's what I'm looking forward to understanding better as the season progresses: just how this specter became material, and how he can change back spectral at will again.

I'm also pretty jazzed to see how the "What If" plot plays out. Though after a few scenes I worried it would reduce itself to "look how crummy their old lives were," that scene between Jack and Locke in the missing luggage room sealed this branch's appeal. It was the one scene where I actually kinda dug Jack, for one, as it highlighted the good side of his altruism. And, for another, again, there was Terry O'Quinn all benevolent and calm. In fact, I have to say that it was O'Quinn's face in the final montage that closes "Part 1" of "LA X" that really sold me on the back-to-reality side: he projects thought unlike any of the other actors, including Michael Emerson, on the show; and he looked shamed and devastated and resigned in ways we haven't seen from Locke in some time. I'm a sucker for a misfit. And I'm loathe to admit it, but, well, I know a lot of my aversion to Matthew Fox isn't just his television-bound acting tics (how much can you nod and furrow your brow?) but also that Jack, plain and simple, is a go-getter asshole. Granted, his position in the show is very interesting, say his arc if you will, from outright hero type to confused dolt, but the dolt part has always been there. That said, it's the go-getter dolt who believes he can reverse Locke's condition, and that hubris is moving.

—Says who
Back on the island, though, it's all jock all the time and even Jack's bravado is the pose of, as I chatted with some friends, a FUCKING BITCH! In that, it's almost hilarious how Cuse and Lindelof seem to want to pile on Jack. Every choice he makes on the island looks wrong. If he's our true protagonist, it's certainly fitting because of all of Oceanic Flight 815 he is the most lost, chasing one red herring after another. He never hears a voice from within that isn't colored from without. He's prey. He's looking for a shepherd, not a flock; he cannot handle a herd with any aplomb. And now he's at the mercy of John Hawkes and some temple people all obsessed with ashes (or was that gunpowder?) to protect themselves from this new Dark Locke. Oh, and, he is let off the hook for Sayeed. Guess he can't be wrong all the time.

[Next week I'm hoping to make some TV Time images to go with these random-fire ideas. Until then, thanks for reading! This season sure does look like it'll be fun!]