By Andrew Dignan
The way the promos at the end of last night’s episode of Lost hyped next year’s uninterrupted string of 16 new episodes you’d think the show’s producers had brokered world peace or found the cure for cancer. Coming at the end of an episode where little happened outside of the final 10 minutes, the flash-edited advertisement finds the show crowing about somehow accomplishing the unfathomable feat of airing over a dozen new episodes … Without a single repeat… Or a week off in between … Not even one! Swear to God.
Never mind that 24 has done the same thing for a few years now. And please ignore the cost of such an unimaginable achievement… namely the show’s nearly three month absence from the airwaves, starting next week. Clearly Lost is quite proud of its new broadcasting model, and I must admit that the serialized show should benefit greatly from the momentum that comes with four straight months of new programming.
Now it’s just a question of whether anyone will bother to come back to watch in the New Year.
Wednesday’s episode “I Do” from executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse was probably not the best episode to air before a long hiatus, lacking both the immediacy and urgency that keeps viewers clamoring for months on end. An all-around meandering hour of television, the episode finds us catching up with Kate (Evangeline Lilly) as she tries to adapt to married life with her blandly affable police officer husband Kevin (Nathan Fillion of Firefly). Uncomfortably pigeonholed into a domesticity of pushing shopping carts, “taco nights,” and cutesy innuendo with her hubby, Kate hides her criminal past (she’s even adopted the moniker of Monica) while still tempting fate by calling up US Marshall Edward Mars (Fredric Lehne) to ask him to stop chasing her. Mars seems to be toying with Kate, telling her if she remains anonymously settled in suburbia he’ll give up the hunt, as if he knows as well as the viewer that Kate is solely defined by her status as a fugitive.
Once upon a time—let’s call it season one—Kate was a favorite character of mine. Attractive, spunky, independent, able to pal around with the boys, could fire a gun; Kate was a worthy foil for Jack (Matthew Fox) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) and an agreeable contrast to the preening Shannon (Maggie Grace), the demure Sun (Yoon-jin Kim) and the largely invisible Claire (Emilie de Ravin). But at some point last season, she ceased to develop as a character. After striving to paint Kate as a woman who could take care of herself no matter what the situation, the show placed her too easily into the damsel-in-distress role, standing by helplessly, letting herself to be pushed around and frequently acquiescing to whatever demands were placed on her. Now this season, it seems like an episode doesn’t go by without Kate breaking down in tears and pleading for someone’s life.
“I Do” does, however, definitively answer what has emerged as the least interesting question on this show: will Kate choose Sawyer or Jack? If the Sawyer-centric episode two weeks ago left any lingering doubt that Kate digs bad boys, then the conjugal visit she pays to Sawyer’s cage in this installment pretty much seals the deal. (Now the only question is when she finds out he not only slept with Ana-Lucia last season but that he’s also likely carrying an STD.)
A couple weeks back there was a small revolt in the comments section as numerous people argued there was no logic in Kate's aborted escape attempt, even if it meant leaving Sawyer behind. At the time this didn’t especially bother me, but now, after being given a second opportunity (and apparently the flimsiest lock in history) and Kate still decides to stay behind, I’m convinced this show laughs in the face of Darwinism. Kate forgoes a window of opportunity to knock boots in a dank, dirty cage and cuddle all night with her Southern “gentleman,” and does so with full knowledge that Pickett (Michael Bowen) plans on killing Sawyer in the morning. Sawyer convinces her that escape is impossible because they’re on a different island than the rest of the castaways. So, here we have two hardened criminals who’d rather wait around to be murdered than risk the swim back to their island (lazy humans: the polar bears did it!)
As soap opera silly as Kate and Sawyer’s lovemaking may have been, it did result in a doozy of a reaction shot as Jack (ever the cuckold) catches the duo in a post-coitus embrace that so unnerves him it stops his own escape attempt dead in its tracks. Let free presumably by Alex (Tania Raymonde), who we see on edge and at odds with the rest of the “Others” earlier in the episode, Jack snakes his way through the Hydra and ends up at a gun locker where he quickly arms himself, then stands around watching a bank of video monitors long enough for Ben (Michael Emerson) to come up behind him.
It was par for the course for Jack, who remarkably gets dumber the longer the episode progresses. Starting off in a taunting, rightfuly antagonistic mode, Jack informs Ben that the tumor located in his spine is in dire need of surgery but he won’t operate on him. For a moment, he finally seems to have realized that nobody on this island can be trusted. Much of the episode is spent on Ben pressuring Jack by using Kate’s feelings for Sawyer (and in turn, Jack’s feelings for Kate), a ploy that would seem to have hit a brick wall upon Jack catching a glimpse of the canoodling.
For a beautiful, fleeting, second I thought we’d see the jealous rage Jack displayed in the season opener. I half expected him to tell Ben “fuck that hillbilly” (or TV-safe words to that extent), calling their bluff to kill Sawyer. But no, Jack decides then and there that he’ll operate on Ben in the morning, because he’s got a plan. And boy, is it a good one. Basically his plan is to stand around letting Ben slowly die on the operating table (he has roughly the length of an episode to live) so Kate and Sawyer can get a one-hour head start on their escape. That’s it. No negotiating for boats or a detailed map listing the best route back to their camp or a phone call to the outside world. Nope, you got 60 minutes to get the hell out of Dodge before the men with guns come after you. My God, these people are idiots, and the good doctor is the worst of them.
The episode’s last act highlights the two biggest problems with the new season so far. People on this show still do not communicate with one another, leading to Jack having no clue that they’re on a different island than everyone else. He doesn’t know this important piece of information because Sawyer never told Kate. Sawyer never told her because “he wanted to give her hope alive.” I’ve written before about the romanticized “comic book logic” which keeps this rickety vessel afloat, but this has to be some sort of nadir. Sawyer’s gesture may have been tender, but it was also painfully naïve and more than a little defeatist. How this guy made it through prison without getting shanked in the shower I’ll never understand.
The other problem I alluded to is that Lost -- a show so overlong it torments my TiVo every week by running a couple minutes past the hour -- insists on confining all essential plot to the final five to eight minutes of any given episode. This means we spend the better part of 50 minutes twiddling our thumbs until we return from the last commercial break, at which point we get Jack operating on Ben, Pickett attempting to kill Sawyer, Jack’s spur-of-the-moment O.R. hostage situation and Kate stuck between a rock and a hard place upon hearing Jack’s “brilliant” plan.
Lost has become so dependent on doling out plot in microbe-sized bites that it no longer feels as if the writers are just making up the seasons as they go along: it now feels like they’re also scrambling, minute by minute, to fill individual episodes as well. It’s become so important for this show to spark water cooler discussion that how we get to the patented stinger of the closing moments has become far less important than the shock value of the event itself. (Eko’s death last week was startling, yes, but also felt arbitrary and inconsistent -- a hastily conceived jolt of electricity meant to keep fans abuzz and on their toes.)
To that end, there’s no reason Ben’s surgery couldn’t have been shown earlier in the hour, with the aftermath of Jack’s underdeveloped plan serving as the backbone of the second half of the episode. I would be more excited about the next episode if I'd seen Kate and Sawyer running towards nothing but a big blue ocean with an enraged Pickett in hot pursuit while Jack slowly came to the realization that his ploy had backfired horrifically. The core elements for this scenario are currently in play, but they haven’t been developed yet, meaning there’s no real tension or dread to the situation. As it always does, Lost placed all of its chips on one number and rolled the dice; I suspect it'll come up snake eyes for them in February.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Lost Thursdays: Season Three, Ep. 6: "I Do"
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15 comments:
I thought Jack's not asking for a boat, or contact with the outside world, etc. made sense in that he knew he only had an hour before he'd either have to let Ben die or save him - before he'd have to play his hand. And asking for some future payment isn't an option - would you trust any of these people to keep their word? So he had to try something that could wok in an hour, and trying to get give Kate and Sawyer a chance to escape was the best he could come up with. Works for me.
The great thing about Lost is that you could always trust the creators to take care of their viewers. Stories would unfold but I always felt that they would lead to something.
I have given them a lot of chances. Now, I am angry.
These are guys who ARE in touch with their fans. They know what we want. The ONLY thing we don't want is stupidity. That and no questions answered. When they tell us that many questions will be answered by episode 6 and they don't do it, they lost viewers.
I am so angry this morning. A one hour lead? Fuck that.Negotiate to get eveveryone off the island. Today. And then do the operation.
Ridiculous show.
I'm too disgusted to even manage much of a post.
Right on, Dignan. Last night was such a total disappointment. I mean, was that really Alex, suddenly hurtling out of the bushes? Why was she in the episode at all? Nothing's been done with the damn character since forever, why keep her on the bench? And, again, I ask, where's her mama? And, then, later, Ben asking, as he is about to undergo surgery, "Did Alex ask about me?" Huh? What the hell is that? Are we to assume some connection (romantic? "Come to daddy") between them? Do we care? And Jack is such a black hole; an energy-drain. He's useless, a eunuch. These writers, their sinking desperation is showing, I tell you.
The teaser at the end was so lame. You can almost see the fingertips of the show's producers madly, frighteningly, bleeding, as they frantically clutch at something, anything, to keep them and their product holding on. Lame.
While a lot of it was stupid, I liked large swathes of it, which seems to set me apart from the entire rest of the Internets.
In particular, I liked individual shots or moments. O'Quinn clutching the cross necklace and having a silent moment with it was a favorite, as was the nice decision to let Kate and Jack seeing each other for the first time play out in silence. Finally, just to have three examples, I liked the oddly menacing shots of Emerson preparing for surgery, his head hovering above the camera.
However, by and large, both of the episode's stories stopped when they got interesting, which is a bad move I think (wasn't that Locke storyline just abandoned?). I'm willing to go with the comic book logic and then laugh about it later (I mean, hell, I'm still watching Prison Break and 24), but when you're doing a stupid story, best not stop said story at a point where the resolution will just point out how stupid it is.
But, as I said, I liked most of it. It wasn't as good or as bad as Lost can be, but I thought it was good dumb fun.
Oh, and I hope the producers/network switch to a starting in January and running straight through schedule for season four. The attempt to create a self-contained arc for these first six didn't work as well as I imagine they thought it did.
The big problem with the episode is the creator's mistaken belief that it is Jack, Kate and Sawyer who hold the most interest for viewers. The near-complete obliteration of Locke, Desmond, Hurley and Sayid through large swaths of this season, and almost all of last night's episode, is prime indication of just how clueless these people are.
Dan: Agreed, and then some. Whenever an episode focuses on Kate or Jack, my eyes hurt from constantly rolling up into my head. Jack is a pill, Kate a zero. I did like the scene where they talked to each other through the glass -- one actor's face seeming to merge with the other's reflection, which I'd call an allusion to Ingmar Bergman's Persona if I thought by this point that anyone associated with the series has any pre-1990 reference point besides The Twilight Zone -- but my pleasure was purely aesthetic and had no connection to the plot or characterizations. My heart raced a bit during the last eight minutes, but as Dignan points out, that's par for the course on a series that treads water for most of the hour, then packs a bunch of twists into the final leg.
And no sooner did Jack appear to come to his senses than he had a high school regression and threw everything out the window because he saw Kate and Sawyer sittin' in a tree. His "demands" in the surgery room were not really demands at all; he ran the tables at that point, but you'd never know it, and given Kate's idiotic soap opera behavior, I question whether she's worth saving (from the standpoint of the good of the group and getting them all off the island someday -- remember that?).
So the producers are taking some time off and will be back with 16 consecutive episodes next year. Bully for them. I wish I could be excited, but the whole series seems determined to smother its potential brilliance beneath layers of mediocrity. To invoke one of my favorite quotes from The Larry Sanders Show, hoping for satisfaction from Lost is like rooting around in Great Dane shit looking for a ring.
"Comic book logic," very nice. It helps me understand why Ben's talk of his plan to get Jack to want to help me wasn't met with a response along the lines of, "You infiltrated, kidnapped and terrorized the survivors of our flight to make me trust you?"
I'm nervous, Andrew et al that you'll take what I'm saying here more harshly than I intend. I hope you'll just see it as entryway to further discussion.
Not having watched much Lost, but being a sometimes lone defender of all nine seasons of a similar extended mytharc show, The X-Files, I can't help but wonder what maligned episodes such as this will look like in the context of a full season first, and a full show-run last.
How much do we hold the writers responsible for the vagaries of network television production and scheduling, and how much is a serial narrative really complete (and therefore able to be discussed in anything approaching concrete terms) before it reaches its endpoint (however that may be brought about)?
I find a good deal of in-the-moment writings on shows with extended narratives to be ephemeral because they're tinged with a fatalistic disgust at how these things are seemingly made and aired: too often these pieces lose sight of the show itself because of a fearfully cynical anticipation of what's to come (I think the "Vito rapes Finn" rumor that was passed around online really colored my view of Sopranos Season 6 - which, technically, isn't over yet - and hindered any cogent criticism I might have been able to make).
Not to say these pieces shouldn't be written, or to absolve the show-runners/writers of any responsibility in these matters, but I do wonder if - taken as a whole season, and then as a whole show - the accomplishments and failures of Lost won't quite be as they're expressed here and will need to be necessarily revised.
Last night's episode made Prison Break look like The Wire in comparison.
Keith:
As someone who stuck with the X-Files till the bitter end (I was known to compare the dying days of the show to sitting bed-side with a soon-to-expire grandparent; you don't want to leave their side but each day is more depressing than the last) I find that the way the shows handled their mythology and over-arching narrative is what separates a show for the ages (which is what I believe The X-Files was up until the film/moving from LA to Canada/let's let our stars write and direct) from a show like Lost which even at its best was a brilliant premise boldly depicted for television, two attributes which get old quickly if there’s nothing of substance underneath.
Ultimately the answers are never as interesting as we hope they'll be and The X-Files lost its mystique once it started giving us concrete definition to what we were seeing, so I don't expect Lost to make the same mistake. I think what you see myself and most of the rest of the people here griping over is how the show frequently abandons common sense and interest in its own premise as it becomes consumed with whatever new distraction is thrown at the characters each week (and really, are these expository flashbacks anything more than distractions; Piling on new information that has little baring on advancing the plot while eating up screen time?)
Not ever episode of X-Files was a winner but the show never abandoned the core dynamic of a skeptic and a believer working together, so each plot, no matter how absurd or poorly thought-out or derivative it was, was at least scrutinized and considered seriously by the characters, and the behavior of the characters was consistent for nearly a decade. Lost has become crippled by shallow, strip-mall logic (Who needs food, let’s golf! Who needs escape, let’s screw!) Where the fantastic has become common place and after less than three months in this situation the characters have lost touch with what it means to be fully-functioning, adult human beings as they’ve morphed into walking plot devices adhering to the increasingly scattershot whims of the writers. I don’t ask that every single moment make perfect sense to me or that each new plot thread be immediately paid-off. I simply ask that a pre-requisite to enjoying the show not be “please disregard how you or any other person you’ve ever met would act if placed in the same situation.” We want to empathize with these characters but that’s becoming harder and harder to do.
Dignan, why don't you merge your essay and these comments you've made, jet on over to The Fuselage, find teh thread for the producers, and drop it right there. Hey, you never know. They watch that board. They need to hear this.
While Jack can be "a pill" (as Matt states), I'm still drawn to the character because I find most of his reactions to be the most true to how I imagine I would react to the Others. The combination of frustration, anger, and dark amusement is just right: every time Ben or Juliet gives some bizarre order (delivered in the patented Ben/Juliet calm but authoritative voice) I think, "Who the hell ARE you people? Why should I listen to a damn thing you say? My plane crashed! Give me a break!" That said, I agree that the writers really blew it on the big plan at the end. When you have the enemy right where you want them, "let's get a head start on the running" is a pretty lame demand.
There's one thing I haven't seen anyone mention, which I thought was the most interesting line uttered all episode. When Pickett and the other guy leave the surgery to go kill Sawyer, the other guy objects with, "Ben just went into surgery!" Pickett replies that "Crawford wasn't even on Jacob's list anyway." Crawford is Jack's last name, right? Who the hell's Jacob? Anybody?
Andrew's comment about the difference between Lost and a "show for the ages" really hits on the whole fascinating/frustraiting aspect of this series: I'm totally hooked into watching every week, but I'm also 90% convinced that in 5 years I won't care if I ever watch an episode again. It's a great thing to have fun with on a Wednesday night and then talk about with your friends/co-workers, but we're hardly in Twin Peaks land here.
I feel obligated to point out that as dull and nonsensical as this week's Lost was overall - its high point was seeing Captain Malcolm Reynolds onscreen in his affable, ready-for-his-closeup-Mr-whoever glory - anyone who actually watched Season Two and figured the show was going to take off and suddenly get good again was fooling himself. (I entertained such hopes after the strong opening pair this season, largely because my expectations had been so low.) Season Two, as I've written at terrifying length over yonder, was simply a failed entertainment: it started and ended well by distracting from the emptiness of nearly every aspect of its story (remember that the opening and closing arcs focused on Desmond), and its best bits, e.g. the tailie flashback episode, were plot-detail-heavy, not strong in character. It doesn't matter whether Season Two's questions are ever answered; they weren't intended to be. They're meant to be interesting only insofar as they're open. It was ever so, guys.
This is to say, in other words, that if people are disappointed in this opening arc, they might ask themselves just what the hell show they thought they were watching last year! Consider that Lindelof and Cuse apparently touted this week's episode as a huge revelatory moment for the show, that the opening miniseries would move the ball downfield in some major way. What happened? Two things: (1) Kate and Sawyer. (2) 'The Others' aren't faceless villains, they're actually people who, instead of lurking offscreen doing ambiguous things with lists, storm around onscreen doing ambiguous things with rocks. That's it. That's what they meant. Lindelof really seems to give a damn whose bed Kate's boots are under, appears to think Charlie's a believable and interesting Angry Little Villain, appears to think 'the believer and the skeptic' is not only a good premise but sufficient dramatic texture. (Sorry for the dig there, Andrew, but groundbreaking or no, The X-Files trafficked in a character-by-coincidence and trauma-as-backstory shorthand that's even less interesting than the sheen of its production or the maddening, pointless scale of its conspiracy.) Which is to say, the writers of Lost don't appear to even want to tell strong textured humane stories. It's possible they don't know how to want to do such a thing. They don't seem to know the difference between information and knowledge.
And looking back on the first two years of the show, they never have. I enjoyed Season One a hell of a lot but years from now we'll go back to the show and see, from the very beginning, its characterological shallowness (oh God we're going to have to hear that insipid '1-2-3-4-5, I let the fear in' story again aren't we?!), its constant substitution of coincidence for meaning, the heavy-handedness of its symbolism, the misshapen plots and season arcs. And most importantly: we'll realize that when the network told us we were watching a dumb adventure-in-the-jungle hour, and the producers insisted they were writing a clever human-condition-in-the-jungle hour, we should have just listened to the money guys, who after all had pure intentions from the start.
The producers have said they only had four years of plot. Sure. But it's not clear they had more than a couple of seasons of Story. Pretty soon they're gonna start talking about the damn Valenzetti equation and we can safely go back to our Buffy DVD's for our dose of emotional seriousness. Or, in a pinch, to Captain Reynolds himself. Now there was a show worth criticizing.
My God, these people are idiots, and the good doctor is the worst of them.
That about sums it up for me. About the only thing I enjoyed about this episode was seeing Mal, but that was tempered by the fact that he was married (!) to Kate. No man deserves such a fate. He's always getting screwed over.
I try not to get worked up about it anymore, but it still ticks me off when anyone believes anything ever said by an Other. Heck, even Alex warned Kate and Sawyer against it.
Rampant stupidity is par for the course now on Lost. By the time it's back on the air, I'll have forgotten it ever existed (Sopranos, anyone?). No loss.
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