Lost: The Package

Keamy: "I'm sorry. Some people just aren't meant to be together."

I wasn't sure what to think about this one. It was like they threw all of the continuing Sun/Jin plotlines at us in pieces instead of as a whole. And -- disappointment -- I thought Sun and Jin would finally be reunited, but nooooo. And how come the cliffhanger? It's the final season! We shouldn't be getting cliffhangers in the final season, she said indignantly.

LAX timeline

The infamous watch that Jin nearly killed Michael over in the first season became a gift to Keamy, along with payment for killing Jin. That was so delightfully circular. So was Sun's pregnancy. (Was it Lee's this time? I don't think so. Jin must not be sterile in the alternate reality.) Even the top button on Sun's sweater was a call back to the first season; I really liked how they turned it from a negative (Jin admonishing Sun) to a positive (Sun seducing Jin).

Keamy said that some people just aren't meant to be together. Did they just tell us that Sun and Jin will be parted forever? Will Sun die in the alternate reality? Will Jin take her to St. Sebastian's so that Jack can save her? (Another pregnant woman. Wouldn't that be karmic?)

I also enjoyed the second half of the Sayid/Keamy story in the restaurant kitchen. And the return of Mikhail, who actually got his very own version of an "eye scene."

Island

I loved Jin finally seeing photos of his daughter Ji Yeon. And that the photos included their dog, Bopo. It's little details like this that make Lost so satisfying. Sometimes.

It was sad to see Sun's garden overgrown and fallow, with only a single tomato remaining as a symbol of hope. Or maybe salad. Sun's weird English aphasia was also a fascinating call back to her season one pretense that she didn't speak English. Interesting that alt-Sun couldn't speak English, either. Backwards, o time. And hey! Jin speaks English and Sun doesn't! He could translate for her. It's perfect.

Sun was desperate to get Jin back, but she still wouldn't make a deal with the Man in Black. It makes sense that he's trying to get all six candidates on the plane with him, since I assume he can't kill them. (I got the impression he was planning to kill Kate when he was done with her, though.) He'll never get Jack, though. Jack is so serene now, almost like he's accepted his fate. I can see him on the Island for centuries, eating mangoes, hanging out on the beach. Can't you? Although the candidate being both Sun and Jin has a nice feel to it, too. (Jacob did touch them both at the same time in "The Incident"; Dan thinks it's both of them, together.) Adam and Eve were introduced in the first Sun/Jin episode in season one. Lost producers, I'm still waiting to find out who Adam and Eve are. Don't forget to tell us. I mean it.

Widmore is very anti-Man in Black, and the war is officially on. Is Widmore only interested in electromagnetic pockets? I just can't see him as an ally. Probably because, as many of us guessed, Desmond was indeed in the box. Is Penny's father determined to kill his daughter's husband? Is this an intentional parallel of the Sun/Jin plot? Will Desmond and Penny be parted forever, like Sun and Jin?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

What have we learned?

-- Widmore's group took out the Man in Black's camp with sleep darts instead of killing them, making it unlikely that Widmore is responsible for all of those dead 316 passengers on Alcatraz.

-- Widmore said that if the Man in Black gets off the Island, Penny and Ji Yeon will *cease to be.* What does that mean? Sounded important. And confusing.

Character bits:

-- I just loved Sun's rant on the beach. Everyone knew she was saying something important, but they didn't know what it was. Their blank faces were great.

-- Now that there aren't corpses to talk to or planes to fly, Miles and Frank are clearly just the comic relief. Actually, I think Frank is in the cast just so he can fly everyone out in the finale.

-- Zoe is a geophysicist. Widmore must need her for something to do with the hunt for electromagnetic pockets.

-- Richard appears to be all energized and ready to fight evil again. A good flashback will do that for you.

-- Poor Sayid is numb; he feels nothing. Then why is he doing what the Man in Black tells him to do? Why not go jump off a cliff, or hike back to the beach?

-- Claire was nervous about leaving the Island. Maybe she's feeling apprehensive about once again having access to hair care products.

-- For some reason, I've really been enjoying alternate universe Keamy. He's just fun to watch, in a jovially evil way.

-- Sawyer called Jin "Hoss." Nothing else to report on the nickname front.

Bits and pieces:

-- No pop-up enhanced repeat of last week's before the episode aired. I feel cheated.

-- Sun cut her hand just as the Man in Black arrived. And there was a big red plant behind her.

-- Island Sun bumped her head. Alt-Jin also bumped his head.

-- Alt-Jin and Alt-Sun had rooms on the 8th floor. Jin's was 842. Mikhail spoke nine languages. Why not eight?

-- And Jin was imprisoned in Room 23, where Karl was brainwashed. Zoe said it was a Dharma thing, but it wasn't; it was an Other thing, because I remember the recording they were playing included references to Jacob.

-- There was a "V countdown" bug on the right-hand corner of the screen. Hey, I watch "V", and I was still really annoyed; it made it hard to read some of the subtitles.

Quotes:

Sawyer: "Want some cocoa?"
Kate: "Where'd you find cocoa?"
Sawyer: "I didn't. Pretend."

Miles: "Unless Alpert's covered in bacon grease, I'm not sure Hurley can track anything."
Frank: "Hey. Don't talk about bacon."

Man in Black: "We're taking a boat ride over to the other island."
Sawyer: "What do you need a boat for? Can't you just turn into smoke and fly your ass over the water?"

Ben: "Why won't you believe me?"
Ilana: "Because you're speaking."

Miles: "She hits her head and forgets English? We're supposed to buy that?"
Frank: "Says the man who communes with the dead."

Six episodes to go, and time is running out. Come on, Lost producers -- no more cliffhangers! I'd like some resolution, please. If you leave stuff to explain on season six DVD featurettes, I'll never forgive you,

Billie

All of my Lost reviews are archived here.
(Season 6, episode 10)

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Chuck: Chuck versus the American Hero

“Love is a battlefield.”

Here’s a couple of things you might need to know, or maybe just forgot: Chuck originally got at 13-episode order, and it wasn’t extended to 19 until all 13 of those episodes were in some stage of production. So tonight’s episode was originally the lead up to the Season Three finale, and next week’s was the original Season Three finale. The remaining six episodes (numbers 14-19) will be more like Season Three and a Half. There’s more info, with some minor spoilers, here.


This was really an episode in two parts: the first, the wacky buddy comedy; the second, the more serious layout of the threads that will be tied up and snipped away next week. The first half—Casey, Awesome, Morgan, and Chuck teaming up to get the girl, for a variety of self-interested motives—was almost hilarious, but seemed to be trying a bit to hard. Not least among the jokes was the way that very little effort was made to explain, for instance, Casey’s presence in Chuck’s apartment, or Morgan’s sudden desire to go to Rome, or how Ellie just got a sabbatical from her brand-new fellowship. Who needs reasons, when you’ve got a bromantic comedy to play with?

The humor of our boys playing heroes was undeniable, but the gravitas of the situations came crashing in at the moment when Shaw told Awesome about the gun. The Ring is hardcore—we saw them kill a harmless functionary, so we know they’re serious. Our second clue? The presence of Mark Sheppard. I know someone, somewhere, in our comments section mentioned this as a requirement for all genre shows (Mark Greig, was it you?). Chuck’s playing with the big boys now: Cylons and River Tam and the Winchester boys, to be specific.

After that, a lot of stuff happened, most of which is designed to lead up to next week’s episode. Shaw offers to sacrifice himself to be an American Hero (well, really to avenge his wife’s death: another instance of love trumping patriotism, which every character on this show seems to go through). Jeffster unwittingly saves the day. Chuck rides a soda machine into an underworld lair. Shaw finds out that Sarah killed his wife during her own Red Test, which we saw glimpses of last week. Chuck saves Shaw, who then tricks Sarah into coming with him to the desert, where only bad things can happen. Somewhere in there, Chuck and Sarah make plans to leave it all behind at Union Station, in a moment of poetic resonance with the train-station misadventure in Prague at the beginning of the season. And Chuck did a pretty decent job of acting like a real spy, even if he was forced to resort to some Jeffster-outsourcing. Being a good leader is all about delegation, though.

It’s hard to rate, or even assess, most of this stuff, because there’s no closure until next week. A few of the plots feel recycled: not just the Bubble of Handsomeness joke, or the underpass scene, or the "we can't show you a preview for next week" teaser, but the air-strike (remember Barstow, last year?), needing to save a team member in peril, Chuck and Sarah reaching a climatic moment but then being torn apart.

As this mini-season winds to a close, we’ve got a few questions: Will Casey be a spy again? Will Chuck and Sarah make it? Was Sarah set up by the Ring for her Red Test, or was Shaw's wife really a bad spy? Will Shaw die, or just be written out? Will Ellie and Awesome ever make it out of Burbank? Will Chuck quit his job at the BuyMore now that he’s a real spy? What does he want of the spy life, anyway?

Bytes:

• Chuck: “Burbank. Bob Hope Airport, to be exact.” This is even funnier if you’ve been to the Burbank airport, which is fabulously tiny and outdated. Some of the baggage claims are outside.

• Morgan: “I don’t think you’ll be able to buy her back, if that makes any sense.”

• Morgan: “Is that what they teach you in the Marine Corps? Roll over and die?”

• Jeff: “Guy knows how to fill out a pair of slacks, if you know what I mean.”

• Morgan: “That guy can fill out a pair of slacks. He’s a real stallion.”

• Morgan: “Take a look at yourself. It’s a freakish bubble of handsome-ness.” They stole this joke from the Jon Hamm episodes of 30 Rock, but it’s still funny.

• Casey: “Kid’s just not wired that way. Not like us.” They’ve been making quite a bit of Sarah’s killer instincts lately. Is it just to counterpoint Chuck’s own naiveté?



And Pieces:

• I am not a fan of the return of the mini-dress, even on super-pretty women.

• Shaw and Awesome crashing through the window. They both wiped their lips, like they’d accidentally kissed. Slash fiction-writers, go wild!

• The soda-machine elevator. Very Get Smart, with more wind resistance.

• Mark Sheppard is so cool.

• That underpass reminded me of: The FlashForward premiere, a scene from The Italian Job (Marky Mark version), and something else. Can anyone help me?

• Casey told Sarah about Chuck’s Red test. Sweet Casey, you can be my spy any day.

• Chuck is willing to leave behind the spy life for Sarah. Quite a lot has changed since the season premiere, although I’m still not sure how.

• Shaw told Chuck to take care of Sarah. This lends a lot of credence to Dimitri’s theories about Sarah-as-trophy.

I don’t know how many Pat Benatars to give this episode, and I’m going to wait until next week to see what happens.

All of my Chuck reviews are archived here.
(Season Three, Episode Twelve)

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Supernatural: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Bobby: "She was the love of my life. How many times do I gotta kill her?"

Poor Bobby. That was freaking heartbreaking.

Even in a wheelchair, we tend to think of Bobby as this super hunter who rescues the boys repeatedly and builds awesome demon-repelling panic rooms in his spare time. Here, we finally saw past the tough surface to the barely functioning, vulnerable man underneath, who has managed to conceal from the Winchesters that he's actually the town drunk. What a marvelous job by Jim Beaver. He makes you feel it. That's what the best actors do.

What a clever twist to the zombie genre, too. I'll admit I'm not up on the zombie genre, but I'm willing to bet they're rarely portrayed as sweetly and normally as Karen was. She wasn't even creepy-looking. A little pale. ("A good Sunnydale rule of thumb? Avoid white-skinned men in capes.") It was totally believable that even an experienced monster hunter like Bobby couldn't bring himself to kill her.

(Okay, I'll take that back. There was definitely something creepy about a zombie baking all those pies. I couldn't believe Dean was eating them.)

I particularly liked Sam in this one, too. Especially the scene where he found Mrs. Jones, the husband-eating zombie, and was torn between wanting to help her and being too revolted to come closer. ("Yeah, I'm gonna regret this.") The shooting sequence in the junkyard was also terrific, and I loved the closet lockpicking scene. Dan thought the blood hitting the camera lens was a great homage to zombie video games. Since I have never once played a zombie video game, I'll have to take his word for it.

Making an episode about zombies on network television that actually scares you and moves you is no easy task. This one got to me. I actually jumped when the gun went off and we knew Bobby had killed his wife again. Of course, if cremation didn't keep Karen in her grave in the first place, what's to prevent all those zombies from coming back again?

Although I guess the point was that the Horseman Death successfully eliminated one of the Winchesters' two most powerful allies. Job done.

Bits and pieces:

-- The Monkey's Paw-like opener was great misdirection, because it made us expect killer zombies. I especially liked the complementary wildebeest documentary on television.

-- This episode wasn't nearly as gross as it could have been, probably because they were going for tragedy. Although that scene with Mrs. Jones getting drool all over Sam was a very special level of ick.

-- When the zombies went bad, they were eating stomachs. I thought traditional zombies went for tasty brains.

-- The initially "pro-zombie" sheriff Jody Mills suffered even more than Bobby did. I kept expecting her to turn her gun on herself.

-- This was the second episode with Death, and we still haven't actually seen the guy. Although this time, we got a description (skeleton-like). I wonder if he's going to be CGI?

-- How long ago did Karen die? It seems like it should have been at least twenty years ago. Bobby didn't become a hunter until after Karen's death, and Dean and Sam knew him when they were kids; Bobby was the one who gave young Sam the amulet in "A Very Supernatural Christmas."

-- Bobby lives five miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He's been arrested for drunk and disorderly as well as mail fraud. That's so sad.

-- The boys were FBI agents Dorfman and Neidermeyer. I didn't need to look those up: that's Animal House. Right?

-- This story had some added poignancy because of Jim Beaver's real life experiences.


Quotes:

Dean: "You gave yourself your own nickname? You can't do that."
Digger: "Who died and made you queen?"

Clay: "I can't believe you were going to kill me."
Dean: "You're a zombie."
Clay: "I'm a taxpayer."

Dean: "Awesome. Another Horseman. Must be Thursday."

Bobby: "The dead rise during the Apocalypse. There's nothing in there that says that's bad."

Sam: "So what do you think?"
Dean: "There's nothing to think about. I'm not gonna leave Bobby at home with the Bride of Frankenstein."

Sam: "Okay, I'll head to town and rescue everyone. Should be easy."

Dean: "It's all right. They're idiots. They can't pick a lock."
(Silence as the zombies start picking the lock)
Bobby: "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?"

Four out of four home-baked pies,

Billie

All of my Supernatural reviews are archived here.
(Season 5, episode 15)

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FlashForward: Blowback

“Irrational, erratic, and frequently stupid.”

Christ on a cheese platter, this was awful. I actually laughed out loud at some of the awfulness—loud enough to wake up the cat (sorry, boo). We had FlashBacks. ShoutingMatches. MovingBoxes. TrustIssues. And all under a new ShowRunner with a penchant for awkward indie music that seems to have been tacked-on at the last minute, without regard for the editing.

The Aaron/Tracy Plot:

Poor Aaron. Poor Brian F. O’Byrne. The writers don’t seem to trust this actor to actually portray the major human emotions of grief and love: instead, they’re forced to rely on physical expressions of those emotions: a fight with a jail guard, a drinking binge. That’s too bad, as I get this sense that O’Bryne might be a decent actor if the writers just let him, y’know, emote. He is, though, a fairly stupid guy. Even I saw Mike as a Jericho plant, but Aaron fell for it right away. Too bad that he raised his daughter to be equally dull: how did she not hear two men, a dolly, and a giant moving box sneak their way into the house?

It was the suspenseful shot of the boiling pot of water that did me in. I usually watch episodes once, then again to take notes for the review. But the shot of the boiling water…I stopped watching, grabbed the laptop, and started typing as the craziness continued on-screen.

I’m fairly ambivalent about Tracy. She and her dad fight, then she makes him dinner. They fight, then they love each other. I can’t understand how all of their fights feel so momentous if their relationship is so very strong. I can’t understand why the writers are comfortable relying on this weird vision of alcoholism to portray the angst of the relationship. This, my dear readers, is a problem of characterization, direction, and narrative coherence.


The Demitri/Gabrielle Union Plot:

There is no way—absolutely no way—that the Freedom of Information Act applies to classified documents pertaining to an on-going investigation, right? I’m usually fairly forgiving of leaps of logic, but this one really irked me. Especially as Gabrielle Union’s (does her character have a name?) goals were extremely unclear. Why does she think she’ll be better at this than a trained investigator? Is this just a ploy to get Gabrielle Union more involved in the plot?

On the other hand, maybe it is just Gabrielle playing every card she has to try to save her fiancé. She goes litigious; Aaron goes Charles Bronson. We all have ways of coping.

The Mark/Lloyd Plot:

All of the plotlines were interlaced, despite appearing to take place over several days (Aaron and Tracy) and several hours (Mark/Lloyd). The goal of that interlacing is to increase our interest by breaking up the stories at suspenseful moments (like suspenseful pots of water). In other words, the goal of that interlacing is to hide the fact that this episode sucked.

Interesting tidbit: the drive from Mark’s office to his house would take an hour in completely ideal traffic conditions (3am-on-Christmas-morning ideal). So Lloyd, bright boy that he is, would have realized that he was headed to Simi Valley well before walking into Mark’s home. All of which, by the way, makes his question of “What are we doing here?” absurd. He would have asked in the car. That the writers didn't realize this somehow cemented my conviction that this was an episode written by well-trained gerbils. They know what they're supposed to be doing (creating suspense, putting complex characters in difficult situations) but they're distracted by the pellets and wheel in their cages.

Even more out-there is the idea that Lloyd, who is either a Canadian or British national, would go along with Mark’s demands on his time. Yes, I know that they were supposed to go from enemies to grudging friends--but that's a need on the part of the plot, not the characters. Lloyd has, until now, seemed smarter than this: getting involved with Mark does nothing for him. A bigger question: does Lloyd remember what the equation was?

D. Gibbons—or Frost, whatever—is a thief. Lloyd and Simon both know him. Our scientists are getting involved in the investigation. Maybe they could just be the investigation? With Demitri and Janis as sidekicks?

The Janis/Baby Plot:

Janis wants this baby—the FlashForward baby. I sort of get that: she felt pregnant, she wants that feeling, and she associates the joy of pregnancy with one particular fetus. It makes a strange sort of sense, because it’s just nonsensical enough to feel human. Demitri and Janis are so great together, but the beauty of their scene was almost ruined by Janis’s horrible line about fighting for the future.

So, What Now?

I have an amazing ability to suspend disbelief. I firmly believe in the existence of Narnia, vampires, and a Mafia-CIA conspiracy to kill Kennedy. But, with the half-hearted exception of Janis, every single storyline in this episode felt completely absurd—a bunch of mini-cliffhangers designed to keep us watching. This wasn't art, or even decent storytelling. It was bait. It was a cheat. It was simply bad. I can’t think of anything else to say.

I told you, months ago, to keep watching FlashForward. Luckily, very few of you listened to me. For those few that did, I am so sorry. I was wrong.

Flashes:

• How does a boiling pot of water catch on fire?

• Lloyd had the good grace to look embarrassed about having used lipstick to write an equation on a mirror like a cliché mad scientist. I buy this actor as smart, which is probably why I like him so much.

• I don’t think that Joseph Fiennes really knew what ‘adamant’ meant.

• The ‘Mirror Test’ doesn’t sound like physics to me. It sounds like Lacan for pets.

• James Erskin’s house was the set used for Shirley Manson’s house in one of the last episodes of Terminator: TSCC. Weird.

• A guy who works for the electric company going “off the grid” is funny.

• My review of next week’s episode (because I’m going to finish the season, even if it kills me) will be late. I have an exciting trip to Somalia planned—it’s a crow-attrition thing—and won’t be back until April 5th or 6th.



Zero out of four empty evidence lockers.

All of my FlashForward reviews are archived here.
(Season One, Episode 13 if we count last week as two episodes, which I think we should.)

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Lost: Ab Aeterno

Hurley: "Your wife sent me."

Is anyone else getting a "my favorite sci-fi show is turning religious" Battlestar vibe?

It's not that I don't like the idea of the Island as a metaphorical cork keeping the genie of pure evil in its bottle. And the idea of the Island as a place where the past never happened and everyone can start over isn't exactly new; we've been on to that one practically from the beginning. And yes, the religious symbolism has always been there.

But I don't want the Man in Black to actually be El Diablo. And I probably could have done without the last temptation of Ricardo, the buried cross (shades of Eko and Yemi), and the obvious baptism scene in front of the Foot. I wonder if I'm just getting tired of waiting for answers. Time travel? Magnetism? Walking dead? Infection? How do these things fit into this Island-as-cork scenario?

I'll probably be okay with all this if it doesn't get too biblical. And at least the theory that they're all in Hell was dispelled by the end of the episode; I was getting uneasy about that one. (I thought the afterlife theory had been laid to rest five years ago by the producers, and I was thinking, no! You're not going to reneg on us at the last minute, are you?)

Richard and Isabella

Don't get me wrong. Nestor Carbonell was awesome, and I did feel for poor, shaggy Richard, who suffered tremendously and is still suffering. Why couldn't Jacob give Richard his wife back, even in the parallel sideways universe? Dogen got his son back, didn't he?

I think that Richard asked for eternal life so that he would never suffer in Hell; and yet, he spent a lot of time in this episode certain that he was already in Hell, so I'm confused about that one. And the fact that Jacob's gift to Richard was unique made me wonder about gifts to the other Losties. Jacob touched Jack right after his famous "five seconds of fear" moment. Did Jack get his miraculous talent as a surgeon from Jacob? Did Jacob give Kate her ability to commit crimes and elude law enforcement forever? Did Jacob give Sawyer the certainty that he would get revenge against Anthony Cooper? I'm not sure how this translates to the other candidates, especially Hurley and the guitar case, so maybe I should stop there.

Richard was uneducated but smart, teaching himself English from the Bible, and it saved his life. Why? What was Captain Magnus Hanso going to do with those people he bought? (And jeez, his minion Whitfield was a prince. I guess a quick death was better than starving in chains, but really. He couldn't just let them go die in the jungle?)

I was confused by the two ghosts of Isabella. I *think* that the first was the Man in Black doing his Walking Dead thing to manipulate Richard into killing Jacob -- and the second that Hurley was channeling was the real thing. Actually, Hurley was so serene that he rather weirded me out.

The Man in Black and Jacob

The Man in Black has a brief, repetitive repertoire: kill Jacob, kill Jacob, kill Jacob. I thought it was interesting that he told Richard that if Jacob spoke, it would already be too late. There's that vocal power again. (Okay, power of persuasion, whatever.) Interesting, how Jacob and the Man in Black never seem to lie. They probably can't. I don't think they can eat or drink, either.

Is Jacob actually good? I didn't like the way he treated Richard; he seemed sly and a bit nasty, and certainly manipulative. But Jacob did say he believes people can be good, while the Man in Black believes they're intrinsically evil. (Glass half full and half empty imagery, too; the wine bottle was this week's Most Obvious Symbolism.)

The Man in Black said that Jacob took his body. For what it's worth.

Ilana

There was a repeat and follow-up to that Jacob/Ilana hospital scene in "The Incident," and again a discussion of the six candidates. What were the bandages on her face for? She got better pretty quickly; did Jacob heal her? Is Ilana someone we've already met as someone else? Did she get plastic surgery as camouflage (although that seems unlikely at such a poor hospital)? Am I getting carried away? Probably.

What have we learned?

-- The Island is a cork. Does that make the Man in Black an evil genie?

-- We now know how the Black Rock got into the middle of the jungle, and how the statue got broken.

-- But that's basically it. Frankly, I was hoping for more.

What I missed last week:

-- It was confirmed that the cause of the deaths on Alcatraz are a mystery. I didn't miss anything.

-- The two other books on Sawyer's dresser were A Wrinkle in Time and Lancelot.

-- I should have observed that Sawyer holds the record in sexual encounters with other members of the cast. Actually, I think he always did.

-- The pop-up enhanced version reminded us *again* that Widmore told Locke that if he didn't return to the Island, the wrong side would win.

Character bits:

-- Richard, or Ricardo, came from Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1867. Interestingly, the biggest plane crash in history was at Tenerife, in 1977. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

-- Like many of the Losties, Richard killed someone before coming to the Island.

-- Loved the campfire scene at the beach. At least they're finally sharing information now.

-- "Whitfield" sounded a bit like "Widmore" to me.

Bits and pieces:

-- The title of the episode means "From eternity," or "since the beginning." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Aeterno

-- Ilana got an eye scene: the right eye. None for Richard, although there were lots of close-ups of his eyes during the episode, as well as a blindfold, and references to closing Richard's eyes.

-- Richard's Bible was open to Luke 4. "And he said, verily I say unto you, no prophet is accepted in his own country." I wonder who this applies to? I bet it applies to someone.

-- Yet another vehicle crash. Yes, the Black Rock smashing through the statue counts. :) The shots of the broken up statue were fascinating, like an oddly dismembered body.

-- Was Richard's corked bottle of medicine (yet another cork) one of the objects he showed to young Locke?

-- I have to mention again that Mark Pellegrino (Jacob) and Titus Welliver (the Man in Black who isn't Terry O'Quinn) have both been in this season of Supernatural as well (my other favorite show), and coincidentally, playing similar characters. What are the odds?

-- Was Titus Welliver doing Terry O'Quinn, or has Terry O'Quinn been doing Titus Welliver?

Quotes:

Isabella: "I looked into his eyes and all I saw was evil." This was the opposite of what Locke said when he saw the smoke monster for the first time.

I'm probably going to get some disagreement, but I didn't love this one as much as I wanted to. Three out of four polar bears, and seven episodes to go,

Billie

All of my Lost reviews are archived here.
(Season 6, episode 9)

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Chuck: Chuck versus the Final Exam

“No, Chuck. Just you.”

How far is too far? At what point does patriotism become murder? Can a good man do bad things, if he does them for the right reason? Just when Casey is at his lowest point, reduced to exorcising his grumpy demons by threatening Jeffster, Chuck reaches the potential acme of his nascent spy career, and is forced to make a difficult choice.

Casey has sacrificed everything: first for his country, then for his past love and the daughter who doesn’t know him. He’s doing the best he can to defend the BuyMore from the threat of Nerf-wielding slackers—he hates it, but he does it. He’s a man of duty, which is how he defines being a man of honor. And he learned a few touching lessons from Big Mike, too.

Chuck, on the other hand, may be in the spy game for the wrong reason. He’s paid lip service to the concept of patriotism, but he hasn’t really convinced me that he actually cares. It seems like the allure of being a spy is also the allure of the perks: specifically, the possibility of finally getting together with Sarah, and not lying (well, less lying) to his family and friends. Chuck’s motives are murky even to him, I think—but when faced with his own personal Rubicon, he took the high road instead. (That metaphor works quite well, doesn’t it?)

The suspense of this episode wasn’t whether our heroes would discover the McGuffin. It wasn’t whether Chuck would get the girl. It was whether Chuck would kill: the teaser left that ambiguous, and we got the flashback, the lead-up to the moment of truth, and then the full reveal towards the end. I’ve had issues with this structure before in other shows, as it seems like a false creation of suspense: because the story has no definite narrative tension, the creators are forced to manufacture it by dangling a “how do we get to that place?” bait and making us wait to be reeled in.

For all of my narratological acumen, I did forget the most important rule of fiction: Chekov’s Shotgun Law, which dictates that if there’s a shotgun over the mantle in the first act, it must go off by the third. Casey was our sleeper agent this week, and the gun Chuck gave him struck me, at the time, as such a downright kind gift that his surprise entry into the boxcar chase (another topos that is just tired and overused) was a surprise.

It shouldn’t have been. For all the guff I give this show for its occasionally scary politics, Casey believes he’s doing the right thing, and he’s willing to sacrifice an awful lot to uphold his ideals, which is more than I do—that’s for sure. He killed the mole because it needed to be done, even though he gets nothing, and might lose what little he has, for that action. Chuck’s not willing to make that kind of sacrifice, because doing so would cause him to sacrifice something else: his inherently good nature. (Casey was the real star of this episode for me.)

And we’re left holding the bag. Chuck is a spy, but he’s a spy under false pretenses. Casey isn’t a spy, officially, but he still has a spy heart of gold. Sarah, meanwhile, is convinced that she has finally lost Chuck, even though his own shiny heart is just as pure as ever—well, maybe a bit tarnished by this new lie, but still gold underneath. Interesting, isn’t it: she’s forced to choose between Shaw, who would have no problem killing the mole, and Chuck, whom she might be rejecting because she thinks he did kill the mole.

I’ve watched some great TV this week: Dexter Season One, the Richard-centric episode of Lost, even the Dominic Monaghan sections of last week’s FlashForward, all of which had me riveted to the couch. (Literally—it was so painful. Note to self: I am not made of denim.) I also read a book that had a lot of promise but didn’t quite deliver: James Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon. Reading Blood on the Moon, I realized what my problem with Chuck has been for this season, because it’s the same problem that I had with Ellroy’s novel: both of them are telling interesting stories, but they’re struggling with not showing the seams of how everything fits together. If I’m reading a book for the first time, and aware of how a metaphor is failing or how a characterization seems hackneyed, then I lose the pleasure of losing myself, even if the story itself has the potential to be compelling. I’ve had the same problem with Chuck. Because there have been questions about consistency of character, I’ve been distracted by the good stuff as I get more preoccupied with the technique of it all: the score, the editing, the characterization, the structure.

Ellroy’s early novels feel…well, immature. His later books works out the kinks, and he’s more willing to let a metaphor hit you once and then retreat—no need to play “Badger in the Bag” with the reader. (If you don’t get that reference, check out the Mabinogi.) Chuck, on the other hand, is struggling not with immaturity but with growing pains. How to make this show grow up without losing its childlike innocence? How to keep our interest in these developing characters, without losing what we love? As this chapter of Chuck winds to a close, and if we do get a fourth season, I’m going to try to stay involved in the story and stop worrying about technique. Sometimes—ideally—a show just forces me to do that, as Dexter and this week’s Lost did. Sometimes I have to try to regain my viewing innocence, and start enjoying instead of evaluating. I’m working on it.

Bytes:

• Casey: “Together, you constitute a clear and present danger.”

• Chuck: “Without a license to kill, you are a menace to society.”

• Casey: “At the moment, I don’t have a better plan.”

• Big Mike: “I need to know that you can be strong like the reed, and not break like the Kit-Kat.”

• Chuck: “I can’t really picture what Shaw does for fun.” Well, Chuck, start with a cage…

• Chuck: “I am a naked spy.”

• Casey: “It was a thoughtful felony.”

• Casey: “You’re not a killer, Chuck.”
Chuck: “Thanks.”

And Pieces:

• The exploding laptop. Both times.

• Union Station is pretty. I’ve never been there.

• Why doesn’t the Intersect allow Chuck to flash on Russian language translations?

• Chuck is—don’t hate me—not a very good spy. He kept radio-ing in to Shaw for help, and doesn’t really seem to be the motivated self-starter that I imagine the CIA is looking for. And the distractions on the stake out: well, they told us where his real passion is, I guess.

• The Subway product placement was really intense. I didn’t mind too much: the lucrative Subway-sponsorship is one of the main reasons that Chuck got this third season, and I appreciate that a sandwich shop is doing what it can to support the arts in these difficult times.

• They did the jump-cut, sped-up camera work thing for the fight scene, just like last week. Repetition makes it less effective.

Two and a half out of four Nerfs.

All of my Chuck reviews are archived here.
(Season Three, Episode Eleven)

(Thanks to chucktv.net for the awesome screencap.)


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FlashForward: Revelation Zero (Part II)

“For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”

Remember Dominic Monaghan’s Dr. Evil chair-spin in A561984? Remember him staring at a laptop and muttering ‘Annabel’? Well, the writers have figured out what’s going on with his heretofore ambiguous, cheesy, and completely confusing character. He’s a black and white kinda guy: most people, he doesn’t care for. Why should he? He’s a genius. But there are a few that do matter: his sister, his father, maybe even Lloyd.

We finally got some answers about Simon this week, and they’re compelling. His father died a few days before the flashes, killed by distant Uncle Teddy. On the day of the funeral, Uncle Teddy got Simon to go to from Toronto to Detroit, where Simon had the unique and unexpected (for him) experience of being awake during the flashes. Jess, you’ve won the Big Invisible Prize, for guessing that Suspect Zero was Simon back in Episode Three.

Uncle Teddy/Flosso/Ricky Jay has something on Simon: it seems like he got him wrapped up in something when Simon was just a kiddo, and refuses to let go. Of course, he’s really just a middleman for D. Gibbons, so his death doesn’t mean a lot for the plot, but it does speak to Simon’s moral values, and it ups the ante on everyone finding D. Gibbons at some point.

Simon killed his father’s killer, and he killed the man who orchestrated his sister’s kidnapping. He also killed the man who took his little finger in Part I. He’s hardcore, but I don’t think he’s amoral. He just has a very select group of people who matter to him. And he’s a fan of his pinky.

Lloyd’s one of those people. Simon is haunted by what he’s done—especially his first kill. He’s “confessed” this sin to two people: the stranger on the train (and that’s what strangers on trains are for, after all), and Lloyd. For both of them, he framed it in terms of what he saw, but with Lloyd it means something more, because Lloyd just might be the person he’s closest to, aside from family.

Simon’s family seems split down the middle. On the one side, there’s Uncle Teddy and the dead father who was probably up to something. On the other, there’s the nice religious mom who made an entire ham for dinner, the tall brothers, and the little sister Annabel. Simon has inherited the ruthlessness of his father’s side, but the devotion to family comes from his mom. Part I showed us the messy duality of Mark and Lloyd—Simon’s duality is all internal. How far will he take his revenge?

Simon “never lets anybody push him around.” He gets that from his mom, too. That could be good news, if he chooses to fight for the right side. But right now he’s something of a free agent—a trickster, a coyote. He said “we have to protect ourselves from the effects of another blackout.” Does he care about saving future people? (That is, is he defining “ourselves” as all of humanity?) Or is he talking about the “ourselves” of those people that are close to him? Or was it all just a ruse, because Janis was there?


Flashes:

• Does Mark have his job back? That was quick.

• Lloyd’s all about the evidence. He didn’t trust his source (Mark) about the possibility of another blackout, so he didn’t do anything about it.

• Janis was walking like she’d hurt her back. Did the masked intruders in Lloyd’s house do it?

• Is Simon’s mom Irish? That doesn’t really explain the Manchester. And his adviser, Scottish? Are there no Canadians in Canada? Is that why the Toronto airport looked like it was still running off generators?

• Janis was awesome in this episode. I loved that she just kept popping up, especially with the Shakespeare quote.

• So, my crazy Doc Josie theory? Simon’s adviser was reenacting, in miniature, Henry V’s victory at Agincourt. This battle was decided not just by awesome speechifying, but also by the use of the Welsh archers that Simon mentioned—the French were unprepared for the force of the Welsh longbow. In political terms, this meant that England used the technological force of one of its earliest colonies (Wales) to conquer the “bad guys.” Now, think back to the reason Familia Campos went to Canada: so Simon’s education wouldn’t suffer (weird, but whatever). Simon’s educational victories, in other words, are based on the resources of one of England’s later colonies, Canada. The question is: who are the French? Who might Simon defeat? And who will be lucky enough to qualify as one of his “brothers”? Fun fact: while Simon was watching a baseball game (the Detroit Tigers), the Detroit NFL team is the Lions. The first official coat of arms for an English king (Henry II) was a lion—and Henry V’s arms had two lions. Tantalizing, isn’t it?
Mark could be the French--and this is where the Buick comes in. Buick is owned by GM, which also owns Chevrolet: the American car company named after the French cross used by the crusaders. So Mark, obviously, must be the French, and he must battle the Welsh longbows to save his kingdom from being overrun by a matrilineal excuse for a pretender. Of course, he's also Shakespeare, which makes the whole thing very meta.


Quotes:

• Janis: “Dude, you live in a hotel.”

• Simon: “Country is such a loose term. It’s Canada.”

• Simon: “Police types. All about power and intimidation. I could have done this with my trousers on, you know.” Exactly what I was thinking. Only I was thinking “pants” instead of “trousers.”

Four out of four cans of sardines for Samantha.

All of my FlashForward reviews are archived here.
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FlashForward: Revelation Zero (Part I)

“How did you find us?”
“You called me.”

Lots of answers. Lots of questions. A little bit of ret-conning. A few missteps. And the best use of a take-out menu I’ve ever seen. FlashForward’s return lived up to my expectations by doing something I didn’t expect: focusing on the two most interesting (and thus far, sidelined) characters: Lloyd Simcoe and Simon Campos. Simon Campos, you’ll be interested to learn, is played by some actor named Dominic Monaghan. Seems like he might be one to watch.


Even though “Revelation Zero” is technically one two-hour episode, I’m breaking the review into two parts, because we covered a lot of ground, and—Lost-style—the first two-thirds was very Lloyd-centric with a dash of Mark; the rest, Simon-centric. Maybe you see it differently? As Mark-centric for the first part? That’s because you’re not blocking out the boring bits. It’s all about perception and choosing your own fate.

When last we saw Lloyd, he’d been abducted by PseudoParamedics (darn, I’ve used that one before)…When last we saw Lloyd, he’d been abducted by ErsatzEMTs in front of his son. This episode picked up right where the other one left off, with Lloyd chained to a pipe in a burned-out husk of a FastFood Tofurkey joint. Ricky Jay (evil villain) threatens torture, and quickly brings in an Isaac for Lloyd’s Abraham. But Lloyd, whatever his DeadbeatDad faults before the blackout, isn’t willing to sacrifice more lives to save Dominic Monaghan’s little finger, and he plays it as cool as he can while under some extraordinary pressure. It’s just the threats against his son that break him.

The focus on Lloyd also gave us some important glimpses into Simon’s character. He’s been a fairly cheesy evil genius so far, and a lot of the dangled niblets have pointed us in the direction of ConfusionLand. But Lloyd clued us into an important fact about Simon: Lloyd couldn’t imagine Simon killing someone. This felt a bit like ret-conning, as Lloyd and Simon didn’t seem that close or that trusting when we saw them duking it out over five-card stud in “Playing Cards with Coyote.” But I’m okay with the shift: in this episode, I felt like Lloyd and Simon knew each other, and knew each other well. They didn’t need to talk extensively, because they had their own shorthand and their own way of working together. Their scenes in the TofurkyTortureChamber felt honest, and made me like Simon’s character instead of just the actor who plays him. He’s not as much of a condescending jerk with his friends.

Sadly, Mark still isn’t very impressive to me. It’s too bad that his flash is so important to the plot, as his death would not be a great tragedy to anyone but his daughter. (I think I’m becoming an Olivia/Lloyd shipper.) His therapist gave him some sort of drug to help him recall the rest of his flash, and what he recalled helped him save Lloyd and Simon. It also set up a few more “Oh! I remember that from the board!” moments for future episodes. More on that in a sec.

Mark’s short conversation with Olivia wasn’t quite as great as the Lloyd/Simon (or Demitri/Janis) exchanges, but it did set up some character changes for Olivia: she feels like she’s been cold and distant at work, and grumpy at home—she also feels like that’s not really who she is, and that she wants to get back to her true self. We saw a bit of that when she was nice to Nicole, and to Lloyd’s son.

Mark saved the day with his Buick (for a Doc Jensen-level analysis of the significance of the Buick, see Part II). More importantly, he saved it with the take-out menu that Lloyd tried to use as an SOS, with little success. I’m completely enamored by the significance of that take-out menu. To review: Lloyd tries to stick it out the window of the basement, but it blows away. Ricky Jay finds it, and brings it back to him. He sticks it in his pocket. Mark recalls the menu from his recalled memories of the board, and hunts down the location of the basement where Lloyd is held captive. When Lloyd is rescued, he gives the menu to Mark to stick on his board.

Lloyd says, “How did you find us?” And Mark says, “You called me.” Mark is talking about the cell phone call from his flash, but his words mean something else to us: the menu from the flash called out to Mark for aid. The future called out to the past. It’s gorgeously poetic, no matter how many self-consistency issues it brings up. I’ll leave the physics stuff to our highly-paid science consultant, WhyMe.

The Lloyd/Mark exchange is particularly interesting in light of the twinning that’s going on with their characters. A luv-connection with Olivia. Kids of similar age. The thing with the laptop: Olivia hugging Mark as she watched herself hugging Lloyd on-screen. The awful preacher character talked to Nicole about how free will and fate are intertwined, and the characters of Mark (who feels fated to drink) and Lloyd (who is certain of the possibilities of free will, using the scientific evidence of Al Gogh to prove his thesis) are just as intertwined. They’re not FlipSides of the same coin—it’s messier than that. And I like that it’s messier than that.

Flashes:

• I’m not going to talk about the preacher, because I don’t really care. Everything he said was extremely trite. Some of it was so trite as to be unintelligible.

• I am going to talk briefly about Nicole’s mother, mostly because I think Lindsay Crouse is awesome. She played Maggie Walsh in Buffy Season Four, and an equally screwed-up psychologist in David Mamet’s House of Games. Plus, those were great fluffy angel wings. Where does a person get something like that?

• The Significant Object in the credits was the burning Bible. Interesting: the Bible also tells us how the world will end—what the future will be like, in other words. But flashes are more personal, and therefore freak people out more.

• Gotta say it again: John Cho? So very cool. I wish he’d successfully hit the CIA agent.

• Did Bryce call a patient “Mr. Minkowski”? Maybe Fisher Stevens’s consciousness flashed to FlashForward.

• The new possibilities of the board—and the phone call…What do you think? It feels to me like the producers realized they had a convenient loophole, since what we’ve seen of Mark’s flash was so short, and they made use of it as best they could. You can only pull that rabbit out of the hat once, though.

• There were cuts between Olivia singing to Lloyd’s son, and Mark confessing to Aaron. The cuts seem to be a tacit acknowledgement of the extremely boring quality of Mark’s issues, but they also show how Olivia and Mark can be pulled apart: it’s not just his drinking, it might be her attachment to the boy, too.

• There were quite a few moments when the writers seemed to be acknowledging fan questions. It was nice the first few times.

• The music for this episode was darn good.


Quotes:

• Simon: “I know America was founded by Puritans, but is there really not a single beer in this entire place?”

• Simon: “I’d say working for the FBI is going to be much more interesting than academia.”

• Janis: “That’s a big word for such a little man.” Ha! Janis is so cool. I wish she would stop getting injured.

• Ricky Jay: “You may call me Flosso. And I’m the villain.”

• Lloyd: “Clearly you weren’t paying any attention to the FBI agent who killed himself.”

• Mark’s daughter: “You always start with the corners and work in…Start with the corners, Daddy.” I hate precocious advice from adorable children.


Three and a half out of four Tofurkey Soy Cheese Steaks. Cuz I’m deducting points for that preacher.

All of my FlashForward reviews are archived here.
(Season One, Episode Eleven, Part I)

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Lost: Recon

Man in Black: "You are the best liar I've ever met."

I am loving these karmic flash sideways so, so much.

It was lovely to see Sawyer "graduate" from con man, to reluctant hero, to head of security for the Dharma Initiative, to an L.A. cop. Yes, he wasn't a strict law and order type -- he let Kate get away at the airport, after all -- but he was still Sawyer, and that made sense. And he was still haunted by the same childhood tragedy, but in much better control of his ghosts.

I was confused about his search for Anthony Cooper, though. In "The Substitute," Locke's father was invited to Locke's wedding, and there was a photo of Locke and Cooper in Locke's cubicle at work. Did Cooper repent in the L.A. timeline and go straight? Maybe his kidney hasn't failed yet, and he's keeping Locke on his string in case he needs it. Of course, we still don't know how L.A. Locke ended up in a wheelchair. Still soooooo many plotlines to resolve.

The attention to detail was impressive. L.A. Sawyer was still a reader; Watership Down was on the top of the pile of books on his dresser. (I believe that was the first book we ever saw him read. Was that his copy that went down with 815, then?) Sawyer took Charlotte a single flower, like he did for Juliet. We even saw a lonely, introspective Sawyer watching Little House on the Prairie, which was specifically mentioned as his favorite childhood show many moons ago. The late Michael Landon was talking about people not really being gone when they die, which of course fit right in with the alternate timeline.

As an extra added bonus, there was lots of sex, and lots of Josh Holloway shirtless or in a towel. And on the Island, there was cage visiting and dress-fondling. Imprisonment, torture, hot sex... ah, memories. Sawyer still seems to love Kate; he even wound up with her at the end of the episode -- twice. And yet, while he was canoodling with the woman in the opening scene and with Charlotte, I kept feeling like Sawyer was cheating on Juliet. I still want the two of them together in the series finale.

The L.A. timeline included big changes for Miles, who had been something of a con man, too. His friendship with Sawyer was a lot deeper, and Miles was a lot more serious. His father was still alive and Miles knew him; was that what made the difference for him? Did Miles still have his "gift"? If he was raised by Pierre Chang, why did his name plate say "Straume"? Miles said he had a girlfriend, but we didn't see her. Anybody we know?

The Island plot was a nice complement to the L.A. story. I don't know why I was wondering which side Sawyer was really on, when past experience should have told me he always looks out for number one. (And Kate, apparently.) Widmore versus the Man in Black should be interesting. And if Sawyer isn't really an MIB recruit, then he's still a possible candidate for Jacob's job. Right?

At least we now know for sure why Kate went with the Man in Black; she did it for Claire. It was odd to see Kate crying; she never cries. And she even had to hug Claire, getting uncomfortably close to The Hair. Please tell me why absolutely no one has even asked where Aaron is right now?

As the Man in Black was working on recruiting Kate, we finally got an intriguing tidbit about him: his mother was crazy, and he still has "issues." Okay. Maybe that was why he slapped Claire in the face. Coincidentally, the real Locke's mother was crazy, too. They couldn't both be Swoosie Kurtz, could they?

What I missed last week:

-- L.A. Ben gave his father life-saving oxygen. In the Island reality, he gassed him to death. Really cool parallel.

-- Cheese curds. Really?

What have we learned?

-- I was laboring under the mistaken impression that Widmore and Smokey were on the same side. Guess not.

-- Being "infected" makes you crazy. I think.

-- By now, the fact that Sawyer and Charlotte are in Los Angeles too strains the boundaries of coincidence. The alternate timeline can't be "real." We'd better find out what it is by the end of the series. My list of things I absolutely need them to answer seems to be getting longer instead of shorter.

Character bits:

-- L.A. Sawyer told Charlotte that the Steve McQueen movie, Bullitt, was the reason he became a cop. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullitt) I think that was a joke. And then he said he just reached the point where he had to decide between becoming a criminal or a cop. That's believable.

-- No one in L.A. called him Sawyer. Did he never take the name?

-- Charlotte was much the same (well, except that she wasn't dead), and worked with Miles' father at "the museum."

-- Sayid, looking confused and possibly sick, would have let Claire kill Kate without lifting a finger to stop it. I hate this.

-- Cindy and the kids were with the MIB, after all.

-- Charlie's brother Liam showed up at the front desk to ask about his brother, who was arrested. Will we ever get more about Charlie? Time is running out.

-- I was sort of hoping we'd see Ana Lucia. It wouldn't be a stretch, since she's an L.A. cop. Of course, L.A. is a big place.

-- We didn't get our usual quota of nicknames, considering that this was a Sawyer episode, but there were a few. Sawyer called Widmore "Chief" and the Man in Black "the old man." Kate was, as always, "Freckles." Alt-Sawyer called Miles "Sunshine." The code name for the other cops to come in was "LaFleur," which was just adorable. And the woman he had sex with and arrested in the opener called him "Dimples."

Bits and pieces:

-- Yet another car crash. Blue car this time. And Kate was driving.

-- Alcatraz' official name seems to be "Hydra Island." I think Kate called it "the Island where they had us in cages." I like Alcatraz better. Short and to the point.

-- Ajira 316 is already getting overgrown with vines, like the Black Rock. Was all that stuff about 316 a set-up for the candidate rejects to leave in that plane in the series finale? Of course, there's the sub, too. But it would be a lot more poetic if they left the Island in a plane. Maybe that's why Frank is in the cast.

-- Who killed the passengers of 316? There's been so much mayhem that I've lost track. Do we know?

-- L.A. Sawyer deliberately broke a mirror. It's starting to become a Lost fad. And it's probably this week's Most Obvious Symbolism.

-- The alarm clock in the opener was at 8:42. I thought I saw eight beers in Sawyer's fridge, and four frozen dinners in the freezer.

-- What's locked up in the sub? If it's not Desmond and/or Penny, I'm not sure I care. Maybe it's Eloise Hawking in suspended animation.

Quotes:

Sawyer: "LaFleur."
About to be arrested woman: "La What?"

Charlotte: "Yes, I'm exactly like Indiana Jones."
Sawyer: "You got a whip?"
Charlotte: "Maybe."

Sawyer: "Is your name even Zoe?"
Zoe: "Is yours Sawyer?"

Sawyer: "Take me to your leader."

Another truly satisfying, character-driven episode. Everything we knew about Sawyer, everything he was capable of becoming -- it was all there. Four polar bears,

Billie

All of my Lost reviews are archived here.
(Season 6, episode 8)

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Chuck: Chuck versus the Tic-Tac

“It’s Casey.”

But this episode turned out to be pretty awesome, wasn’t it? Oh, wait, you haven’t been participating in the conversation inside my head. It went something like: “Wow, Chuck has been uneven.” “Yeah, right?” “I wonder how they’ll pull off this [finally!] Casey-centric episode.” “Yeah, I’m sort of nervous.” All of my internal dithering aside, though, I loved this week’s edge, although I’m not sure every episode should be this suspenseful or this gloomy. Plus, Robert Patrick? How cool is that?

Last season, Casey risked his own career to save Chuck and Sarah. This season, Chuck and Sarah returned the favor. When Casey got shanghaied into committing treason by a delightfully grumbly Robert Patrick, I thought the plot would end there. Getting an emotional backstory was just happiness gravy. So Casey has loved and lost, but would never actually betray his own country—no surprise there. And he sacrificed everything to do what he thought was important for his country. Twice.

Casey doesn’t have a spy name, like Sarah and “Charles Carmichael.” I guess the idea is that he doesn’t have a “real” life to keep separate from his spy life—his entire identity is being a spy. and his former persona has been gone since 1989. He knows what he has sacrificed, and what he is still sacrificing. He is continuing to sacrifice his relationship with his former fiancée and his daughter because it’s his last link to serving his country, in his eyes, at least.

In Chuck and Sarah news, she said that she worried that he had changed. (Had she changed her mind at some point?) She also told him not to “give up on the things that make [him] great.” Chuck, though, gave up on fear (see below) with ill effects. We got a cliffhanger that hinges of Sarah’s choice this week…what will she decide?

In my obsession with structure news, Chuck answered the question of how to go dark without alienating viewers by going dark, but using Casey as the focal point instead of our cuddly hero. I’m so happy we finally got a Casey story, sad as it was.

But that story had some repercussions. Casey is no longer a spy, although I can’t believe that will last long (right?). And Chuck’s lack of fear—becoming “the Intersect he was always supposed to be”—had some truly lethal consequences. He really seemed to enjoy choking that guy. Is fear the only thing that keeps us moral? Is Chuck’s good-guy nature just a product of being a wimp? Is it his wimpiness that makes him great, like Sarah said? Can’t it just be that he’s a good man?

Bytes:

• Sarah was supposed to meet Shaw in DC? Like, for a date at the Reflecting Pool? Or for CIA stuff?

• The arrow pointing belowground to the secret CIA facility? Adorable.

• Fast-forwarding through 15 levels of security was funny, especially as Sarah’s hair-extension bun got very messy by the bottom level.

• Chuck’s obliviousness as he ratted Casey out was a great contrast to Sarah’s high-alert tension.

• Fitzroy was hilarious. He reminded me of that FBI accountant in one of the later seasons of the X-Files who was basically just a fangirl.

• Every time Awesome and Morgan said “Medicins sans frontieres,” it sounded dubbed. It also sounded like both actors were more comfortable speaking Spanish than French. I know, because that’s about what it sounds like when I try to speak French. Of course, my Spanish sounds Italian. And my Italian? Really just English with a funny accent and lots of hand gestures.

• Those were some hardcore fight scenes, with everything sped up to make it seem more intense. It worked.

…And Pieces:

• Morgan: “The answer is yes. I set the DVR to record the Mork and Mindy marathon.”

• Chuck: “All right, then. Time to save the day.” Splat!

• Casey: “How would you like to be a part of a very important, very secret mission?”
Morgan: “Yeah. Can I get a cool call name, like Condor or Ladyfingers?”

• Chuck: “That someone would have to be desperate, stupid, or just plain willing to do anything to impress him.”

Josie’s Tiny Soapbox:

• Chuck seemed shocked that Casey had been a part of CIA ops in Honduras in the eighties—the era of School of the Americas/CIA-backed death squads throughout Latin America. The thing is, it’s not like we don’t know that the US did terrible things then and there. Is Chuck just now realizing that the US government has done terrible things? Has he not yet realized that he’s working for the same organizations that did those terrible things?

• “They’re moving him to a black site in Thailand outside of US torture jurisdictions.” I don’t think that’s how the Geneva Convention is supposed to work.

Four out of four Cuban cigars.

All of my Chuck reviews are archived here.
(Season Three, Episode Ten)

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Lost: Dr. Linus

Arzt: "You know, you really had me fooled with that sweater vest. Linus, you're a real killer."

And the Emmy goes to...

I'm not kidding. Michael Emerson was phenomenal. Quite possibly his best performance so far, and that's saying a lot.

I just knew that, under Ben's devious, manipulative and occasionally murderous exterior, there was a good guy screaming to get out. In the flash sideways, we finally saw the Ben that should have been. Yes, he was still staging a coup to take over the high school, familiar behavior for Ben -- but he easily gave it up for the sake of a girl who wasn't even his adopted daughter. Yes, he had a job that didn't challenge him and a boss that made him miserable (gee, does that sound familiar to any of us?) but LAX timeline Ben has a good life. He's a good teacher, he has friends like Arzt, and he takes good care of his sick father. A life well lived.

And seeing Ben finally redeem himself on the Island was amazing. He could easily have killed Ilana and taken up the Man in Black on his offer to rule the Island. And Ilana could have just let Ben go over to the dark side, too. Deciding to forgive him, to welcome him back to the beach -- just that scene was worth the price of admission. Interesting, that Ben was seeking forgiveness for failing to save his adopted daughter, while Ilana needed forgiveness for failing to protect the man she thought of as a father.

It was so lovely seeing Alex alive and happy -- no trauma, no slingshot, clean clothes. It's a shame we didn't see Danielle, though she was mentioned. Someone on the LostReviews list pointed out that Danielle and Alex should have been living in France. But I think Los Angeles isn't really Los Angeles as much as it's Karmaville. (Sort of like Dharmaville but with karma.) Ben's redemption couldn't have played out like it did without him making amends to Alex and putting her first, which was exactly what he didn't do in the Island timeline.

Black Rock

As if all the Ben stuff wasn't good enough, the B plot with Richard, Jack and Hurley at the Black Rock was fascinating, too. We've all guessed that Richard came to the Island on the Black Rock in chains, so that wasn't a surprise. Helping Richard die -- or actually, not helping Richard die -- was an interesting test of faith for Jack. Jack is still angry about everything, but he's starting to believe, isn't he? The Lighthouse really did prove something to Jack. And you know, Jack is the lead character in the series, and his name is so much like Jacob's... I'll stop now.

When Jacob touched people, he gave them a gift. For Richard, it was immortality. Did Jacob also give immortality to the Losties, or were they different gifts? Does the gift go away if the candidate fails? (I'm thinking of those three hundred and some crossed out names.) Ilana said there were only six candidates left. Which six? The six that the MIB knows about? Or does Ilana have better info?

Back to the Beach

Does anyone else think it's funny that they're back at the beach again? The entire series seems to consist of expeditions and campsites. Let's move to the caves. Let's move to New Otherton. Let's go to Alcatraz. It's interesting that the Man in Black's base of operations is apparently going to be Alcatraz. Maybe the opposing sides can lob really big rocks across the bay at each other.

Speaking of funny, Widmore arriving via submarine like a Nazi in a Mel Brooks movie had me laughing out loud. (I guess he's the one Jacob said was coming. I had been hoping for Desmond.)

And Miles was a delight. His disregard of anything resembling tact ("Linus killed him") and his gleeful greed made an already terrific episode even better. I'm glad that the eight million in diamonds found its way out of that double grave. I hope Miles makes it off the Island and spends the rest of his life lounging by a pool somewhere drinking pina coladas.

What have we learned?

-- Richard became immortal because Jacob touched him. Jacob's touches are gifts.

-- The selected candidate will find out what the job is about. Does that mean no one knows what it is except Jacob? Who told Jacob?

-- Notice how little we learned this week? But hey. Ben redemption was a biggie.

What I missed last week:

-- According to the enhanced version of last week's, Sayid's brother's name is spelled Omer, not Omar.

-- The secret passage in the hall of the Temple was marked with the Egyptian hieroglyph for eternity. Which I believe was also the symbol on the necklace that Nadia was wearing in the flash sideways. Yet another reference to immortality.

Character bits:

-- Absolutely loved the transparent allusion of Ben and Alcatraz as Napoleon and Elba.

-- I also thought it was interesting that LAX timeline Ben was still obsessed with taking care of children, just as his Island self was.

-- In an episode full of parallels, the Man in Black offered Ben control of the Island, while Locke gave Ben the idea to become principal.

-- Frank said he didn't make flight 815 because he overslept.

-- Ben's father Roger was still alive (though ill), and his relationship with Ben seemed to be a good one. Roger talked about not staying on the Island with the Dharma Initiative. And every single Lost fan went, "A ha!"

-- Jack just tried to kill himself a second time. The first was when he took the poison pill meant for Sayid. But maybe Jack had already realized that it wouldn't work, huh?

-- I'd already heard that Mira Furlan wasn't willing to come back, or she probably would have been in this episode. I wonder if Blake Bashoff also said no? If he hadn't, I bet Karl would have turned up in that high school.

-- The tight-fisted Principal Donald Lawrence Reynolds was played by William Atherton, who has been in practically everything. I'm sure "Donald Lawrence Reynolds" must be a reference to someone or something. Anyone know?

-- The assorted titles in Sawyer's abandoned sand trap library included Justice is Truth in Action by Benjamin Disraeli (which seems to be a quote, not an actual title), The Chosen by Chaim Potok (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_(Chaim_Potok)) and an issue of Booty Babes, which I don't recommend looking up on Google. All of which are full of symbolic Losty goodness. Except Booty Babes.

-- The reunion scene on the beach was lovely. But where is freaking Jin?

Bits and pieces:

-- LAX timeline Ben's mention of the East India Trading Company in 1813 felt like it related to the Black Rock.

-- I don't know if it means anything, but I noticed three vertical, parallel blood stains on Island Ben's shirt.

-- Love the Black Rock interior set. Gorgeous and strange. Much like Lost itself.

Quotes:

Ilana: "Are you sure?"
Ben: "He was standing over their dead bodies holding a bloody dagger. So yeah, I'm pretty sure."

Miles: "Linus killed him."
Ben: "What? That's not true!"
Ilana: "Are you sure?"
Miles: "He was standing over Jacob's dead boy with a bloody dagger. So yeah, I'm pretty sure."

Hurley: (asleep) "Cheese curls."

Ben: "Shall we return to the high seas?"
Alex: "Sure."

Four out of four polar bears, of course. And only nine episodes to go,

Billie

All of my Lost reviews are archived here.
(Season 6, episode 7)

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Chuck: Chuck versus the Beard

“You’re a good liar, Chuck, but you’re not that good.”

I know y’all have each and every word of my past reviews memorized, but just in case you’ve forgotten, I said something brilliant in my explication de Chuck at the beginning of the season: “Chuck is right. His emotions screw everything up.” That’s the theme of the season, but what exactly constitutes Chuck’s emotions have lead to the unevenness of the past few episodes, as well as the occasional fan- or Josie-outrage.

When Season Three started, the conflict was between spy-life and love-life. Chuck chose spying (3.01), and the show told us that he chose it to save mankind (3.02). Chuck started to get into the spy life, but we saw (via Awesome), how hard the constant dishonesty could be (3.04). Meanwhile, as Awesome represents Chuck’s innocent side, Shaw represents the hardened spy (3.05) that Chuck is turning into (3.06). Then he meets a pretty girl on a plane (3.06) and tries to balance spying with dating (3.07), as does Sarah (3.07-08). Chuck’s rebound relationship showed us how cold he can be (3.08), but had the unintentional effect of making his angst over losing Sarah seem diminished—the Hannah thing also made his earlier choice of spy-life over love-life seem…um…completely ruined. (I think that ruination might have been at the heart of the fandom backlash against Hannah.) And the big choices between spy-life and love-life that permeated the first few episodes of the season gradually became big choices between honesty and dishonesty: a conflict that centered around Hannah (who got the short end of the stick), Awesome (who will not stop kvetching about how hard it is to lie), Morgan (who misses his friend), and Ellie (who suspects something).

I said last week that my distaste for some of the recent developments centered on the way they were developed: Chuck couldn’t go full-on Evil, because the show would lose its charm, so we were left with characters telling Chuck how evilish he was getting, even if we couldn’t see it. Similarly, a lot of the honesty-drama has centered on everyone else’s reactions to Chuck’s lying, and the negative effects it has on them. Paired with the displacement of the conflict, from love to lying, the meaty emotional arcs have felt hackneyed, as though the writers are swapping out Angus beef with buffalo meat, and sometimes swapping it back. (That is not my best simile ever.)

[You can skip this paragraph: Josh Schwartz’s first show, The O.C., made us of a similar drama-creating series of events, and Gossip Girl continues to do so: one character does something, feels bad about it, and everyone around them begins to spin like tops to fix the lack of happiness. On The O.C., I found this touching, as that show was basically about people trying to do right by each other. On Gossip Girl, it’s feeling hackneyed, especially as Serena’s love life is not that interesting. And on Chuck, the effect isn’t great.]

This week attempted to resolve the honesty-conflict with Chuck’s full confession to Morgan. Along with the summary dismissal of Hannah from Burbank, we can feel the arcs that were set up in the beginning of the season start to draw to a close. That makes sense: this season was originally supposed to be just 13 episodes, so we’re nearing the original end, even though the total final count will be 19. So Chuck set up some shaky pegs, and is now knocking them down.

With iffy results: I’m so happy that Chuck and Morgan and now friends again, and Hannah’s departure means we’re one step closer to the inevitable Chuck/Sarah pairing. The dishonesty snafu, which momentarily led to Chuck being unable to flash, is now resolved: All he needed was a good heart-to-heart. I’m not sure we needed that kick-in-the-face symbolism (yes, Chuck’s good heart is what makes him a good spy), but it made for a fun plot.

Our remaining pegs? Awesome and Ellie, who might be on the lam; Sarah, the love of Chuck’s life, who is doing something with Shaw; Shaw, who is doing something with Sarah; The Ring…am I forgetting anything?

As far as the actual episode goes, it was nifty. Morgan as hero was cute. Chuck and Morgan are funny together. The BuyMore Last Stand was a quaint subplot with disturbing undertones. Shaw and Sarah are a beautiful couple. Casey’s fight with the Ring Spies was rougher than fighting usually is on this show (his shirt came untucked!), and that’s a good thing.

The next few episodes should be good. We’ll get resolution. Of some sort. And when we look back, we’ll forget how uneven this season has been, and remember that it contained a lot of game-changers and was fun to watch.

Bytes:

• Morgan: “This conversation is never an easy one to have with an employee…I’m firing you as my best friend.”
• Bellgirl: “May I say you two are a very beautiful couple.”
• Ring Spy: “There’s no need to be conservative here. Terminate the rest.”
• Big Mike: “These corporate fatcats think they can take whatever they want. They can take dignity, they can take all the hot women, but they will not take our jobs. And they will never take our store!”
• Morgan: “Buddy? Don’t freak out.”
• Casey: “The only thing I hate more than hippie and neo-liberal fascists is the hypocrite fat-cat suits they eventually grow up to become.”

…And Pieces:

• Jeff’s chloroform addiction came back into play. When was that last mentioned? Early Season Two?
• Stop. Stealing. Music. The Muse-theme and the Terminator-theme were back. Is there any rhyme or reason to this?
• Zachary Levi directed this episode. He did a good job.
• The Iwo Jima re-enactment was funny—but the snapshot saved it. I was briefly freaked out by the lack of parallelism.
• The Nerf guns.
• The torture scene reminded me of the Firefly episode “War Stories.” Probably because in both episodes, the energy level is kept high through having the buddies not facing each other, which keeps the camera moving.
• Jess, I’ve been watching for pregnancy clues, and Ellie has been drinking in the past two episodes. I don’t think she’s having a baby.

Yikes!:

• The BuyMore employees were staging a protest against The Man to keep their jobs working for The Man. The irony? Utterly lost on them.
• Using “Fortunate Son” to energize that fight for The Man, especially in the context of that song’s popularity in the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Iwo Jima re-enactment--that ain't right.


Three out of four Duck Hunts.

All of my Chuck reviews are archived here.
(Season Three, Episode Nine)

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Smallville: Conspiracy

Lois: "Zod. How did you end up in my nightmare on psycho street?"

What I liked about this one was the conflicting ways the Kandorians were portrayed. First, they were totally sympathetic -- two displaced sisters far from home, never to regain their powers. One of them was kidnapped by a mad man with an unfortunate resemblance to Pinhead who imprisoned her in big Zip-lock bag. And then we found out it was happening because the woman and her Kandorian buddies were experimenting on human beings. (Bad.) And then we found out it was human cadavers. (Not so bad.) Whom they were accidentally bringing back to life in a Frankensteinian way. (Really bad.)

All of this back-and-forthing also happened with Zod, whose only motive appeared to be protecting his people (good.) He even died in their defense (also good). At one point, I was actually thinking, "Poor Zod." Poor Zod? Just to make the good guy Kryptonian thing more obvious, Zod masqueraded as a reporter and chatted up Lois while wearing Clark Kent's glasses. And then Clark's magic healing blood gave Zod his powers. Which is, of course, really stupendously bad. Especially since Zod can fly. Tell me again why Clark can't fly? And can Zod pass his powers on to the other Kandorians the same way? I can't believe this was what Zod intended all along, though. No one is that diabolical.

At least we got a lot of Lois, who is one of the main reasons I'm still watching this show. And I am happy to report that they may have gone there with Oliver and our diabolical darling, Chloe -- even though all we got were sparks without smoochies. They seem to fit better together than any other pairing either of them has had in the past. And as I know I've said before, Chloe deserves her very own superhero love interest -- and this one's also a billionaire who looks incredible without a shirt. (Notice how nearly every episode with any significant Oliver content has a scene in which he is not wearing much. And thank you.)

There was another reference to "The Wall." Dan is still pleased that they're actually doing the Suicide Squad. I don't know what that is, but if Dan thinks it's good, it probably is.

I should probably mention that Smallville has been renewed; we're getting a tenth season. I sort of can't believe it. As I've mentioned probably way too many times, I honestly believe Smallville should have ended two seasons ago. Michael Rosenbaum's terrific portrayal of young Lex Luthor, his battle with his internal demons and his inevitable and tragic descent into evil was the big reason I got into Smallville. I will probably continue reviewing until the end of season nine, but I have no plans to review season ten.

All of my Smallville reviews are archived here.
(Season 9, episode 14. Or is it 15?)

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Lost: Sundown

Ben: "There's still time."
Sayid: "Not for me."

I'm sort of in mourning today. I loved Sayid. He was my favorite character. And now he's...um... Lost. That clever Man in Black; he picked the one thing that Sayid would sell his soul for.

Sayid has had such a shitty life. Always stuck with the dirty, morally corrupt jobs in both realities. If he'd been born in a peaceful place, if he'd been loved as a child, he probably would have been a truly good man. He wanted to be a good man, even while he was doing such horrible things. The fact that he did what Dogen told him to do makes me think there was still good in Sayid, right up until he met the Man in Black and got an offer he couldn't refuse.

And doesn't that add an extra possible dimension to the flash-sidewayseses? Jacob apparently promised Island Dogen that Dogen's son would live on, and that's exactly what he's doing in the LAX timeline. Will Nadia live on in the LAX timeline, too? Did Jacob and the Man in Black collude on the creation of an alternate universe intended to satisfy their candidates? How could that be?

I wasn't surprised that Sayid killed Dogen and Lennon. (Can you kill someone in a healing spring, though? Won't they just pop back up?) I thought all through this episode that Dogen had set Sayid up so that Smokey would kill him, and it backfired. Of course, since this is Lost, the whole situation was so ambiguous that we're left wondering what would have happened if Sayid had stabbed Smokey *before* he spoke. (And will that be the way to take him down in the end? Did they just set something up there?)

The massacre at the Temple was telegraphed way in advance, too, so it didn't surprise me, either. Although I have to say that you don't see a lot of massacres set to the tune of "Catch a Falling Star," so that was new and different. That was the song Christian sang to Claire when she was little. Where is Christian, by the way? He used to hang around in nearly everyone's backstories, and now we haven't seen him in forever. Did John Terry get another gig? How's his driving record?

LAX timeline

I think I'm enjoying the flash sideways more than the Island story; it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Sayid was, like the others, a better person, at least in the sense that he was more self-sacrificing and repentant of his former occupation in the Republican Guard. But he was also punishing Nadia as well as himself by pushing her into marrying his cowardly brother Omar. Sayid and Nadia were so obviously still in love and longing for each other, even though she'd had two children with Omar. And Omar knew it, too. Tragic.

Keamy showing up as the loan shark was just delightful. It was even a bit of foreshadowing, since Keamy's guys were all slaughtered by Smokey. What the hell was Jin doing tied up in the freezer? (Which paralleled Claire keeping him in her shelter. For that matter, Claire was also imprisoned in the Temple. Parallel-a-paloosa.)

The Foot Group and the Temple Group together at last. Mostly.

So we have Claire, Sayid (*sob*) and possibly Sawyer (no! no!) on Smokey's side. Hurley and possibly Jack are on Jacob's. No news yet on Sun and Jin. I was worried Miles would be killed during the massacre since he doesn't have a number; thankfully, no. Kate, whose name I missed on the big wheel at the Lighthouse in last week's, was also the first one of the Losties that Jacob touched in "The Incident." Her name wasn't on the walls of the cave, was it? I think the cave belonged to the Man in Black. Is Kate going to be Jacob's secret weapon?

I'm also wondering why Kate picked up that gun and followed the Man in Black's merry crew. What was she thinking? What is she planning? And hey, did anyone else want to shake Kate when she told the infected Claire all about taking Aaron off the Island and raising him? But then again, how could she know she was being massively stupid?

What have we learned?

-- The Man in Black has some sort of vocal power. I guess.

-- The previews said they couldn't show us stuff. I thought we'd get some answers. I don't think we got answers. Maybe I wasn't paying attention.

What I missed last week:

-- The sign in front of the conservatory said, "Welcome all candidates." :)

-- Kate's name was also on the big wheel in the Lighthouse, at (I think) number 51.

-- According to the enhanced version, Faraday also played Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu, like David did.

-- The enhanced version of last week's told us what Dogen said to Hurley in the corridor, and I'm paraphrasing since I wasn't recording it: "You're lucky I have to protect you or I'd remove your head and feed it to the boars."

Character bits:

-- In the LAX timeline, Sayid was working as a translator for an oil company, and apparently had been for quite awhile.

-- Massive Sayid/Dogen fight scene. Sayid always gets the best fight scenes, doesn't he?

-- In the Island timeline, Dogen was once a banker from Osaka and his son died in (yet another) car accident. I thought at first that Dogen's baseball was his "object," like the compass was Locke's, but looking at the baseball appeared to remind Dogen that he had rules to follow and couldn't kill Sayid.

-- Sayid's brother Omar was taken to St. Sebastian's, and of course, we saw Jack walking down the corridor. He and Sayid didn't acknowledge each other. But didn't they "meet" on the plane when they resuscitated Charlie together? Maybe they had other things on their minds.

-- Did Cindy and the kids make it? I didn't see their bodies, but I don't think I saw them with the Man in Black's party, either.

-- Sun and Jin have been apart forever. They're now closer, geographically and chronologically, than they've been in three years. I'm just saying. It's time, people.

Bits and pieces:

-- Miles said that Sayid was definitely dead for two whole hours.

-- The weirdo torture that they were doing in the Temple reveals where you are on the scale between absolute good and absolute evil. And I'm asking how?

-- Keamy broke some eggs. A cliche comes to mind. And hey, Sayid was a cook in a restaurant in Paris in his other life.

-- Another parallel. Sayid killed Keamy and his minions, right before the other Sayid killed Dogen and Lennon. Good Sayid killed the bad guys, and bad Sayid killed (possibly, although I've never been sure) the good guys.

Quotes:

Claire: "You're going to hurt them."
Man in Black: "Only the ones who won't listen."
Is that a reference to the MIB's new scary vocal power?

Miles: "She just strolled in here a couple of hours ago acting all weird. Still hot, though."

Sayid: "We had an unfortunate incident involving a boomerang. My apologies."

Another three polar bear episode, and only ten episodes to go,

Billie

All of my Lost reviews are archived here.
(Season 6, episode 6)

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