Lost - "Jughead"

Oceanic who? Wednesday's Lost was the first one in forever not to focus on the misadventures of Jack and the team and instead shined a welcome light on some of the more interesting storylines set up this season.

On the island, the time is 1955 and Sawyer, Juliet, and Locke discover that the people they have taken captive are indeed Others (or Locke's people if you're a bald man with a desperate need for meaning in his life). One of their captives was someone we knew, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Meanwhile, the Freighties got themselves taken hostage where they met the Others' leader: Richard Alpert! Looking exactly the same age. Richard and Co. assume that the Freighties are from the US government, there to deal with their leftovers.

That leftover was the titular figure: an H-bomb named Jughead. Faraday managed to convince Alpert that he wanted to disarm the bomb...by confessing his love for the sickness-bound Charlotte. That scene didn't quite connect for me, maybe because Alpert seemed a little too willing to go along with this. But in the end, Faraday and an Other named Ellie went to check out Jughead, where they met up with the Juliet-and-Sawyer cavalry who had come to rescue the Freighties. At the camp, Locke met Richard and told him when he was born (thus setting up Alpert's visit to John Locke's birth) and also encountered an Other who goes by the name of CHARLES FUCKING WIDMORE! Yes, Widmore's history with the island seems to go back much further than we knew. But then there was another time jump, leaving the Charlotte collapsed with a major nosebleed, Locke no closer to getting off the island, and the Others with a still-armed H-bomb and Faraday's advice to cover it in concrete and bury it. After all, the bomb hadn't gone off as of 2008, so this shouldn't be a problem. Right?

Well, tonight's other storyline threw that into doubt. It was Desmond's stuff that worked a lot better from an emotional standpoint, starting with the reveal that Penny and Desmond had a child together. A child named Charlie, as we found out in the episode's most touching moment. However, Desmond has to risk all that to go back to that island he left so long ago: Great Britain. There he encountered Faraday's old lab (after being told there was no record of a Professor Faraday) and learned about a woman named Theresa Spencer. Theresa was Faraday's lover/test subject when something went very wrong and she was left in coma. So we now know that Faraday's time travel theories have been wrong before, with tragic results.

Equally shocking was the news that his research was underwritten by none Other than Charles Widmore. Desmond's decision to visit Widmore wasn't as ill-advised as it seemed; it turns out that all Charles cares about is that Desmond is keeping Penny safely off the radar. Much more ill-advised was Widmore's decision to tell Desmond what he wanted to know. Now the whole family is on the road (water?) to Los Angeles, the current whereabouts of a certain bug-eyed, revenge-hungry Other.

All in all, I'd say this was a good, but not great episode. The Desmond stuff was interesting and touching and I liked what happened on the island a lot. But the two elements didn't quite feel united, and the leaving the Jughead stuff literally dangling was unsatisfying (although I'm sure that it'll come back soon). It seems a little like Lost is still trying to find their way around this new structure and it lacked the visceral pop of "Because You Left" (which I think has been kind of underrated). However, given the number of shocking developments and nice twists contained in the episode, I won't let a little nit-picking get in the way of enjoying a great episode.

A-

Top 5 Lost Theories of the Week (In this space I'll partake in a little theorizing):

5. Okay, so I was watching Deus Ex Machina (the one where Locke and Boone go to the plane and Boone dies) and I was reminded of what Boone says in his dream: ""Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs" What if that Theresa, Boone's childhood nanny, is THE SAME THERESA!!! It doesn't really make sense to me, either. The best I can come up with is that she fell down the stairs because she happened to be climbing them when her consciousness got displaced from time.

4. So, if you watched the repeat of The Lie, you no doubt noticed what a waste of space those pop-up pieces of info are (for example, when Locke appeared for the first time, the pop-up said "this is John Locke." I am not kidding.) However, the very end did reveal something useful and previously unknown. It turns out that Mrs. Hawking's first name is Eloise. Is she the Ellie we met on the island tonight? And is she Faraday's mother and namesake of Eloise the Doomed Lab Rat (new band name!)? Its looking Michael's-on-the-freighter obvious, so let's hope they don't drag this out.

3. So can the future be changed? After all, we saw Desmond acting on what Faraday told him to do in the past. But, more than that, the weird ending to all the Jughead stuff seems to me to be setting up a switch. What if you can change the future? And what if Faraday just changed it in a very negative way?

2. Desmond and Penny named their child Charlie, which is sweet. But what if Charlie gets to the island, travels through time and grows up to be CHARLES WIDMORE?!?!? Yeah, I'm not buying it either, simply because it would be very very silly for Penny to be the mother of her father.

1. What became of Jughead? I imagine that will be a topic that returns later, but I found a very intriguing idea on the AV Club's comments thread. What if the Others take Faraday's advice, encase Jughead in concrete and bury it underground. And what if they buried it in the site that would come to be known as the Swan? Perhaps the bomb was interfering or somehow affecting the island's weird properties, thus causing what happened down at the Swan. I think this is a really solid theory.

In preparation for tonight's Lost

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Battlestar Galactica - "A Disquiet That Follows My Soul"

I'm currently working on the first draft of a novel. As I'm writing it, I find that the destination keeps changing and the needs of the story are causing me to have to change details of the characters, one's profession, for instance. I can roll with this, because I have the luxury of then going back and changing everything so it fits together before I show it to anybody. So, in a way, I am sympathetic to the plight of Ron Moore and the writers of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly they did not plan on there being a second Cylon/human hybrid and, when they decided to turn Tyrol into a Cylon, they left themselves with a gaping hole to fill.

The solution to that problem was one of my many issues with "A Disquiet that Follows My Soul." Out of nowhere, we get this random news about Cally that just randomly renders moot a major part of of the story for the last couple of years just because it suits the writers' need. It was lazy and boring, which kind of perfectly describes the episode.

The show this week revolved around what the fleet was going to do about their tenuous relationship with the Cylons. Adama and Roslin want to align with them, while Zarek, Gaeta, and in all likelihood a large part of the fleet want to cut them loose. In a way, this could be an interesting development - if the fleet's whole existence has come down to find Earth and beat the Cylons then it could be just as big a blow to some people to lose the Cylons as an enemy as it was to find that the whole Earth thing wasn't going to come together for them.

But the whole thing just didn't really work. Right now it seems like everyone would have much larger concerns. Roslin and Adama, both still seem too shaken up about Earth to really contribute much, Gaeta wasn't exactly convincing in his role as betrayer of the fleet, and Tom Zarek has never really done it for me. I also see the other side a little bit more than the show did. Yes the Cylons are kinda good now and sure the right thing to do is to ally with them. But let's not forget that these Cylons were completely okay with destroying the colonies and ending life-as-everyone-knew-it. You can't expect everyone to happily let bygones be bygones that easily

So this week's episode felt lazy and wheel-spinning and, combined with the mehtastic reveal of the final Cylon (that went more or less unremarked upon this week) I haven't really been feeling the last hours of Galactica so far. Of course, its still way too early to make any final judgments, but the writing problems and lack of imagination here really bugged me and had me longing for the days of season one and two.

C

Lost - "Because You Left"/"The Lie"

Jam-packed with more crazy plot twists, strange developments, and time travel than most shows pack into a season, the two hour, two episode fifth season premiere of Lost showed that the writers no longer care about making concessions to new viewers. Mad Men may be slow and ambiguous, The Wire hopelessly complex, but there's no show as challenging and rewarding as Lost.

We begin, as is our season premiere custom, with a jaunty song and a man going through his morning ritual. That man: Dr. Pierre Chang who you may remember from such hit movies as The Swan Station Orientation Film and The Orchid Station Orientation Video. He travels out to the construction site of what will become The Orchid, the location of “an almost limitless energy that will allow us to manipulate time.” But there are rules, rules that will likely come to play this season. Oh yeah, and Daniel Farraday is there. I don't think I'm overstating things by saying this may be one of the best sequences Lost has produced and perfectly launches us into the epic and exhausting season premiere.

Back off the island, Ben has set about his plan to bring the Oceanic Six plus Locke back to the island. Their first step is to go get Hurley, but Sayid has already busted him out and now Hurley's wanted for murder. None of the rest of them will be any easier for Ben/Jack to get to, with Sayid clearly having had some kind of falling out with Ben and Sun making a pact with Widmore to kill Ben (also something that's against the rules, if what we learned at the end of The Shape of Things to Come is to be believed). As for Kate, she's on the lam after lawyers come to give Aaron a maternity test (a kind of test that I imagine doesn't really get a lot of action). I'm still betting that the lawyers work for Ben, but it is for now unclear.

This was all very exciting, but it was the stuff on the island that really captured my imagination. It appears that by turning the wheel and moving the island, Ben caused the Losties still left on the island to become displaced in time in what appears to be a more severe version of what Desmond went through. Speaking of Desmond, we got to see hatch-bound Desmond again, who Farraday told to go see his mother. So did Daniel change the future, even though he was insistent that's not possible? Why do the rules not apply to Desmond? Either way, Desmond had better hurry, since Charlotte is getting the Nosebleed of Doom. It seems like she still has way too much story to tell before she can go the way of Minkowski (there wasn't any mention of the still looking for where I was born thing), but I'm worried because it doesn't look like there's going to be a solution to their problems anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Sawyer (if he doesn't refer to Farraday as Doc Brown by the end of season I will be very disappointed) took over as leader of the survivors who because of the time travel stuff, lost their shelter and all the Dharma gizmos and supplies that had been keeping them alive. Frogurt(!) seems especially freaked out by all of this, but hiss terror would be short-lived as things got even worse when someone with flaming arrows attacked them, someone who appears to be neither Dharma nor Other. Or are they? Could these people be the Others before they became Other? Widmore and his cronies?

And Locke had a couple of bang-up sequences of his own. First, he encountered the plane crash that brought Eko's brother to the island. Then he runs into Ethan who nearly kills him before the island shifts through time and Richard Alpert shows up in time to give Locke the information he needs. It seems that what's happening on the island wasn't supposed to happen and in order to fix it, Locke's going to have to bring everyone back. And die, confirming the Locke-as-island-Jesus theory. Oh, and Richard gives Locke a very familiar looking compass (which one of these things belongs to you, already)

The second hour focused a little too much on the Oceanic Six, specifically Hurley who didn't want to lie but had to. But unlike last season's "The Beginning of the End," which was really about the same thing from an emotional standpoint, this one came up a little short, since there was too much going on for Hurley's emotional beats to resonate, but not so much going on that it could make up for that problem. That being said, there was still a lot to like in "The Lie," from Mr. Reyes watching Expose (with a special cameo from the Previously on Lost guy) to the Ana-Lucia appearance.

With Hurley still on the lam, he goes to the only people he can trust: his parents. They do a decent job of stopping the police, but Sayid needs a doctor, so he goes to see Dr. Shepard. Jack revives Sayid, but their story ended before we could get into the meat of why Sayid now distrusts Ben or how Jack will convince him to go back. Meanwhile, Kate met up with Sun, but not a lot happened there either. And in the end, Ben came to see Hurley and seemed to just about have him convinced when Hurley ran out in the street and turned himself into the cops.

This was really about just stacking the odds against Ben and while the process that got us there was kind of tedious, the pay-off was excellent. Ben goes to see Mes. Hawking, the grey-haired lady who talked Desmond out of marrying Penny the first time he traveled through time. It seems that she is in league with Ben (and the woman who works at that butcher's shop), but tells him that he only has 70 hours to convince the Oceanic Six to go back. What happens if he fails? "God save us all."

So in my humble opinion we got one killer episode and one just okay episode. "Because You Left" showed us what Lost 5.0 would look like while relaunching us into the action with the pedal to the floor. "The Lie" suffered from being a little plot heavy, but I think the awesome ending kind of redeemed it. Either way, our long wait is over and its clear that Lost is as exciting and action-packed as ever. Downloading that much mind-blowing information at once was very exhausting but so worth it. Relax and sleep well everyone, our obsession is back.

Because You Left: A
The Lie: B

Tailgating Lost

T-2 hours till the season premiere of Lost and I'm pretty pumped. In case you're looking for some Lost-related ways to fill the time, here's some cool links:

The first Doc Jensen article of the season is up and it is, as always, excellent. Be warned though that while there aren't any overt spoilers he does seem to give away something that was surprising (to me anyway).

Doc also talks to Darlton Clindelof about season 5.

Here's an excellent interview with Damon Lindelof that goes into a lot of stuff about how the strike altered season 4 and features an especially interesting answer towards the end about the casting process of Ben.

USA Today does a pretty good job of recapping where we left everyone and has a pretty good interview to boot.

And from io9, a compendium of the best Lost shout-outs and parodies.

That's about it. See you guys after the show for the recap!

Woo-Hoo!!!

Less than 24 hours!

Battlestar Galactica - "Sometimes a Great Notion"

What was the biggest surprise of the episode? The thirteenth tribe? Kara's charred body? The identity of the last Cylon? For me, it was the scene the in the morgue. Lee stands over Dualla's body searching for a reason. He asks Adama, seemingly setting up Olmos for another gradiose speech. Instead he spits out "I don't frakking know." This episode wasn't about major revelations or mind-blowing twists (although it has both). It was about the people.

But I'm getting ahead. Last night's episode picked right up right with last summer's gut punch of an ending: Earth, it seems, is not the safe haven everyone thought it was. Instead, Baltar's testing confirms that the planet has been radioactive for a veeeery long time. Everything that they've gone through and fought for: its all been meaningless. The implications of that certainly weigh on the episode, but I don't want to neglect the somewhat shocking revelation that the thirteenth tribe was Cylon, not human. What? There were all kinds of twists here, but nothing made my head hurt quite like that one. How are these Cylons related to other seven? How can the Cylons have been invented and manufactured? I've long thought that the show has been building towards some kind of reveal that the humans are actually Cylons themselves and perhaps that's the case, but this new info doesn't really bolster that case.

That being said, the most effective part of this episode for me was watching the toll the news of Earth took on the fleet. Roslin's face when she got back to Galactica and saw the mass of gathered people seemed to say it all. Meanwhile, with Roslin checked out it was up to Lee to take charge and try to give some hope to people who had lost all of theirs. This led to the shocking scene with him and Dualla, one which took me completely by surprise. With the throbbing hopelessness of their situation staring her in the face, Dualla spends her last few moments savoring her perfect evening with Apollo and then pulls out a gun and shoots herself.

This led us into the scene I talked about earlier. Watching as Roslin and Apollo fell apart, it was for a moment reassuring to see Bill Adama, pretty much the most emotionally solid character of the last four seasons, step into the frame. Which made it that much bleaker to see that he had given up too. I've got to give all kinds of credit to Olmos, who nailed the scene with Apollo and the equally powerful one with Tigh later on.

Meanwhile, Kara and Leoben explored Earth and found that the distress signal that led them to Earth came from a downed Viper containing...the body of Kara Thrace! What??? We now know officially that she's not a Cylon (that always seemed a little too easy) so how is she still alive? That's a little too much of a mindbender for me to deal with and it seems like Leoben felt the same way (yet another person who can't handle what he finds on Earth).

Then there was Tyrol, Tory, Anders and Tigh who all began to remember parts of their lives on Earth 2000 years ago. So they're all over 2000 years old. And it appeared that Earth, while populated with Cylons, was not populated with just the 12 models we know and love. I imagine this notion will be the one that the remainder of the episodes pivots on.

But of course, there was the big finale. It seems like Ellen was one of the few characters who I completely failed to consider as being the last Cylon, but it definitely wasn't the kind of great gut punch twist that the show is known for delivering. For this reason, I was initially disappointed. But think about it and it seems like one of the few choices that actually makes sense. It raises the stakes of what went on in New Caprica even more and it adds yet another dimension to the Saul-Ellen relationship. The most important thing to keep in mind is that this isn't the end of the series, which means that while the choice of Ellen may not have been the most immediately satisfying, I have enough faith in the writers to trust that it will pay off in the long term.

A-

P.S. Pretty much the definitive post-show analysis is here, featuring interviews with Ron Moore, the episodes' writers, and its director.