So very very lost.
…..I’ve just watched a special telling me all about the entire Machavallian goings-ons that has happened throughout season 5 of “LOST” in preparation for the first of a two part season finale the free to air network had buried late late last night.
And yet… despite this catchup tutorial… I still had to go to “LOST WIKI” to try to get a grip on who is who and what the hell is happening in this time shift soup of a tv show.
Even after the special and the first part finale…. all I really wanna know is –
1) what is a Jacob and no it isn’t a brand of coffee or a biscuit…. or is it??
2) what’s the deal with the dude who never ages and has a name like the Tijuna Brass Band fellow.
3) Locke was cool and he so now isn’t but is that because he is now the nemesis of Jacob… or is he??
4) will Kate ever get her funbags out for real… seriously… the FHM coverage was lame… be proud girl.
5) have we forgotten about the freaky Walt character.. we have? Cool… he was annoying except for the magic comic book with the polar bear… what about the polar bear?? Arrrrghhh.
6) what is it with this immortal bloody dog. If I was on that Island… I’d be sticking with that dog… he knows something… maybe he’s a Jacob…
7) Apollo candy bars… really??? And all the plain wrap generic Dharma branded food… how come this isn’t on our shop shelves by now… come on people there’s money to be made here….
EIGHT) ….and now for that other bloody annoying space time continuum annoyance blighting me… no not “Heros”, I gave up on what was an exciting and promising first season that dive bombed into utter crapdom in season 2+ with …you guessed it, plenty of time flash-forwards-backwards-sidewards… no no no people, I mean that freakin ‘new’ Star Trek movie…. the one with evil dude from…. well… Heros… that fixed watches who is now in this movie as a Vulcan who ….also most certainly also likes watches and the film is directed by…. oh… dear… grods… J.J. – the very man behind Loooooooosssssssst !
Hey there, Saturday, let me sling you a long, cool welcome-on-back to Ranchero Voodoo, the sunniest little patch to be found here in the fetid depths of The Swamp Of Insanity [1].
And yeah, I feel your pain about Lost, except that I don’t, because I avoided watching the show entirely. It wasn’t easy, either — I had all these friends… well, a friend… who kept asking me if I’d seen the latest episode, and who then would relate interesting and surprising plot developments from the episode in question, and who would ask me to interpret these developments in my capacity as The Guy Who Sits On The Couch And Says ‘I Bet It Was His Twin Brother! No, Wait, He Is The Twin Brother! No, No! The Woman Is All Three Of The Twin Brothers!’
Sadly, many years ago I learned a bitter lesson from watching Twin Peaks.
Back then, we were young and innocent and listening to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice, and we thought it was possible to sustain a storyline that had so many holes in it that it basically didn’t exist as anything other than an abstract concept that David Lynch scribbled onto a napkin late one night while obviously experiencing a migraine.
We were all going around saying, “She’s wraaaapped in plaaastic,” and we didn’t think it was weird at all that Laura Palmer came back as her own cousin in Season 2 and got murdered for a 2nd freakin’ time, how unlucky is that?
We happily suffered through the pointless James Hurley substory, where he left Twin Peaks to go find himself and then arrived back in Twin Peaks because apparently that’s where he’d been all along, but only in a metaphorical sense.
We shrugged our shoulders and said “What the…?” over how Big Ed could stay married to the more-than-a-little-psychotic Nadine when he was clearly in love with Norma Jennings, owner of the Double R Diner, who was in turn married to the brutal Hank, who everyone thought was safely locked up in prison until he unexpectedly convinced a parole board to set him free (and wasn’t he a nasty piece of work? Oh yes he was).
We didn’t blink an eyelid at the Character Development Arcs of Major Garland Briggs and his ne’er-do-well son, Bobby Briggs, with the first beginning the show as an ineffectual and largely forgettable father-figure and developing into a balding and slightly overweight Guy Who Knows Serious Stuff About What’s Really Happening, and the latter visibly heading down the road to Minor Level Annoying Badass Town and then somehow turning out to be a character with hidden depths and complexities and maybe he wasn’t really a complete asshole after all?
We loved it when The Log Lady turned up, even though she made no freakin’ sense whatsoever, and we-ate-it-up-with-second-helpings-please when Special Agent Dale Cooper tried to solve the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer by throwing stones at bottles and blaming the whole failed experiment on the Buddhists.
In short, we adored this show and we hoped that one day it would all make sense and we ignored the fact that the script was eventually required to support more than 60 distinct characters and a headache-inducing number of substories [2].
But, of course, it couldn’t continue. Ratings for the show started to decline and eventually the writers were only given a handful of episodes in which to try to resolve all of these threads into something that made sense; and they failed. Even more depressing, Lynch decided to try to keep the series alive by finishing the last episode of Season 2 with a monstrous cliff-hanger [3], but no third season was ever commissioned.
Sigh.
So, you see, after Twin Peaks I simply couldn’t bring myself to get involved in another series where you need a whiteboard and a bottle of painkillers to try and figure out, episode to episode, who’s still alive, who’s really dead, and where in the story timeline you are truly at.
Actually, come to think of it, I did get involved with another series after Twin Peaks — that was The X-Files, but after about Season 5 I lost interest in that as well, mainly due to the kind of disappointment I had about Twin Peaks and the way I thought the X-Files writers were pretty much doing the same almost-resolving-but-not-quite-and-BAM-you-weren’t-expecting-that-were-you story development that I’d seen with TP.
Hopefully the writers for Lost will get a chance to actually resolve the storyline in a way that makes sense to its fans, and hopefully they haven’t already thrown away any chance of doing that by trying to be too clever to the point where no resolution can possibly make sense.
You’ll have to tell me all about it once the very last episode has been aired.
Murray @ Midnight
I guess the big difference between Lost and T/X-Files is that the producers of Lost have a definite season completion agreement with the networks so they have a set period to finish up everything… you know… before the movie comes out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_(TV_series)
Lost will conclude in its sixth season with its 120th and final episode airing in May 2010.[10] Season six will consist of seventeen episodes.
This is kinda rare for US tv serials as usually the greed factor is too strong and they keep commissioning new seasons well past their used by date toe xtract as much moolar (the principal currency of the Sextet Nation of Five Tribes and One Other).
James Hurley sub-story???? But one of the cool characters in Lost is called Hugo ‘Hurley’ Reyes…. hmmmm …oh and beofre I forget… dude, check out the tv show t-shirts…. I really like the jumpsuit.
http://abctvstore.seenon.com/index.php?v=abctvstore_lost&ecid=PRF-TV2-200196&pa=PRF-TV2-200196
Love it. It almost ranks up there with “The Sopranos” t-shirt advertising their pole dancing bar hang out – “The Bada Bing”.
http://www.amazon.com/BADA-BING-T-shirt-Sopranos-Adult/dp/B000Q0L2TM
want it!
Darren Saturday said:
You’re absolutely right — it is rare. I guess the only thing left to hope is that the writers haven’t got the story into an unresolvable state by trying to be too clever.
Murray @ Midnight
Darren Saturday said:
According to Wiktionary, a Jacob is Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘testicles’, which probably tells you a great deal about the Cockneys and their abilities to rhyme.
Darren Saturday said:
Oddly enough, Richard Alpert was once at a Tijuana Brass Band concert, but it isn’t known if he enjoyed himself. He went to the toilet twice. He is approx 14,544 years old, when measured diagonally. Some heretics might think this has something to do with TimeCube, but obviously has much more to do with Twelve.
When we say he went to the toilet twice, we mean ever.
Darren Saturday said:
Locke will be cool again in Season 6, and also look for an explanation of the whole backgammon motif in which Locke returns from a future version of the island carrying a Harrods shopping bag and raving hysterically about a CD he almost purchased of Seal performing reggae covers of Donovan songs.
Darren Saturday said:
No, she won’t.
Darren Saturday said:
Walt is obviously still among The Others (except that I’m told he’s apparently back in LA, but I’m going to just pretend that didn’t happen). The polar bear is a metaphor for his emotional crisis about losing his mother and the fact that his adoptive father abandoned him. Also, it’s a real polar bear, which damn near tore his head off. Some metaphors are harder to deal with than others.
Darren Saturday said:
The dog quite obviously knows everything about everything, but there’s only so much you can communicate with “woof!” (aside from, “Timmy’s down the frackin’ well again.”)
Darren Saturday said:
Great idea, but why in Grod’s name aren’t you trying to think of merchandising ideas for Voodoologic? I mean, what the…?
Just a quick followup on your Twin Peaks riff’ – Kyle McLachlan who played Special Agent Dale Cooper wants to bring back a sequel in the form of five minute webisodes. Oh dear…….
http://www.cinematical.com/2009/06/17/special-agent-dale-cooper-heads-back-to-twin-peaks