"Greatest Hits"

DECEMBER 7, 2010

FOCUS: CHARLIE
EPISODE: 3.21
AIRED: MAY 16, 2007

Pretty much every problem I had with Season 3 was eradicated by "Greatest Hits" and the following episode, since they brought in full force everything I loved about Lost, and delivered what may be the most satisfying cap of any season of the show (yes, even Season 1). I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but by killing off a major character that we've been with since the very first episode, it truly showed us how no one was safe, and that final scene pretty much broke every conventional rule of serialized dramas. Well played!

But that's "Looking Glass", let's talk "Greatest Hits". Frankly, if you don't tear up at least once during this episode, you pretty much have no soul. I'd argue that Charlie's reflections leading up to his death are sadder than his actual death, since we had been told so many times he would die over the course of the season, it was sort of anticlimactic. But reflecting on the best moments of his life prior to that? Oh man, I lost my shit the first time I saw it and still get teared up at parts, particularly Liam telling Charlie that he's the one that will grow up, get married and have a baby (oops), and of course declaring the moment he met Claire as the best in his life.

The real nose-blower, however, is his goodbye to Hurley. It's sad in so many ways - that he has to insult him to save his life, that Hurley doesn't realize he's never going to see what is essentially his best friend again, and their very bro-mantic "I love yous"... again, if you're not at least misty eyed here, you're some sort of goddamn robot.

Hell, the episode is so good I can even ignore two rather clunky bits of writing: 1. Charlie actually starts writing the list before Desmond tells him that this is it for him, and 2. Why does he write one at a time? Since he's going backwards, he obviously knows what #1 is, why does he delay? I think it would have made more sense if he had written it out at some previous time (especially when he actually stops rowing the boat in order to write down #1 - Desmond should have been like "You gonna help, brother?") and then they used the camera to REVEAL one at a time throughout the episode.

I also love how their usual multi-group plan for the end of a season worked together for a change. Instead of having folks off doing one thing and others doing something mostly unrelated, it was sort of like a three part attack, with Charlie and Desmond going off to shut off the signal so that Jack and the others could send a message from the radio tower area, where they would all be because Sayid, Jin, and Bernard (oh yeah, Bernard and Rose show up for the first time all season, and Vincent pops up too!) were waiting to ambush the Others. For the first time all season, everyone appears and has something to do. Well, Locke's in a ditch somewhere, but everyone ELSE has a goal and if they fail none of the other parts will work or will be in vain.

I also love when Carl tries to "out" Juliet by revealing she's a spy to the other survivors. "They know, but, thanks!" I love her. She'd get to be a lot funnier next season ("It's stressful being an Other, Jack."), and I truly think part of why S6 felt so underwhelming is due to her absence - she may have come on board late but she quickly became one of my favorite characters, and her stuff with Sawyer stood up with the best of the show's "couples".

Onward to the season finale!

Where are we?

PLEASE, GO ON...

"Fire + Water"

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

FOCUS: CHARLIE
EPISODE: 2.12
AIRED: JANUARY 25, 2006

One of the things I’m most looking forward to as I re-watch every episode back to back is deciding once and for all what the worst episode of Lost is. I often say it’s the one about Jack’s tattoos, but I can’t remember the on-island story in that one, which might be fine. “Fire + Water”, however, is pretty worthless on and off the island, and now even more so with the show’s conclusion in mind (which I’ll be spoiling in a bit, so if you haven’t seen S6 yet, don’t read this review!).

Charlie’s flashbacks reveal... his brother was a drug addict and he had a need to take care of his loved ones. Gee, they haven’t covered that ground yet, thanks for the insight. The baby commercial is just stupid – I get that they were supposed to be washed up, but wouldn’t it make more sense to have them reduced to playing in a Chuck E Cheese or something? Liam also seems to kick heroin in a day or so – the timing structure of the flashbacks is a bit fuzzy.

And yet it’s still not as bad as the island stuff, where Charlie goes apeshit despite not using drugs, tries to drown the baby, sleepwalks... it’s just a mess. Also, Locke’s treatment of him is totally out of character – I get that he’s frustrated, but he also seems to be hanging with Claire more than necessary just to spite the guy. Seems Locke would be trying to help Charlie, not make his situation worse.

Then we have the baptism nonsense, which in hindsight makes either makes no sense or the writers seem to be suggesting Christian beliefs are nonsense. Claire specifically asks if her and Aaron both need to be baptized in order to stay together in the afterlife. Since they DO end up in the afterlife together, that either means that everyone was Catholic/baptized (which, they're not - Locke dismisses it, Sayid is Islamic, etc.) or Lost’s writers don’t believe baptism has a point, right? Don’t forget – they knew how the should would end! Nothing is just there for the hell of it, right?

Also, why does Locke keep all of the statues/heroin? If he thinks the heroin has any medicinal value, why keep it in the statues? Wouldn’t it make more sense to break them, get the H, and give it to Jack (the DOCTOR), instead of locking it in a room that Jack (or anyone else) apparently won’t know the combination to?

The only thing to a saving grace the episode has is the couple of scenes between Hurley and Libby, as their glorified platonic relationship begins to grow. There’s an odd moment about the washer and dryer being new (huh?), but otherwise it’s just a sweet and funny little subplot, plus it hints about her time in the institution, one of the 395 or so things that they went out of their way to implement into the show and never explain. But you gotta love Hurley’s cluelessness, plus Sawyer’s rare moment of genuine selflessness when he helps Hurley get her attention.

Hell even the Lostpedia entry for this episode is crap – whoever wrote the synopsis has stuff all out of order and in some cases repeated. Ugh. At least once I’m done with this project I’ll probably never re-watch any of the episodes again (maybe season 6 just to make it even with the others, which I’ve watched 3-4 times each), so I can take comfort knowing I won’t have to sit through this one ever again.

Where are we?

PLEASE, GO ON...

"Homecoming"

OCTOBER 5, 2010

FOCUS: CHARLIE
EPISODE: 1.15
AIRED: FEBRUARY 9, 2005

According to the Lostpedia, Damon Lindelof considers “Homecoming” (which he wrote) the worst ever episode of Lost. Now, I assume he couldn’t pick one that someone else wrote, but even among the ones he DID write, I’m not sure why he singled this one out. It’s not a particularly great episode, no, but it’s not a BAD one by any means. You get Jack kicking some ass, Charlie going all Charles Bronson on Ethan, a nice Office shout-out, and an 815 reference (the copier) that I just caught now on my 4th viewing. Not too shabby.

My guess would be that the episode does have some plot contrivances that exist to keep the Others from being unveiled too early. We get that Charlie is pissed, but shooting a guy in cold blood does seem a bit out of character. And it also robs us of Ethan, who was always one of the more interesting Others (which they obviously agree with, since they kept working him into flashbacks – he appeared in more episodes after he died than he did before).

Also their new clothes are largely ill-fitting. Sawyer’s bright blue shirt and Jack’s black one just don’t look right on the characters. It’s an odd thing, yes, but I dunno, it bugged me for some reason. However, I highly doubt that was one of Lindelof’s issues.

Otherwise, what’s not to like? Hurley delivers one of the show’s all time best eulogies (“Sorry I kept calling you Steve.”), Vincent returns, Jin gets to have another “conversation” with one of the English speaking folks (Charlie, who tells him he’s lucky to be so ignorant – it would have been cool if they had figured out a way to do an episode from Jin’s perspective, without understanding a word), and Jack gets one of his rare good insults directed at Sawyer.

As for the flashbacks, like the best episodes (which again, this is not), we learn more about the past of a character while understanding what drives them to do what they are doing on the island. Here it’s Charlie being turned down by a woman he cares for, telling him he will never be able to take care of anyone. It’s a sad moment, and ties in perfectly to the island stuff, which a few of the recent episodes weren’t as successful at doing (such as “All The Best Cowboys...”). I remember one season 2 episode, they actually changed who the episode was “about” by swapping in someone else’s flashbacks, but that doesn’t seem like it would be possible with this one. It’s totally a “Charlie” episode (hell, it’s not even HIS worst one, now that I think of it - the one where he has flashbacks about doing a diaper commercial was way worse).

Then again, Mr. Lindelof thought dedicating half of the final season of the show to some temple that no one cared about was a good idea, so why listen to him?

Where are we?

PLEASE, GO ON...

"The Moth"

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

FOCUS: CHARLIE
EPISODE 1.7
AIRED: NOVEMBER 3, 2004

Despite having one of the most obvious metaphors ever committed to film, “The Moth” is a good episode of Lost. I don’t mind heavy-handedness too much, and Charlie crawling his way out of the “cocoon” is still better than the good vs bad nonsense in the 6th season (wrapping baby Jacob and baby MIB in white/black was the last straw). Still, now I look at it as a sign that these guys maybe weren’t the best writers in the world after all.

Otherwise, solid stuff. I liked the idea of a cave-in, because so far they hadn’t really faced much “real” danger (one cannot consider polar bear attacks in the middle of a tropical island to be something that would realistically come up in this situation). Maybe it should have been someone more expendable inside, since Jack isn’t really in danger until the last episode of the show, but it still works. And I like that it gives Michael something to do besides say “Come on, man” to Walt for once, plus lets him and Jin work together to save Jack (I also like that Jin puts aside his “Me man, you woman” attitude towards Sun for a while, letting her get dirty and help move rocks).

It’s also the first time we can really feel sympathetic toward Sawyer, since Kate is such a bitch to him in this one. He even goes out of his way to tell her about Jack’s accident, but when she berates him (twice) before he even speaks, he decides not to. Her fault. There was a moment in an earlier episode where he related to Boone how much it sucked to be the one everyone hated, but here was the first time you got a good glimpse of the conflicted hero he’d eventually become. When Kate says “You’re actually comparing yourself to JACK?”, Josh Holloway totally nails the hurt look in his eyes.

I haven’t talked much about the acting on the show; I think they were all pretty great in their roles, but a lot of them, Holloway included, seem to have perfected one character and don’t have much range beyond that. I couldn’t imagine him playing Jack, for example (nor could Matthew Fox pull off Sawyer). Of all the folks I wasn’t familiar with prior to the show, Naveen Andrews seems to be the one most capable of taking on a completely different role with ease. But they all pale to Terry O’Quinn, who gets some nice moments with Charlie in this episode, making him beg for his heroin 3 times before he will actually give it to him.

Quick note – I never thought about it, but Charlie tosses his stash into the fire that is cooking their food. Enjoy your heroin-smoked boar, everyone!

As for the flashbacks, I liked how they each took place months or even years apart; showing them before they even got signed, to the peak of their fame, to when it was all over. But I think they should have shown something in between him first trying it and the last flash, where his brother is now clean and he’s a mess – how did that transition occur? We got some of that filled in over the years, but the way it was structured here was awkward at best. I know fans like to “organize” the flashbacks in chronological order (at least, on paper) – of all of them, Charlie’s would be the one that would require the most work, because his flashback episodes tended to span many years, filling in blanks like that one while adding other pieces to the puzzle.

But hurrah! Another one without any lingering mysteries! Good old season 1.

Where are we?

PLEASE, GO ON...

"Pilot" (Part 1 and 2)

SEPTEMBER 22, 2010

FOCUS: CHARLIE, JACK, KATE
EPISODE: 1.1, 1.2
AIRED: SEPTEMBER 22/29, 2004

When Lost premiered, I didn’t have DVR or Tivo. I was still using VHS and the ever tricky “timer”, which caused many a panicked “Did I shut the VCR off? Did I cue the tape up to the right spot?” moments in my life (we didn’t have Hulu back then either). And I can’t remember what it was, but I was already taping something else the night Lost premiered, so I had to watch it live. By the end of the hour, I knew this was going to be a show I ALWAYS watched live, or as close to it as possible.

Because I watch a lot of shows, and some just sort of get left behind, caught up during the summer season (I just finished 24 like, last month). But Lost is the exception – throughout its 6 year run, I never went more than a couple hours after it aired without watching it. If something came up and I had to be out late, I’d watch it when I got home, even if it was 2 am and I had to be up at 7. There were two reasons for this. One – it was a show built on revelations that folks could spoil on the internet. I remember during season 3, a major death was spoiled by someone on the East coast, as I was on the West before it aired. That’s not cool.

But the main reason is, the show was just too damn good, and I didn’t want to wait for the new episode any longer than I had to – it would be like opening your gifts on December 27th, as far as I was concerned. And re-watching the two part pilot just reminded me of that all over again. I hadn’t seen it since the days leading up to Season 3 (I would always re-watch the previous two seasons whenever one was about to begin), and while I could have made the same point then, it’s even more relevant now: the pilot is almost remarkably simple when you think about the show as a whole, and it got so much right that other serialized shows got wrong.

The pilot is fascinating by virtue of how much ISN’T in it. No Ben or Juliet, hell, no Others, period! No time travel. No Desmond (boo!), no hatches, no Dharma, no convenient stockpiles of food or fully developed neighborhoods, nothing. Just 48 people and some plane wreckage, for the most part. So many of the serialized shows that came after Lost made the fatal mistake of introducing all of its mysteries right up front, giving you too much to process and too little reason to care. But Lindelof/Carlton (and Abrams, I guess) knew that in order for anyone to stick around for the long haul, they needed to care about the folks at the center of the story. The debate over whether or not they had the whole show planned from the start will go on forever, but we can probably all agree that they never intended to have 5-6 seasons of folks on an island simply trying to survive until rescue comes.

Yet, in the pilot, we are only given brief tastes of that sort of stuff. The monster eating the pilot (which I still don’t get, in the long run, the smoke monster didn’t usually just kill folks at random), the French broadcast, and the goddamn polar bear are the only “big story” things in the two-part pilot. Just quick tastes and hints - nothing that ever overshadows the always compelling “desert island” scenario. And for every “sci-fi” type moment, there are about 5 that are nothing but character development. Sure, the scene with the polar bear is pretty bad ass, but the scene where Hurley gives Claire some airplane food, and then gives her an extra for her baby, is the type of stuff that got people to love the show.

And they were terrific at setting up character mysteries without them being too distracting. Sawyer reading the letter, Jin and Sun’s volatile relationship, etc – these are small moments that help you realize that understanding the truth about these folks is just as, if not more, interesting than anything involving polar bears. The one exception is Locke, who is just too creepy in these episodes. I suppose it can be chalked up to him just being weirded out by having the use of his legs again, but these moments just don’t feel right to me. Especially in contrast to folks like Hurley or Jack, who already had their characters down pat. Of course, I think Locke was the most mangled character over the show’s run, but we will discuss that more when it starts to become relevant. Otherwise, another amazing thing about the show is how little it suffers from the usual pilot problems, such as different looks for the characters, clunky exposition, or a focus on things that ultimately aren’t embraced by the audience and thus phased out. It’s not just a pilot, it’s a great episode of Lost – that’s not something you can say about too many shows (Community comes to mind – the pilot of that show is borderline painful at times, and almost every character is completely different than the one they ended up being).

Even without all of the “looking at it now...” type stuff making it interesting, it’s simply an amazing pilot episode, yet to be topped in my opinion. The opening post-crash stuff is as riveting as anything that was ever on ER, and the journeys around the island (transceiver, high ground for the signal) are exciting in all the right ways – there’s a sense of adventure, some tension/suspense, and a lot of character building – I love the bit where Kate’s trying to get Jack as impressed as she is about Charlie being in Driveshaft, and Jack’s just like “What? Whatever, can we go?” There’s also a great deal of humor, and even that reveals character (Shannon explaining why she doesn’t know French). This show characterizes 12-15 people in one episode better than most shows do with half that number over an entire season.

One thing I never really noticed before was that Jack was barely in the 2nd half of the pilot (possibly leftover from the fact that he was originally going to die, at the hands of Smokey if memory serves). It’s an ensemble show through and through, but Jack was always sort of the main character (him and Kate appeared in the most episodes, whereas folks like Jin or Desmond would disappear for 4-5 episodes at a time), and there aren’t too many hour long episodes in this first season that he wasn’t a significant driving force behind the island stories, even if the flashbacks were about someone else. But the 2nd half is mostly about the folks going off with the radio, and he’s not in their number.

Kate is, however, and I guess I should get this out of the way in case I haven’t made it clear over on HMAD or twitter – I think Evangeline Lilly is the most beautiful actress in the world, and I was smitten almost instantly with her (despite that horrid orange shirt). It’s funny how often I’d read about people hating Kate, and I was never sure if I just disagreed for real or if I was just mentally blocking any potential issues I might have with the character because she was played by someone I found so alluring. One thing I’ll definitely be doing with this “re-view” is trying to look at her character more objectively to see if she really was a weak link of sorts.

Another thing I will be doing is pointing out mysteries that were never really solved in any satisfying way. I can let the goddamn sneaker slide, but I’m still sort of baffled how Jack got that far away from the plane, in thick brush, without his seat (we see that he is buckled in during the crash) and with almost no signs of injury. Plus Rose was right next to him on the plane (and Locke right behind her), but they both were on the beach. This is the sort of thing that probably didn’t help when the finale came around and lots of unintelligent people thought they were dead the whole time.

Also the fact that the comic book seemed to mirror some of the island events, I don’t recall any explanation for. But then again my memory is shit, so if I think something went unsolved, and it didn’t, please let me know!

The biggest thing I took away from the pilot was how much I am going to miss this show, and more importantly, how much I miss what it used to be – simple, centered on character, and not disappointing. Every season had a couple of clunkers, but I never was disappointed by a season as a whole until the last 2, which I thought spent too much time on things that didn’t matter (S5 – 1977, S6 – The Temple) and lost sight of (or just plain ruined) too many characters. I didn’t hate the finale like many did, but I definitely had problems with it. But this pilot? It’s friggin perfect.

Where are we?

PLEASE, GO ON...