Lost: "Pilot, Part 1"

It's jarring to watch the first few minutes of "Lost" again. Part of the fear is, I think, our own knowledge of what's to come - you can't help but pondering hatches and cages and a man named Ben, when you see Jack wake up again, looking so good in a suit that you have to wish he'd never found that shitty blue t-shirt (isn't it funny how, by now, the castaways have worn the same clothes for so long that they've practically got superhero uniforms - Sawyer's scrubulicious work-shirt, Locke's Eagle Scout cargo pants, Kate's sporty-chic wifebeater...)

The show's greatest pleasures are rooted deeply in space and time - our steadily-expanding knowledge of the island's layout, and the vivid one-day-at-a-time presentation. These two facets of "Lost" are rarely remarked upon, and they're also the two things which make the show so special. Can you name any other show on network TV with such a vivid sense of place - another show that actually deserves its own Tolkien-style map? HBO got there first, of course - with the Sopranos' Jersey, with ancient Rome, and with Deadwood, a town so small you can hear the sheriff screwing the rich widow from three log cabins over. But not even HBO has quite caught up with Lindelof/Cuse's vision of time. No matter how often the plot might zip-zap backwards and forwards, the show is always rooted in a steady forward motion, day in, day out. In this way, "Lost" is really the 21st century's first period piece - it's just about to be 2005, on the island.

Those are the two reasons why it's so anxiety-inducing to see Jack race through the forest out into the beach. We're feverishly aware that he will be on this island for months (we're right around day 100 in season 4), and more, we know what's happening elsewhere on the island - that Desmond is lying down in the hatch, more alone than ever, probably drinking to forget about the man he just accidentally killed; that Ben is at the Flame, showing Juliet her cancer-free sister, while his man Ethan races towards one beach and his rival Goodwin races to another.

The island, at moments like this, seems like such a fiercely physical, hyperreal narrative arena. You can imagine that Jack could have run in the wrong direction and tripped one of Rousseau's traps, or run straight into a polar bear. You can never quite get a handle on how big the island is - we live for those very occasional airborne shots, like in the season 3 premiere - and so, even though it feels extremely physical, and alive, there is also something mesmerizingly small about it. It's like a video gamescape in a free-range GTA clone, or a dollhouse version of an outer ring of Hell.

There's another reason the opening minutes make for such anxious viewing - they are just about the most perfect minutes in TV history, about as close to pure cinema as network television could ever get. The beginning of this saga - from when Jack opens his eyes to the moment he staggers away from the beach for his fix-me meet-cute with Kate - is essentially wordless, horrifically quiet before it becomes extraordinarily loud, and represents everything great and ridiculous about what this show would be - an energetic, more-is-more aesthetic, a steady piling of happenstance upon happenstance, like fragile candy-colored Jenga blocks: there's wreckage of a plane crash! one guy is pinned down under the fuselage! you think that's bad, but you haven't seen the pregnant chick! she's having contractions! quick, hand her off to the fat guy while you give the old lady CPR! great, the old lady's breathing again, but watch out, part of the wreckage is about to fall on the pregnant chick and the fat guy! and everything's EXPLODING!

There hasn't been anything else like this scene in the show. Oh, there's been action sequences - the season 3 ending battle on the beach, with Hurley leading the way in the old Dharma van - but nothing matches the endless background desperation, the choreography of mayhem that's half Buster Keaton and half Looney Tunes. That may be part of the reason that some people have gotten continually exasperated with the show. The pilot promised endless island action, but the show quickly became so much more inquisitive - pondering, in season-long rap sessions, strange hatches and numbers. Watched now, five episodes away from the end of a revitalized season four, the plane crash plays more than ever like a traumatizing event because, by comparison, everything else that has happened to the castaways seems so quiet. The heart of what "Lost" is about isn't in the plane crash (which we never see) or its bloody aftermath (where we begin) but in the quiet aftermath to the aftermath, while the credits roll and Michael Giacchino's mournful score plays over scenes of devastation. All of "Lost" is the meditative aftermath to calamity.

Musing - how is it that J.J. Abrams could direct both the two-hour pilot of "Lost" and the two hour third "Mission: Impossible" movie with pretty much the same visual aesthetic - shaky camera, heavy close-ups during dialogue scenes - and come up with two great hours of television and two obnoxious, grating, miserable hours of cinema? Part of it is the democratic camera, focusing equal attention on its huge cast and not on one single megastar. Yet it's also, I think, the implicit understanding that each of those characters will have a story to tell.

Yes, that's built into the show, but isn't that really the point of television - that every character, sooner or later, will discover his own plot? (Think about Gunther on "Friends," or the town of Springfield in "The Simpsons"). Whereas in "Mission: Impossible 3," Abrams doesn't even bother to give us any background on the rest of the team. No one in "Mission: Impossible 3," or really, most major Hollywood movies anymore, have secrets. I don't mean plot secrets, like "I'm working for the terrorists to save America!" I mean real secrets - something they don't want anyone else to know about. Now more than ever, TV characters take their cue from Bogart in "Casablance" - you don't know a single thing about him (there's intimations of fighting in a revolution, and he can't ever go back to America), and that profound unknowability makes him all the more fascinating.

I don't think anyone remembers anyone from "Mission: Impossible 3," because everyone's motivations are so banal. But after the first 45 minutes of "Lost," you know everyone on the cast, precisely because you don't quite know them. Four seasons later, we still don't. How about that?

Lost: "Meet Kevin Johnson"

A violent woman and a peaceful man are in a room. She is sitting, he is standing. She is unlikable, he is annoying. She is a murderer, he is a weakling.

They are not close, have nothing in common, used to be enemies and could never be lovers. Yet they have known each other for a little while. They are at that point in an acquaintanceship where just one good conversation - nothing momentous, something friendly, a bit of humor - will be enough to make them friends.

The woman has a gun. She wants to kill someone. She has always wanted to kill someone (and has - three times, that we know of, once intentionally, once unintentionally, once in self-defense without one bit of guilt.)

Right now, she wants to kill one person, specifically. Someone who hurt her. She is a violent, unyielding person; everyone who knows her hates her, and everyone who knows her hurts her; it is her tragedy to never know which comes first.

She wants to murder again, but lurking deep within the black, ichor-wrapped vessel that is her heart, some ray of redemptive light has shone through. She will not kill today. Maybe she will never kill again. Maybe she has found a bit of peace.

The man should not be able to understand any of this. He is a gentle man, though not a gentleman. He is the sort of artist who knows his way around a construction yard. He has no real interest in life besides protecting his son and himself, in that order, to the exclusion of all else. He has never hurt anyone, although he has often been hurt.

So it is somewhat surprising when he says "Let me do it." The same person who has hurt the woman has hurt him, too, although only in a vague, indirect sort of way. He tries to describe his thirst for vengeance, in an unconvincing tone. So much of what this man says is unconvincing, as if he were second-guessing every word, or worse, as if meaningless talk is his only real defense from losing his mind.

He is small and sad. The mother of his child was far more successful in far more impressive stratas of society; she refused to marry him, and took his son two hemispheres away, and made sure that, as far was the law was concerned, he wasn't even the boy's father. He was reunited with the boy for only a few days before his son found another, older, more aggressively masculine father figure. A history of emasculation - by women, by men, by society, by his child. Everyone loses some of the time; Michael Dawson loses all of the time.

"Let me do it," he says again, and the woman hands him a gun. He looks at it, with that pained look of a man who is about to give up. And if we are not particularly savvy viewers, we might think that he was not going to do it. And if we are savvy viewers, we might think that he would do it. After all, the man they both want to kill, whose name used to be Henry Gale, has just about overstayed his welcome - how much longer can a guest star steal the show?

"I'm sorry," Michael says. And we think we know the next words: "I can't do it." But he doesn't say anything. He shoots Ana Lucia, who looks first surprised, then terrifically sad, then dies. And the only sound in the room (in a subterranean hatch, on an island in the middle of the ocean) is his shaking joints and shallow breathing.

"Michael?" says Libby, and we just about realize that those towels she's carrying are for the romantic picnic on the beach with Hurley when Michael turns around and shoots her twice, his eyes wide with panic and realization.

"Meet Kevin Johnson" replayed this moment (in that quick-cut slamjam "Previously On" way) about two years after it first aired on TV. The power in that moment comes, I think, from the horrific quiet. It might be the first time that murder on broadcast television could stand next to the deadpan horror of murder on "The Wire" - unexpected, inevitable, utterly lacking in sensitivity. Why shoot one cast member, when you can shoot two? It broke so many of the show's own rules, and violated so many of our own expectations. Wasn't Ana Lucia supposed to be a major part of the show, the negative inversion of Jack's heroism? Weren't we supposed to see Libby's flashback episode? Isn't Michael a wuss?

Oh, Michael. Perhaps more than any other character from the first season of "Lost," he was the plot orphan of season 2 - no romance, no interest in the island's many mysteries. His only real relationship on the show, besides a tenuous friendship with Jin (a man who once tried to kill him), was with his mysterious son, absent for most of season 2 except in backwards-speaking island-vision mode.

I watched most of the latter half of season 2 all at once, and watching that much "Lost" in one sitting has the general effect of smoothing out certain narrative slides, so it was only in returning to those episodes more than a year after the fact that I became aware of the cult of "Waaaalt!" Read any analysis of last night's episode and I guarantee you will find that exclamation at least once, with the multiple "a" not even coming close to capturing the strident squeaky repetition that was Michael's season 2.

Part of the pleasure of "Lost" has always been its occasional overripeness - it's pulp, after all, and you don't expect subtlety from a show about plane crashes on mysterious islands where smoke monsters turn into fists and kill unrepentant drug lords pretending to be priests - but the sheer monomania of Michael's paternal obsession was always a bit striking. And a bit off. While so many of the characters gained shades during season 2, Michael seemed to pruned down to his bare, one-dimensional essence - did he have any scenes where he didn't mention his son?

That was why his double murder was such a rare moment of narrative satisfaction. A good Christmas present is something that you don't know you want but find that you can't live without; a good plot twist is something you didn't expect to happen but, you realize, was destined to happen all along. Of course Michael pulled the trigger - hadn't he said, all along, that he would do anything for his boy?

So Michael became the traitor. Other characters had committed crimes before, but that was all in flashback world, off the island. There was something vaguely secure about their island life - no matter how much they quarreled, they still had to live together, and work together. Sayid might torture Sawyer, but they could laugh about it later. There was a certain mutual respect among the castaways - they might not like each other, but they did need each other.

The writers were starting to chip away at this interpersonal security - turning nice boy Charlie into a vengeful wraith (it didn't take, and by next season he was back to his ruefully funny, ultimately self-sacrificing self) - but Michael's actions, more than anything, set the tone for the rest of the series. It suggested that the war of ideas between Jack and Locke could become a real war. It established, once and for all, that the castaways were far greater dangers to themselves than whatever lurked in the jungle.

Most of all, Michael's murder, and his resulting departure from the island, proved that Lindelof and Cuse were not just auteurs of the plot tease - that they could provide a real narrative climax to an ongoing storyline, could write an ending, and that that ending would not be a happy one. Michael had finally saved his son, and look where it left him. The flashforwards provide a constantly ironic postscript to everything that happens on the show - the more that the castaways do to try to get off the island, the more it becomes clear that getting off the island damns them to lonely, private damnation.

But we knew that back in the season 2 finale, as Michael cast one look back over his shoulder, leaving behind people who could have been his greatest friends. You could tell that he didn't want to go back; you could tell that he didn't want to keep going. He was trapped in some existential guilt spiral paradox. He had saved himself and damned himself. He was absolutely fucked.

That's where his flashback picked up last night. Whenever Michael writes a note, you know it's probably a suicide note; whenever he goes for a drive, you know he's probably trying to crash his car. There were parts of last night's episode that didn't quite ring true - how did Michael and Walt get back into the country so fast, without passports? How did Michael manage to con his way onto a boat owned by an evil multimillionaire, and how did a boat full of Blackwater-ready mercenaries not think to check inside that big brown case sent airmail to the quiet, mysterious deckhand?

But next to those little inconsistencies, there was the dark, vivid wit. For my money, there won't a funnier scene scene on TV this year than watching Michael sitting in his little Manhattan apartment, watching some 70s game show, trying to kill himself. He raises the gun, squeals a little bit and pulls the trigger, and the gun jams. Annoyed, he checks the barrel - it's full. Nonplussed, he raises the gun to his temple to try again again. And then JANGO! TV tells him that an airplane that he nows crashed on an island was just found at the bottom of the ocean.

This scene is so giggly over the top. It reminds you why "Lost," more than most TV, is a great show to watch with lots of people. I saw "Meet Kevin Johnson" with a few of my best friends who also happen to be as obsessive about the show as me, and it's remarkable how many gigantic belly laughs "Lost" can provoke - both from great sharp lines, (Hurley's "We knew that, like, forever ago."), crowdpleasing character bits (Sayid uses his Iraqi jujitsu! Ben begs somebody to trust him!), and bits so ripe with melodrama you can imagine an Elmer Bernstein score replacing Michael Giacchino's swooping trumpets (Michel: "I came here to die.")

It would be pointless to make a parody of "Lost," since the show is so much funnier than a parody could ever be. That's not to say that the show isn't powerful. I think of Ben's final words to Michael: "You're one of the good guys now, Michael," says the most evil man alive, and Michael, head down, almost gagging on the irony, can only try to sob. This is "Lost" at its finest.

I've said before that the show, which used to be about Catholic-inflected redemption, is now about something more zen - self-realization, reaching peace with yourself rather than trying to improve yourself, yoga, "Namaste." Moments like this, coupled with the entire fatalistic tone of the flashforwards, make me wonder if I'm only half-right.

Consider - Michael only started working for Ben because he was seeking redemption - not in some vaguely defined way, but directly. Decloseted Tom made it so overtly explicit that the writing would have been amateurish if it wasn't so obvious that Michael was being set up. And now, his attempt at redemption has sunk him lower than ever. Sure, he was living in hell in New York City, but at least he couldn't hurt anyone except himself. Now, he's back - back in the show, back (almost) on the island - and he may yet add to the death toll on his conscience. It's as if a soldier, home from war and despondent over his actions there, decided that the best way to make up for his past was to return to the war and try to do better this time. Michael second tour of duty begins now, and it looks like it will be even more fatal than the first. Redemption leads to more damnation. Is "Lost" the most agnostic show in TV history?

One final thought - "Lost" has always been a show about dysfunctional father figures. Christian Shephard emotionally abused his son and abandoned his illegitimate daughter; Anthony Cooper stole his son's kidney, ruined his love life, and then threw him out a window; Sawyer's pop pulled the old spousal murder-suicide; Kate killed her abusive stepdad, who was actually her real dad; Sun's dad turned her husband into a mobster; Hurley's dad left when he was a kid; Aaron's father left Claire single and pregnant; on and on and on (there's been at least two incidents of patricide perpetrated by the main cast of "Lost" - three, if you count Locke's murder-by-proxy).

But Michael is the only main character who is explicitly defined as a father, not as a child. Sure, Sawyer's got his illegitimate girl somewhere in middle America, and Jin's got little Ji Yeon somewhere in the future, but Michael has been Walt's father since the beginning of the show.

It may be that his storyline holds a key to understanding the show's endgame. None of us really know what the hell role Christian Shephard will play in the future of the show - whether he's alive or walking dead, whether he is Jacob or the monster makes him look like Jacob or what. But it's clear that he will make many more appearances (or perhaps a few more potent appearances).

And as much as every child on this show seems doomed to hate their fathers, I wonder if our understanding of Michael - the way he constantly finds himself in impossible situations, and how sometimes his abject love for his son just isn't enough - is going to contribute to some final twist. Is the show about how the sins of the father are passed down to the son? Or is it about how, when the son becomes the father, he discovers that they weren't sins at all?

Worst Day Ever?

I go into every Tuesday with a magnificent trepidation. Maybe because it is the furthest day from the weekend, or because that was the day when I was growing up that I would have to go to an awful hour and a half of a Boy Scout meeting and be reminded how much I hated the Boy Scouts (both the organization and the rest of my troop), or because I have some vague shadow-Freud memory of being born on a Tuesday (a fact that I discovered in eighth grade, when I had been hating Boy Scout Tuesdays for over three years.)

Today at work was awful. The new car smell is officially off. There just wasn't time for anything - for breathing, for thinking, for doing any of the other interesting things I try to do with my day. For some vague reason, I've felt like crying ever since the last time I saw my shrink (there is nothing worse than walking out of your shrink's office feeling like you are about to cry - much better to let it out in the office and walk out refreshed - it's like leaving a restaurant when you're still hungry, or leaving a bathroom feeling like you need to shit.) Worse, I had an awful dream about people I never want to think about. Worse, I finished "Kavalier and Clay" on the bus, and there may be no more perfect final words in any American novel after Fitzgerald finished "Gatsby." Then midway through the day, I read that Anthony Minghella died. For some reason, this struck me as being so sad that I had to leave the office and go to a bookstore and pick up a new book.

Now I just read that Arthur C. Clarke died. Mark your calendar. March 18, 2008 - the crappiest day in history.

Lost: "Ji Yeon"

Jin and Sun have always been the most foreign of foreigners on "Lost" - Jin couldn't speak or understand English, Sun had to make pretend she couldn't either, and unlike the Iraqi-accented English featured in Sayid's flashbacks (or the African accents in Eko's), their Korean dialogue is always subtitled (yet another "Lost" breakthrough that now seems utterly normal, since that Hiro Nakamura - the most popular character in a zeitgeist show - hardly ever speaks English.) It was easy to brush them off as vague Asian caricatures: the proud businessman husband who knows karate, the quiet respectful wife who likes gardening. Husband and wife - that was the weirdest thing about them, really. On an island full of young, hotly disheveled single people, here were a pair of young, hotly disheveled married people.

Seriously, what's weirder than marriage in a TV drama? Sitcoms, from "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners" through to "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The King of Queens," have focused so much endless attention on married life that it's easy to forget how few hour-long dramas have featured marriage - not in the supporting cast, not as a show-killing ratings-grabber, but as an integral part of the show right from the start. I mean, just look at a list like this and ponder just how rarely the dramatic possibilities of marriage have been explored on American television. "The Sopranos" might have changed that - marriages are at the center, in one way or another, of "Dirty Sexy Money," "Big Love," "Rome," and of course "Desperate Housewives," but that last show is really just proof of the skewed vision of marriage that reigns in TV land - rife with death twists and yardboy mancandy, it's a vision of America as the country of divorce, where getting married is just the first step to having an affair.

Sun had an affair - one of the many buried mysteries on the island that, in this splendid fourth season, seem constantly in danger of forced excavation. As horrifying as writing for "Lost" must be some of the time - trying to navigate between flashbacks and flashforwards, all while creating a new cliffhanger every commercial break - it must also be a nice feeling to have so many storylines lying around, like land mines in a field of roses just waiting to be tripped. On Thursday, in the midst of a quietly antic episode, there were at least three such explosions - Jin found out that Sun slept with another man; out of the shadows of a dank ghost ship stepped island-Judas Michael; and we found out who got off the island - and then found out we were wrong.

I tend to rag on the Jin/Sun episodes, mostly because their two entries in season 3 were such painful retreads of old themes - Jin selling his soul to Sun's father for the sake of their marriage, Sun trying to escape Jin but then realizing that she loved him, etc. This kind of stuff could fly way back when Jin seemed genuinely a bit dangerous and their on-island marriage was truly hanging by a thread (and when Michael and Sun developed a quiet, unresolved, rarely-remarked-upon flirtation) - but ever since he got back from the failed boat adventure with Michael and Sawyer (remember the boat?), he's been a badass teddy bear, fishing and learning English to please his preggers wifey. Nothing could be more of a buzzkill, after a Desmond or a Locke episode, than the expectation of yet more Korean domestic intrigue.

But Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim are two of the best actors on the show - she usually gets the acclaim and her overarching storyline is more interesting, but it's remarkable what a complete character he has carved in a performance that's only subtitled half of the time (his campfire story session in "Catch-22" is a moment for the ages.) And their marriage has held strong. "Lost," for all its po-mo narrative zip-zap, can be so lovably retro when it comes to romance. Penny waits 8 years for a phone call; Sayid arranges a torchlit picnic for Shannon and asks her brother for permission to date her. (It may be notable that all these classically romantic couplings mostly involve foreigners, whereas the Americans on the show have invariably twisted relationships, strewn with cuckoldry and divorce and bastard children and step-cest.)

"Ji Yeon" might have been about the beginning of the end for Sun and Jin - perversely, and in classic cross-cutting gusto, just after portraying their greatest marital triumph. Jin, sobered by his fishing trip with Bernard, forgives Sun for her affair - recognizing that his own actions pushed her away. I know some people thought that the Jin flashback was a cheat, messing with the audience's perceptions just to keep Jin's fate a secret. But I would argue the whole tone of that flashback spoke volumes about his decision on the island - that, even before he started beating fools up for his mobster-in-law, Jin was a driven workaholic who would stop at nothing to get some functionary's newborn a giant plush fucking panda. For about a moment towards the end, just after it clicked that Jin wasn't bringing the panda to Sun, I thought that maybe he HAD gotten off the island, but that he just cared more about his work than his newborn baby.

That wasn't the case, of course, but I think that we were supposed to take that confusion one step further - to note that, without the island, Jin would have been that kind of man. Of course, thanks to the island, they have experienced reconciliation - really, they seem to have been happier than they ever were before - and they have conceived, but at the cost (it seems) of Jin's life. Is a short happy marriage worth more than a long unhappy one? Yet again, the writers deployed the flashback to mercilessly undercut our warm fuzzies, to cast doubt on the whole arc of the episode's island storyline, and to force us to fits of panic as we consider two and a half seasons of waiting to see a beloved character die, or worse.

There were other great moments in this episode. If "The Constant" and "Walkabout" are gigantic slabs of seasoned Porterhouse, then episodes like "Ji Yeon" and "Tricia Tanaka is Dead" are a plateful of sushi sampler, or a course of randomly selected Tapas - full of tiny diverse morsels, setting you up for a main course to come. That boat just gets freakier and freakier, for one thing - the crazy Kiwi stuntgirl from "Death Proof" finally appeared in person after weeks on the radio, just long enough to read a book upside down and then, in a haunting and hilariously non sequitur image, jump into the water weighted down by chains. (Another great image - walking in to their new bedroom, Desmond and Sayid spot a Cobain blood mark on the wall.)

Jack and Juliet didn't share any scenes, but was it me, or did they both seem to have an extra little swing in their step - as if they were constantly tiptoeing back from a makeout sesh down the beach (or from a freaky mysterious-jungle screw - Where would you rather do it, honey? The cockpit of a crashed plane? That Question Mark station with all the video feeds? Henry Gale's balloon? The Caves? Hurley's golf course?)

Wonderfully, Michael is back - and, even more wonderfully for everyone who ever got ill playing the "WAAAAALLLT!!" drinking game, he seems to have more on his mind than saving his son from everything. Next episode is the last one before a monthlong break - can it be that we'll get the Michael flashback that we've all been waiting for? And if it is a Michael flashback, then good god! Not since "The Man Behind the Curtain" has there been an episode with so much potential for constant whathafuck.

Think like a "Lost" Writer!

Your name is Damon Lindelof. You kicked off the fourth season of "Lost" with a bombastic plotline hidden as a throwaway line - "Oceanic Six" is this year's "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World," the phrase that steadily pays off with each ensuing episode. In typical fashion, you've managed to make even that precise number a bit confusing - does little baby Aaron count as one of the six? Does Ben? If so, which one? If not, how many more people got off the island who aren't being counted by the public at large? In the flashforward future, is Juliet hunkered down somewhere outside Portland? Has Charles Widmore locked Desmond up and thrown away the key?

But now you've getting down to it. Who is/are the last/rest of the Oceanic Six? More to the point, who, like Sayid, needs to be one of the Six, if only to give them some reason to be on the show? You have to be looking at Jin and Sun, right? Sure, Desmond had a vision of Claire getting on a helicopter... but then why would Kate have Aaron? You could have Sawyer or Locke, but both of those characters want to stay on the island now - everyone else who got off the island (that we know so far) is firmly in Jack's camp of get-the-hell-outta-here. Anyways, it's not like Sawyer and Locke ever suffer for things to do. But Jin and Sin? Shit man, they haven't done ANYTHING since forever.

So which one is it? Well, my money used to be on Sun - it lends a nice gender balance to the Oceanic Six, and it just seemed impossible that Jin would ever leave the island without her. But how weird would it be if BOTH women who get off the island had a baby? Wouldn't that be strange - not the usual "Lost" strange, but just a mundane, under-considered strange? And wouldn't a sad, broken Jin, left adrift without his love, make such a great role, such a huge character shift from the stalwart, proud man we've come to know?

But then again, there is the wild card of Michael. Isn't it funny how pretty much everybody knows that Michael is Ben's man on the boat? Like, this has moved from widely-believed theory to basically accepted fact in greater Lostopia. Wouldn't it be a wild whizbang if Michael's NOT the guy on the boat - but if he is the last of the Six?

Maybe. I'm not buying it. Vote Jin in 2008!

Lost: "The Other Woman"

Not nearly enough poems composed in archaic repetitive rhyme schemes have been written about the cruel beauty that radiates from Elizabeth Mitchell's sad, curious face. Not to say that the actress is herself cruel, or sad. In fact, she is the prototypical "Lost" actor, rescued from a career of TV guest appearances and co-starring roles in big-screen dross (she was the Missus in "Santa Clause" 2 and 3) that established her credentials as a journeyman pro but that only hinted at her depth as an actress. You can imagine that she has had to fight to make a career: bit parts in 90s TV shows with names like "LA Firefighters" and "Significant Others," Dennis Quaid's wife in "Frequency," Linda McCartney in a TV movie that was actually called "The Linda McCartney Story." She was Angelina Jolie's lesbian lover in "Gia," one of the very rare TV movies that people actually talked about. But Angelina became Angelina, and Elizabeth Mitchell had a four-episode stint on Jennifer Love Hewitt's "Party of Five" spin-off.

I don't mean to make fun of her. Far from it. This woman is tough. She never had her debutante moment, was never the next It Girl, like her old co-stars Jolie and Hewitt (and now Evangeline Lilly). She has just worked, and kept on working, past the age when Hollywood stops paying attention, maybe waiting for her big breakthrough, maybe satisfied enough to be a working actress, which is usually an oxymoron.

That is why her beauty is so particularly cruel - because it bespeaks a certain wizened experience, an understanding of despair and human frailty, and a cold, black humor about this cold, dark world. It is that humor - that deadpan, fatal sarcasm - that made Juliet such an instantly perfect addition to the show. For those first six episodes of season 3, when Sawyer and Kate were in cages and nothing seemed to make the least amount of sense, mysterious Juliet was the reason to keep watching, beckoning us forward.

Lost's first round of female characters were desperately sincere - spunky Kate, preggers Claire, just-wants-to-be-loved Sun. They tried to do something different with Ana Lucia, but she was a bit too much of an extreme in the other direction - unnecessarily angry at everything, as if Michelle Rodriguez had her boxer's grimace from "Girlfight" botox-carved permanently on her magnificently self-loathing face. I liked Ana Lucia, but her best moment was unquestionably her death. It was the shot of thrill juice the show needed, coming after long weeks of number-typing.

Juliet was different. For one thing, she was funny. Hilarious, even. There are a few characters on "Lost" who can save a listless episode with just a couple of lines - Ben, obviously; Sawyer, with his endlessly hyper-referential nicknames; Hurley, with infinite inventive inflections on the word "dude"; and Juliet, who had one of the best lines of last week's "The Constant." Faraday was about to explain the whole time-jumping helicopter mindfuck, when Charlotte (who, I'm guessing, is the one member of the Fantastic Freighter Four who is genuinely evil - as opposed to Miles, who is just petty, money-mongering evil) said:

CHARLOTTE: Dan, let's not confuse anyone.

JULIET: (with impeccable timing and an expressively inexpressive face to challenge Buster Keaton) Well, Daniel, maybe if you talk real slow, we'll be able to follow.

Lines like that don't just make you giggle. Whenever the show reaches astronomical heights of time-skipping cross-reality geekery, moments like that give the show its bite. Much of "Lost" has been done before, but it's never been done with such a nimble sense of humor. People never cracked jokes in "Forbidden Planet." People didn't even know what sarcasm was in "Forbidden Planet."

"The Other Woman" was a Juliet showcase, and its story was so straightforward, both in the island present and the island past, that it's mesmerizing to consider just how delicately the writers wrapped this flashback together with her welcome-to-the-island showstopper, last season's "One of Us." Both episodes covered pretty much the same time frame - "One of Us" showed us Juliet's arrival, and "The Other Woman" begins soon afterwards; the earlier episode ended just after Flight 815 crashed, while last night's took us forward just about a month later.

But man, did "The Other Woman" change pretty much everything we understood about "One of Us." Hell, last night changed just about everything we knew about everything. Because as much as "The Other Woman" told us more about Juliet, it told us even more about Ben. We learned that, in his own strange, megalomaniacal, socially maladjusted little-boy-lost Big-Bad way, Ben is in love with Juliet.

Juliet's therapist mentioned that Juliet "looked just like her," leaving everyone to ponder on that "her." (Someday, someone will write an extended thesis about the use of pronouns in "Lost" - Tom, spotted sans beard by a drugged out Claire, explaining to Ethan that "he" is getting impatient; Kate, practically shining with make-up off the island, telling a brokedown Jack that she has to leave, because "he" will be waiting for her; Hurley, on the asylum basketball court, yelling at Jack that "it" wants us to come back).

That "her" may be a reference to Ben's old childhood friend Annie, whose fate we'll probably learn about in Ben's next flashback. But then again:

 

The woman on the top is Elizabeth Mitchell, radiant as always. The woman on the bottom is Carrie Preston, who played Ben's mother in "The Man Behind a Curtain." Am I crazy for seeing a resemblance and sensing some deeper, Freudian romance on Ben's side? Doesn't it make a perverse amount of sense, then, that Carrie Preston is married to Michael Emerson, who plays Ben? Would that not be the most extreme, twisted-romance casting decision ever?

I may be wrong. No matter who Juliet reminds Ben of, his devotion to her formed the emotional punchline of "The Other Woman." It was an unrequited affection - unlike the episode's other entanglements, which were decidedly requited, rife with cuckoldry and betrayal and fulfillment. This was an episode about romance - two love triangles, both with Juliet as the woman in question, stealing one woman's husband and another woman's One True Love - why else would Kate find her way to just that precise spot of the island, except to lose Jack again just as she was returning to him, for good?

You can argue that last night's "Lost" was a soap opera, and it certainly was, in the sense that much traitorous love was made by all. But I think it's more fair, and descriptive, to call it soap operatic - a whirlwind, a rising tide of backstabbing fuckery and dime-store romance, all set against the background of unimaginable evil and unthinkable disaster.

And god, was it hilarious. A therapist accuses her patient of sleeping with her husband, and wants her to stop not because she wants her man back (he's been sleeping on the couch) but because she doesn't want him killed. By the other man. Jesus, Michael Emerson! The scene where he had Juliet over for dinner - "Come in!" he squeaks, with all the nervous desperation of a lonely romantic from a late-period blink-182 song. And then, his declaration of love, so passionate, so petty - "You're mine!"

Watching this episode was like learning that your wife of twenty years had sex with your college roommate before you ever met her - it doesn't change anything, and yet it changes everything. More than anything, "The Other Woman" proves the artfulness of Lost's flashback conceit. This episode was like a good Christmas present - it gave us something we didn't know we wanted so badly. Rather than answering an obvious question - who is the monster, who is Jacob, blah-de-da - it explored a far more devious mystery - just who, exactly, is Ben?

He's a grinning face of evil, charming enough to yell, offhandedly, "See you guys at dinner!" And he is desperately in love - if such an unimaginable possessiveness can be called love - with Juliet Burke.

Who can blame him?

(As an aside: does anyone else notice how good the set designers have gotten about building such three-dimensional scenes? What I mean is, how many times does a new scene start on this show that makes you giggle or marvel at the lunatic detail - Locke barbecuing some rabbits, Sawyer and Hurley playing horseshoes, Juliet and Goodwin sharing some wine from the submarine, Ben's table set for two, Ben's hidden safe. Far more than the kinetic camera and the special effects, it's these little touches that make "Lost" truly cinematic - the minute attention to detail, the way the very environment seems to tell a complete story.)

One Year From Now, Will "24" be a Good Show Again?

When 24 finally returns in January 2009, it will have been over a year since we learned from the preview that they're bringing Tony back from the dead in a plot twist that would be show-killing if they didn't so badly need him; almost two years since the middle of the sixth season, when we all realized that the show had fallen into cliché, repetition, oddly fervent patriotism and utterly unfun melodrama; and three years since its fifth season, one of the great narrative cycles in 21st-century television, from its gleefully merciless opening minutes (they shot David Palmer!) to its unforgiving closing shot (the Chinese got Jack!)

Everyone knows that the sixth season went incredibly wrong - boring Bauer family plotlines, an out-of-nowhere mid-season reboot that shifted Jack's focus from evil stereotypical Arabs to evil stereotypical Chinese. But much more than all the myriad individual bad ideas, there was an awful sensation that all the of the show's success had gone madly, horrifically, to everyone's heads. Remember, the show was not very huge back when it debuted - it had middling ratings, and probably wouldn't have lasted a full season if Fox hadn't set such store by its concept (24 episodes, 24 hours.) It certainly wouldn't have lasted much longer if it hadn't been for changing viewer habits: the 24 Season 1 DVD is the pop culture object that marks the shift from old TV to new TV.

So the show became bigger, and bigger, and Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer hit that awesome-ridiculous sweet spot, loved ironically and sincerely by emo hipsters and Minutemen. When season six debuted, "Jack Bauer" was interchangeable with "Chuck Norris" in the hundreds of stupid-funny jokes permeating the internet, the punchline of all of them being: Jack Bauer is God.

What happened to 24? Well, Joel Surnow may have been part of the problem. The famously conservative executive producer (he had a fake-news comedy show on Fox News that lasted about two seconds) seemed to believe that the show was a work of pure patriotism - that Jack Bauer's example was saving real lives. Certainly, in season 6, lacking any major twists or genuinely interesting drama, the flag-waving did seem more obvious. But don't take my word for it.

Here's the DVD cover for season 1:














Mysterious, oblique - Jack Bauer is trapped between the dark and the light.
Here's season 4 (not the best, but certainly the most active):

Moody. Could that fire in the background be a nuclear explosion? Or perhaps hell, beckoning Jack hither.

Now here's season 6:

Yup.

There may be hope. Joel Surnow has departed the show, after initiating a major reboot that will send jack to Washington, DC (bye-bye, LA), without CTU, with a woman president. The show has been down before (Season 3's Colombian drug dealer brothers were a bizarro low point.) Maybe the extra year off will give all the creators some time to plan things out just a tad bit more.

After all, season 6 wasn't all bad. In fact, I think it may have the most mesmerizing beginning of any season - in episode 1, Jack sacrifices himself to save the country he loves, allowing himself to be handed off to an old enemy (and then, suddenly revitalized, goes vampire on a terrorist); in episode 2, he teams up with one terrorist to battle another (Alexander Siddig made such a great partner for Jack - until the writers sent him off to die in a dumbass assassination attempt on the president, all the way across the country from Jack Bauer); and, in episode 4, just seconds after he killed Curtis, his closest compatriot and opposite number, Jack, defeated by his own devotion to his duty, quits CTU... only moments before a NUCLEAR BOMB GOES OFF IN LOS ANGELES!

I think this might be the most powerful scene in "24" history. That's despite the fact that, in many way, this is also the most ridiculous scene in "24" history, not in the least because of the poorly-animated CGI mushroom cloud... actually, no, I take that back, not even the most finely-animated millimeter-perfect CGI would have worked. If the producers of 24 had, in fact, dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles and filmed that, it would have looked unrealistic. How do you sell a nuclear bomb, in this day and age?

This way:
I love the look on Kiefer Sutherland's face here - the weakness, the fear, the realization, the abject horror mixed with disbelief. Here's a guy who just had to kill his best friend, and you can see him thinking the same thing we usually think watching this show - like, "How is it that the worst thing I could ever imagine happening just happened, and not two minutes later, something else happens that makes that other thing look like nothing much, at all?"

Maybe that should be where the show ends - or where we tell everyone to stop watching, years in the future. Do we need to see Jack Bauer solve everything? Can't we just assume that he will fix everything, or at least catch the guys responsible? Wouldn't it be so powerful for the show to leave Jack at his most human - in the eerie quiet that follows a supersonic boom, with the light on earth, briefly, much brighter than the sun?