Lost: "There's No Place Like Home," Part 2 and 3

What is a TV Movie, exactly? Just this year, that strange form has reappeared in a number of strange permutations. You have the movies that sprout from the "BSG: Razor" genus, a 90 minute standalone story meant to whet viewer appetites during long inter-season breaks. "24" is jumping on this train, too, with a two hour season 7 prequel airing this Fall. How the mighty have fallen; just a couple years ago, there was talk of a big screen "24" movie, which, like "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut," "X-Files: Fight the Future," and "The Simpsons Movie" would have taken place in the negative zone between seasons where production values are higher but plot resolutions are vague enough so as to lead purely abstractly into the following season. The new "X-Files" movie is a different breed altogether: the Franchise-Begging Spin-Off Sequel (see also "Sex and the City" and, after all, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"). There's also the subgenus of Animated Direct-to-DVD Multi-Episode Spin-Off Movies, represented by "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" and "Futurama: Bender's Big Score."

Of course, I don't think any of those items would prefer the nomenclature "TV Movie" - for people born after 1980, that phrase has meant only bad, with its overtones of Lifetime "issue" stories and Sunday evening literary adaptations that weren't good enough to make the big screen. Lacking the narrative weight of television because of its standalone nature, and lacking the gravitas of movies because of low budget and short production time and commercial interruption, the TV Movie is, really, neither TV nor Movie. It's a mongrel concoction, much less than the sum of its parts. I'm not even sure what you would call a TV movie: is it a genre, or a style, or a form? Nothing really seems to fit.

HBO has done its part to renovate the reputation of this bizarre mishmash thingamajig, turning original movies like last weekend's "Recount" into starstudded events, yet I think that has more to do with HBO's singular reputation, and its fearlessness in terms of defining just what television is: its seasons might be 8 episodes or 20 episodes, so that it's often hard to tell the difference between a miniseries like "John Adams" and a one-season wonder like "John from Cincinnati."

Of course, you may as well ask what is TV and what is a Movie, in this strange day and age where TV shows like "The Wire" or "The Sopranos" have told stories that formed beginnings, middle, and ends, while in superhero Movieland, whole franchises tug along in an eternal act 2, where no ending appears without the promise of a sequel or a spin-off. Hell, even the terms "TV" and "Film" don't really apply anymore. I watch most of my TV on my computer; in the next few years, most Films will be shot in high-quality digital video, and projected digitally

Still, the terms persist. They mean something. Watching TV feels inherently different from watching a movie. There is something grand in the genetic code of the word "Film," even if you're watching it on your iPod; there is something familial about the word "TV," even when its widescreen HD. Films have endings; TV has a "To Be Continued" sign.

"Lost" has neither, of course. The creators have never bothered with the old "To Be Continued," and I'm willing to bet that we've already seen the ending, or at least some version of it. What is great and mesmerizing about the show is not simply how it constantly breaks down our expectations of narrative progression - of Beginning, Middle, and End - but also how, like its spiritual progenitor "Memento," it always finds a way to return to that linear (emotional if not chronological) order.

Consider "There's No Place Like Home," which was separated into three parts but which, at a total of two hours minus commercials, was really as close as "Lost" has come to making a movie out of itself; it flowed along like on cohesive whole, save for the non sequitur (yet awesome) cross-cutting slow-motion music montage which ended the first part. "There's No Place Like Home" began in what used to be the future: the Oceanic Six landing in Hawaii (yes, after four years of standing in for Australia, Korea, Tunisia, Tikrit, and practically every state of the Union, Hawaii finally played itself in an episode of "Lost.") They were reunited with their family members: look, there's Sun's dad, and Hurley's Cheech dad, and Jack's mom! Awww!

In any other show, this moment would have been the grand finale: the slow motion, the happy-sad Giacchino theme. In fact, it used to be: many episodes in the first season ended with a scene like this. Here, though, it played like a necessary storytelling evil; as lame and cheesy as it was, thinking about that scene now, considering where the Oceanic Six were coming from and where they ended up, it plays as tragic, even darkly funny. By the end of the finale, two futures became the present: the near-future, with the Oceanic Six's arrival back in civilization (we saw a picture of it at the press conference, and then saw the event itself two hours later), and the practically dystopian flashforward future, where Sayid is an assassin, Hurley is a mental patient, Sun is her father, Kate is a fake mother, and Jack is a bearded drugged out wreck.

I don't mean to argue that the "reunion" scene was good. It wasn't. It was sloppily shot, and it fell back on an old network TV crutch of letting slow-mo and high-tempo music cover dramatic failings. Wouldn't you have liked to hear what everyone was saying to everyone? What's great about "Lost" is not that the show is perfect, but rather, that the show knows its own weaknesses.

Consider the first episode of season 4, "The Beginning of the End," which was the worst episode of the season. It was easy to miss when it first debuted: the sheer fact that "Lost" was back, and the revelation of the "Oceanic Six," and Jorge Garcia's pitch-perfect performance, and the series-redefining moment when Jack pulled the trigger on Locke, smoothed over the rough edges of an oddly sputtery debut episode. ("Lost" always has trouble with its season premieres; ironic, for a show with such a boffo pilot.)

There was the oddly congenial, even jokey atmosphere: Rose telling Claire that she better show Charlie a good time back on the beach (a scene which might have come out of the third season of "The OC"); Bernard telling Hurley, with all the mock authority of a part-time actor essaying the role of Father Knows Best, that he should go and jump in the water; Hurley's slow-mo run into the water, as painfully over-the-top as Eric Bana's bad-sex terrorism flashback at the climax of "Munich"; and, worst of all, the clips of Charlie's death that were interspersed with Hurley's final speech. "Lost" has largely eschewed big speeches since Jack's "Live Together, Die Alone," and wisely so - it will always be difficult for TV to really suggest the breadth of people in a listening mob. And the clips? Charlie's death was one of the most moving moments in the show's history; to replay it less than one episode later felt like the lowest form of TV hell.

But that first episode plays strikingly well, when you understand just how effectively it was setting up everyone for the fall. I've written before about the cynical, darkly comic energy that the flashforwards injected into the show: how moments of on-island triumph segue painfully into off-island tragedy. "There's No Place Like Home" took that one step further: we saw the climax right at the beginning, when they arrive in Hawaii. We already knew that things would turn out badly; we knew that right from the first flashforward, with Jack yelling "We have to go Back." Usually "Lost" has two narrative threads; "There's No Place Like Home" had three. They were:

1: How they got off the island
2: What happened between getting off the island and "We Have to go Back!"
3: What happens next

Time travel, according to the show, follows a basic model of course correction. There are very important things which are supposed to happen, such as death. There are myriad other things which might happen along the way, but the outcome is never in doubt. Of course, this is EXACTLY how the creators of "Lost" have written the show - Lindelof and Cuse, in discussing shortening eight episodes to five after the strike, pointed out that they knew where everyone had to end up, and it was just a matter of getting them there. And it is also how we experience the show. We KNEW that Sawyer was going to stay behind on the island, but we didn't know how, or when, or why.

So, when he was the odd man out on the helicopter, and it was running low on fuel, we all knew exactly what he was going to do; the surprise wasn't in what happened, but in immediately before it happened, when the cruel inevitability of fate, and of continuity, demanded he jump out of the helicopter. I'm calling it: this was the most swooningly romantic moment that the show has ever given us, as urgent as Desmond's trans-hemispheric Christmas morning phone call to Penny but with the added benefit of the kiss, of Josh Holloway's scruffy grin, of Sawyer the former nihilists self-sacrifice, and of Jack's painfully awkward, spurned stare; you could see how the jealousy would fester in him, years later, when Sawyer was not there and so Sawyer seemed to be everywhere.

So, too, with Ben. When he said "I'm getting changed," you might have sensed that he would put on a Dharma jacket with a nametag that said "Halliwax"; when he fell down the ladder, you knew exactly how the wound would look in his arm. Still, who could have expected a giant gear, simultaneously suggesting Atlas (holding the world up with his shoulders), "Atlas Shrugged" (is Ben not a strangely Ayn Randian protagonist?), and the gearshift technology of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis."

For some people, this may be the moment when "Lost" finally goes too far. For me, this was yet another moment where "Lost" took me in its arms, kissed me with tongue like some superpowered Amazonian princess, then slapped me unconscious, slung me over its shoulder, and mumbled "Don't worry, I'll take care of you," right before running straight into the middle of a tornado in a volcano inhabited by giant man-spiders with ray guns. It made no sense, yet it made perfect sense.

And then, in a moment so unexpected yet so perfectly correct, the sky was bleached and sound like a repressed sonic boom sputtered throughout the island, an exact replica of the purple-sky event from the end of season 2. Which is funny, because except for a few scant references in season 3, that even hasn't even been referenced all season. How wonderful, that there is now a recurring motif of even-numbered seasons ending with that strange electromagnetic implosion. Who wants to place bets on Season 6?

Yet I was most moved last night by Jin, running out onto the deck of the freighter and waving at his pregnant wife, and Sun, screaming "We have to go back!" How wonderful that it was Jack who told her that they couldn't? For practically years, Yunjin Kim was the best actress on the show with the least to do; now, she's just the best actress, period. (Sorry, Elizabeth Mitchell.) That was raw, and true, and depended not at all on narrative trickery or sci-fi wackness, but just good old-fashioned righteous female fury (the sort of thing that has become BSG's stock in trade.)

Is anyone as interested as I am in just how "Lost" episodes are made now? From circumstantial evidence (ie, wikipedia), it would seem that the shorter amount of episodes means more production time per episode (and a larger budget?) Certainly, the show just felt more juiced this season - never more so than last night, when Sayid was fighting Keamy. This was a real fight; intriguingly choreographed, surprisingly graphic, not quite "Bourne" but man was it close!

Above all, I'm fascinated by one Jack Bender. He's directed every season finale so far. Even more impressive, he directed such series standouts as "Walkabout," "One of Us," "The Cost of Living," and two episodes from this season which may just be the best hours of story that network TV has given us, "The Constant" and "The Shape of Things to Come." In looking up Bender's resume, I noticed something amazing: he was also the director of "Blackout," the greatest episode of the horrifically forgotten early 2000s show, "Boomtown," which featured one of the truly memorable scenes in TV history: David McNorris, alcoholic DA, swilling his mouth full of whiskey while he considers wiping blood off of his windshield. He had awoken from a blackout to find that he had hit something, and later discovered there'd been a hit-and-run nearby that left a homeless man dead. While Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" plays in the background, McNorris delivers an imaginary, slurry closing argument (to the jury, to the judge, and the God.)

Neal McDonough was the actor, but he's never been as good. Surely Mr. Bender had something to do with that? Usually, the role of the TV director has been downplayed, but clearly Bender has something going on here. (He also directed "...To Save Us All From Satan's Power," a flashback episode of "The Sopranos" - clearly, the guy has a thing for time jumping.)