I loved the episode ab aeterno (trans: since the beginning or for long ages) - Richard's story. It featured a wonderful performance by actor Nestor Carbonell and a well-written backstory that featured Richard as Ricardo, a kind-hearted man from 1867 - a deeply-grieving widower who had been wrongly convicted for murder while struggling with a greedy doctor for medicine that could have saved his sick wife.
Ricardo is himself saved by an ancestor of Whitmore and chained to the below-decks of the same shipwrecked wooden sailing ship Black Rock we've seen before (remember the Richard/Jack dynamite scene from last ep?). A storm hits, which we find out later was Jacob causing this ship sailing to the New World to wreck on the statue of Taweret, and thus strand Richard on the island. Everybody dies eventually but Ricardo (before he had good English) and TOSM (The Original Smoke Monster) face off - TOSM makes a couple really cool appearances where he viciously murders everyone except Ricardo (TOSM even has sparks at his tip) before Man-In-Black appears (Smoke Monster's human form) to Ricardo. A struggle ensues for Ricardo's soul. Ricardo had a vision of his wife before meeting MIB - was it an hallucination? Was it MIB manipulating/tormenting him? Ricardo's offered a Faustian bargain by MIB and accepts, he will stab Jacob - whom he does not yet know (then living below the foot of the statue) with the silver ceremonial dagger so he can be with his wife again - but Jacob sees him coming, bests him, and offers him another deal - be the person who vets new arrivals for me, he tells him - help sort out who is ultimately good and who is evil at their core. So, in essence, we have Richard as Tattoo to Jacob's Mr. Roarke.
Up to this point Carbonell transcended the script with his performance, then the writers gave him a line which served the plot but was at odds with what we were seeing. Jacob tells him, no, I can't bring your wife back and I can't absolve you of your sins (Ricardo was devout) ... then the poor forlorn fellow who seemed devastated, hopeless, and ready to die moments earlier to be with his wife says "I want to live forever" W-T-F ?? [see comments for another take on this]
Jacob and MIB have another little chat - this time on a mountainside looking over a valley, not the beach (but here's the old pic) and Jacob gives MIB the bottle of wine he had used earlier as an example to Ricardo "Evil is like the wine in this bottle - the cork is the island, holding it here." Of course MIB smashes the bottle. Also White Rock appeared (prior to its scale days) - when Ricardo had returned to MIB after failing to kill Jacob - Jacob asked him to deliver it - clearly signaling to MIB that Jacob considered Richard in the white camp at that moment - or it's simply their in-joke - a Black Rock smashes Jacob's temple, so Jacob will turn this agent of destruction - Ricardo - into a white rock of goodness.
So the sci-fi time-travel elements of LOST fade further into the distance as we get a redux of the LEXX season 3 story arc (Fire and Water) and the end of BSG (angels, and god did it) - a showdown between good and evil as what underlies all phenomena on the island and in their lives leading up to the island.
Touching scene at the end where Hurley shows up when Richard/Ricardo has had enough (in his time-frame he's walked from the dynamite scene in the Black Rock last ep) and shouts to the air for the MIB/TOSM to honor his deal - which was an offer forever.
Hurley it seems can talk to more than just Jacob - now the dead wife, Isabella (sporting spiffy modern clothes) appears to Hurley (and eventually to Richard) and the love-through-time couple have their touching reunion - We are already togethershe tells him.
Hurley regularly communicating with Jacob, and now other spirits too, would lead you to believe that he is the clear front-runner to replace Jacob, as he is clearly the most pure-of-heart. But we were left with a shot of MIB/Locke standing a ways away watching the love reunion so maybe it was MIB appearing as Isabella to both Hurley and Ricardo, and it was all a perverse manipulation.
If the writers intend one last sojourn to evil before their grand finale then it was a fake-out - but so far it seems pretty straightforward - a march toward redemption for most of our star characters.
With the guest appearance of Zoe on last week's LOST, the clues are lining up
Zoe is the last letter of the alphabet, or Zed for 0 ... Zoe looks like Billie Jean King, who was/was not afraid of the male penis the way Zoe here is/is not afraid of the gun Sawyer holds to her face ... Billie Jean King ended male dominance of tennis in the so-called battle of the sexes in the 70s ...
Zoe will be the agent that brings to an end the domination of the Smoke Monster on the island
The Legend of Billie Jean came out in 1985 - numbers which add to to 23 - Jack's number ... the movie starred two actors named Slater (Christian and Helen), one male who represents the female-oppressing monotheism of Christianity and the other, female, who represents the pantheism of nature-worship and multiple gods of both genders
Michael Jackson's Billie Jean came out in 1983 - Michael Jackson's initials, MJ, add up to (M=13, J=10) ... 23 - Jack's number ... 1983 adds up to 21, plus 2 for the two years until LoBJ came out and that equals 23.It's all about Jack ... and Billie Jean, er, Zoe will help him realize that
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 add up to 108 which, if you subtract from 350 = 242 ...2+4+2 = 10 and the dollar is divided by units of 10. Now $3.50 is what the Loch Ness Monster kept trying to get from Chef's dad on South Park in the Succubus episode ... the word succubus has 8 letters (Hurley), one vowel (U) used three times which if added to the one representing the vowel equals 4 (Locke), and if you take the one vowel (1) and put it in front of the five consonants you get 15 (Sawyer) ... Sayid (16) is part of the code 1623 that activates the security fence that can keep the evil Smoke Monster out so he will have to work with Jack - Since 42 is Sun/Jin we can split that in two, or 21 each, when added together makes 3, but since there are two of them it is 6 which is the same number of Wimbledon titles Billie Jean King won! [Who knew this would be so easy to figure out?]
Here's someone who explains the meaning of numbers even better than I do
Er, no one spoke up at the demographics meeting (about appealing to women and tweeners) that the robot coming out line was really stupid? Daddy, inside this robot body there is a real girl!
Nothing says love like a father exploiting a childhood fear and burning his daughter to show he loves her! Daddy's so mean - don't make me shoot the dog!?!
First big misfire of this final season - Sawyer and Miles are cops. And Evil Locke says, "I'm the smoke-thing." And Locke has a heart-to-heart with Kate (I wanted Oprah to mediate). Locke is better as the scary, silent enigma.
Yet another small island, yet another plane, yet another group of survivors (well some were decaying and drawing flies) ... oh, and the submarine, "He's waiting for you." And guess who's back, the architect, er I mean Charles Whitmore, and he and his people are looking to catch and/or kill Smoke Monster/Locke. Plane or sub - what will Sawyer take? Lots of flashbacks with character overlap: Kate-Sawyer-Miles-Charlotte. Hope next week is better (Richard's story)
Still in no hurry to go anywhere, we now have more story streams to follow. The wife has a past as a wack-job, but wait, maybe she has religious visions - which interest her new alcoholic best friend - the Sappho schoolmarm. She sees her long-lost dead brother. Daddy Adama finally makes it to Virtual Caprica (which seems to have leftover battles and a the look from Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow) ... and I'm sure it will take him several episodes to finally find his daughter (ho-hum). There is a subplot with a business rival from another planet battling Daniel Graystone (ho-hum again), and the subplot with the nerd who works with the robot I guess fits the tweener demographic. We had to watch a dumb representation of Pyramid which looked just like the set and game that 7of9 played in a Voyager episode. And next week we get to see daddy lecture his teenage robot. All that's missing from this show is Natalie Wood and flip hairdos.
An investigative journalist I like, Larisa Alexandrovna, writes on her blog at-Largely the most compelling theory I've read so far (other than my own) about what the LOST story is about and where it's going. She's linked on this latest post to her overall theory which is dense with science. As we found out with RDM's Battlestar Galactica reboot, so much of what seemed carefully crafted story threads during a show's run do not necessarily ever get woven together into an elegant tapestry which creates a stunning and fully realized picture of what we are supposed to understand.
I think Alexandrovna is giving the show's creators/writers too much credit. In television you never know how many years you'll get to tell your story nor if certain actors will leave the show, etc ... it is a fluid process making a television show and such a dense and richly complex theory as she has laid out seems to me to be beyond the original vision of the show's creators. If they end up there, I think it will be more through creative mental gymnastics to tie the loose threads together masterfully with what they've dangled up to now than by design. The number sequence and the importance of the Valenzetti Equation are at the heart of the mystery and Alexdrovna has come around to my way of thinking that the key is Jacob seeking his replacement. Alexandrovna discovered through TiVo rewinds that there is a name which corresponds to one of the shows key numbers, 108. Lighthouse reflector glass rotated around a marked circumference - and at numerical marks it showed reflected images of the pasts of various show characters. Mark 108's name is Wallace ... which gave me a knot in my stomach. Remember when Daniel was referenced on BSG at the end of Season 4? Daniel turned out to be merely a word - a writer's trick used to provide backstory - a really really cheap out. We never saw Daniel, he didn't matter, we only know he was "sensitive" because we were told that, and that's all we knew. Introducing a pivotal character late in Act III is a cardinal no-no in screenwriting. If this Wallace appears and is important then LOST is taking the easy way.
The cave markings and lighthouse let us know which numbers belong to which characters and the lower the number, the seemingly more important. The numbers are also Hurley's winning lottery ticket numbers, so clearly he is a fulcrum upon which the story pivots. He's remained alive, fat, and healthy and can see Jacob.
4: Locke 8: Hurley 15: Sawyer 16: Sayid 23: Jack 42: Sun /Jin ? There is only one prime number among them, and that is Jack's number 23. Not only because he's the ostensible star of the show but also because of the prime (as I guessed earlier) of course Jack is Jacob's replacement. Other logical conclusions we can draw is that odd numbered people get killed first or are do not cut it as candidates, as only Jack's number and Sawyer's number are odd and not yet crossed out. This new realization causes me to amend my earlier view that Kate would be the last candidate, now I think it is Sawyer - for the dark side with Smoke Monster/Locke. If the show is to be about a balance of power between good/evil - dark/light - black rock/white rock ... then probably Sawyer will be Jack's counterpart at the end.
Why the island has its strange properties presents the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum for the writers: did human endeavor alter reality and manifest at the island or was the island always a living thing that drew its desired humans to it for its own ends? That now is the more interesting question for me.
Egads, so early into this show's run and it's strayed so far afield of its ties to Battlestar Galactica that it's hard to even know what the show is about. We got to see the Adama clan be very Tauron and do their version of sitting shiva for the dead, complete with some clapping (here, I've put a link to another famousclapping situation) ... Adama senior's hunky gay brother takes his shirt off to reveal Maori-like tattoos (why, exactly?) and we got to watch the other chick stuck in this version of the Matrix meet some unsavory characters and de-rez them (Tron, LawnmowerMan anyone?) and earn gold coins like in an 80s era videogame. Subplots galore - board meetings (Robocop), the dreaded word "closure" was uttered - ugh, the virtual nightclub world turns out is part of an entire surreal city (Dark City, Bladerunner, Sin City, etc) ... too many ideas - none fully formed (other thanlet's film the robot and switch back-and-forth between it and the girl!). As Michael Kors says, "You need to edit edit edit." The Esai Morales character seems weak, unfocused and ineffectual and he's supposed to be the rock of the family that later gives rise to William Adama, Admiral of the Colonial fleet fleeing the Cylons? The show has elements that look good, and a couple interesting things happening but overall so far it's pretty bad. It doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.
I wasn't going to watch this show but as I'm often up very very late I catch the 2am or 3am reruns and so I'm current to the episodes.
Daniel Graystone: Ineffectual and dull as dirt. Mrs. Graystone: Shrill, stupid and a bore. Adama by Esai: Hemmed in so far by bad scripts. Robot/Lolita: the cheerleader on Heroes is more interesting. Mobster Brother: Actor betrayed by bad writing. Schoolmarm: Only character I like or have any interest in (and that creepy robot/computer entity behind the "confessional" screen). Grannma Adama: backstory we don't need. Little William Adama: actor is good but he's pretty irrelevant to the story. Virtual Clubworld/Etc: Eh, seen it all before. Representation of Caprica and the other Colony worlds and people: Pretty terrible, almost no difference and more like Dark City than Ancient Greece. Production Design: the one truly bright spot - slick and nice-looking. The Plot: Drags on interminably when we know what needs to happen next and want to get the fuck there already without the side-steps and diversions. Longevity: Methinks this model will last but one year.
I've caught bits and pieces here and there of the enigmatic show LOST and watched part of Season 4 and decided I'd watch all of Season 6 (the last year) as it airs, so I've just finished with the most recent 4th ep on Hulu and I think LOST just flashed me its junk.
I have a little bad news for die-hard fans, so stop reading now if you don't want your hopes dashed. It seems that LOST may well fall into the trap that Ron Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica suffered (for which this blog was created to originally celebrate before that show imploded and I became a critic) - the dreaded deus ex machina.
Below I have clues to the final eps, with each major character getting an episode built around them - leading up to the replacement for Jacob as the story's ultimate goal (Much like the reboot of The Prisoner [my review here] was about James Caviezel's young idealistic man taking over for the tired old man played by Ian McKellen). In a nutshell, LOST is being reduced to a good-vs-evil story and they couldn't have made it any more literal.
Smoke Monster Locke picks up the white stone off of the scale in Jacob's secret cave and tosses it off the island into the ocean. Get it? Jacob was good, Smoke Monster bad (now in Locke's body) ... and the scale represented the balance that existed before Ben was manipulated into killing Jacob.
Smoke Monster Locke (we got to see from his smoke monster POV at one point in the ep) is seducing Sawyer so he will end up being the Judas character no doubt - a bad boy to the last. We got to see the characters' names and numbers so that will be explained at some point - the whole numbers game they've dangled again and again. So for the next few eps real-time on the island (whatever that means there) bad things will happen to bring it all to a head now that the scale is tipped in favor of evil. This good vs. evil theme was explored thoroughly in Lexx during its 3rd season. Expect several major LOST characters to die.
Here is the link to my source for info on the upcoming eps (there may be a better source out there): ep guides ... and here is what the next eps have to offer according to that source [my notes in this color]: S6-Ep5 Lighthouse - Hurley must convince Jack to accompany him on a mission, and Jin comes across an old acquaintance [Claire reintroduced] S6-Ep6 Sundown - Sayid faces a difficult decision, and Claire sends a warning to the temple inhabitants [Sayid dies I bet] S6-Ep7 Dr. Linus - Ben-centric of course [insight into why he's such a weasel?] S6-Ep8 Recon - A Sawyer-centric episode [probably about his betrayal and death] S6-Ep9 Ab Aeterno - A Richard Alpert-centric episode [Richard was a candidate who didn't measure up I'm guessing, hence his long tenure on the island] S6-Ep10 The Package - A Sun/Jin-centric episode [watch, the couple will live to get off the island] S6-Ep11 Happily Ever After - A Desmond-centric episode [time-travel explained by the interloper with a touch of Faraday I bet] S6-Ep12 Everybody Loves Hugo - no info [Hurley's turn in the spotlight] S6-Ep13 The Last Recruit - no info [my guess is it will be Kate] S6-Ep14 The Candidate - no info [Jack, of course] So through deduction it appears that all of the terrific chill-inducing strangeness of the show and the fascinating time-travel elements are going to be reduced to some cosmic need to maintain a balance between good and evil. Now since Jacob has appeared to Hurley in a dream (or as a spirit, whatever) is he like Yoda and more powerful in death? Is the white Polar Bear a representation of Jacob? Will the white rock turn into the bear and swim back to shore? Science fiction fans love atmospherics and ideas. All you have to do is show us light-beam weapon, call it a phaser and we get it. Tell us there is some number sequence at the root of nature and/or the power behind the island and we get it - but we expect some explanation and for it to be creative. I, like many fans, would love for the mystery to be richly textured and goose-bump inducing when it is finally revealed - but I won't get my hopes up. I truly hope JJ Abrams doesn't let us down as badly as Moore did with BSG.
SyFy had a marathon of the old classic The Invaders the other day. Forgot what a terrific show that was. Tight story, good guest stars, knew what it set out to do.
Yikes, I write a post in praise of a really well-written Heroes ep a couple weeks back only to have the 2 follow-up episodes kinda suck ... well, the most recent ep really sucked. So, no more posts about Heroes [but I must mention that Heroes actress Ali Larter is a doll, met her again tonight]. I did find this great site that has lots of old sci-fi gems: Godzilla movies, original Outer Limits eps (not available in all countries) most look terrific, no commercials, just click on the tag cloud at right for your category ... awesomeness! RETROVISION.TV
Okay, I finally saw Battlestar Galactica: The Plan tonight on its SyFy airdate and was pleasantly surprised. It is about the best cut-and-paste I've ever seen. Making Cavil the focus and the brilliance of actor Dean Stockwell is was gave it heft. My troubles with the overall story - particularly Ellen as the 5th hidden Cylon and the entire Oedipal nonsense to the Cavil-Ellen relationship (oh, and let's not forget model 7, the unseen Daniel) are well-documented on this site in post after post, but The Plan could not address those - being locked in as it was by the previous episodes.
This would have made a wonderful side-story during one of the long let's-sell-DVDs-to-the-scifi-nerds endlessly long hiatuses USA/SciFi exec Bonnie Hammer imposed upon BSG fans. Certainly it was miles better than the dumb and useless Razor miniseries. I was disappointed, however, that in The Plan there was no Roslin (oh, an extra's leg in one shot), no DeAnna (okay file footage in one shot), and that again it was so gritty and literal. Thankfully Ellen was hardly a presence. I knew I'd end up watching it eventually, and think the editors deserve awards for poring over all that footage of earlier eps to get their paste clips. Olmos did a terrific job with the direction - lot's of good reaction shots - especially when Cavil knifes the little boy. The whole idea that love is his real enemy was, er, not so good. Certainly there were problems - Cavil has his own little area of the Galactica complete with Hooker-Six and they regularly have little coffee klatches with a Simon, Doral and a Leoben ... hmmm
Now it's perfectly normal for there to be a difference of opinion about art - a painting, a film, a television show. But a couple of posts over at io9 have made me realize that what I really like about that site is its Gawker media design layout and images, and the writing much less. Rarely is there an article I actually want to read. Also, the clear Gen-X, Gen-Y and 00 age-range of the writers reveals itself too often - especially with their lame lists of bests and worsts (their age shows through their lack of inclusion of many superior or inferior works to which they've clearly never been exposed - true enthusiasts would seek them out regardless of age ... but I digress). Two recent posts over there trash the latest ep of Heroes, which I really liked. They don't get it. Lots of speculation about what should have been done in terms of offing this character or that, or which direction the story should take. What they don't understand, clearly, is how good writing tends to be either a journey or a full circle. The most illuminating and deep writing seems to follow the Hero's Journey archetype as delineated by scholar Joseph Campbell: the protagonist must step outside the circle of community/conformity and take literal and/or figurative journey of discovery and returns to his/her community and changed and enlightened individual. Hence, the story arc of Heroes Season 4 is returning the story to its roots, and the elements that put it on the map in the first place. All the pretentious snark in the world doesn't change the fact that the io9 trashing of Heroes Let It Bleed are simply wrong. From my own experience, there were at least 3 or 4 times I would do posts here on Galactica Variants while Battlestar Galactica was on air only to see a particular writer lift parts of my posts. Lazy writing, unimaginative writing, and, er, borrowed writing are the result when you're under a mandate to produce content I guess. Heroes is an uneven show, no doubt about it, but it has found its essence again (we'll see if that lasts) and the io9 snarks don't get it.
The mid-season premiere (Season 4, ep. 13, Let It Bleed) was extremely well-written by series creator Tim Kring . I loved it. Over the course of this 4th season the show has steadily veered back to where it began and it's exactly what I wanted: the evil Sylar, persecuted and misunderstood mutants, and the cheerleader as the fulcrum of all their fates.
I've really liked the new storyline with the cult-leader semi-villain Samuel as the device to bring focus to the mess the story had become in Seasons 2 and 3. The actor portraying Samuel, Robert Knepper, is terrific, as are many of the new secondary characters in the disjointed in space-and-time Twilight-Zoneish carnival in which they live/hide. There has definitely been a reboot to the show and I'm guessing that Mark Verheiden of Battlestar fame has been a guiding hand in this story-focusing and writing-honing process. The show once again has clarity, depth, humanity and menace. It feels much more adult than the past two seasons and never was that more clear than in the writing in Let It Bleed.
I could just gush and gush about bits of dialog and especially how again and again the dialog and situations took sharp turns from what appeared to be a straight walk into cliche. We saw archetypal situations throughout the 2-hour episode and were not only surprised at what people said and did but a bit astonished at the sophistication of the writing. Truly adult and in some cases very wise words. The cheerleader has now shown us how she's earned her stripes as the voice-of-conscience among this motley crew. This episode marks the restoration of Heroes and I certainly hope it portends to more like it. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it above on the Hulu embed. Visually, I've enjoyed the color-saturation and soft-focus and the tighter framing of shots - it has a more surreal feel this season.
I loved the episode ab aeterno (trans: since the beginning or for long ages) - Richard's story. It featured a wonderful performance by actor Nestor Carbonell and a well-written backstory that featured Richard as Ricardo, a kind-hearted man from 1867 - a deeply-grieving widower who had been wrongly convicted for murder while struggling with a greedy doctor for medicine that could have saved his sick wife.
nd. Everybody dies eventually but Ricardo (before he had good English) and TOSM (The Original Smoke Monster) face off - TOSM makes a couple really cool appearances where he viciously murders everyone except Ricardo (TOSM even has sparks at his tip) before Man-In-Black appears (Smoke Monster's human form) to Ricardo. A struggle ensues for Ricardo's soul. Ricardo had a vision of 
his wife before meeting MIB - was it an hallucination? Was it MIB manipulating/tormenting him?
me, he tells him - help sort out who is ultimately good and who is evil at their core. So, in essence, we have Richard as Tattoo to Jacob's Mr. Roarke. 
?? [see comments for another take on this]
the wine in this bottle - the cork is the island, holding it here." Of course MIB smashes the bottle. Also White Rock appeared (prior to its scale days) - when Ricardo had returned to MIB after failing to kill Jacob - Jacob asked him to deliver it - clearly signaling to MIB that Jacob considered Richard in the white camp at that moment - or it's simply their in-joke - a Black Rock smashes Jacob's temple, so Jacob will turn this agent of destruction - Ricardo - into a white rock of goodness.
replace Jacob, as he is clearly the most pure-of-heart. But we were left with a shot of MIB/Locke standing a ways away watching the love reunion so maybe it was MIB appearing as Isabella to both Hurley and Ricardo, and it was all a perverse manipulation.
