Lost Review: Those You've Known

After this post, this blog will become something more than sporadic Lost rants, I promise (if only because season 5 finished Wednesday night). But the finale was on crack, so indulge me for a bit.

Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead. You know the drill.

In the interest of time and my general sanity, I'm going to break this up into various bullet points, because otherwise it'll be a thousand words of me sobbing about Juliet and Sawyer with a few crackpot theories thrown in. Thus, onward!

Nukes: I admit, I only warmed up to Jack's insane idea of exploding a hydrogen bomb at the Swan to neutralize the electromagnetic field that will eventually cause Flight 815 to crash on the Island because I just wanted him to shut up about it. We also find out that Jack the Selfless has a secret reason for wanting to change the future: he wants another chance with Kate, at which I seriously considered throwing things at my television.

Interestingly enough, Sawyer's admittedly very tiny torch for Kate is also what makes Juliet agree with Jack's plan, which also made me want to vomit. KATE IS NOT THAT SPECIAL, GUYS. SHE IS INDECISIVE AND ANNOYING AND SHE AND JACK DESERVE EACH OTHER. Kate is also not helping matters by throwing Sawyer various patented Soulful Glances every other second. Sigh.

Anyway, like almost every one of Jack's plans, the hydrogen-bomb thing fails pretty spectacularly. Sayid gets shot trying to get it to the Swan station, Jack goes on a muderous rampage through Dharmaville in revenge (fun times!) and then when he finally drops the bomb down the shaft, it doesn't explode. FAIL.

Also, Saywer beats Jack up. FINALLY.

Jacob: After years of waiting to find out who the mysterious Island-god-leader-person is, we were introduced to him in the finale's opening minutes, as he watches a ship on the horizon (the Black Rock?) while sitting on the beach. Jacob is more than a little creepy. In this episode's flashbacks, he manages to meet most of Lost's principal characters at seminal moments during their lives to offer a few cryptic asides and then wander off mysteriously. He is also apparently quasi-responsible for Nadia's death, which is unforgivable. Poor Sayid.

Jacob is also involved in a serious rivalry with another ancient Island creepster, whom Entertainment Weekly's Lost expert, Jeff Jensen, is calling "Loophole McNameless." I like it. Anyway, Loophole tells Jacob within the episode's first few minutes that he wants to kill him, and that he will find some "loophole" to achieve it.

"Good luck with that one, kid," Jacob says (more or less) with a smirk. Burn.

Zombies: I really tried to like Undead Locke for a little bit, especially after Undead Alex voiced her support for him a few episodes back. But, seriously. Undead Locke is a bum. He's smarmy, he's annoying, he baits Ben like it's his job (Ben, to his credit, is usually ready with some dry comeback), and he likes reminding everyone that The Island Tells Him Things. Incessantly.

So I was happy but not terribly surprised to discover that Undead Locke is not actually Locke, but probably Loophole McNameless posing as everyone's favorite emo tool with daddy issues (come to think of it, that's pretty much everyone on the island. Never mind). Real Locke is, interestingly, still a corpse. Well done, Ben.

Deaths, maybe: Sayid has survived the Gulf War, two plane crashes, Horace's grass clippers, and life as Ben's hit man/secret lover, only to be (maybe) killed by tiny Ben's drunk father? COME ON.

Moving on. My journalism ethics professor enjoyed reminding us all last semester that, above all, people need to be included. Clearly, Jacob never got this message, because Ben has some serious exclusion issues with him. In a surprisingly poignant sequence just after he and Undead Locke finally meet up with the erstwhile Island king, Ben asks Jacob why he's never bothered to talk to him despite his years of service to the Island.

In this situation, someone like Jack or Real Locke would have maybe thrown a weak punch and then cried. Instead, Ben stabs Jacob, because, like him or not, he always gets the job done.

Most importantly, let's have a moment of silence for the badassery that is Dr. Juliet Burke.

When the future hatch goes haywire after Jack's bomb plan fails miserably, Juliet gets dragged into the electromagnetic drilling tunnel, only to be grabbed at the last minute by a devastated, desperate Sawyer who lets out some Titanic-worthy "Don't you let go"s. Then: she falls down the shaft, Sawyer absolutely falls apart, I nearly cry, she lands at the bottom of the shaft, nearly dies, and then sees the unexploded hydrogen bomb.

Being the awesome person she is -- and, after all, there's really nothing left to lose at this point -- Juliet whams the thing (which is rigged to explode on impact) with a rock.

The entire screen goes white.

And that's it.

Here's to season six!

Lost Review: Better Late than Never

There are various legitimate reasons for why this review is so overdue, why I have skipped Sunday Nunday and Tuesday Newsday this week (sigh), and why my life is mildly ridiculous right now, mainly revolving around some torn ligaments in my ankle (don't ask) and far too much homework.

However, I figure that since Lost is tonight and I will not get to watch it, I might as well console myself by writing a heinously overdue review.

Spoiler alert: I highly doubt there are people who have yet to see last week's episode, but if you haven't, stop reading, for obvious reasons.

Our episode opens with Dharmaville in disarray. Horace, acting like the crochety old woman he is, is yelling at everyone; the flames are dying down from tiny Ben's hippie-van-on-fire diversion; and, of course, Hero Jack has Important Questions for Everyone.

"If he was locked up, how did he start the fire?" he asks, directing several piercing gazes at Horace and managing, miraculously, to come across as both mind-numbingly dull and in cahoots with the enemy. Nice one, Jack.

Horace just flips back his flowing locks, shoots off a condescending remark about how it must have been an inside job, and looks grumpy, as usual.

Meanwhile, Kate meets tiny Ben's loser dad -- who is one of those people you could feel bad for until you catch a glimpse of tiny Ben's taped glasses and bruises, and then you hate them again -- and Jin rolls in with a dying tiny Ben in his arms.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we're off.

Juliet tries to operate on tiny Ben, but her forte is babies, not tiny dying future megalomaniacs, and so, naturally, she sends Sawyer to ask Jack for help. As much as I hate Jack, there are several things he is useful for, and one of them is saving people from imminent death (sorry, Boone).

But we're dealing with New Jack now, the one who seems to have forgotten all about the seminal moment that was his "live together, die alone" speech in Season 1, the one who only recently shaved the Jeard, the one who, apparently, couldn't care less about DYING CHILDREN.

Dying children, Jack! You once pumped your own blood into a tool who ran a wedding business! For shame, sir.

Instead, Jack decides to make sandwiches while Hurley and Miles have one of the more amusing conversations in recent Lost memory, in which Miles tries to explain time travel to Hurley, who espouses the well-regarded "Back the Future" theory of time travel, which is basically that when you change the past, you cease to exist.

Miles, obviously an adherent to the Daniel Faraday school of time travel theory, tries to tell him that what's going on is All Part of the Plan, because you can't change time. There is really no point to this conversation except to allow the audience to feel better about themselves for asking the same frantic time-travel questions last week, but I adored it, mainly because Hurley worrying that he will disappear is just. too. cute.

Meanwhile, Kate yells at Jack about tiny Ben, Jack whines about how he already saved Ben once and how Kate still doesn't love him, Kate gives him a Look, and Jack returns to making sandwiches and whines that he can't fix things and that the Island will take care of everything. (Juliet also yells at Jack as he gets out of the shower and gives him a very critical once-over. Burn.)

Actually, Jack's moaning about how The Island Will Fix All is rather Lockian, come to think of it. Perhaps if Undead Locke ever gets back to 1977, they can build a smoke hut and drug people together.

In the face of Jack's crushing lack of any sort of common decency, Kate and Juliet decide to be awesome together and take tiny Ben to the Others in hopes of getting him fixed. As Kate prepares to cross the Hostiles' truce line, Sawyer shows up, hair blowing in the wind, and offers to help.

After some posturing by a group of Hostiles, Richard Alpert emerges, eyeliner gleaming, and agrees to take tiny Ben, but warns that he'll lose his "innocence" (?) and all memory of the event.

Which leads to this episode's shocking-but-kind-of-predictable conclusion, which is this:

a.) If Jack had agreed to operate on tiny Ben, tiny Ben would have lived without having to be magically cured by the smoke monster or whatever Richard Alpert is planning to do to him. Therefore,
b.) if Jack had cured tiny Ben, tiny Ben would not have "lost his innocence" and become the skeevy little creeper we all know and love. Ostensibly,
c.) if Ben was not so evil, he would not have given the Losties so much trouble. Ergo,
d.) everything that happened to the Losties at Ben's hands is entirely Jack's fault. (And maybe Sayid's. A little.)

To quote my fellow copy desker and Lost addict, one Brandon B. Taylor, I can't believe I once believed in Jack. Sigh.

Some other points:
- Horace continues his tradition of stating the obvious when he discovers keys left in the lock of Sayid's empty jail cell: ""He didn't break out, somebody let him out." O RLY?
- The flashback this episode is about Kate and Aaron, and what happened to Aaron before Kate left for the Island. It's sad and sweet and actually managed to win back a lot of my respect for Kate, which is nice, because I've been annoyed with her for a while.
- Sawyer tells Kate they would "never have worked out." HE CAN BE WITH JULIET FOREVER NOW, HOORAY.
- We also find out that Sawyer told Kate to find his daughter Clementine just before he jumped off the helicopter last season. My love for him knows no bounds.

Lost Review: Building It Up to Tear It Down

I have been heinously behind on blogging/homework/life, but this is no matter, as I have recently caught up on Lost and am subsequently shell-shocked by the insanity that was this past episode. Seriously -- it's turned one of the central tenets of the show upside down, and I have no idea where it's going next, but good god am I excited to see what happens.

Spoiler alert: anyone who hasn't seen last week's episode yet, stop reading now.

Our episode opens in Tikrit, Iraq, which is apparently the hometown of Sayid, who earned a place on my "generally awesome people" list very early on. A father is urging his pathetically obese son, ostensibly a young Sayid, to kill a chicken for dinner; pathetically obese kid refuses, tears spilling down his pudgy cheeks; I begin to worry that all of Sayid's credibility has been destroyed forever; and then ACTUAL YOUNG SAYID, who is much cuter, appears on screen and casually snaps a chicken's neck while his fat brother looks on, shocked.

My relief that Sayid was not the playground loser in his youth is boundless.

And we're back to the present (or, in this case, 1977), where a captured Sayid is lounging in his Dharma cell, refusing to eat or speak. Although I kind of understand (Dharma-brand beer has to be terrible), this will not last long, and it doesn't, because 12-year-old Ben Linus shows up with a sandwich and a book and a terrified-but-hopeful look in his eyes.

Tiny Ben is awesome and sad; he's just desperate for a friend, and it's pretty much the most adorable thing ever. If he'd been born in Britain, he might have grown up to be Harry Potter. Instead he just gets to be one of the best villains ever (Ben totally beats out Voldemort in my book).

Horace, the leader of the Others, shows up and tries to force Sayid to talk while waving a pair of grass clippers. Sayid shows no emotion, and rightfully so, because aging hippie men with dumb hair and lame grass clippers are quite possibly the least threatening things in the world.

Meanwhile, back in Dharmaville proper, Sawyer and Juliet share a sweet little moment in which Juliet laments the fact that Jack and company have returned to the island and pretty much ruined everything. Sawyer is adorable and reassures her and DAMN IT I WANT SAWYER AND JULIET TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER, the end.

In an effort to keep this life intact, Sawyer storms into the cell where Sayid's being held and tries to formulate a plan to get him to join the Dharmaites. Sayid refuses; Sawyer warns him that he could jeopardize everything he's worked for.

"I've built a life here, and a pretty good one," he says. I melt.

The flashback for this episode, by the way, is Sayid-centric, focusing mainly on what happened to Sayid after he stopped killing people for Ben. At one point, Ben finds Sayid in some third-world country, where he is building Habitat for Humanity-esque houses to atone for his various Ben-fueled sins or whatever, and tries to convince him to kill one more person for him.

There is only one significant line in this scene, and it's this:

Ben: "You're capable of things that most other men aren't." SAYID/BEN 4EVAAAAA

The rest of the episode (except for the end -- wait for it) does not require too much commentary, but there are a few choice moments, including:
- Everyone tells Sayid he's going to be tortured for information, but the Dharmaites' version of a torture man turns out to be an aging hippie (surprise!) who feeds Sayid some drug that makes him tell the truth. Coupled with tiny Ben's striking resemblance to a certain boy wizard, the truth serum has convinced me that Lost is pretty much Harry Potter in the South Pacific.
- Sayid slurs to everyone that he's from the future, and torture-man utters one of the best lines of the episode: "Maybe I should have used half a dropper? Oops?"
- Horace spends the entire episode trying to make scary faces but usually ends up looking like a grouchy old woman, which is what he is. I really, really hate him.
- Hurley has apparently been assigned to kitchen duty and, predictably, looks adorable in an apron.
- Tiny Ben gets slapped around by his loser dad and ends up with a giant bruise and taped glasses. I just want to give him a hug.

The rest of the episode is pretty uneventful, until the end, which is honestly one of the most shocking developments I've ever seen on Lost.

The Dharmaites, against Sawyer's advice, take a vote to kill Sayid because they think he's a Hostile; in response, tiny Ben pulls his first badass move of the episode and SETS A VAN ON FIRE, sending it careening through Dharmaville. While everyone is fighting the flames, he breaks Sayid out of jail and the two go running through the forest, trying to find Richard "Permanent Eyeliner" Alpert and the actual Hostiles. Jin finds them, tries to convince Sayid to come back, and a desperate Sayid knocks him out and takes his gun.

Adorable tiny Ben, impressed with Sayid's moves, says something adorable and chipper about how awesome Sayid is. Sayid looks up, agonized.

"You were right about me," he whispers. "I am a killer."

And he whips out Jin's gun and SHOOTS TINY BEN.

And that's it.

I can't even begin to imagine what this means for the show -- does Ben not exist anymore? Has Sayid changed history entirely? Has a hole been ripped in the space-time continuum?

I get where Sayid is coming from -- if you had the chance to kill random evil masterminds before they could actually become evil masterminds, wouldn't you? -- but it's still one of the show's most mind-blowing conclusions.

Actually, I think Ben will survive and grow up to be the skeevy little creeper we all know and love, and that his preternatural knowledge of the Losties likely stems from the fact that he knew them all when he was 12 and figured out who he was supposed to become. I have no idea if I'm right. But I can't wait to find out.

Album Review: The Hazards of Love

I've listened to the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, twice through so far and read countless reviews of it, and I'm still kind of torn about it, to the point where I've been sporadically bothering my friends all day to ask their opinion.

One minute I adore the lilting melody of "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; the next I want to tear my hair out over the overtly metal nonsense that is "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing." I've wavered between getting sucked into the album's overarching plot (more on that later) and dismissing the entire thing as too weird for words. It's hard for me, because I adore the Decemberists beyond all reason, to the point where I regularly yell "WE LOVE YOU COLIN!" at the stage at their concerts. I've spent years defending the band against its standard criticisms: their music is weird, their references obscure, their lyrics pretentious as all get-out.

But I'm going to say it: The Hazards of Love is weird, obscure and pretentious. It's a prog-rock opera in the grandest sense of the word, with dense, pulsing guitar riffs and crashing organs and a surprising amount of what metal would sound like if Led Zeppelin was planted in 1872. The whole album is a loosely connected story about a heroine named Margaret, her lover/baby daddy/son of the Forest Queen, William (who turns into a fawn during the day, randomly), said Forest Queen, and the Rake, who, sadly, is not a common garden tool, but a widower who murdered his children because he missed being a bachelor. Whew.

True to form, frontman Colin Meloy warbles delightfully throughout the album, and the band brings on guest singers to voice Margaret and the Forest Queen. Becky Stark provides suitably waifish vocals for Margaret, but props to Colin for getting Shara Worden to sing as the Forest Queen. Even as the band descends into metal sludge halfway through the album, Worden's soulful growl slides above it all. She absolutely owns her half of "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid," one of the best songs on the album.

The Hazards of Love is ambitious and grandiose and sometimes insane, and a lot of the time, this works. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the Decemberists' 2004 EP The Tain, which had a lot of the same epic elements, but I occasionally found myself drifting off in its dense melodies and climactic chords. It's not an album to pull a few catchy singles off, but as a cohesive musical whole, it works. It's easy to forgive the band for the distracting, stuttering distortion on "The Abduction of Margaret" when it's followed by the absolutely gorgeous folk tune "Annan Water." And some of the prog is, admittedly, pretty good -- "The Rake's Song" features some deeply disturbing lyrics but subversively catchy rock. For the most part, the album slides between thick prog rock and sweet, poignant love songs, each song bleeding seamlessly into the next.

That being said, part of the Decemberists' charm once lay in the fact that they could mesh epics like "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" with folk-pop goodness like "O Valencia!" on the same record. Hazards is all epic and no pop, which -- while it produces some crazy and interesting musical concepts -- kind of saddens me. Seasoned Decemberists fans know that Colin Meloy can make a song about a lost bicycle sound like the best thing you've heard in days. He doesn't need to sing about a shape-shifting fawn-man to convince us of his musical genius.

It's interesting to compare Hazards to the Decemberists' EP series, Always the Bridesmaid, released last fall. While Hazards represents what I think everyone's been fearing a little bit ever since The Tain -- the giant, inaccessible, "oh-god-what-were-they-thinking" concept album -- the EP series is almost a return to how the band began: sweet, melodic ditties about things as ordinary as a rainy day or a road trip through New England.

It's fun to rock out a little to The Hazards of Love, and the album definitely has its high points. And you have to give the band credit for taking on such an ambitious project, even if it falls a little flat at times. But for me, the Decemberists will always be about the mesh of the epic and the mundane, the pairing of wonderfully complex lyrics with choruses that will get stuck in your head for days. That's not Hazards, not by a long shot. But something tells me that Colin Meloy won't be sticking with Rakes and fawns for long.

Download: "Annan Water," "The Rake's Song," "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid"

Lost Review: Ancient Commonsense

Note: As a Lost addict whose copy desking usually interferes with actually watching the show in real time, I will be posting sporadic episode reviews as I get to them. Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for confused readers who don't watch the show. It's far too late for you now.

I have been waiting for the big reunion episode for ages, ever since our six erstwhile castaways left the island at the end of Season 4, and we finally got the goods tonight. Sawyer was appropriately stunned, Hurley was big and cute and hug-ful, Jack did this whole awkward handshake thing, and our own Mistress of Meaningful and Poignant Looks delivered with various regretful grimaces and a desperate and sad hug. If Sawyer leaves Juliet for Kate, I will destroy my television.

And then comes Sawyer's big reveal: thanks to the island's time-hopping, he and Jin and Co. have been stuck in ... wait for it... 1977 ever since Locke left. In keeping with tradition, everyone drops what they're doing, makes scared faces, and the camera zooms meaningfully in on Hurley.

"Um... what?" he asks, staring around apprehensively. Somewhere in the great VH1 Has-Beens episode in the sky, Charlie "Guys... Where Are We?" Pace is smiling.

And we're off.

Sawyer, who is awesome, manages to get the returned castaways into the Dharma Initiative by passing them off as new recruits who've just arrived on the island via the initiative's sub. They all get flower leis and "Namastes" all around (the entire Dharma Initiative are secret hippies, for serious) and job assignments. Jack gets "Workman," which basically means "glorified janitor." Score one for Sawyer.

Sawyer also gets major points for a confrontation between him and Jack, when Jack, apparently dissatisfied with the fact that Sawyer has pretty much saved them all from death by Dharma, stops by his house to complain. "Where do we go from here?" he whines. Sawyer says he's thinking about it.

"It looked like you were just reading a book," Jack counters brilliantly.

Sawyer, who is pretty much my favorite person in life right now, puts down his book and straight-up OWNS Jack with a little-known fact about Winston Churchill (he read a book every night, even during the blitz, because he said it helped him think better) and a legitimate analysis of Jack's leadership style, which is that he has none.

"Back when you were calling the shots you pretty much just reacted. See, you didn't think, Jack. And as I recall, a lot of people ended up dead," Sawyer drawls. "So I'm going to go back to reading my book and I'm going to think. 'Cause that's how I saved your ass today." BAM.

Jack tries to fight back with some lame stuff about how he got everyone off the island, but Sawyer is a piece of ownage and Workman Jack leaves dejectedly. It's Sawyer time.

And then Kate and Sawyer exchange this little look, and Kate looks weirdly disappointed, and Sawyer looks weirdly guilty, and if she somehow destroys the competent awesomeness that Sawyer and Juliet have going on, I will break things.

In other news, we find out that Sun, undead Locke, and Ben are stuck in 2007, which poses some problems. And Jack's undead father has shown up again, which should be interesting.

Other notes:

- Sun proves her awesomeness once again and knocks Ben out with an oar. Sweet.
- Sayid is also in 1977 with the Dharma kids, but he had the misfortune of getting picked up by some legit Dharmaites before Sawyer could find him, so he's in Other jail right now for being a suspected hostile. Sad face.
- At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I'm kind of mad Jack and Co. are back on the island, because Sawyer and Juliet are ADORABLE, and everyone seems to have made a little home for themselves where they are. Seriously, all they have to do is avoid Ben's giant Dharma extermination in, say, 1990-ish, and they'll be fine.
- Juliet and Kate's first exchange in the Dharma processing station was crazy tension-filled. If Kate tries to come back to Sawyer, I am fairly confident we'll see another Kate/Juliet mud-wrestling showdown.
- Tiny Ben shows up! He is still appropriately creepy. I am so glad he's back.

And, lastly, your Sawyer one-liner of the evening:

After a Dharma Initiative member suggests that they kill Sayid: "Well, I appreciate your input there, Quick Draw, but I wanna talk to him first."

A Turn for the Worst

I will likely never see Wendy and Lucy again, and I'm okay with that. It's difficult and sad and depressing and tragic, and it's rough to to sit through.

That being said, it's important and necessary and should most definitely be seen.

It's a simple plot -- Wendy, a young woman with a car, a dog and $525 to her name, gets sidetracked in Oregon en route to a job at a cannery in Alaska when her car breaks down and her dog, Lucy, runs away. The film follows her over the course of a few days, detailing her increasingly desperate attempts to get out of her situation in unflinching detail.

Wendy -- played by the spectacular Michelle Williams -- just can't get a break, and the real tragedy is that no one really cares. Clutching a dirty pillow and carrying everything she owns in a duffel bag, she moves through the tiny Oregon town in a daze. Every now and then she lets out a plaintive "Lucy!" It is, in a word, heartbreaking.

Wendy and Lucy is a sparse little film, with no soundtrack and only a few characters. Wendy herself is largely an enigma -- we know that she has a married sister in Indiana who can't be bothered with her plight, that she keeps a careful record of her finances and that, for whatever reason, the most important thing in her life is Lucy. Wendy's a blank slate -- but I think that's why I found myself worrying about her literally five seconds into the movie.

We care about her not because she's a standard indie-film goddess with a quirky backstory and a distinctly optimistic outlook on life, but because she is a sad little everywoman without a plan or a future. We care because under the right circumstances, she could be any of us.