written by: eddie kitsis and adam horowitz, who have a snarky writing style that suits 'exposé' and hurley's episodes, but not here, and not at this point in the narrative. too many jokes in the wrong places, as well as an apparent disconnect with the audience's investment and frustrations. now, if they'd had the guts to just run over dr. arzt, i'd forgive them.
directed by: paul edwards, who's first episode of 'lost' was 'what kate did.' here was his chance to close out his career with 'lost' on a high note, and come full circle. i felt like there was some mismatch here between director and writers - eddie and adam were writing an episode unlike the ones they usually do, and edwards perhaps didn't know how to properly handle their comic style.
director of photography: stephen st. john, who i think is new to the show. this week didn't give us any new locations, mostly taking place at the temple and the hospital, with a pit stop at the docks and the ruined dharma barracks. if the show is going to live up to season 1 on a cinematic level, it will need to find more moments to luxuriate in the locations, and it will have to be more visually brave than is has been. every time i rewatch the pilot, i'm surprised by how scaled down the show has become over the years.
nutshell: this episode made me realize the narrative potential of the parallel story, but it's unfortunate that the writing didn't live up to it. while i don't think it was a terrible episode, i understand why so many people were frustrated, especially after such a great start. sadly, perhaps the cleverest thing about it was the title.
directed by: paul edwards, who's first episode of 'lost' was 'what kate did.' here was his chance to close out his career with 'lost' on a high note, and come full circle. i felt like there was some mismatch here between director and writers - eddie and adam were writing an episode unlike the ones they usually do, and edwards perhaps didn't know how to properly handle their comic style.
director of photography: stephen st. john, who i think is new to the show. this week didn't give us any new locations, mostly taking place at the temple and the hospital, with a pit stop at the docks and the ruined dharma barracks. if the show is going to live up to season 1 on a cinematic level, it will need to find more moments to luxuriate in the locations, and it will have to be more visually brave than is has been. every time i rewatch the pilot, i'm surprised by how scaled down the show has become over the years.
nutshell: this episode made me realize the narrative potential of the parallel story, but it's unfortunate that the writing didn't live up to it. while i don't think it was a terrible episode, i understand why so many people were frustrated, especially after such a great start. sadly, perhaps the cleverest thing about it was the title.
issues:
• parallel timeline:
- kate
- claire
- ethan
- sayid
- dogen
- jack
- claire
• preboomer
• parallel timeline:
lets hope this is the 'end' of arzt. har har..
the best episodes this season will be the ones that deal honestly with the characters, pointing them on trajectories that are logical and in line with who we discovered them to be during the first three seasons of flashbacks.
i think this is an episode that probably worked much better on paper. eddie kitsis and adam horowitz, promoted to executive producers last year, are mythlogical drivers of the writing staff. they love to bring minor background characters to the forefront, expecially dr. arzt, frogurt, and little known others (hence the ludicrous expansion of aldo from season 3). they also have a specific writing voice that works great for hurley's episodes and more tongue in cheek episodes like the excellent 'expose.'
unfortunately their sarcastic humor was deeply misplaced in this episode, dropping too much self referential humor, the stuff with aldo (remember him?), the arzt stuff, the zombie joke (hurley asks sayid if he's a zombie) was a fun shoutout to fans of the podcast (damon and carlton have been promising for years that season 7 of 'lost' would be the 'zombie season'), but didn't quite work in the context of the episode.
1. kate
what i don't know is where they plan to go with kate's story from here on out - she has claire's credit card, so she's somewhat trackable. how will her story be woven in with the other characters after this point? has she served her parallel universe purpose with claire by suggesting that she keep her child, thereby uniting claire and aaron in at least one universe?
i like this interview with evangeline lily because she talks about the differences between the parallel kate, and the island kate so clearly. unfortunately the actual writing and directing of the episode don't demonstrate that at all. critics of her acting would say that you can't actually tell she's doing anything different as an actress, but i happen to be of the camp that thinks she is great. i want the show to give her the same narrative drive that she expresses here: island kate is completely over jack, she's gone to trial for her crimes, has spent three years raising a child, mostly by herself, and cares only about reuniting that child with his mother. by contrast, lily describes parallel kate as an overgrown childish thrillseeker who gets off on the danger of being on the run and courting risky situations.
where is the parallel story going to take this kate? to jail? to trial? death? will it reunite her with jack somehow? the seeds are there - kate has his sister's credit card..
2. claire
here was a fantastic opportunity to reintroduce us to claire, who we haven't seen in over a year - it was also a missed opportunity to refresh our memories about her bigger story; the boyfriend who walked out on her, the psychic, richard malkin, who freaked out and then insisted that she raise the child herself, then mysteriously decided that it would be ok for her to give the kid up for adoption if she gave the child up to a couple in los angeles.. claire's assessment of the situation was that malkin knew the plane would crash and deliberately placed her on the plane to ensure that she would raise the child herself.
so the question is - how does the absence of the island affect malkin's intentions? what is malkin's relationship to the island? was he once an other? did malkin just deliberately set claire up with a flaky couple? was this simply an adoption-gone-wrong? in this universe, is it still important that claire raise the child herself? they wasted a great opportunity to satisfactorily handle these questions.
the mysterious relationship between the timelines is hinted at when claire mysteriously 'knows' that the child's name is aaron. and there's also a brief reaction shot of kate that seems to register some recognition in her face upon hearing the name as well.
3. ethan
while i think he would have been better placed as the adoptive parent, the most interesting revelation of the episode was ethan's presence at claire's hospital (amazingly, it's a different hospital from jack's!), and that his name is now ethan goodspeed, rather than ethan rom. remember ethan was born on the island, delivered by juliet, and was the child of horace and amy goodspeed. it seems that in this timeline, after ethan was evacuated from the island, it sunk, and he had no place to go back to. he was never recruited by the hostiles (who changed his last name, though they didn't see any need to change ben's last name), yet still continued a career in prenatal care.
there was some interesting misdirection during the ethan scene:oh no! is ethan still bad? oh no! is he going to do something bad to claire? oh no! was aaron meant to be born on the island and nowhere else? now that would have been interesting.. imagine if this had turned into a grisly death scene for claire, the one we feared would happen to sun if she didn't get off-island in time. ethan could redeem himself by heroically attempting to save her. the scene raised all of those possibilities and paid none of them off. is this going to be the happy fun time timeline?
there's a fun juxtaposition where ethan says 'i don't what to stick you with any needles if i don't have to.' of course, the irony is that he spent a good deal of season 1 sticking needles into claire (see photo above).
what else remains to be said about the parallel timeline? i think we're just going to have to be patient. it looks like this season is unraveling the episodes in roughly the same character order as season 1 - which means it goes kate, locke, jack, sun, charlie, sawyer, sayid, claire.. so tonight's episode is locke, which should mean a generous unloading of mythological data as well as a fairly intriguing parallel storyline.
oh yes, much has been made of this screenshot showing the date on claire's sonogram as october 22, 2004, pushing the date of flight 815 up by a month. well, gregg nations, script coordinator for the show has essentially confirmed that the date was yet another prop error, making two for two this season after sayid's botched passport in the premiere (the fine print says iran instead of iraq. oops). i'm really astonished because it takes a considerable amount of effort to create these props, and to shoot the closeups. plus, anyone on the crew knows that the show is designed to be freeze-framed and analyzed. i mean, to mess up sept 22, 2004 is, like, messing up one of the numbers. someone on props should be fired.
original timeline:
this portion of the story was equally frustrating. the high point was a good performance by josh holloway, though the logistics of that wedding ring have me puzzled. he buried the ring in the floorboards of their house? when was he planning on digging that up and proposing? he never felt like mentioning the whole marriage thing during events leading up to the incident? if they knew last year that the ring was in there, it would have been a great teaser to show his desire to get back to their house one last time before leaving on the sub. instead this felt like a plot element shoehorned into the narrative to give the character a physical trinket to cry over. if i wasn't hung up on these details, if it felt like the proposal was something organic that he'd genuinely been planning (or that the writers had genuinely been planning), i could have taken the emotional journey. but instead i felt somewhat manipulated. it's that 'this is a crying scene' kind of manipulation that makes me worry about what we're in for the rest of the season. especially when the showrunners talk about it being 'like season 1.' i pray that this isn't what they think season 1 was about. it was about characters, not crying. hopefully this is just an early misstep.
usually the second episode (or, hour 3) unloads the big exposition for the course of the season. in season 4 we got the excellent 'confirmed dead' that introduced us to the freighter science team. last year at this time was 'jughead,' both definitive episodes for the arcs of the seasons. so it was disappointing that at this point in the show for season 6, it doesn't feel like we've seen 'the thing' that's going to define the ending of the show/season. that may be because they're following the first season character order, and it just didn't make sense to shoehorn 'the thing' into kate's episode - we didn't see any of the beach/statue story, so tonight's episode will likely not contain any temple, typewriters, baseballs, or pills. whew.
1. sayid
another missed opportunity: torturing sayid. having dogen begin by blowing ash over sayid was a dramatic mistake. this action made it obvious that the intent was to diagnose, and that the diagnosis would have something to do with smokey. rather than identifying with sayid's horror at being tortured, i found myself on dogen's side, studying sayid's reactions to see if he betrays any signs of smokey or jacob's nemesis. i also found myself making whimsical note of the irony of seeing sayid tortured.. not the best way to structure that scene. it should have been shot from sayid's perspective, not dogen's, and it should have felt like truly random torture of the exact style he once administered himself. we should have wondered if these temple people are actually in the business of enforcing poetic justice, and then surprised to discover the true purpose.
we still don't know what sayid is now. or rather, what he's going to become when 'it reaches his heart.' all that we've previously seen on the show of the infection is rousseau's team, who seemed to appear totally normal and then would suddenly try to kill her. if sayid starts doing that it could get interesting.
2. dogen
there are so many 'leaders' of the others now that it's confusing. remember the 'sherrif' isabel, who branded juliet on her back for killing pickett? when she came into the show, ben said she outranked him. was she visiting from the temple to administer justice? where does alpert fall into this hierarchy? it seems like every season these people have another level of management to conquer. i would like an office-style organizational chart drawn up detailing who answers to whom, please.
the questions we're supposed to be asking about dogen: what was he typing before he found out sayid was still alive? why the f does he have a baseball on his desk? what is his relaitonship to jacob and his nemesis? does anyone at the temple have any idea what's happened at the statue? did the others run out of batteries for their walkie talkies? what are those plants growing in his office? why is it important that all the people on jacob's list remain at the temple? if sayid failed the test, why couldn't they just kill him and be done with it? what is in the pill? why does it have to be taken willingly? what would happen to sayid if he did take it? what kind of poison listens to your 'intent' before activating? i'm spiralling here people, help me.
3. jack
argh so many reasons to be frustrated by this episode, not least of all because the characters are also frustrated. the introduction of that damned pill just made my heart sink. not an interesting thing to make our beloved characters debate over for an hour. were they trying to do something like 'the button?' i can only hope that like 'the button,' patience will pay off and there will be interesting answers to what the pill is about.
it seems like jack is now just being argumentative for the sake of it. he's got a long way to climb this season if he's going to be a legitimate leader again.
one thing i've realized during this episode is that for the people who landed in 1977, only kate and jin have clear objectives. sawyer has nothing. sayid has nothing. jack has nothing. hurley has nothing. one of the inherent strengths of season 1 was that everyone was working toward the same goal, even if they were incapable of working together. the show needs to state its season goal quickly, or it's going to get tiring fast. fingers crossed for tonight.
4. claire
so claire is now setting traps similiar to rousseau's, and has apparently been 'taken' by the infection that rousseau's team fell to in 1988. well this raises all kinds of questions. was rousseau actually the sick one? how exactly does this sickness manifest itself, and how is it related to smokey/nemesis and his ability to take the form of dead bodies on the island? is this going to answer what desmond's injections were about? 
2. claire
one way they could have done this would be to have ethan behind the door of the mysterious couple wanting to adopt aaron. this would have been a much creepier and interesting choice than the hospital setting. instead give ethan a monologue about how his wife died, and he just can't take on the responsibility of raising a child.. which would echo his story from the missing pieces about how his wife died in childbirth.. but introducing this lindsey baskum character (an anagram for 'used by malkins' hrm), and then giving her an irritating, teary monologue is not a satisfying way to close out the biggest mystery of claire's original story. also: making characters cry a lot is not a good way to recall our memories of season one.
the mysterious relationship between the timelines is hinted at when claire mysteriously 'knows' that the child's name is aaron. and there's also a brief reaction shot of kate that seems to register some recognition in her face upon hearing the name as well.
3. ethan
there was some interesting misdirection during the ethan scene:oh no! is ethan still bad? oh no! is he going to do something bad to claire? oh no! was aaron meant to be born on the island and nowhere else? now that would have been interesting.. imagine if this had turned into a grisly death scene for claire, the one we feared would happen to sun if she didn't get off-island in time. ethan could redeem himself by heroically attempting to save her. the scene raised all of those possibilities and paid none of them off. is this going to be the happy fun time timeline?
there's a fun juxtaposition where ethan says 'i don't what to stick you with any needles if i don't have to.' of course, the irony is that he spent a good deal of season 1 sticking needles into claire (see photo above).
what else remains to be said about the parallel timeline? i think we're just going to have to be patient. it looks like this season is unraveling the episodes in roughly the same character order as season 1 - which means it goes kate, locke, jack, sun, charlie, sawyer, sayid, claire.. so tonight's episode is locke, which should mean a generous unloading of mythological data as well as a fairly intriguing parallel storyline.
original timeline:
usually the second episode (or, hour 3) unloads the big exposition for the course of the season. in season 4 we got the excellent 'confirmed dead' that introduced us to the freighter science team. last year at this time was 'jughead,' both definitive episodes for the arcs of the seasons. so it was disappointing that at this point in the show for season 6, it doesn't feel like we've seen 'the thing' that's going to define the ending of the show/season. that may be because they're following the first season character order, and it just didn't make sense to shoehorn 'the thing' into kate's episode - we didn't see any of the beach/statue story, so tonight's episode will likely not contain any temple, typewriters, baseballs, or pills. whew.
1. sayid
we still don't know what sayid is now. or rather, what he's going to become when 'it reaches his heart.' all that we've previously seen on the show of the infection is rousseau's team, who seemed to appear totally normal and then would suddenly try to kill her. if sayid starts doing that it could get interesting.
2. dogen
3. jack
it seems like jack is now just being argumentative for the sake of it. he's got a long way to climb this season if he's going to be a legitimate leader again.
one thing i've realized during this episode is that for the people who landed in 1977, only kate and jin have clear objectives. sawyer has nothing. sayid has nothing. jack has nothing. hurley has nothing. one of the inherent strengths of season 1 was that everyone was working toward the same goal, even if they were incapable of working together. the show needs to state its season goal quickly, or it's going to get tiring fast. fingers crossed for tonight.
4. claire
the sickness was relatively low on my list of mysteries demanding answers, but if it ties into the bigger picture, i'm happy to see it addressed.. (you hear me, show? tie into something larger.) even if it's eventually going to tie in, if we don't have that assurance, this is when it feels like the audience is being fed filler. enough fans complained of this to prompt damon to address it in his twitter: "For those of you complaining of "filler." Seriously. PLEASE WATCH NCIS: LOS ANGELES. I promise not to hold it against you."
it looks like claire has been living in the jungle for three years - and after being 'infected,' probably was not flashing through time with the rest of the survivors. i'm looking forward to finding out what happened to her.. it's another cool throwback to season 1, where claire disappeared from the show for several weeks after being abducted by the others. here is the same story arc, only played out on a larger scale. looking forward to seeing exactly what happened.
• primary gripe
oh so many gripes. my major gripe though is the scenes with aldo that just did not fit. i'm not sure if the problem lies in the writing, the directing, or possibly a mismatch between writers and director. rob mcelhenny's cameo in season 3 was fine because he had almost no lines and was knocked out quickly, but here he was not only given lines, but seemed to be encouraged to reprise his character from 'it's always sunny in philadelphia.' i love that show, but that show does not belong in 'lost.' what should have been funny was groaningly bad, and took me out of the show completely. the scenes would have been much much better served by a mysterious badass other like ms klugh, friendly, mikhail.. anyone!!
• preboomer
rousseau'd claire steps out from behind the trees. nice wtf face from jin (essentially his same wtf face from meeting rousseau in 1988), as well as a corresponding wtf face from claire. but the real shocker about this preboomer isn't that claire has returned to the island story, it's that jin's leg is in a bear trap. oww, that totally sucks for jin. dip him in the temple pool, i guess, if it still works. please episode 4, reward our patience!
it looks like claire has been living in the jungle for three years - and after being 'infected,' probably was not flashing through time with the rest of the survivors. i'm looking forward to finding out what happened to her.. it's another cool throwback to season 1, where claire disappeared from the show for several weeks after being abducted by the others. here is the same story arc, only played out on a larger scale. looking forward to seeing exactly what happened.
• primary gripe
• preboomer
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