Curiouser and Curiouser...

Ok, well, I'm back. It's been too long, internet. First of many backed-up posts, weakest first.

So I read Alice Adventures in Wonderland, but my honest opinion is that it has basically bugger-all to do with our show. It's just a long series of silly weirdness, without much deeper meaning. Furthermore, it's clever little nonsense tone really gets under my skin. Haha puns! Math jokes! Long parodies of poems people had to memorize back in the 1800s! I'm sure it was funny once. If you were Lewis Carroll.

Alice and Wonderland is pretty high up there in terms of number of direct references. In the first season episode "White Rabbit", Locke encourages Jack to follow his vision of his Dad, comparing it (him?) to the titular rabbit. There were more literal white rabbits all over the place in season 3: being shaken to death, leading lil' Ben towards his dead mom, being eaten. And, of course, the season 3 finale was called "Through the Looking Glass" --same as Alice's sequel-- and our new station "The Looking Glass" has a little bunny logo.

So I was hoping for some really profound clues, but all I really found were puns. If you've seen the Disney movie you know everything interesting that I have to say. Quick highlight reel: Alice follows a white rabbit (with a pocket watch and clothes) down a hole, falls for awhile, unwisely follows the advice of 'Eat Me' cakes and 'Drink Me' bottles, goes to a Mad Hatter Tea Party, meats a Cheshire cat, plays croquet with a flamingo-mallet, eats some mushroom (because a hookah-smoking caterpillar told her to), almost gets beheaded by the Queen of Hearts, and then wakes up. Because it was all a dream. Great.

It's not that it's not fun, because it is. But for every cool image and clever joke there are three or four that don't work for me. It's fun, but it's all surface. I think a search for deeper meaning here is the surest way to suck the life out of it. It's a story about a convoluted journey through a place where logic works against you and what should make sense doesn't. Don't ask me to take it any farther without magic mushrooms, or at least some "Drink Me".

That said, it seems to me that the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has a chance of being more relevant. It has time distortion, opposite mirror-selves, a giant chessboard, and a Jabberwocky. So I'll give that a shot, even if it all turns out to be all a joke about binomials and Tennyson.