Pilot Part 2: shut up and stop trying to be charming.

Here goes.

Will was trying to make a point about who was in which bathroom when the plane crashed.
Oh Shannon, I hate you. ( I get used to you in the 2nd season)...

We have gotten sour with each other over what Aurora will keep track of.
Poor Hurley and his early lines. "Some people have problems. Us...him." BLEH.

Talk about side wounds! The Marshall has a masterful one.

It's SNACK TIME. Fruit Snacks all around.

We are talking about the nature of Vincent. Whether or not he is always a real dog. And if so, what kind of a real dog. Seriously, that dude is weird. Also, it led us to discuss the nature of the Horse. It seems like it should always be a hallucination....but Sawyer sees it.

Sawyer is being Emo. Will points out that he's in a fuselage part that looks like a cradle, and says
"he wants to be good." And then Sawyer offers that priceless line: "I'm a complex guy sweetheart".

Aunt Mary Jo has joined us!

I am wondering about Jack's scratch marks on his face. They look like something from Watership Down. Like the bad bunnies marks...I'm not sure about this

Way to shoot a polar bear, Sawyer.

Basically this episode is about being ADORABLE. In which Hurley faints on the Marshal.

Sawyer is "The Prisoner", says Sayid. So who's Number 2?

Oh here comes the radio signal. I still don't believe that none of these people know even a little French except for Shannon. Oh well. It's convenient that Rousseau speaks English. Why the hell didn't she use it when she record the Message?
Ok done. Seriously, adorable.

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The Pilot

#1 I am excited for the whole half season of Ian Somerhalder. I love him so much.

Charlie is so cute when he is wandering around.

Jack's side is sort of pierced in the beginning. Does that mean he's like Jesus? Watch for more on that theme. Does that make Kate his Mary Magdalene? Aurora points out that she decides not to lie about her name even though she's been lying about her name for years. Because he makes her want to be better? Like Jesus, and Mary Magdalene.

Oh I miss the old days when they relied on the stars on the beach for ambience.

The Monster showed up for the first time! Terrific!
Apparently Rose says "there's something very familiar about that sound"...which Aurora points out makes sense because she's from the Bronx and it is taken from a taxi cab meter sound.

It starts to rain, and everyone is freaked out. Except Locke who is sitting out in it happily. A foreshadowing of his later love affair with the monster? Probs.

Oh hai, Greg Grunberg. I am totally not trusting you.... I am really starting to believe that there is some serious setting up going on here. Especially in the event that someone controls the Monster, I think lil' pilot could have made it out ok, and the things he is telling the Losties are just a way for whoever is controlling the island to set them up. It seems to me like he's trying to see if the Losties are listening when he tells them how they crashed. Aurora points out that he conciously puts down the radio.... I guess this doesn't mean that the monster is controlled by something, because the Others might have hoped that the pilot might have survived to further infiltrate the Losties. Eh. I dunno.

And Pilot Part One. DONE.

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Live-blogging the LOST WEEKEND!?!

Ok.
Here's the deal.
It's time for the LOST Weekend, where we watch every episode of Lost in a 3 day time span.
Eat a lot of junk food. Do some house-cleaning. Read books at the same time. Maybe apply for jobs.
But mostly and most importantly. WATCH LOST.

It is going to rule. And we will keep you, our fair readers posted on it. And maybe take this opportunity to catch up on the Blog. We're still reading....well.. I'm listening to Our Mutual Friend and Aurora has some older stuff to catch up on.
Oh, and I should probably say some words about "And Then There Were None".

Oh and I think I am going to have a "Cowboy Up" shirt made.
And change my ringtone to "Make Your Own Kind of Music".

This is going to be hella hella fun.

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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.

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Apocalypto: I liked it, and it is relevant.

First things first.
We're not dead. In fact, we just got steady internet service, so hopefully we'll be back with a vengance. We have, however, come to an impasse. We've read most of the easy (less than 500 page) books, and are left with, basically, The Fountainhead and Our Mutual Friend (ok Catch-22, The Mysterious Island, Tale of 2 Cities, etc). Aurora's got tons of posts to make--she's listened to the Odyssey and Alice in Wonderland on Librivox, she read the Tommyknockers....I'm almost done with the Time Quartet. It's had its ups and downs , including the death of its author, Madeleine L'Engle. She will be missed. In TV world, we've been watching The Prisoner! Also, I managed to get my sister and mom through the entire series up to this point. It was nice to see my mom hate and then love Sawyer, see the Sun-Jin switch, see the Michael switch, see Tess stay faithful to Sayid, or, as she calls him, " Number One Iraqi ".

And yes. Last night we watched Apocalypto. All the negative Mel Gibson buzz aside, it was a pretty decent film --it was amazing to look at, and steeped itself so deeply in a people and a time that is rarely represented, while at the same time being a pretty simple story of human determination, human flaws, and the problems that come with power. Sound familiar? Well, I think so. So does she...It didn't help that the film started out with a tapir (relative to the wild boar) getting gored by this really awesome really primitive trap. The film leads us to identify with this village of Mayan natives who are pretty unassuming and sometimes play jokes on each other and so forth. Then, lo and behold, the big-city punks come in, a bunch of the old dudes get killed, the young-and-able get captured, and all the kids get left behind. On the arduous walk to the big city, they encounter a small, really creepy child who tells the big-city meanies that their society is going to fall. She reminded me of vision-Walt. In the big city, they realize that they're not being taken to work, but to be sacrificed. Pretty brutally. Our hero escapes this fate because there is a solar eclipse which makes the boss guys declare that the sacrifice should stop--instead the rest of our village friends are taken out back and killed for sport with arrows, javelins, and big-ass rocks. Fortunately, our hero escapes, and spends the rest of the movie leading his captors on a chase through a waterfall, quicksand, poisonous snakes, man-eating jaguars, and that awesome impaling trap from the beginning of the film. Finally, he gets home to his wife and child--only to find the white man arriving on the beach. She says "What are we going to do?" and he says "We're going farther into the jungle," which is totally the right thing to do cuz the white man is a bitch. And the white man is just going to bring another big, ugly power structure that twists people into doing really bad things in the name of society.

SO. I think it sounds familiar--besides the jungle with big bodies of water nearby, there are some really interesting things going on with society asking people to put a really low value on human life...which the corporations on LOST could easily be doing...which real-world society (which Lost draws from) does all the time with our really dumb wars and police actions, and which lots of people stand dumbly by for, or cheer on. But hey, isn't there a temple in the big city of Apocalypto? So maybe the bad guys here are sort of like the Others, with a pretty flawed power structure and a lot of myth and superstition to bolster them. Ultimately, though, I think the movie is about the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations--not just these Mayans, but Rome and the U.S., and everybody. The thing is--I could see this story playing out on the Lost island hundreds of years ago--see it being played out now--and see it being played out again on the future island. And that is spooky, and also totally awesome. The power of the same story playing out over and over again, unable to be stopped, only briefly avoided, is part of why Apocalypto is good, and why LOST is great.

And that's that. I just found out Our Mutual Friend is on Librivox. That is going to make things 10 times easier.

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Lions and Aliens and Christians, Oh My!: C.S. Lewis Kicks Butt.

I am working my way through finishing C.S. Lewis's book-length works.
C.S. Lewis has been in my blood for a decade, both because he is a great storyteller and a pretty darn well-reasoned spokesperson for Orthodox Christianity. But what does that have to do with LOST? Well... In both the Chronicles of Narnia and the Ransom trilogy (which I'll be talking about), a great mythological world that seems, in some ways,very unlike our own, teaches Christian morality and belief in action without reducing it to 10 commandments or a Golden Rule. It's harder to pin that sort of thing down on Lost and it definitely has less of a clear message about what the "right thing to do" is, but I think there are some interesting points of contacts nonetheless. Let's dive in....


The Ransom Trilogy makes the most sense. In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom travels to Mars, meets and befriends its fauna, and gets to know about the way God (who in this case is pretty Christian) works on other planets. But not in a hokey "everything is like Earth" way, but rather in a "Maybe Earth is a little bit less in tune with God than other planets"...which actually in some way or another, seems to be a pretty loud tune in SF. In the second book Perelandra, Ransom is charged with the duty of protecting Venus's ethereal Adam and Eve from their own Fall. He is successful, and Venus looks like its shaping up to be a very different world than fallen Earth.

But the most relevant book, and the last, That Hideous Strength, takes place right here on Earth. That Hideous Strength finds Ransom back on earth, preparing to manage an interplanetary response to the threat of apocalypse. The devil's arrival, it seems, is about to come at the hands of overeager scientists and academics who really messing with the natural order, some knowingly and some because of their own ignorance and disconnectedness from the real world. They are a pretty nasty bunch of academics, lets say. Eventually, albeit briefly, Ransom gets Merlin on his side and calls down the gods (from their corresponding planets) to foil their plans. Merlin and the gods as ancient magic are neutral, so its okay that the Christian heroes co-opt them. Which, needless to say, I love, since it takes a big man (LEWIS!) to really celebrate the reality of non-Christian elements being important in the Christian tradition....

Which, to come back to LOST , seems apt in a world where Christian(Eko of course, and others by way of their virtues...and by allusion in the show) and Pagan(The Island) have to put down their own suspicions of each other to fight something more evil than they seem to each other. At least I hope that's what is going to have to happen with the Losties and the Others. Yep. And maybe it goes with my continuing feeling that Dharma really wasn't up to any good, and the purge might have actually been justified. Although I don't think Clive Staples would have been on board with that. Anyways, the point that those who are calling the shots aren't always the good guys and make it hard sometimes for you to see how bad they are, is an important one.
But in the end, in the very end, someone good is going to call the shots. Kapish? Hm. Just read it.


Narnia is a little bit less clear, since it is, after all, a children's story. Since it is in another time-space... and Carlton has said something to that effect. I felt a connection most seriously in "The Man Behind The Curtain" actually. In The Last Battle there is a False-Aslan (a donkey put in an Aslan suit by a tricksy monkey, seriously) which people are mistakenly worshiping, and Narnia is falling apart. People who believe in him are wrong, people who don't believe in him decide not to believe in Aslan at all, the southern people who believe in Tash instead of Aslan (thinly veiled Muslims) are arguing about his meaning....and Aslan is nowhere to be found.
Plus the Monkey cultivates everyone's reverence for the False Aslan by way of smoke and mirrors and complicated ritual, which real Aslan didn't need.

So when Ben was getting all up in Locke's face being like "I'm going to take you to see Jacob" and everyone was all "ooh Jacob! We've never seen him but we here he's pretty great," I was pretty skeptical about him--I know Wizard of Oz came first but if Jacob is the Island/the Island God/imaginary or false Island-God or what have you, he has a lot more in common with Aslan/False-Aslan than with little Mr. Marvel. But we saw Jacob...right? I'm not ready to believe Jacob is what people think he is, or if he is, Darlton and Co. did a pretty good making it hard to tell what he is. It's not a one-one correlation,but The Last Battle does focus on what the Followers think and do with regards to their Leader as much as on what that leader is. And isn't that we've been watching the Others do for the last season?

Well--I know I haven't done justice to my favorite guy in the world, so, seriously, read his books.
He balances myth-making and very serious meaning really really well. Sort of like LOST!

What's coming up?
Well--I guess I took a little break to read comics. Our Mutual Friend and The Fountainhead are still being slogged through, and I'm reading the Time Quartet, and school is starting! But we've got a bunch of hiatus to go, and plenty of books to read, both long and short and Stephen King-y.
Plus we've started The Prisoner. So creepy. So...
Be Seein' You!

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In which everything turns to a mush in my head, or what Jack should learn from Buffy

This isn't about any book specifically, it's just random rambling on my part. Spoilers for all Harry Potter and Buffy (and Star Wars, but that seems ridiculous). So as I've been totally reabsorbed by Harry Potter, Emilia and I have been working out way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it got me thinking about the importance and awesomeness of "the trio". Which got me wondering about whether other trios can give us any hints about how things might work out for Lost's main triangle. So let's take a moment to ignore all the other characters and focus on Jack, Kate and Sawyer. Just pretend it's the start of Season 3. Jump with me, won't you?

Seems to me there are two basic structures, with Harry Potter and Buffy in one camp and Lost and Star Wars in the other. Harry, Ron, and Hermione square up eerily well with Buffy, Xander, and Willow, as the brave, whiny, and burdened by destiny hero, the loyal, earnest dork, and the clever, insecure and socially awkward brain. Lost's big three of Jack, Kate, and Sawyer line up with Luke, Leia, and Han Solo as the earnest, whiny, daddy-issues hero, the tough, ballsy heroine, and the scoundrel with a heart of gold.

Now I do have a couple of actual points here, besides that archetypes are fun. First and most personal, why is it that the hero always seems to have issues with being a little whiney-pants? Dear to my heart as all these stories are, there are moments in all of them when I find myself yelling at the screen (or book) for the hero to shut up already. I guess it’s sort of the problem with being the hero: it really is all about you, and at some points that's a real burden. There are times when you just gotta deal with that by yelling at your friends for no reason (Harry), running away and being a waitress (Buffy), straight up ignoring Yoda (Luke) or some good ol' crying in the jungle (Jack). The good news is, by the end of the three finished stories, Harry, Buffy, and Luke have all pulled it together to the point where they are (usually) able to focus calmly on the mission, drawing on the strength of their friends and family, and act as brave and selfless leaders. Jack has a ways to go on every front.

Ok, the next, sort of counter-intuitive thing I notice is that the hero hardly ever gets the girl (or guy). It seems that in all four examples, romance within the trio is between the two seconds, not the hero and a second. All of them have false starts, misleads or confusion in the other direction. Xander likes Buffy, Luke is entranced by Leia, Jack loves Kate, and Harry and Hermione….well I don't see it, but there are enough mixed signals to start a huge shipping war lots of 13-year-old girls still have internet scars from. But none of those couples get farther then a kiss- the real chemistry and balance was in a hero-less pairing.

Of course, if you watch Buffy you know that Willow and Xander didn't work out either, but they had a real, if screwed-up, romance (you have to give Buffy some leeway. Unlike the other three stories I'm talking about, Buffy was never planned out farther than a season or two ahead, and the constant need for drama frequently eats through long-term story satisfaction. We are talking, after all, about a show that suddenly decided in season four that Willow was a lesbian). And I'm sure that our Lost triangle is (groan) far from resolved. But if Ron/Hermione and Han/Leia are any clue, bet on the couple that bickers.

Something else I notice about the three finished stories is that by the end, the hero has to face death in a very clear, conclusive way. Harry, Buffy, and Luke step willingly, defenses down, into the arms of certain death. In DH, Harry accepts that he will have to sacrifice himself, faces Voldemort wandless, and dies. Buffy has the distinction of dying twice, first in season one when she faces her prophesied doom at the hands of the Master, and more certainly at the end of season five when she dives into a dimensional portal to save her little sister (and the world). At the end of Jedi, Luke presents himself to Vader, and goes willingly into the Death Star (I love George Lucas, but subtle he's not), fully expecting to die.

I'm not saying Jack will die- all the characters I just named are smiling contentedly as the credits roll on their stories. I'm also not sure that I'm right about the way the triangle will play out. I'm just guessing about the way this will work, but it seems clear to me that the three finished stories point in particular direction, especially for Jack.

If Jack is going to step up and be the hero of the story, he's gonna need to get in line with the hero path. First, he should stop pushing people away and bogging down in his own shit. Less Order of the Phoenix all-caps Harry, season two sad Buffy, whinny can't lift the X-wing Luke. Be the leader and the hero, stop letting your problems push you away from the people you need. Second, he's gonna need to step fully out of the way of Kate and Sawyer. However that plays out, it's not about him, and him staying in the picture is dragging everyone down. Finally, there is going to come a time when Jack's going to need to step between his people and death, and he'd better be ready for it. And I'm not talking "I'll get off the island and come back for you guys" sacrifice. If the other stories are any guide, our Doc's gonna have to accept death with open arms. I really hope he's up for that.

Ok, coming up next, a Jurassic Park post. Also, someday we'll blog about old BBC show The Prisoner, which based on the pilot is basically Lost, but with funny jackets and an evil balloon. Don't laugh, it's totally terrifying.

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