SPOILER SECURITY DEVICE
* This has already come up this season, but it bears repeating: It’s a lot tougher for the show to do “shapeless dread” now that we’ve met all the Others, and gotten a good look at the Smoke Monster, and learned that the Dharma Initiative was ultimately a bit on the ineffectual side, and discovered that it’s all part of some great game between Ben Linus and a British tycoon, and so on and so forth, than it was back in Season One when you had no idea what the fuck was going on. So this episode was an all-out effort to, in the words of “The Battle of Evermore,” bring it back. Smoke monster attacks, crazy Rousseau, “the sickness” turning out not to be the time-travel aneurysms at all, brainwashed Frenchmen, Christian/Jacob, the freaking Temple at long last, “This place is death!“…the aim was to freak you out with mystery and terror. It worked pretty well. It still wasn’t as scary as the show used to be (remember the hieroglyphics on the countdown clock, or when the pilot got snatched out of the plane, or “we’re gonna have to take the boy,” or “help…me…”)?–but maybe we’ll get there this season if and when Jacob starts playing a bigger role.
* In the latest of his unceasingly excellent weekly Lost reviews, Todd VanDerWerff points out that the absence of flashbacks and flashforwards removes some of the intra-episode narrative coherence from how the show tells its story. Instead of having a subplot with a beginning, middle, and ending within the hour even as the larger Island plot rolls on, now it’s all plot, which (as I said of the premiere) gives the episodes a slightly overstuffed feel at times. But the pace is so breakneck, and the movement toward a destination seemingly so assured, that it’s still really satisfying, I think.
* Gory, wasn’t it? Bone shards, fly-ridden corpses, dismembered arms–it was the Geoff Johns episode of Lost. Good for them! Lost at its best is full of pulp thrills.
* This is probably an awful thing to say, but I never found Rebecca “Charlotte” Mader attractive until she went nuts and started dying. Those crazy-eyes! Hubba hubba.
* You know what? I think that’s an okay thing to say. The attractiveness of its leads is a big part of Lost’s appeal, and not just for dudes–it’s the one show I can think of where female fans seem to be randier for the male cast than male fans are for the female cast. But seriously: Evangeline Lily, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emilie De Ravin, Maggie Grace, Yunjin Kim, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros, Sonya Walger? Damn. See what I mean? Pulp thrills.
* I chuckled at how in-your-face that cliffhanger ending was.
Bernard guest-starred as a patient on Grey’s Anatomy last night (yes, I still watch it…) and started coughing up blood at one point, prompting me to yell, “The island shifted again!”
Megan did not laugh.