SPOILER WARNING

* Fucking Ben.

* If I looked up and saw Locke and Lt. Daniels staring at me from across the street, I would not walk, I would RUN in the opposite direction. Those are two scary bald motherfuckers.

* It was wonderful to have an episode devoted almost entirely to putting Terry O’Quinn in front of various other actors and having him act toward them. Man is he good. The suicide scene was marvelously tough to endure.

* I thought it was fun how at first you think Ethnic Guy and Ethnic Lady are some kind of agents, but then it turns out they’re just the Jack and Kate of the new group of castaways. (Maybe.) Clever little turnarounds like that are one of the things Lost does so well–and are also a hallmark of season openers for the show, which makes sense because last week’s episode felt like a finale (and may have been intended to be one when it was first mapped out back before the strike shortened last season).

* I was hoping for a bwahaha evil smile on Locke’s face when he discovered injured Ben at his mercy on the Island. Oh well. “‘He’s the man who killed me’ – cut to black” is pretty awesome too.

* One thing Lost tests is one’s ability to read fiction, for want of a better way to put it. That is, when it advances several conflicting theories for what’s actually going on with a character, it will eventually depict that character in a way that confirms one of those theories without coming right out and saying it, but at the same time the show’s byzantine plots and secrets will make people ignore these obvious context clues in the performance, mise en scene, score, even dialogue, and hunt for what’s “really” going on. For example, for a long long time the question among some fans of my acquaintance was “Is Ben telling the truth when he says ‘We’re the good guys’?” It always seemed obvious to me that he and his cronies could only be “good guys” in the most relative sense of the term, since they were constantly busy with the shooting and the torturing and the kidnapping and the brainwashing and the noggins and the piggins and the frikins, but when you finally got to the episode that revealed Ben to be an actual mass murderer, complete with mass graves and everything, I thought it was beyond debate. Amazingly, even after the events of tonight’s episode, in which Ben cold-bloodedly murders the fan-favorite character at his most physically and emotionally helpless, some of these fans are still saying he’s probably the good guy. It reminds me a bit of when it became perfectly clear that Aaron was one of the Oceanic Six and yet people were still holding out for some other sixth member because he was still inside Claire when the ship crashed, as though the media would ignore the baby when coming up with a numerical nickname for the miraculous survivors of a plane crash and stint on a deserted island. It strikes me that part of being able to make heads or tails out of a story like Lost is being able to look at hoofprints and think “horse” rather than “zebra.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.