Todd VanDerWerff’s latest weekly Lost review is just lousy with insights, so I’m just going to spend a whole post quoting and agreeing with it if you don’t mind. On Josh Holloway:

This dude should be a movie star.

Agreed! And I’m the last kind of person to say that because I tend not to really care about the devil-may-care badasses with the hearts of gold. I love Han Solo like I love all Star Wars characters, but I’m not a “HAN ROOLZ LUKE DROOLZ” type. Ditto Batman and Superman. Megaditto Jack and Sawyer. But something about the way Sawyer is written, and about the way Holloway portrays him, imbues him with an approachability that many such stock characters lack. It’s perfectly believable that he’d be friends with Hurley, for example, you know? He wouldn’t be posing during the times they hang out, either, he’d just wanna have a nice time with him. That’s what I like about the character, and Holloway.

After the [love] triangle resolved itself, though, he retreated into the background simply because the show wasn’t quite sure what to do with him anymore. He was too much a leader now to simply go back to playing a foil to Jack, but he also didn’t really have a credible idea of what the castaways should DO to counterpoint Jack’s fervor to get off the Island and Locke’s fervor to stay on.

Yep. That’s why it’s so much fun to see him come into his own, and why it’s disheartening to see Kate and Jack come back and start the love quadrangle dynamics up again.

Lost, of course, makes a big deal out of names….A lot of this is just silly spot-the-reference gaming, like you might see on, say, Family Guy, but Sawyer’s voyage has had as much to do with the idea that he takes on different names to suit different occasions as anything else. When he was just Sawyer, the agreeably Han Solo-esque rapscallion, he was a pretty basic riff on the con man with a heart of gold. Once his real name came out as James Ford, however, the show felt safe in giving him a few inches of vulnerability. And now he’s Jim LaFleur, and he’s essentially become a respected member of society. He’s got a stable relationship with a loving live-in girlfriend and a great job (head of security for DHARMA).

Totally, and wow. Well done. (BTW, I couldn’t help but think that his pseudonymous surname is a relatively meaningless reference to Myron LaFleur from The Mist by Lost-writer fave Stephen King.)

While I thought “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” was one of the series’ better efforts, the last two episodes have both had a crippling failing in doling out lots of exposition in the clumsiest way possible (i.e., just handing giant speeches to people pretty good with exposition and hoping for the best). “LaFleur,” written by Elizabeth Sarnoff and Kyle Pennington and directed by Mark Goldman, however, handled exposition in the best way possible: It dropped the characters right in the middle of it.

Matthew Perpetua, call your lawyer.

DHARMA (or, as I like to call it, the Television Character Actor Economic Recovery Plan) has always been one of the bigger mysteries on Lost (somewhere up there with questions on the Island itself, the smoke monster and the Others), and its abandoned facilities lent a nice haunted house quality to much of season two, which is easily the show’s SPOOKIEST season, if nothing else. There’s something about out-of-date technology and abandoned research facilities wasting away in the middle of a tropical paradise that gives the show that extra level of intrigue (think of those oddly unsettling training films, for instance)…

Agreed on all counts. That’s one aspect of the show I really miss. Remember when the countdown clock revealed those hieroglyphics? Remember when you first heard “SYSTEM FAILURE”? Remember when “Walt” said hello on that ancient computer?

Sawyer and the others have gone through a lot of pain in the past while, so to see him having a moment of happiness at the successful delivery of Amy’s (Reiko Aylesworth, late and much-lamented of 24) child by Juliet, who had to overcome her professional jitters, was nice…

And the show obviously knew it, which is why they risked the loss of a cliffhanger or a big dramatic moment by cutting to commercial on Sawyer’s grin. It was worth it.

I figured pairing off Sawyer and Juliet was inevitable, but I didn’t think it would work as well as it did here. Their relationship has a maturity that Sawyer’s pairing with Kate (based as it is on adolescent crush-level dramatics) just DOESN’T have. This being TV, where adolescent crush-level dramatics hold sway, I expect this will turn into a wacky love quadrangle, but I also sort of hope Sawyer and Juliet just jilt Jack and Kate and say, “Thanks, but we’re much happier now.”

Oh, indeed! In fact I think that the show has painted itself into a bit of a corner here, since Jack and Kate have been shown to be such selfish sad-sacks while Sawyer and Juliet are running around rescuing people and caring about people and saving babies and drunks and creating a happy life for themselves. The show needs to hope that the collective energy of Skater and Jacket shippers formed over the course of three to five seasons can overwhelm the goodwill engendered by whatever they’re calling the Juliet/Sawyer pairing in the space of one episode. As far as I’m concerned that’s an uphill climb!

Really liked that scene where those left behind anxiously discussed their fates around the small table in DHARMA village, particularly the way the image of young Charlotte disappearing off into the darkness with her mother was shot. That whole moment could have been unbearable, but it just wasn’t, thanks to some interesting directorial choices.

That scene was really well done, wasn’t it? The sandwiches and milk, the outdoor lights illuminating the early summer evening as children run inside–really evocative of eating dinner on your porch on a lovely summer night. They didn’t have to set the scene in that environment, but they did, and it made it all the stronger.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 7:13 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.