SPOILERZAPOPPIN

* Explain to me how “We’re takin’ the sub” constitutes a) a cliffhanger; b) an adequate response to their lack of a pilot to fly the plain, unless Sawyer became a sub captain during his Dharma days and I missed it.

* So that part was pretty irritating, and since it’s the end of the episode, it left something of a sour taste in my mouth.

* I suppose I’m also frustrated that my “Widmore’s coming to pick up the MIB” theory didn’t pan out. Well, as far as we know. Everyone is just lying to everyone else all the time now, then admitting it and moving on, so I figure both Fake Locke and Widmore are entitled to be bullshitting about this too.

* Actually, maybe I’m just frustrated by everyone lying all the time. What is this, Gossip Girl?

* Anyway, now that we’ve (in theory) learned that Widmore isn’t on MIB’s side after all, how many factions are really in play over the course of the show? You’ve got Widmore’s people. Ben’s Others. Jacob still seems separate from the Others to me. Then there’s the MIB. The Dharma Initiative. The castaways. Rousseau. The French team?

* In the “pro” column on this week’s installment: Sawyer’s a character who can really hold an episode, and while I’m sure the cop stuff in the flashsideways is as egregious inaccurate as was the teacher stuff in the Ben flashsideways last week, I’m not married to a cop and wasn’t raised by a cop so it didn’t bother me, and instead made a lot of sense as a road Sawyer–or more accurately, in this case, Jim Ford–could have gone down. It makes at least as much sense to become a cop and track down the con man who destroyed your family as it does to become a con man yourself to do it.

* And again we see a character confronting and surmounting the emotional issues that bedeviled them in the original timeline. Jack puts his daddy issues to rest and mends fences with his own son; Locke lets go of his rage and compulsion to prove everyone wrong and allows himself a happy life with his wife-to-be; Sawyer opens up, trusts someone, and knowingly puts a huge if not insurmountable roadblock in the way of pursuing his grudge to its murderous end. In all three cases these aren’t storybook happy endings, but in the immortal words of Bruce Wayne, “This would be a good life…good enough.”

* On the other hand, we’d previously put Kate in this category–instead of running, she came back to care for Claire–but of course here she’s still running. And ending up in the hands of Sawyer/Ford in a fashion reminiscent of Sayid finding Jin.

* Which raises the question: Why the hell did Sawyer, a cop, let a woman in handcuffs go at the airport in the first place? Was it because he didn’t want to reveal to anyone that he was there? Wouldn’t there be ways to tip someone off without saying “I’m a cop”–like not helping her sneak past security, for example? Well, maybe this’ll come out during her interrogation, I don’t know.

* Lots of cameos in this episode. Good to see Charlie’s brother.

* Good to see Charlotte, too! She was never my favorite, but I liked her here, and not just because she looked better than she’d ever looked before. Well, okay, maybe because she looked better than she’d ever looked before. But kudos to Rebecca Mader for that anyway. She was convincingly sexy, and she handled the infuriating humiliation of being angrily booted from a bedroom just minutes after having sex convincingly too.

* (Speaking of which, this is only relevant to Tri-State Area viewers, but one of the things I’ll miss about Lost are those little five second glimpses of Liz Cho during the teaser commercial for Eyewitness News.)

* I don’t know if this says more about Lost or what watching Lost does to people, but Fake Locke tells Sawyer he’s the smoke monster, Sawyer asks about why he killed all those people but not a peep about “what the fuck are you, smoke monster???”, and I barely even blinked.

* Haha, the “I’m just a scared and lonely survivor please don’t hurt me” routine’s been done before, Zoe, and by a better actor than you. Won’t get fooled again!

* Even though it was (too) quickly defused, the creepiness of Claire being all friendsy with Kate and then trying to cut her throat while Sayid looked on all sedated-like, then Fake Locke coldcocking Claire to talk her down, was really somethin’. I wasn’t sure what kind of mileage they’d get out of these sorts of scenes, but it worked, not least because crying is something Evangeline Lilly does well.

* “Why won’t you play the game?” Your very-much-lead item today is Scott Woods’s “In Search of Digital Love,” an hour-long audio documentary/review/essay/mixtape/mash-up/sound collage/whatever exploring Daft Punk’s flawless song “Digital Love.” Aided and abetted by critics Brian MacDonald, Michaelangelo Matos, and Nate Patrin, Woods makes some really astonishing sonic connections here, sometimes by simplly riffing off a single word uttered by his interview subjects–a suite of samples from ’70s/’80s songs with the word “Magic” in the title, for example. (This makes me want to make a playlist of such songs, but adding in my twin faves from this ’80s-radio-staple subgenre, the Alan Parsons Project’s “Magic” and Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra.”) Meanwhile, I never would have thought of “Layla,” but dang if that isn’t dead on. And there’s science-fiction content galore in there, as you also might expect. (I’m proud I recognized Lenny Van Dohlen’s voice in the commercial for Electric Dreams simply from remembering him as Harold in Twin Peaks–which is also sampled!) I’m so impressed by this thing it’s not even funny. Take the time and listen to it. (Via Tom Ewing.)

* Recently at Robot 6: How to write comics and Lady Gaga/Beyonce/”Telephone” tribute art.

* In a very fine postcript to Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Kubrick retrospective, Aaron Cutler talks about Steven Spielberg’s A.I., lingering on the heartbreak of it. I need to revisit this film.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews the John Porcellino King-Cat collection Map of My Heart. I like when Tom discusses what new things he gets out of experiencing a familiar, even beloved work in a new format, and this review is of a piece with his earlier commentary on Fantagraphics’ excellent Love & Rockets digests.

* Always love a Jeffrey Brown superhero piece.

* Eve Tushnet liked Deadgirl, the hot-zombie-woman-as-sex-slave movie. I’m glad to hear it’s about misogyny rather than a function of misogyny. On the other hand, my wife’s admonishment that we’ve had quite enough art told from the perspective of misogynists, thank you very much, continues to haunt me.

* Apparently They’re very happy with the performance of Caprica and want to make more Battlestar Galactica spin-offs.

* Speaking of: I am very late to this game, but I know you gonna dig Katamaran’s mash-up of Battlestar Galactica with the feel of Spike Jonze’s video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” This thing had me laughing out loud, hard, on the train.

I suppose it’s worth pointing out that you could never do this with Caprica. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Twilight Saga: New Moon RiffTrax available simultaneously with the DVD release! BALLS OUT. (Also via Topless Robot, bless his heart.)

* Finally, I took one last dip into last week’s Lost thoughts comment thread. Take a look, then I’ll see you back here tonight!

* Due to a scheduling mishap I’m not sure if this showed up in everyone’s RSS readers today, so please note this morning’s Comics Time reviews of several noteworthy monthly comics that came out last week.

* Recently on Robot 6: How Siege and Blackest Night are really doing, Savage Dragon does the Strange Tales/Bizarro Comics thing, and Sara Ryan and friends have advice for comics writers.

* Phoebe Gloeckner says The Twilight Saga: New Moon was the Best Film of 2009. Somehow this does not surprise me at all. In other news, The Diary of a Teenage Girl debuts tonight off-off-Broadway.

* The Doug Wright Awards strike me as a serious consideration of comics whereas most of the other major North American awards programs really aren’t.

* I found Frank Miller’s tribute to Brittany Murphy (no permalink but it’s the only thing there at the moment) surprisingly moving. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* I skipped a few of these (plain old missed the 2001, skipped A Clockwork Orange when I saw it was a pan (!), and I still haven’t seen Barry Lyndon despite Kubrick being my all-time favorite director and owning the movie since the Kubrick box set came out a decade ago), but Not Coming to a Theater Near You has rounded out its series on Stanley Kubrick with fine pieces on his three final (and my three favorite of his) films: The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and the best of the bunch, Eyes Wide Shut. Provided you put any effort into it at all, it’s difficult to write badly about EWS.

* On the Lost front, Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly round-up post has a couple of nice catches, while I’m way behind on the comment thread on my own Lost post for last week.

* Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes have split up. Perhaps she realized that she is Kate Winslet and he is Sam Mendes.

* Remember when TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe drew a picture of David Bowie for my David Bowie sketchbook? The Yellow Bird Project is now using it as a t-shirt design to raise money for Haiti relief. I’m very excited about this and am grateful and glad to have been a part of it. Buy one!

* I was sad to hear about the death of Corey Haim. Prior to the release of Crank: High Voltage, the only film of his I’d seen all the way through was The Lost Boys. (Blown Away I tended to fastforward to the good parts back in middle school.) But The Lost Boys is obviously a marvelous movie, and watching it recently, one of my favorite parts was Haim’s one-of-a-kind performance as some kind of junior-high dandy.

* Todd VanDerWerff liked last night’s Lost more than I did. He makes a decent case.

* As a big fan of both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ghostface Killah, I’m please to be able to say this: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ghostface Killah.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS HO

* “May I please see the storage facility, Mr. Venkman?”

* Here’s a phrase I never expected to hear in conjunction with Lost: “Directed by Mario Van Peebles.”

* Tania Raymonde = Great Googly Moogly

* It would be odd of Ben’s dad (legitimately great make-up job on Uncle Rico/the werewolf, by the way) to suggest that their life would have improved if they’d stayed on the Island had a nuclear bomb gone off and sunk it to the bottom of the sea, right?

* But who knows what kind of strange rules apply in a world where high school principals exercise dictatorial control over the budget and teachers jockey for power to replace them in the middle of a school year.

* Arzt is getting annoying. (Getting?–Ed.) I sort of wish Locke had been the guy riding shotgun with Dr. Linus’s scheme to take down Principal Walter Peck, but I suppose that sets up all kinds of parallels they weren’t prepared to do.

* I also sort of wish Illana weren’t such a pivotal character right now, because we have so little to go on with her. We’re less attached to her than to any other surviving character on the entire show. She is to the cast what the Temple set is to Lost sets.

* One way I could tell in this episode that things are moving to a head is that they had two climactic confrontations: Jack and Richard, and Ben and Ilana. Either could easily have been the focal point of an entire episode, and would have been, in an earlier season–or hell, earlier in this one.

* As it stood, I think I preferred the Jack and Richard scene. I loved seeing both men pushed past their limits: Richard in panicked despair, divided between shadow and light as he frantically explains why he’s now so desperate to die; Jack in crazy-eyed, careless confidence, bound and determined to find out the reason he’s now so sure he has to be there, a Man of Faith to rival Locke from earlier in the show. Good stuff.

* Ben’s scene was as well-acted as you’d expect from Michael Emerson, and I bought it, but again, using Ilana as his foil made it feel like a dress rehearsal rather than closing night. Imagine if his interlocutor had been Locke, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, or Richard. (Moreover, you’d think Miles, Lapidus, or Sun would have something to say about forcing a man, even Ben, to dig his own grave.)

* So maybe the episode was a bit…off-balance? Given the subject of the flash-sideways, Ben’s story should have been the main one. But you had a big moment with Jack, Richard, and Hurley, while Fake Locke showed up as well. It dulled the impact.

* I always enjoy a good slow-motion smiley reunion scene on this show. With all the team-ups and split-ups and bumping into each other in the jungle and storming off in a huff that goes down, it’s occasionally nice to get a reminder that a lot of these people really like each other, or did at one point, and care about one another. We care about them too!

* Miles psychically detecting Nikki & Paulo’s diamonds was a hoot. It was like the writers raced to pick up something even the most die-hard fans wouldn’t have put together. (That said, I’m sure someone said “hey, wouldn’t Miles notice Nikki & Paulo’s diamonds?” before, but I almost feel bad for that person.) Would have been nice if he noted they’d been buried alive, but still.

* So Fake Locke’s posse is on Hydra Island, huh? I wonder if Sawyer and Kate will have one last roll in the polar bear cage, for old times’ sake.

* Recently on Robot 6: The Best Show on WFMU and send Tom Brevoort a postcard.

* This dude made his D&D room into an actual dungeon. Living the dream. (Via Topless Robot.)

* See you tonight for Lost thoughts!

* Here are the 2010 Oscar winners.

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Stanley Kubrick retrospective is up to Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. Here’s a fine bit from the former by Katherine Follett:

In the novel, Humbert believed in his arrogance that lusting after a basically non-sexual girl was somehow the mark of a rare aesthete, as if he had an appreciation for inaccessible modern art, while adult women were the equivalent of banal, eye-pleasing landscapes. But now that Lolita has the body of an adult woman, and Humbert’s interior voice is nonexistent, we’re left with no special reason why Humbert is drawn to Lolita, other than ordinary–and totally understandable–lust.

Sue Lyon was a dime, obviously, but I still thought the film got “she’s too young” across effectively enough. Meanwhile, I enjoyed Timothy Sun’s take on Strangelove for how systematically it reminds us that American cinema’s greatest satire includes characters called Buck Turgidson, Jack T. Ripper, Merkin Muffley, and Major Kong.

* Dan Nadel on Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac. Interesting point of comparison to Josh Cotter’s Driven by Lemons.

* Loving, loving, loving Zak Smith’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars. Here’s a killer pair of posts running down the pros and cons of the game’s Demons and Devils, and here’s a marvelous rumination on the way players flip back and forth between their in-game and real-world selves while playing. I mean, for real, I’m running out of superlatives.

* Recently on Robot 6: JMS as the third leg on the Grant Morrison/Geoff Johns footstool and Jared Stumpenhorst’s LOST 365.

* I’m starting to think it’s weird that trailers show you the entire plot of a movie. Like, this Iron Man 2 trailer leaves pretty much no surprises for the first three reels, right? But hey, War Machine.

The 848-page Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol. 1 hardcover, for $8.24. Act now, because I assume this price won’t last.

Tons more deals via Bully, but that one strikes me as particularly outrageous. (Via Ken Lowery.)

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? And that’s probably telling. I watched the pilot a little before it aired, on DVD. I waited a couple weeks before watching the next two episodes back to back, on TiVo. Then I waited until last night to watch the next three episodes in a row as well. Now, Caprica isn’t a show the Missus has any interest in, so watching it live isn’t an option, in all fairness. But the same could have been said of Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos, and in those cases I’d just wait until she went to bed–nothing could stop me from watching new episodes the night they first aired. Part of that was fear of getting spoiled the next day, which I’m not as concerned about regarding Caprica, since no one I know seems to be talking about. (That’s probably telling, too.) But mainly, I’m just in no hurry to watch the show. Last night’s three-episode marathon felt almost like homework.

Why? Jim Henley was close, but not quite there, when he talked about how unlikeable the characters are. I can get around that–where would The Sopranos have been without unpleasant people? What I have a harder time with are characters who are unexciting. It occurred to me sometime last night that Caprica has no Starbuck, no Baltar, no Bill Adama (well, you know what I mean), no Colonel Tigh, no Six, no President Roslin, no Apollo…no one whose continuing adventures I’d be excited to see, regardless of their level of bastardry. No one whose smiles or rages intrigue me, no one who makes me laugh, no one who makes me cheer, no one who makes me shudder. Instead it has a lot of people in expensive clothes, hiding how they really feel all the time, until it finally comes out in some big scene of melodrama, which ultimately feels just as contrived as their buttoned-up anal retentiveness elsewhere.

It’s just very difficult to get invested in Daniel and Elizabeth Graystone’s troubled marriage when we’ve never seen what would make either of them worth sticking around with. It’s difficult to feel for Joseph Adama’s plight as a man torn between two cultures when we haven’t seen what he’d really contribute to either. It’s tough to really get into the semi-villains like Sam Adama and Sister Clarice when the only thing that elevates them from cliche is an equally contrived tweak of conventional mores–look, the gangster is GAY!/look, the religious zealot is a SWINGER! Sasha Roiz’s Sam is probably my favorite performance on the show–he wears those clothes gorgeously, his eyes are intelligent, he comes across as the most at home in the show’s ersatz Coppola tones–but he’s still hampered by the rote construction of the character. Sister Clarice I’d be happy to never see again. James Marsten’s Barnabas is even more dire.

I’m also increasingly convinced that starting the show with the death of children was a big mistake. Where can you go from there, tonally? The answer, as it turns out, is pretty much nowhere–it’s just been a dour, sour show ever since. I can’t remember laughing a single time, or being on the edge of my seat. I think the one episode that managed to buck this somewhat was the fifth, “There Is Another Sky.” Between Graystone finally pitching the Cylon to his board of directors as the ultimate pet/slave, setting up the technological revolution that we viewers know will eventually lead to the destruction of civilization, and the lost avatar of Tamara Adams discovering she’s all but indestructible in the virutal world within which she’s trapped, we finally had genuine thrills–moments that weren’t mired in the inability of a bunch of jerks to properly process their grief. I mean, it wasn’t perfect–the Tamara stuff felt really Matrix-y and dated, while a third storyline involving the cultural customs of the Taurans left me scratching my head as to how almost all of the interplanetary differentiation and strife present here disappeared in time for Battlestar. (I assume the First Cylon War served as a great unifier, but it’s still weird that Bill Adama never talked about this stuff when it we’re being told it’s such a formative element of his young adulthood.) But it was something. In a weird way, it was where the series probably should have begun. Last night’s episode was a step backwards, unfortunately. I hope they can get things moving again.

* Behold: The Secret Origin of Destructor.

* New York Noise is a terrific music show that airs on New York City’s public television station NYC TV, focusing on local bands, local labels, local video directors, and formerly local members of all three categories. The list of artists I love that I first discovered through this show is really just outrageously long, but the best example I can think of is when, in the course of back-to-back videos, I heard the music of Klaus Nomi and Antony & the Johnsons for the very first time. My wife and I sat there like someone had just detonated an atom bomb in our heads. Seriously, New York Noise has been a vital lifeline to the city’s musical bounty for me for years. Unfortunately, the channel has suspended production of the show. Please sign this petition, join this Facebook group, and email Mayor Bloomberg about it. I’ve done all three and hope you will too. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Lost links: Some intriguing catches in Whitney Matheson’s weekly “best of the Lost comments” post, and here’s a working link for Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly follow-up post (thanks, Jesse M.).

* Stuart Immonen draws a mean Ben Grimm.

* Don’t know how I missed this when it first appeared, but I enjoyed Ted Naifeh’s Gary Numan and David Bowie-influenced Batman sketchbook.

* One of my favorite bloggers, Jon Hastings lists his top 20 films of 2009.

* Real-Life Horror #1: The Obama Administration is reportedly considering trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military tribunal rather than a civilian court after all. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Real-Life Horror #2: Matthew Yglesias ponders the differing reactions to those who murder while Muslim versus those who don’t.

* Your quote of the day comes from Mike Barthel:

If our indie bands are going to be pretentious and juvenile, why must they be either tweely earnest or blue-collarly retro?  Why can’t they instead evoke that particular feeling of driving mournfully around the suburbs at night in between rewatching The Crow?

Amen!

* Recently on Robot 6: Sweet Batman & Robin art from Cameron Stewart and Andy Clarke, Hope Larson on Mercury (via Kiel Phegley), and Eliza Dushku departs from Wizard Worlds Anaheim and Toronto.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s comment-based Lost follow-up reveals that fannish tensions are running high right now, something I wasn’t aware of at all.

* I’m filing this Tom Spurgeon review of Daniel Clowes’s Wilson away for later use.

* The character of the week at We Are The LAW is Orko! I never hated him. Here’s Rob Bricken doing him 8-bit-style, while TJ Dietsch’s version made me laugh out loud.

* Wowsers, this SOTA Toys statue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon is pretty terrific. Also eldritch, tenebrous, cyclopean, etc.

* Renee French is creepy: part 3,892 in a continuing series.

* Well, how about this: The Strange Tales hardcover comes out today, and with it come the release of my final three Strange Tales Spotlight interviews for Marvel.com: Nick Gurewitch, Brian Maruca, and James Kochalka. That first one’s even a bit newsy: There are more Perry Bible Fellowship comics and more Marvel-Gurewitch collaborations in the offing. But for me, these three interviews represent the last leg of my literally years-long involvement with the project, which has now seen me interview all thirty creators involved with the book. What a pleasure!

* Christopher Handley’s attorney Eric Chase explains the nebulous legal Calvinball that led him to plead Handley out in his comics-related obscenity case. Turns it the “I know it when I see it” standard makes cases like these difficult to defend, which Chase feels is precisely the most dangerous effect of that standard. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Recently I saw people linking to some dopey-sounding essay about Why Don’t Jews Write Fantasy; Spencer Ackerman responds to this call for a Jewish C.S. Lewis and a Jewish Narnia by pointing out the existence of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the Marvel Universe. That’s pretty brilliant. I mean, I know everyone talks about how superheroes are by and large the creation of American Jews, but locating them in the fantasy tradition that way, as a unique alternative to the epic fantasy of Tolkien or the allegorical fantasy of Lewis or the sword and sorcery of Howard and so on, strikes me as very smart. I know there are better-educated consumers of fantasy reading this blog–perhaps you’d care to chime in on this in the comments.

* I’m as excited as Sparkplug is to see John Hankiewicz’s Asthma placing so highly in a pair of recent Top 100 Comics of the ’00s lists. That is a major, major work, woefully underdiscussed.

* Cameron Stewart is posting black and white pages from Batman & Robin #9, and they’re striking. Those blacks are really powerful and multidimensional.

* Josh Cotter has started up his annual experimental-comics project March Hare. Guy’s good.

* The quote of the day is from Zak Smith: “The main points of the game are: hanging out with your friends, inventing strange things, and problem-solving–all of which are maturity-scalable activities.”

* Congratulations to the same-sex couples of Washington, DC, who could get married starting today.

* I feel like Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost post is a little off this time around. I don’t know that waxing philosophical about how the Allies did terrible things in World War II too is a particularly illuminating point of comparison here, you know? VanDerWerff also tries to shunt the “good vs. evil” debate into the “destiny vs. free will” one, but given who he feels represents each side, that sure is stacking the deck; he then takes the “destiny vs. free will” thing and pins it to a particular line in the first episode of this season in a fashion that strikes me as out-and-out Doc Jensen-y. But hey, if Lost has taught us anything, it’s that everyone has an off week.

* On that note, swing by this week’s Lost comment thread if you haven’t already. The joint is jumpin’!