Months ago, the press coverage of the final season trumpeted a bloodbath episode in the approach to the season finale.  Hard to imagine this wasn’t it.  It’s not that LOST has no history of wiping out regulars (Boone [...]]]> As there’s no way to talk about this episode without spoilers, the whole post is behind the fold.

Months ago, the press coverage of the final season trumpeted a bloodbath episode in the approach to the season finale.  Hard to imagine this wasn’t it.  It’s not that LOST has no history of wiping out regulars (Boone and his sister, Eko, Libby and Ana Lucia, Michael, Charlie, Locke), but it’s never done so in bulk like this.  Three of the original survivors from episode 1 were killed in a space of 2-3 minutes, plus (maybe) Lapidus.

But for the most part, I found their deaths somewhat unaffecting, and in the hours since watching, I’ve been asking myself why.  I think the answer can be found in Quentin Tarentino’s brilliant film Pulp Fiction (no, really).  And if you’re the last living person who has yet to see Pulp Fiction, you should definitely stop reading now.

If you know me at all, you know that I think Pulp Fiction is one of the great movies of all time, and arguably the best of the last quarter century.  Possibly the most cunning aspect of Pulp Fiction is the sequencing of the tales.  If the film were told in time sequence, it would open with the visit by Vincent and Jules to the wannabe drug dealer, followed by the accidental Marvin shooting and the cleanup by the Wolf.  Then Butch would meet Marcellus about throwing the fight (and have his first unfortunate interaction with Vincent), and Vincent and Jules would go to the diner where they’d meet Honey Bunny and husband and Jules would decide to be the shepherd.  Later that day, Butch would throw the fight and Vincent would have his dinner with Mia.  Overnight, Butch and Marcellus would have the incident with Zed, and Vincent would bring the overdosing Mia to his heroin dealer for the memorable adrenalin shot.  Finally, early the next day, Butch would return home for the Christoper Walken watch and shoot Vincent, before leaving on Zed’s motorcycle with his girl.

Sure, the movie could have been told that way.  But the Vincent/Mia “date” would not fit well with the creepy basement “Bring in the gimp!” scene.  Jules’ defining moment would happen much too soon.  And most importantly, Vincent’s sudden demise would be immensely unsatisfying.  Vincent would have appeared in nearly every scene until Butch’s appearance on the second day, and then would die on the john right before the end, without a word of dialogue.

Instead, Tarantino saves the diner scene for the end, and miraculously, we get more time with Vincent.  We enter the scene knowing that Vincent’s end is imminent, but not knowing when it will occur, or more importantly, why Jules is not with him.  Jules’ decision to leave the service of Marcellus is doubly meaningful, because we know that Vincent will be alone at Butch’s apartment when he’s shot.  Thus, his hopeful and life-altering change proves bittersweet, because we already know how it will turn out for Vincent.

So – back to LOST.  Last night, we lost three or four key characters in the space of a few tense underwater seconds.  Sayid bolted away from the camera with the bomb to be annihilated offscreen.  Jin and Sun had a powerful Jack and Rose moment as the submarine sank.  I guess Lapidus got mashed by a door – it wasn’t all that clear.

But, as in Pulp Fiction, we’ll see these characters again, as we have every major character who has died on or off the island (with the exception of Eko, who has permanently disappeared due apparently to his unwillingness to sign on for any new episodes).  In fact, given that Sayid, Sun, and Jin play central roles in the flash-sideways sequence that is ongoing, we’ll probably see them next week.  Thus, their deaths, while sad, seem temporary.  No less noble — Sayid sacrificing himself to save the others, Jin refusing to leave his trapped wife to drown — but more ephemeral.

Of course, as in real life, the loss that surviving mourners feel is often more affecting, more tragic, than the deaths themselves.  And watching Hurley, Kate, and Jack sob at the loss of their friends was every bit as heart-wrenching as it should have been.  Lest there be any doubt, these recent episodes show brilliant storytellers at the absolute peak of their abilities.  The end of this six-season journey looks like it’s going to be every bit as good as we could have hoped.

Updates on TV stuff later (or tomorrow).

Last year’s Beatles nights (yup, two consecutive weeks last season – who thought that was a good idea?) were debacles, as the contestants made poor song choices and looked terribly [...]]]> In a surprise, the Top 9 put together the best set of performances of the season, climbing from the depths to, at the very least, mediocrity.

Last year’s Beatles nights (yup, two consecutive weeks last season – who thought that was a good idea?) were debacles, as the contestants made poor song choices and looked terribly uncomfortable through most of the performances.  This year, most of the song choices were at least defensible, and eight of the nine performances were at least decent.

Who was the ninth you ask?  Sad to say, Lee DeWyze.  He’s been a critical darling all year, though I’ve never been a fan.  Over the past couple of weeks, I started to warm to him, but his performance of “Hey Jude” was just unequivocally bad.  Off key the entire song, Lee actually turned away from the microphone at one point in the middle of singing to make sure he was playing the right chord.  Really?  There’s like two chords in that song.  Then the guy with the bagpipes came marching down the stairs.  Disaster with a capital “Duh.”  Note to Idol contestants: sing alongs with the crowd in a 90-second performance will never work.

I thought three performances clearly outshone the others.  Crystal, on a night where she struggled with her voice, had her most likeable performance.  I still don’t think I can be classified as a fan, but her slinky version of “Come Together” (and no, I never thought I would use the word “slinky” in describing her this season either) had a great groove and was massively entertaining.  The didgeridoo I just don’t get, but whatever.  Note to Ricky Minor:  if you can’t find someone with more than three days experience to play an instrument, probably best not to put him on stage next to the singer.

Siobhan was brilliant last night, and Kara’s comments had me scratching my head.  Let’s recap:  last week, all the judges tell Siobhan she needs to dial it back, not scream, and sing really well.  She sings a quiet, contemplative version of “Across the Universe” and sings it perfectly, with control and emotion.  Then Kara says she doesn’t “get it” because Siobhan didn’t scream.  Como say what?  Note to the judges:  Sometime today, you are going to go back and listen to Siobhan’s performance again and the light bulb will come on.  You don’t always have to show off to sing great — it’s often harder to sound terrific when doing something more understated.  There is not another singer in this competition who could have succeeded the way Siobhan did last night.  Not one.

But the best performance of the night, and maybe the season, was Casey’s version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.”  I got a sense that someone was going to sing a solo Lennon or McCartney song when the opening sequence described the solo success of each post-Beatles.  Then I forgot about it until Casey chose this criminally underrated Lennon tune.  This performance had it all:  terrific guitar playing, big vocal range, a performer in total control.  And look, no bagpipes or didgeridoo.  Note to the frontrunners:  Casey is the overlooked contender; he may not be the best every week (although he was this week), but he’s never among the worst.

It’s been pretty obvious for weeks that there is a clear top 5, and that the others have their work cut out for them if they want to crash the party.  Crystal, Siobhan, Lee, Casey, and Big Mike are going to be battling four weeks from now unless something shocking happens.  Aaron and Katie are fine karaoke singers, but completely uninteresting.  Andrew is interesting but not all that good.  Tim is Sanjaya.

In closing, I have to give a shout out to Aaron who chose “The Long and Winding Road,” just as I suggested yesterday he should.  What’s that you say?  He wasn’t very good?  Well, that’s on him — he should have sung it better.

Predictions for tonight’s bottom three:  Andrew, Aaron, Tim

Going home:  Andrew.

Crystal – In My Life

Casey – Revolution 1

Siobhan – Got to Get You Into My Life

Lee – Drive [...]]]> The contestants have an embarrassment of riches to choose from tonight, and will undoubtedly screw it up just like they did last year.  But if I were coaching the final nine, these are the songs I would pick:

Crystal – In My Life

Casey – Revolution 1

Siobhan – Got to Get You Into My Life

Lee – Drive My Car

Andrew – Here, There and Everywhere

Big Mike – Golden Slumbers

Aaron – The Long and Winding Road

Katie – Yesterday

Tim – Fool On The Hill

My guess is that none of these will actually be chosen by the person I’ve indicated.  Nevertheless, let’s hope someone, anyone, is good tonight.

Who knew Richard Alpert was such a romantic?  Maybe we should have guessed with those eyelashes.  Turns out Richard’s story is a 140 year tale of love and loss, suddenly vaulting him to #1 on the “Tragic Island Denizen” list.

I want to focus [...]]]> Last night featured the long-awaited Richard Alpert backstory.  Spoiler-y goodness behind the fold:

Who knew Richard Alpert was such a romantic?  Maybe we should have guessed with those eyelashes.  Turns out Richard’s story is a 140 year tale of love and loss, suddenly vaulting him to #1 on the “Tragic Island Denizen” list.

I want to focus on one specific thing from last night’s episode though, the first conversation between Richard and Jacob.  Jacob wants Richard to be his right-hand man, and asks Richard what he wants.  Richard asks to be with his wife or to be saved from hell, and Jacob replies to both requests that he “can’t do that.”  Finally, Richard says he wants to live forever so he won’t go to hell, to which Jacob replies, “That I can do.”

So who is Jacob really?  Is he god/God?  I think that, despite his claimed limitations, he might well be.  He says that he doesn’t act directly so that the people he brings to the island must exercise free will.  This could explain why he “can’t” reunite Richard with his wife — she’s dead and he’s alive, and Jacob is not going to kill Richard.  As for being saved from hell, I think there’s another interpretation:  Jacob literally can’t save Richard from hell, because he’s not going there anyway.  Jacob’s bargain with Richard and his refusal to “save” him may simply be Jacob’s way of allowing Richard to live long enough to realize that he’s a good man.

On the other hand, Jacob could just be a proxy for god, a servant of good.  There are definite Jesus parallels: his sacrifice in allowing himself to be killed by Ben Linus (John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”); his placement on the island as the “cork” in the wine bottle holding in evil.

It’s been a recurring theme for the writers this year to make reference to the theories of Lost fans.  Last night’s episode was no exception, digging out the biggest early theory of all, that the survivors are actually dead and living in hell or purgatory.  Hearing Richard say it out loud was a reminder of all of the promise that this show had back in Season 1 (and also a reminder that Cuse and Lindelof swore in interviews that the characters were NOT dead).  We weren’t intended to believe Richard, but instead were invited, as we have been so many times this final season, to remember seasons past.

I thought this was a brilliant episode, topping even the massively entertaining Sawyer ep from last week.  Also, that it was incredibly brave to conduct more than half of one of the show’s most important episodes in Spanish with subtitles.  Lost keeps raising the bar, and I’m growing more and more optimistic that the ending will be satisfying.

What did you think of last night’s episode?  Like the spiritual component?  Or do you think Lost is disappearing down the same hole as Battlestar Galactica?

A sign of what [...]]]> This week’s Idol featured one of those moments, one of those unforgettable performances that live in Idol history.  Sadly for Paige Miles, it was because the performance was so breathtakingly bad, so spectacularly dreadful, that it will be the limbo stick under which Idol contestants fail to crawl for years to come.

A sign of what was to come was offered by Ryan, who suggested that “some Phil Collins” was due after the break.  I turned to my wife and said, “Please don’t let it be Against All Odds again.”  Naturally, it was, but still, we had no idea of the horrors to come.  I struggled for a comparison, and here’s the best I could come up with.  When our cat was young, he hated the travel cage.  My wife used to grab him in a pillow case and carry him to the vet in a cab so that she wouldn’t have to put him in the cage.  Whenever she’d grab him with that pillow case, he’d make this terrible and sad howling noise that caused people for miles around to gnash their teeth and weep.  This was like that, only worse.

The judges (somewhat surprisingly considering their relative inability this season to unanimously recognize bad singing) pounced quickly, with even Ellen getting in on the fun, falling back on the Paula special, “You look beautiful.”  The kiss of death indeed.  The most amusing thing about the performance is that it seemed to suck all of the tension out of the rest of the night.  All of the contestants seemed to know that they could suck — a lot — and would still be fine as long as they didn’t drop F-bombs on stage or swallow their tongue.

And suck they did.  This was what I expected last week when the contestants were required to choose Stones tunes.  This week, with 100 years of #1 hits to choose from, they produced a string of lousy performances of songs we’ve heard over and over again in previous seasons.

First, the good from a decidedly bad lot.  Siobhan trotted out Stevie Wonder again, following up her Hollywood week performance of “Living For the City” with “Superstitious.”  Simon’s right – she needs to bag the hollering for a couple weeks, but otherwise this performance was so much better than the others that it was like seeing Joss Stone at her high school talent show.  In a shocker, Crystal played Janis Joplin!  No, really!  Her performance of “Me and Bobby McGee” was just fine (and my wife, who digs the hippy tunes, loved it), but I’m just so bored with her.  She needs to do something different.  But man, she was rocking the new teeth.

Big Mike was also just fine with a safe rendition of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.”  Nothing exciting here, and a 60’s Motown number was what I would have predicted he’d go to, but as with Crystal, he can coast for right now.  Lee was done no favors by getting the first slot in front of “The Disaster That Was Paige,” but was also okay with his performance of “The Letter.”  I’m guessing this was his tribute to Alex Chilton, who died last week and performed that song with the Box Tops, but if it was, I think he should have said so.  The performance was notable because — well, no, it wasn’t really notable at all.  But it wasn’t bad, and on this night, that was good.  Casey was fine tonight too, doing a bar singer rendition of “The Power of Love” (Huey Lewis, not Peter Cetera).  Casey seems to dig him some 80s cheese-pop:  he also sang Bryan Adams earlier this year.  I like it anyway, though, because he seems like the least ironic guy in the world.  He can pull off these tunes because he’s not a navel-gazing whiner listening to Conor Oberst tunes on loop on his iPod.

The best that can be said for the rest is that they weren’t Paige.  Tim Urban did a laughable rendition of Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”  If he was cleverly pandering to his base (the gay male vote), this was a brilliant song choice.  If he was just a clueless dope, this was terrible.  I thought he was going to stop in the middle to entreat the diners in the audience to “try the veal.”  As with Paige, I heard Ryan say that Aaron was going to sing Aerosmith, and immediately knew it was that cheesy song from “Armageddon.”  He wasn’t awful, but he sure as hell wasn’t good, despite Randy’s standard boy crush.  I loved the Ryan line, “If you want to vote for David Archuleta….”

Andrew just keeps slipping.  He has the right voice for Marvin Gaye, but had a god-awful arrangement of “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and sang it like a stalker.  I think he’s done very soon.  Katie Stephens finally pulled out a song written after she was born, singing Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”  I must admit that I did 90 seconds of web surfing during this performance and don’t really remember it.  Finally, Didi chose Carly Simon, which should have been in her wheelhouse, but then did a weird, cabaret version that looked like she was auditioning for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  Not good, but again, after Paige, who’s worried?

Predictions for bottom three:  Paige (duh), Tim (again), and Andrew.  Bye Paige.

What did you think?

Does “The Incident” refer to the electromagnetic pocket being breached, or the hydrogen bomb being detonated?  Or both?

This goes deep into an issue I’ve been [...]]]> As promised, here is a new set of intriguing questions from the previous list that remain unanswered going into the much anticipated Richard Alpert episode (more spoilers abound after the jump):

Does “The Incident” refer to the electromagnetic pocket being breached, or the hydrogen bomb being detonated?  Or both?

This goes deep into an issue I’ve been contemplating.  Are we supposed to assume that the two storylines this year are parallel timelines, created by some split in the past?  If so, was that split cause by one of these scenarios?

Charles Widmore knew of Paik Industries and even mentioned that he played golf regularly with Sun’s father.  Are these two powerful men merely business associates, or do they share a deeper connection (such as an interest in the island, perhaps)?

It’s become fairly clear that the flash-sideways stories are beginning to interconnect in significant ways.  In the 815 crash timeline, Keamey worked for Widmore, and in the sideways timeline, Keamey had Jin locked in the back of the kitchen where Sayid killed him.  That points toward a Jin/Widmore relationship of some kind.

What did Jacob do to Richard to cause him to stop aging?

I think we might get an answer to this and other Richard Alpert questions tomorrow.  The answer may start to provide some insight into Jacob’s identity and the nature of his (and the Man in Black’s) power.

In some ways, these questions pale in comparison to new questions introduced this season (which, in some ways, makes me wonder how many of the old questions will go unanswered simply because we don’t care as much about them as new questions).  For instance, I’d add the following key questions:

Has Sayid finally given in to the dark side?

Who, if anyone, is going to replace Jacob?

Does Widmore’s appearance in the sub mean that now anyone can find the island?

When the Man in Black says he wants to get off the island, where/when does he want to go?

Will the timelines converge, or will one or the other be obliterated?  Or neither?

What are your big questions as we move toward the series finale?