I graduated university, moved out, went overseas, hit a convention, sold a story, got a part-time job, got fired from a part-time job, and started drinking scotch and black coffee (not together, mind).

Last year seemed like it was marked out by things coming to an end. This one was all about change. “Tumultuous” is the word I keep using. There’s almost nothing in my life right now that’s the same as it was twelve months ago. And for all the things that depressed me and made me feel like crap, it’s been good change. It’s been a good year.

I’m hoping this is part of a pattern. The old stuff comes to an end. Everything changes. And then everything settles into new stuff. So that’s why I’m not making New Year’s Resolutions, beyond the things I’ve been resolved to do since I had the vaguest semblance of self-awareness. Instead, I think 2012 is going to be about finding equilibrium. Finding a good groove and settling into it.

Happy New Year.

Kinda.

I’d like to start using this space a little more than I have been for the last year and a bit. So, please watch this space.

For a quick refresh on this episode, I suggest you check out Lostpedia’s excellent Wiki page.

It was a mistake on the part of Team Darlton to pick up the dramatically compelling threads of the lackluster “Collision” with a Kate episode, because the shine has worn off the apple and the her two-dimensionality is really showing. What started as a strong, independent character with an interesting backstory has devolved into the worst of all television constructs: a soap opera character, who can never decide which boy she really loves and does little else but think about it. At least other episodes had her tromping off through the jungle chasing someone who told her to stay behind, or occasionally shooting bad guys, but here it’s literally just running from Sawyer’s arms to Jack’s arms and back again. The flashbacks were only a fraction more interesting, as they seemed to cover the same old ground as episodes like “Whatever The Case May Be’. Sure, we find out what Kate’s crime was and a bit about her screwed up family and the resulting issues (drink!*), but the net result was just more scenes of a potentially awesome character being not awesome. What happened, Darlton? What happened to this character? And why did it take until season 5 for someone to fix things?

The Hatch stuff wound up being a big letdown, but in hindsight, I can see the psychological hands behind this action, further manipulating and breaking the audience as they do the characters. And the fact that the characters were as let down as the audience says that the writers’ didn’t intend this to be a huge earth-shattering revelation and it simply fell flat: we’re meant to feel let down, dejected and just a little bit faithless. The Hatch is doing it’s dirty work of breaking people down into tiny, useless lumps of humanity; it it any wonder Locke lost his shit at the end of the season? It’s an incredibly ballsy move for a show to put the audience in the mindset of someone like John Locke when the story is currently trying to break Locke’s faith in the great “plan” of the Island. More than a few people lost faith in the great plan of the writers and wound up quitting, like Locke does at the end of the season.

Mind you, we’re a bit better off than Locke and Eko, since immediately after the important instruction to not use the computer for communication, we see Michael doing just that and have to wonder what badness will come of this. I’m wondering now who exactly was on the other end of that IM chat: Walt or the Others, trying to lead Michael into a trap. At this point, I don’t think it matters and in the muddle of season 2, I’m happy to let this one slide off my mental plate.

But for it’s seeming uselessness, I have to give props to Terry O’Quinn and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje for wringing every bit of tension they possibly could from their scenes together. Both characters seems calm and zen-like, but so much comes through in their powerhouse performances. It’s a shame we couldn’t get years of these two verbally sparring. Similarly, everyone involved in the funeral scene deserves some kudos, because that was an absolutely heartbreaking, tearjerking sequence. Even in the brief reaction shots of the castaways, everyone brings their A-game and makes you feel the loss of a Lostie.

A few scenes of brilliant performances don’t excuse the standard fare of season 2, which is nothing and lots of it. It’s by no means the worst episode of Lost, but it’s near the bottom and only a necessary watch if you’re a completist like me.

* The Lost Drinking Game. Mummy/Daddy issues? Drink!

For a quick refresh on this episode, I suggest you check out Lostpedia’s excellent Wiki page.

Ugh… I wish I could say the stable centre of this episode was the brilliant performance of Naveen Andrews as he brings Sayid’s grief to life in a visceral and real sense — because he really does — but I can’t say that because the centre of the episode is Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia, and as was the case with the previous episode, she’s not a strong centre for any story.

It felt that even with everything we know about Ana Lucia, about how she lashes out to cover her fear, didn’t quite cover this over the top scenario of her holding Sayid, Michael, Jin and even the Tailies hostage. And I just don’t think the actress pulled off the performance, didn’t adequately communicate the emotions of her character. Those miraciouly scenes where she was sitting and holding the gun, waiting for something to happen, it looked too much like Rodriguez was gritting her teeth and concentrating hard, saying ‘upset and guilt, upset and guilty, upset and guilty’ over and over again to herself and hoping that she’d be able to act out those emotions.

It didn’t help that in their final scenes, Andrews was acting rings around her. He was the best thing about this episode and it was great to watch Sayid run through this gauntlet of emotion as he reacts to the death of the woman he loves, from a white-hot fury to a slow burning one, and finally that acceptance at the end that they’ve all got the same troubles stemming from the same source. The flashbacks didn’t really do much to soften my opinion of Ana Lucia, though the final reveal that she’d lost her child did a lot more to explain the flat-out cynical and aggressive attitude of the character. It was just more scenes of Rodriguez getting outacted as she tried to slot herself into an episode of The Shield for twenty minutes and didn’t pull it off.

There were a lot of great little moments scattered throughout the episode. We see a number of indicators that the Hatch is starting to weave its psychological magic on Jack, from his pale, gaunt appearance (Rose even comments on it) to the increased paranoia and aggression, demonstrated when he gets worked into a frenzy during his interrogation of Eko and his snap reaction to go after Ana Lucia with guns. And I’m everyone was a bit misty-eyed at the reunions on the beach — I’m not sure who was more heartwarming, Rose and Bernard or Sun and Jin. Of course, they’re all very deliberately contrasted with the reunion of Jack and Ana Lucia, who stand at opposite sides of a very wide shot and mull over what a frakked-up relationship the Losties and the Tailies are gonna have with one another now.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. An episode packed with brilliant moments just wasn’t brilliant because its core — Ana Lucia — was very weak. When I started writing the season 2 posts, I absolutely did not want to just rag on Michelle Rodriguez for twenty-something posts, but it seems I’m doing so anyway because she’s just not bringing the kind of A-game we’re expecting after a season with our regulars. It’s the downside of an absolutely brilliant cast: anyone coming in who isn’t just as brilliant looks piss-poor by comparison. So, ultimately, I think this is one of the more skippable episodes of the season.

Have a listen, and I hope you enjoy.

For a quick refresh on this episode, I suggest you check out Lostpedia’s excellent Wiki page.

The saga of the Tailies is a great “what if?” scenario, a way of holding the mirror up to our Losties (who don’t appear in this episode properly) and showing us what might’ve happened if the circumstances had been far more dire. Many of the important aspects of season 1 are mirrored in this episode: the leader who emerges and the lieutenants who provide a different kind of support; the infiltrator; the DHARMA station; tiny but nevertheless weird occurrences. Unfortunately, telling this story from the beginning with a different set of characters creates a lot of redundancies. There are quite a few times, especially at the beginning of the episode, when we get an infodump that’s nearly identical to what we got in season 1, with talk of black boxes, signal fires and the chances of rescue.

One of the downsides of this mirror that the Tailies provide is that it throws one of the casting inadequacies into sharp relief. Simply put, Michelle Rodriguez is no Matthew Fox. I don’t have a particular hatred of the character or the actress, but it was clear in this episode that she really didn’t have the same chops. Being the leader of the Tailies, she winds up having to give a lot of the same speeches that Jack did in season 1, but they never had as much conviction or emotion. When Jack gives a speech, it’s moving; when Ana Lucia does it, it’s kind of annoying. It was much easier to get into the character when she was being a brutal, pragmatic leader, partially because I think Rodruigez plays that kind of role better and partially because this episode succeeded more when it veered off from what the Losties did in the similar situations.

Ultimately, I think the Others were the stars of this episode. From the outset, they were a much more dangerous and present force than they’ve ever been in the show to date. Right off the bat, they’re snatching people and striking fear into the hearts of the Tailies — can you blame them for getting so paranoid and violent? And every scene with Goodwin just crackles, especially with hindsight once his attempts to manipulate the group become obvious. Easily the best scene of the episode is when he and Ana Lucia sit on the top of that hill and talk. The audience knows he’s a bad guy, and the directing reflects this, as his every move is subject to a lingering camera shot and musical cue, like he’s going to strike any moment — especially when all the stuff about the knife comes up. And then Ana Lucia reveals what she knows, and the scene takes on a whole different energy. We learn more about the Others in these few minutes than we had in the entire series to date, about the Lists and about the people they snatch. The fight was short and brutal, exactly what it should’ve been since we already knew how it would turn out.

And there were many nice mythology touches that gave me a little shiver of excitement, both on the first watch and in hindsight. That knife, the first hint that the US Army had previously been to the Island. The glass eye, which screams “Mikhail” a full season before his introduction. We see Eko look in the bible, an interesting detail that becomes important later. We find out Bernard was the one who talked to Boone on the radio. All these cool little details that explain or foreshadow, and I enjoyed seeing them.

This episode had problems — redundancies in its storytelling and a weak lead — but so many great moments, from the rest of the characters and the cool mythology stuff, that would’ve made this episode one worth checking out if it weren’t already the (arguable) necessary saga of the Tailies. A great ep — not brilliant, but great.

For a quick refresh on this episode, I suggest you check out Lostpedia’s excellent Wiki page.

The best parts of the episode were, of course, the stuff with the Tailies. The Island continues to be a scarier place than ever, though Ana Lucia’s little speech wasn’t nearly as big a contributor to that feeling as the writers probably intended. Instead, it continued to come from the brilliant silent reactions of the cast, combined with increasingly eery direction that saw us continually placed at the wrong angle to see anything but our characters, putting the audience in the same claustrophobic, paranoid space as the characters. And it all gets ratcheted up another notch when Cindy the Stewardess (and as far as I know, one of only three genuine Australians cast on the show) gets snatched by the Others in the middle of a scene. It’s genuinely terrifying, and I almost resent how the episode left that storyline and didn’t come back to it until the last few seconds of the episode. I say “almost”, because the sudden shift in tone back to Shannon’s more dramatic story brilliantly sets us up for the shock finale.

The Shannon and Sayid plotline was far from thrilling and only borderline entertaining. Despite how interesting the character of Shannon is (and the flashbacks did a lot to deepen her), the majority of her Island screentime was spent on this quest to go looking for Walt in the jungle, stubbornly insisting that she’s not crazy, and it just wasn’t particularly interesting. Despite the fact that Walt showing up unexpectedly and talking backwards is more than a little bit mind-blowing, it seemed obvious from the get-go that this was a supernatural apparition, and even if Shannon had no cause to expect anything like that, I did. I knew that this wasn’t the real Walt, and that a search through the jungles would wind up being pointless, and yet I had to watch this storyline unfold anyway. It was annoying. That said, I did enjoy the splashes of character stuff that were threaded through the Island storyline. Shannon’s line that Walt was out there and “all alone” was incredibly telling, especially in light of what we see in the flashbacks, and it was nice (and more than a little heartbreaking) to see her and Sayid’s final scene in the rainy jungle. And then, of course, there’s that final scene. It’s still shocking, and chilling, and leaves me in fear for Ana Lucia’s life. It continued Lost‘s trend for being absolutely brutal when it came to death, though more on character deaths in Lost when I get to “Collision”.

The flashbacks added some nice depth to Shannon. After seeing how the end, I can really understand why she’d take to conning money out of her family, and I can understand why she’d want to go galavanting off into the jungle to find a possibly-imaginary child just because he’s all alone. I’ve never thought ill of Maggie Grace’s performance, and as you’d expect in a Shannon-centric episode, she’s on fine form. And it was cool to see Boone again (although that haircut was ridiculous). And Shannon’s stepmother is another addition to the long list of parents who drive their kids batty enough to get them stuck on Evil!Fantasy Island. …you know, I’d been about to say something along the lines of ‘these flashbacks weren’t of much value’, but you know what? All these things is pretty solid and made watching the flashbacks wholly worthwhile.

This is definitely one of the weaker episodes of season 2, and were it not for the big conclusion, I’d probably declare it completely skippable. As it is, its main value lies in the deepening of Shannon, so I’d only see big fans of that character (and I was falling off that bandwagon by that point) getting a lot of enjoyment out of this episode.

For a refresh on this episode, I suggest you check out Lostpedia’s excellent Wiki page.

It’s something I’ve been bringing up repeatedly these last few reviews, but despite the fact that they took away screentime from the characters we already knew and (mostly) loved, the Talies were a brilliant tool for making us scared of the Island again, and this time without the CGI and special effects of the Monster. It was done without much of anything, really, just a few extras with dirty feet and the fantastic performances of the actors. There were looks of complete abject terror on all the Tailies’ faces from the moment they stepped out of the Arrow and into the jungle, and I loved seeing the ways in which that fear manifested itself. Ana Lucia is possibly one of the most frightened characters ever to appear on the show, because the way I saw it, every time she talked tough, got violent and generally acted unnecessarily hardass towards the other characters, that was her way of coping with the fear, by trying to act like she wasn’t’ scared and overcompensating; the louder, tougher and meaner she acted, the more frightened she was. We see later in the season that Eko is generally a very zen person, but throughout “…and Found”, he was continually tense (and intense), coiled like the worlds most dangerous slinky, always ready to react. Similarly, Libby’s fear reaction is one we only pick up on in hindsight, as she’s a very warm, friendly person, but every time we’ve seen her in season 2 so far she’s looked ready to curl up in the foetal position and cry her eyes out.

We also a couple of creepy-as-all-frak scenes, the first one being the discovery of Goodwin’s body and Eko’s one-word confirmation of “Others” (though as usual with Lost, context is everything). That brief glimpse of his face just screamed “pain!”, not to mention the manner of his death, being impaled on a giant wooden spike. Then there was the big one, our first post-”Exodus” glimpse of the Others as they walk through the jungle barely making a friggin’ sound, the last one carrying a goddamn teddy bear. The fact that  we saw Jin and Eko’s faces more than we saw the Others themselves really made the scene work though, as their wide-eyed expressions and that almost comical way that they looked from extreme left to extreme right and then back again all conveyed a sense of awe and terror. That final shot before the act break, where the two look at each other with expressions of “HOLY SHIT WTF?!?” on their faces, really say it all.

It’s always a pleasure when Sun and Jin are the focus of an episode, because as I’ve said previously, they’re both phenomenal actors and everything they do is just utter win. Watching Yunjin Kim slowly break down over the course of the episode was absolutely heartbreaking — and the mechanism that allowed for it was fantastic too. I’ve been in situations where I’ve latched onto an object as a proxy for a person or something else I thought was important, and my heart really went out to Sun as she scrambled around the beach camp looking for her wedding ring, grieving over its loss in a way that she couldn’t grieve over the loss of her husband. Without that fantastic performance to ground that subplot, the hurricane of Aesops that came from Jack, Locke and Kate all would’ve seemed cheesy, but instead they worked and felt like the advice and kind words that one would get from friends. Daniel Dae Kim continues to be completely awesome in “Chewie” mode, the guy who can’t communicate in words. His every Korean word, hand gesture, steely gaze and iota of body language spoke volumes about his intensity as a person and his loyalty to Michael. Pairing him with the uber-empathetic Eko was a brilliant choice on the writers’ part, as the quiet intensity of the two characters make them ideally suited to scenes together.

The flashbacks were probably the weakest part of this episode, which is saying something, because they were incredibly good. It was cool to see the pair in their pre-courting days, there was something very childish about them — not immature in the bad sense, just not having woken up to the realities of the world and how they stack up against dreams and desires. There was the nice running thread of Sun and Jin both looking for something in their lives (as is the theme of every flashback, really): Sun wants a companion, and as much as she gets annoyed at her mother’s efforts, she puts in just as much effort and she’s really willing to go all-in with Jae Lee; Jin wants respect, and thinks that the way to earn it is to be the lapdog of the rich and powerful and hope they notice. The end of this particular chapter in their lives is not so much their meeting but their deciding that they’re not gonna find what they’re looking for in the current situation: Sun walks out of Jae Lee, and Jin walks out on his job. And even though the scene of their meeting is just a few seconds, we can absolutely see the spark between them, and despite the rocky road of marriage presented in “House of the Rising Sun” and “…in Translation”, it’s lovely to see on the Island that they’re both found what they were looking for.

It’s a Sun and Jin episode. So it’s awesome. You know it’s going to be awesome, and in case my gushing hadn’t made it abundantly clear already, it’s one I think that people absolutely can’t miss.

Milk Carton TV has had two new episode: “And Now For Something Completely Different”, a quick Randomcast to fill in on a week in which our brilliant Editor in Chief was swamped and couldn’t get the regular episode ready; and “Rock, Paper, Scissors — Feedback!”, where the crew read out feedback and get swamped in a tonne of tangents.

Critical Myth also has a new episode, called “The 2010 Summer Season Begins!”, in which John, Edmund and Gary discuss the new episodes of Warehouse 13, Eureka and Rescue Me.

Hope you check these out and enjoy them!