The fifth season finale of Lost aired in the US last night, but it's still hanging in the air for us UKers. To a lesser extent, so did the finale of America's Next Top Model (go Allison and/or Aminat!!!). Therefore I'm hiding from the Internets in order to avoid spoilers, which I've managed to stumble upon for the past two years running. Easier said than done, as Digital Crack is unavoidable in our home, even with a computer that breaks down more often than a car in a horror movie. (Tip for readers: never buy Dell!)
So I stepped out this morning to buy broccoli (The Fart-Inducing Green Brain of the vegetable world), and browse in shops, rather than run the risk of absent-mindedly opening Twitter and seeing something spoilery. Browsing in shops is fun when you have money. When you don't? Not so much. Anyway, to pass the time I took bad pictures of things that caught my eye, using the iPhone. And now I'm sticking them on the Internet to distract myself from the excitement about the finale of ZOMGLOST, which I'm hoping will be ten times better than the finale of Fringe and twelve times better than the finale of Dollhouse.
How in the hell did this become so cheap so quickly? Hasn't it only been out for about six months, and it's being sold for tiny pounds? I thought this would be much more successful. Everybody likes horror games based loosely on almost-competent Paul W.S. Anderson films, right?
Maybe it would have been more successful if it came with an in-game option to throw Sean Pertwee out of an airlock. Of course I'm being terribly glib. I know this was partially written by Warren "Evil" Ellis, and so has the mark of excellence branded on it. More than anything else I saw today, this almost convinced me to spend money on something that wasn't essential, like bills, or medicine for me and my cat, or Allman Brothers Band downloads for Rock Band, or broccoli.
Usually when I browse in game shops, the prices never seem to come down. Today? It seemed like the recession finally convinced shops to drop game prices, which is one good thing about the crunch, I guess. There were bargains everywhere, and not just in the Pre-Owned racks. This caught my eye, however.
Yet another Red Storm game, only this time one that is based on a movie adaptation of a Jack Ryan novel instead of being directly developed by Tom Clancy and his team of macho pro-army coders. Clancy is a total gaming whore (in a good way), developing dozens of average-to-great games over the years. Something tells me that a first-person shooter based on a very dull movie by an otherwise intriguing director (Phil Alden Robinson, improbably enough) is not going to be listed up there with Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six. It did make me wonder if there was scope to develop games based on other Phil Alden Robinson movies:
Sneakers - Give me the controller, right now, or I will shoot you, right now! Guide your team of hackers, security experts, and piano teachers through a series of heavily guarded facilities in search of gadgets and doodads that do very exciting things to computers. Levels include: avoid a trace on a phonecall for one whole minute! Solve multiple anagrams using Scrabble tiles! Drive a van across town with no visual aids whatsoever (the first entirely pitch black game level ever devised)! Try to convince Sidney Poitier to explain just why he was thrown out of the CIA! Have long chat with Sir Ben Kingsley and his stylish ponytail! Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario inside the Setec Astronomy moonbase.
All Of Me - Get out of my mind, Lily Tomlin! Guide Steve Martin through LA while the controls on your joypad are randomised to mimic the disruptive influence of body-sharing crank Tomlin! Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario inside Steve Martin's brain.
Field of Dreams - You've built it, but will they come? A baseball simulation featuring many famous disgraced players of yesteryear. Featuring voicework from Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Billy Crystal, Ray Liotta, Amy Madigan, Jimmy Smits, Patti LuPone, and Timothy Busfield, and expanding on the franchise campaigns of Football Manager and the Madden series, you are given the task of earning enough money to keep a baseball stadium and a farm going over several years. Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario where Costner has to shoot the tears caused by the heartwarming final shot of a million hippies visiting the farm.
I can say, with full confidence, that those games would be better than this.
Fuck you for allowing this to happen, Nintendo. (ETA: I just noticed the title of the game isn't even grammatical. GAH RAGE!)
It wasn't all browsing for games. Zack Snyder's movie adaptation of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen split nerd opinion down the middle, often within the same nerd. I liked some of it, but was utterly unmoved by it in the long run. A shame, as Snyder was obviously expended a lot of effort to recreate the shell of it, though he didn't seem to have figured out what was supposed to go inside, i.e. a point to the whole thing other than slavish imitation. Even if you really hated the movie, however, you could console yourself with the thought that the original book was still there, and remained unsullied by the film. Until now.
I don't know if that t-shirt design is really drawn by Dave Gibbons, but the thought that his wonderful character designs are being slowly replaced in the popular mind by the faces of these actors upsets me greatly. Far more than is deserved, I'm sure, but still, it's a dick move by DC and Warners. If Gibbons did draw it, I hope he got paid well.
Speaking of movie adaptations, here's something for every miserable emo teenager in your family; yet more Twilight merch!
Here is an exclusive excerpt from the book, just to give you a taste of what's inside:
Monday 3rd. Just got back to my trailer after a hard day half-assing it. Much harder than I thought it would be. The director of photography kept making things harder by putting the camera in some really interesting places, but that's missing the point. Teenagers see the world as an ugly place, and so we have to make sure that the movie is as ugly as possible. If I could switch off the lights altogether, that would be perfect, but no one will let me even though I'm the fucking director. Even so I've managed to drain the film of as much colour as possible. The rest can be removed in post. Director of photography is unhappy about this, but I'm in charge, dammit!
Tuesday 4th. My teenage stars were wonderful today. Almost none of the dialogue was audible, with Kristin doing a great job of turning all of Melissa Rosenberg's words into exasperated noises and facial twitches. Robert was even better. There was one shot where his eyes bugged out of his head for about two minutes straight! I think it was acting, though he might have been expressing horror at Stephenie turning up on set to stalk him again. She's getting really good at avoiding security.
Wednesday 5th. Big effects sequence to be filmed today! I'll let someone else handle that.
Thursday 6th. Robert keeps giving interviews about how stupid Twilight is, and how much he resents being in the film. If I wasn't so entranced by his beautiful hair and unnecessarily complicated face, I'd fire his ass. Kristin is much easier to work with, though it's getting harder and harder to keep her awake during takes. Oh, the glamourous life of a film director!
I have a terrible feeling there will be some poor emo girl who will stumble across this blog and be very very upset. It will look something like this picture I spotted on the way home.
Don't cry, little emo girl! I'm sure there will be another Paramore album coming out soon.
And now, LOST FINALE!!! You'd better rock my world, TV show.
This week's big scientifical revelation in Fringe, that some ill-defined bad guys are using a mode of tech-lepathy called The Ghost Network, sounds awfully like something Warren Ellis would cook up, right down to the cyber-hip name. It sounds so much like one of his ideas that it gave me deja vu that persists days later. Has Ellis come up with this concept before? Did they rip him off? He's so prolific that can't keep track of every mad thing he has come up with, so until someone sets me right, I'm going to fret about it.
Actual Plagiarism of the Week:
Tim Kring has been eager to stress that he doesn't read comics, thus making any similarities between the show and anything in any comic ever a total coincidence. So does this mean he's now going to say in interviews that he's never seen Cronenberg's The Fly?
Our jaws dropped at the shockingly obvious plagiarism of Suresh's transformation into a wall-climbing superhuman shag-beast whose body is turning into something slimy and unpleasant (much like his original personality). It was just like the movie, even down to the shots of him staring into a mirror in horror, and scaling the walls of his loft before ravishing the nearest hott woman.
Still, even though this means, as Canyon pointed out, we've had to put up with way too many shots of Suresh coated in lard, it does mean we'll get to see him pontificate on insect politics before having his head blown off by a sobbing Maya. I'll get the popcorn ready for that turn of events.
Self-Plagiarism of the Week:
Announcing the season arc for Heroes with a flourish of impressive special effects, we were unfortunately treated to some not ao impressive ideas. Just like the first season, Hiro travels into the future and sees a city (this time Tokyo) destroyed by an enormous explosion.
I mean, this is a joke, right? Or there's more to it. There has to be. Maybe it's a bomb that has the Shanti virus in it, just to rip off the second season as well.
Fashion Faux-Pas of the Week:
Outside the Heroesverse it was either the new, relaxed Daniel Meade, who is only a backwards baseball cap away from total Durst-ocity...
...or Michael Le Traceur and his military beret that looks way too much like a moob stuck to his scalp.
Inside the Heroesverse it was either the futuristic angry garb of Peter "Greaser" Petrelli...
...or Maya Goopez who, as a Hispanic woman, is obviously required by TV law to dress like Hilda Suarez from Ugly Betty.
The costume department couldn't think of any other way to dress her? I guess part of it was so that BrundleSuresh could yank her clothes off and have his way with her at a moment's notice, but otherwise, it's unimaginative and a bit insulting.
Bitchface of the Week:
Robin Tunney spent most of the running time of The Mentalist rolling her eyes and looking really hacked off.
Whereas House's antics exasperate those around him, they still respect him and his intelligence. The cops that work with Patrick Jane, aka The Mentalist, seem to just hate him, and barely even appreciate his Amazing Powers of the Brain. It's enough of a difference to make the formula work without seeming to be more of the same.
Mystery of the Week:
That subtitle makes it seem like I'm really fascinated by the big mystery in Fringe, i.e. who or what is the CEO of Massive Dynamics, what is his connection to Dr. Walter Bishop, and should the company's name be spoken a la Alan Partridge, with the emphasis heavily on the MASSive? To be honest, I'm only mildly intrigued by this (and what The Pattern is), especially when compared to the WTFness of Lost's pilot, with its many fascinating mysteries. However, the Fringe questions are definitely interesting enough to keep me tuning in, and that's before we get to Dr. Walter Bishop and the soothing voice of Anna "Vanatron" Torv. So, here are my guesses for who William Bell, CEO of MASSive Dynamics, is.
The clone of Dr. Walter Bishop (this is a popular theory on the internets).
The male clone of Olivia Dunham.
A miniaturised man operating Nina Sharp's arm from a little operating booth within said arm, as a homage to box office titan Meet Dave.
The Fringe universe itself (with the various characters representing different aspects of his personality).
A steam-powered clockwork robot constructed by Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Babbage, and Michael Faraday.
A swarm of black nanobots that can be repelled by a sonic fence.
Albert Einstein after drinking from the Fountain of Youth.
A heckuva guy!!!
A cloud of living thoughts in a jar, made crazy in isolation and now plotting revenge.
The secret child of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, conceived at the behest of a cabal of Cthulhu-worshippers, and fated to bring about the return of the Elder Gods, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
An unholy genetic hybrid of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Rupert Murdoch, Masaru Ibuka, and Andy Dick.
Keyser Soze.
I demand prizes if any of these is right.
Passive Aggressive Jerk of the Week:
Upon being confronted by his annoying mother about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Greaser Petrelli snaps, "Sorry mom, I'm too busy saving the world right now."
We were hoping he would follow that up by saying, "Saving it with string, mom. String!"
Unedifying Sight of the Week:
Paula Garces, who spent a period on The Shield being unbearably snotty and unprofessional to everyone else working at The Barn while being groomed by Dutch Wagenbach in a particularly depressing subplot, has taken a break from appearing in televisual excellence to be treated like a big sexpot on Knight Rider. Seeing her disembark from a car with gullwing doors from a seat that is way too low was utterly depressing. It's not her fault, obviously, but did no one realise that showing a hott spy struggling to get out of a car had the opposite effect of that intended, i.e. to get the teenage boys at home all excited?
The series of pictures above range across about five minutes of screentime. (This is a lie.) If you could see it in motion you'd understand why it's so awful. Poor Paula Garces, forced to dress like someone from an Austin Powers movie.
Still, at least she inspired Jerell when coming up with a pop-style outfit for the odious and bratty Kenley on this week's Project Runway.
Lose, you whiny brat, LOSE!
Career Move of the Week:
An end to our pain...
Run, Stephen Tobolowsky! Run for the hills! And if they want you back for a flashback or dream sequence, just say no.
Gupta of the Week:
Zoe, the button-pusher in Knight Rider, is so ill-conceived, mean, and relentlessly smug, that it shows up the entire awful show for the mistake that it is. There is no charm here, no humour, no excuse. Lowlights include:
Reacting to the imminent fiery death of Michael Le Traceur and Sarah Blandhott by sleazily delivering the line, "This just got interesting."
Reacting to the lucky escape everyone gets from being killed by a napalm-coated morphing supercar crashing into a closed door by saying, "That was awesome." She trots out another awesome when her colleague, Billy, "comically" passes out.
Saying "Owned!" to Billy after KITT chides him in Kilmeresque monotone. That one was for the kidz!
Sneering at a highly stressed Billy that, "You'd better hope this works, because if it doesn't..." meaning, "...our two colleagues will burn to death," all the while smiling at some fixed point off camera, which is the least inspiring comment ever given to a rapidly-typing computer nerd during an emergency.
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to put a catty bitch in this cast? Is she meant to be funny? Sassy? All she is is a skinny burr under our mind-saddle. It's like someone wandered into the Knight Rider HQ from an America's Next Top Model photoshoot. There is no scenario conceivable that makes this decision work.
Silliest Exposition of the Week:
While going through a list of supervillains, Noah Bennett tells newly glum daughter Claire what each of their superpowers are. The German is Magneto, Pyrokinetic Man is Pyro, and Jesse... Well, you don't want to know! Except that anyone with the superpower of being able to read can see that his superpower doesn't sound so bad.
So, basically he's Paul Oakenfold.
I'm shaking in my boots.
Over-Used Plot Device of the Week:
Brain surgery! It's grisly, it's scary, it's slowly becoming boring. If it's not Chase the Moron poking around in Felicia Day's medulla oblongata...
...it's Dr. Walter Bishop moving a blob of liquid metal around Bill Hicks-lookalike Zac Orth's visual and auditory centres...
...or it's Sylar doing... well, something nasty to Claire's brain.
I love that Tim Kring said we would get an answer to the question of what Sylar does to brains in order to acquire powers. Well, now we know. He does something nasty. Thanks Tim!
Improbable Transformation of the Week:
After an act of stupidity so profound that it drove Canyon into a fit of rage, Betty ends up renting the worst apartment ever without viewing it first because of an attack of plot-contrivitis.
As if that wasn't annoying enough, in the final scenes Hilda, Justin and Ignacio save the day with about eight hours of decorating, leaving the apartment looking so good Betty and her heinous stockings have a little dance to celebrate.
I have to keep reminding myself that this is a fairytale, and that in the Ugly Bettyverse, nothing can trump The Power of Family. Still, though.
Intensity of the Week:
It almost burns, the intensity.
So, a busier week than I expected, but with a bit of actual entertainment, a promising new show, and lots of unintentional humour. So what does Brian Michael Bendoom think?
I'm nothing if not sensitive to the requests of this blog's regular visitors, so when blogger The Judge (aka glitternova) told me how much she loves Lost and thinks I could stand to talk more about how great Lost is, and basically just never ever shut up about it and post about it, like, every day, I realised I should hurry the hell up and get cracking on my long-delayed post about the excellent three part finale, There's No Place Like Home.
Why the delay? Other than the usual life-stuff (and the rigmarole of getting screen grabs from over two hours of intense action and mind-bending weirdness), it's hard to know where to begin with it, partially because it was so complex and dramatic (obviously), and partially because it aired about a month ago and everyone in the world has moved on. Then it struck me. Why not make this season of Lost-blogging circular, and go back to my ten reasons list, and see how it matches up to the spectacular finale. Turns out, with its focus on action and emotional drama, the show was less about the usual sci-fi weirdness (though it still featured it) and more on wrapping up the Oceanic Six backstory and getting some killin' action going on. That's more than fine by me, but I do have one strong reservation about the show now (say it ain't so!), and I'll get to that eventually. For now, let's do this list.
Reason 10: Awesome Character Actors
With a lot of story to get through, the finale wasn't the place for extraneous characters, and so the only new actor to add to the rollcall of cool guest spots was the always welcome Michelle Forbes, playing an Oceanic representative shepherding our saved heroes to a press conference in Hawaii.
I've been a fan since she played the fascinating Ensign Ro in Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I was psyched to see her here, but sadly she wasn't in it for long. TV can make it up to me by changing its mind and finally going ahead with Global Frequency, damn it. Other than her, it was good to see Cheech Marin return (again doing a solid for his old Nash Bridges boss Carlton Cuse), this time being used as a symbiotic host for Donald Trump's hair.
Another welcome return came from L. Scott Caldwell. Rose has been regrettably missing for almost all of this season, and while it's great to see Sam Anderson's Bernard getting more to do, we've missed her snark, here aimed right at obnoxious Miles after catching him snacking on Dharma nuts.
Another return, though this time not as welcome, as Andrea Gabriel as Nadia. Not because I don't like her, but just because it was horrible seeing her reunited with Sayid, knowing that they were not going to get to spend their lives together. Her appearance was practically a cameo, and not for the first time. If the fifth season is going to show more of the Oceanic Six's post-island life, perhaps she'll be back, but I doubt it, somehow.
However, if the finale belonged to any single guest actor, it has to be Kevin Durand, playing the supremely evil Keamy. From his first oily appearance to his brutal demise, he has been an unnerving presence, and by appearing to be an unstoppable enforcer of doom, he sealed his future place as a Lost fan-fave.
It's always fun to see an actor who, while having a large and interesting resume, has yet to make big waves in the popular consciousness, finally turn up in a hugely successul network show and make such an impression that viewers will hopefully remember him from then on, and his performance here, with his increasing paranoia and escalating hostility, was truly memorable. He really took the role and ran with it. It helps that before now the villainy in the show has been of the cerebral, duplicitous kind, so to have someone come along with such a menacing physical presence was a real change. This was best shown in this Bourne-esque fight scene, one of many highlights, during which Keamy gets battered and stabbed, beats Sayid anyway (!!!), gets shot by Richard Alpert, and then somehow still has the strength to make it to the Orchid station to terrorise Ben.
Keamy, even though I hated you, I'll miss you, you evil bastard.
Reason 9: Beautiful Hawaii
With Lost A-directors Stephen Williams and Jack Bender on the case, shots of humbling grandeur were littered throughout the three-parter. The only thing that could ruin this shot was the awful knowledge that those on the raft were heading for a worse fate than being stuck on an island.
These other shots are just pretty ones. No special reasons for choosing them.
Blurg! I have got to go to Oahu. Of course, it's not all natural beauty. The show still features some of the most eyeball-gratifying compositions on TV.
Not to mention some great set design...
...and "bigness", I guess you could call it.
It so rarely feels like a TV show anyway, as it is so large in scope, but with 132 minutes of finale to watch, it was like the best sequel to a really long movie ever. With so little time to shoot, edit, and score, it's even more impressive than usual that it looks so great. It's shallow, but I don't see how it's possible not to respond to the look of the show.
Reason 8: Echoes
There was some repetition of themes from previous episodes throughout the finale, though not as many as there were during last season's finale, Through The Looking Glass. That really felt like the full-circle conclusion of everything that had come before it, while this was perhaps a little less satisfying in that respect. That's not to say I didn't love it; I think we screamed and cried all the way through it. It just didn't feel as rounded, but then we are talking about a cast and crew racing to get done following the strike delays, and polishing things off to a fine sheen was right out (see also some really shaky green screen work).
I feel bad for carping about that, as the Lost team did the best they could with not much time to spare, and the overall result was superb. Plus, there were some elements that resonated. I particularly liked that Sun and Widmore's big meetup was conducted outside Le Pont de la Tour, situated on the South Bank of the Thames, in view of Tower Bridge.
A couple of seasons ago, we saw Penny and Desmond breaking up on the South Bank (with the help of not great effects), just a hop, skip and jump down the river, at about the point where the Royal Festival Hall resides (though they were unable to replicate that properly, the FX shots of the Houses of Parliament gave the location away). Considering my previous theory that Widmore has cunningly "enlisted" Desmond to act as a guardian for Penny, it's oddly apt that Widmore is now possibly organising his fightback against Ben just ten minutes walk from the place where his daughter and possible "bodyguard" split up.
I say possibly, because I'm not yet convinced Sun is really working against Ben, though that might be residual feelings from when I thought Jin might still be alive. Seeing as how Jin's ultimate fate seems to be pretty unequivocally decided now, perhaps she really is out for blood. Who knows what the price of that will be, but it will make her inevitable return to the island along with the rest of the survivors all the more dramatic (I say that with confidence as the show will otherwise make little sense if the island isn't revisited). Oh, and as for Jin's fate, according to Canyon there is NO WAY Jin is dead. I think she wants to be sure she will get to see more of DDK's guns.
Another echo, which might also serve as foreshadowing, came with the sight of Sawyer emerging from the surf following his awesome sacrifice, somehow sans shirt.
Perhaps it was removed as he passed through the bizarre time differential, which means it will always be thirty minutes behind him from now on. Shirtless Sawyer for the rest of the season, ladies! Rejoice! So why is this an echo, and not just an excuse to bump up the number of hits we get by putting these pictures here with the phrases "Josh Holloway shirtless", "Sawyer shirtless", "Josh Holloway hot wet", "Sawyer hot sexy freeware examination answers", and "Sawyer hot body water rippling pecs shirtless Moon Bloodgood" nearby?
And Juliet was getting hammered on Dharma Rum as Sawyer approached and finally realised the Kahana had blown up...
...while in the past Juliet had been having a civilised drink with her lover while discussing porn and free things, probably.
Ergo, Juliet and Sawyer are going to close the love-trapezoid that so far has seen Kate/Sawyer, Kate/Jack, and Jack/Juliet. Excellent.
I also liked how Locke appeared to his new followers, the Others/Hostiles/Time-Travelling-Island-Supercomputer-UFO Rotary Club, on top of a hill. Not only was it a heroic pose, it echoed the sight of Ben staring down at Locke in the grave after shooting him in the space in his torso where a kidney had once been.
I also liked that Locke was now the opposite of Ben, who is willing to sacrifice himself to exile from the island in order to save it, either by turning a large frozen wheel or by giving himself up to evil evil Keamy. Here we see him from above in a position of weakness; the opposite of Locke being shot from below in a position of triumph.
I really liked the seemingly dilapidated or unfinished Orchid exterior. It was here that Jack and Locke had what appears to be their final argument about whether the island is a place of miracles or not, with Locke on the side of faith and Jack on the side of science. The visual was not too subtle, but still pleasing to anyone who has become invested in their bickering.
Jack is still sceptical at this point, and when the island disappears later, he is still in denial about it all. Man, even Scully eventually came around on the UFO thing, and she spent the last reel of the movie in an alien sarcophagus with a weird breathing tube in her mouth. Of course, one of the main themes of the show, other than the free will/determinism thread which is becoming more and more important (and upon which my favoured Sirens of Titan theory depends), the science/faith battle is the main one, and certainly the one that divides Jack and Locke, but one of my favourite things about Lost is not that the battle is between science and religion, but current scientific knowledge and the hope that there is something more there. Darlton Cuselof has said that the events of the show are explicable using science, so we can say that the island isn't God's back, or something equally dreadful. Of course, if that turns out to be wrong, I'll pretend I'm not miffed. Compare that to Battlestar Galactica, where the presence of God appears to be likely, though I hope it isn't and that the entity that is moving the Cylon and human pieces around is some natural but very powerful phenomenon.
The only other echo I could find involved Keamy, who ::choke:: managed to beat Sayid (I'm not getting over that any time soon), prior to getting shot by Richard Alpert, though it merely paused his evil rampage of evil.
Later on, still alive but bleeding badly, Keamy invades the Orchid station, and while bragging about his Dead Man Trigger, gets ambushed by Ben, and much stabbing happens real quickly.
Ben's assault of Keamy is like a very clumsy re-enactment of the hella-intense fight earlier, but Keamy ends up lying in the same position as Sayid, this time with knife wounds in his neck instead of a big bit of wood.
Of course, it is at this point that Ben responds to Locke's panic over the people on the soon-to-explode Kahana with the immortal line, "So?" The only echo that generated was the echo of my bellowing laughter. Oh Ben, I wanna hang out with you and drink Dharma beer (though I'd appreciate it if you didn't try to gas me to death).
Reason 7: Easter Eggs
The biggest screengrab moment in the whole episode was from the frozen chamber under the Orchid station, where we saw a group of hieroglyphs scratched into pillars and walls.
There are some translations of some of them at the ever-dependable Lostpedia, and they seem to revolve around violence against enemies, which is curious. The island seems to have been inhabited by another civilisation once upon a time that is just as concerned with protecting the secrets of the island as the Hostiles and Ben have been, and has encoded legends or laws about such a philosophy into the walls of its weird archaic teleportation technology.
Hurley seemed to be experiencing a lot of the weirdness this time around. For a start, he arrived home in what looked to me like the murderous Golden Pontiac of Lost myth. Okay, I accept I could be really wrong, as I have no idea what a Pontiac looks like, but it certainly piqued my attention. Just to make things weirder, he encounters a coconut (possibly delivered to his home by an errant Hurleybird, a la the African Swallows of Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and more of those pesky whispers, signalling a possible instance of Island-Meddling, though it remains unclear as to whether he has experienced any peculiar behaviour prior to that moment.
Even though it all turns out to be a false alarm, his reaction is such that you wonder just how much his already battered psyche was further damaged by his time on the island. Plus, Jesus Christ is not a weapon (a line designed to make Lost fans' brains explode with the potential significance).
A few minutes later and his birthday party is wrecked by the return of the numbers, which have been on holiday for a while. It was nice to see them back, but if we're talking about awesome cameos, surely the best was the return of Mr. Eko. A cheeky little cheat on the part of Cuselof, but the fans understand what was going on there, and it was an elegant way to acknowledge that that character was still important to the overall picture of the show, as well as providing another echo, this time of the mention of Ana-Lucia in the fourth season opener.
Reason 6: ZOMG Michael Giacchino
As ever, my musical hero Giacchino did the do, but my favourite moment came with his reworking of the Parting Words theme from the season one finale, which played over the departure of Michael's raft. Here it returns, slightly altered, as our heroes arrive at Membata, suntanned and heartsore. And yes, there were tears, he said defiantly.
How good was that? Good enough to get him into the Academy. I gather that the season four boxset will feature a documentary about The Lost Symphony, which is great news. It's out in October in the UK, folks! Rare we get to beat the US (the region one release is in December), so I'm going to gloat like crazy over that.
Okay, this is already huge, and splitting it up might be the only way to ever get it done. Hold onto your hats, folks! The finale review nobody asked for will continue shortly!
