Lost, "There's No Place Like Home, Pt. 2 & 3": Dude, where's my island?

Okay, I sat down for 10 minutes, tried to wrap my head around all that had happened and how I felt about it, and now it's time for the for-real review. "Lost" season four finale spoilers coming up just as soon as I play some chess...

Like I said above, I'm still processing even as I write this (because I know I'm not going to be able to sleep until at least I finish this review), and I think the first thing to do is to chart the location and status of everyone, as best I can figure, at the end of this whole deal.

Out in the real world: Jack, Kate, Aaron, Hurley, Sayid, Sun, WAAAAALTTTT!!!!!, Ben, Widmore

In hiding: Desmond, Penny, maybe Lapidus (though he could just be kicking it in the Caribbean again, assuming he's too small a fish for Widmore's people to go after)

On the island: Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Charlotte, Richard and the Others, probably Rose and Bernard (Rose was chiding Miles moments before we saw Faraday load up a raft filled with redshirt Lostaways, and I doubt Bernard would've left without her), potentially other redshirts (though their ranks are running pretty low at this point; the freighter explosion was like the "Lost" equivalent of the Moldavian Massacre)

Dead in 2004: Michael, Keamy and his mercenaries

Dead in 2007: Locke (aka Jeremy Bentham, the mysterious man in the coffin from "Through the Looking Glass")

Location known, status unknown: Claire and Christian (who are on the island but may be the walking dead)

Maybe dead, maybe lost at sea, maybe back on the island: Jin (who was on deck and could have miraculously jumped clear of the explosion), plus Faraday and the redshirts on his raft (and if any or all of these people weren't absorbed in the island-disappearing effect, then they're kinda screwed, as Penny's boat obviously didn't find them)

So now that we have that mostly cleared up, I find myself looking forward to season five more than I do reliving this conclusion to season four. At the risk of sounding like a total hypocrite -- considering how often over the years I've pounded my shoes against a table and demanded answers from Lindelof and Cuse -- "There's No Place Like Home" (all three parts) played fair with the audience 100 percent, answered most of the questions raised by "Through the Looking Glass" and then "The Beginning of the End," explained how the Oceanic Six got off the island, why they're lying, etc., etc., etc... and yet, as I did with the answer-laden "Cabin Fever," I feel ever so slightly disappointed by all of this.

Lindelof likes to talk about how they've set themselves up for failure, that the answers people have cooked up in their heads about Smokey, and the numbers, and all the show's other mysteries, will invariably seem cooler than what the show itself eventually reveals. And there may be something to that in my reaction here, but I don't think so. I think that the way Cuse and Lindelof structured this season and the Oceanic Six story at the heart of it, things were going to have the feel of inevitability by the end of it. By this point, we'd been given so many clues and nuggets of information about the Six's escape, the cover story, etc., that much -- but not all -- of "There's No Place Like Home" was largely taken up with filling in the remaining gaps in the story, like how Sun made it off the freighter but Jin didn't, the origin and motivations for the Oceanic Six lie (about which I will have more to say below), the identity of the guy in the coffin, etc. This episode reminded me in some ways of the "Dexter" season two finale, where the plot mechanics of that otherwise-thrilling season brought us to a finale that could only end one way, and which therefore didn't seem quite as special as what preceeded it. Until this season, the quality curve for "Lost" -- both within each episode and within each season -- has been an inverse bell curve, with the best stuff tending to come at the very beginning and, especially, the very end. I loved the hell out of season four, but I'd rank all three parts of "There's No Place Like Home" well behind "The Constant," "The Economist," "The Beginning of the End" and "Confirmed Dead," to name just four.

Which isn't to say I disliked the episode, or that it dashes all the optimism I've had about the series ever since "Through the Looking Glass," or that it makes me any less crazy about having to wait until early 2009 to see what happens next. I was just, based on how much I dug this season and how mind-blowing the show's finales usually are, a bit let down.

But there was still a ton of good stuff here, most of it outside the plot mechanics of the Oceanic Six stuff.

Start with the completely unexpected, completely tear-jerking, completely fabulous Desmond and Penny reunion. Did anybody see that coming this early in the series? Anybody? Screw the Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet stuff (which, with Juliet and a shirtless Sawyer left on the island, is sure to be a full-on quadrangle by the start of next season); this is the true epic love story of "Lost," and it was a moment as well-earned as it was surprising. Yet as awesome as it was to see the dumbfounded look on Penny's face (even though she knew where to look for Desmond, she didn't honestly expect to find him that easily) or the joy on Desmond's, I have two separate yet equal concerns for these two: 1)That, having been granted their happy ending and been sent into hiding by Jack, they now disappear from the series for long stretches, at least until Ben can find them to make good on his promise to Widmore; or 2)That, having seemingly been granted their happy ending two seasons before the show's over, one or both of them is doomed.

Or consider yet another edition of Sayid Jarrah: Breakdance Fighter. Seriously, they need to have Sayid beat people up with his feet at least three or four times a season, because it's always splendid, as was the entire fight sequence with Keamy and the mercs, from Kate running towards the chopper right up to Richard shooting him in the back and, like the Libyans in "Back to the Future," not thinking to check for a bulletproof vest.

Or, for that matter, there was the entire sequence with Keamy dying, the chopper running out of fuel, and people scrambling on and off of the freighter. As I've said many times in the past, for all that we like to dwell on the mysteries, this show is at its best when it's about the characters and their emotions, and that sequence was packed with great character beats: the realization that Locke, in spite of his obsession with protecting the island at all costs, still cares about the survival of Jack and the rest; the look of pure happiness on Michael's face (the first such expression he's shown since before Tom Friendly kidnapped Walt) at learning Sun's good news; Hurley again feeling guilty about his weight as the chopper began to plunge, and Sawyer deciding once again to sacrifice himself for the sake of his friends; Sun screaming for Jin (whose death I don't want to believe in; it's enough that Sun believes he's dead); and the eerie appearance of Christian, currently acting as Jacob's proxy (and therefore the island's), to tell Michael it was finally okay for him to die, because he had served his purpose to the place.

Now, when Locke first broached the idea of lying to the outside world with Jack, I rolled my eyes at his logic, and at the idea that Jack would buy into it. Jack cares as much about protecting the island and its secrets as I care about Jack's love life or his tattoos. But by the time they were on the raft and the boat was approaching, it made more sense. First, he knows (or hopes) that at least some of the Lostaways are still on the island, and he finally appreciates just how obsessed and deadly are the people who faked the Oceanic Six crash and financed Keamy and company. The lie is to protect whoever's left behind on the island (which wasn't a factor when Locke first discussed it, as Jack assumed everybody but Locke would get off just fine), but it's also to protect the Six. So long as they maintain this lie that's in some way consistent with the lie that Widmore and his people created, it becomes a mutually assured destruction scenario: Widmore can't go after the Six, because the Six are playing along in a very public fashion.

(That said, I still don't understand all the details of the lie, which they had a week on Penny's boat to craft. Kate as the heroine of the crash and as Aaron's mother is for the benefit of making Kate look good when the time came for her to stand trial, but what about that business of three other people -- identified, in the expanded version of the press conference scene from Part 1 that ABC showed immediately before the finale, as Boone, Charlie and Libby -- who survived the crash but didn't make it off the island? Was that just to make the story seem more plausible, because the odds of everyone making it off the plane and then surviving on the island would be too slim? If so, why those three? And does this mean that we may one day find out what the hell Libby's backstory is?)

If "There's No Place Like Home" wasn't the game-changer that "Through the Looking Glass" was, at least it opens myriad story possibilities for next season. We obviously have the story of Ben and Jack teaming up to get the Oceanic Six (plus the corpse of Locke, and quite possibly Walt, now that the timeframe gibes with Malcolm David Kelley being eight feet tall and bursting with testosterone) back to the island. But we also potentially have three year's worth of island stories to tell, depending on exactly where and when the island disappeared to. For all I know, by the time Jack drags everybody back to Craphole Island, he'll find out that, from Sawyer's perspective, only a couple of days have passed, but Locke/Bentham's story about how bad things got on the island after the Six left implies there's a lot of story to tell there. I like the idea of an island setting with no Jack to play leader, Kate to play damsel in distress, or Ben to play pathological liar mastermind. Plus, within the real-world setting, we have the question of where Desmond and Penny are hiding -- and whether Sayid, as Ben's hired gun, would be willing to knowingly try to hurt the two of them -- what exactly Sun is doing with Paik and Widmore (and if she ever finds out that Ben killed Keamy, leading to what she assumes was the death of her husband, Ben-allied Jack is going to have some 'splainin' to do), how many former characters Hurley's playing chess with (Mr. Eko shout-out!!!!), what Abaddon's deal is, etc.

So even though this one wasn't all I might have hoped it could be (even as I should have realized, by the nature of what had come before, that it couldn't have been much more than this), I'm still very psyched to see what comes next, and frustrated as hell that it'll be another nine months or so until we find out.

Some other thoughts:

• A couple of things were possibly ignored, or at least not explained well: Claire never got in the chopper, per Desmond's vision (though, as with the Naomi/Penny confusion, there's precedence for Desmond's visions being wonky), and I'd argue that nothing so terrible happened as a result of Hurley going with Locke in the premiere to justify him apologizing to Jack about it. I suppose you could say he blames himself for all the redshirts who went with him and Locke and then died when Keamy moved in on New Otherton, but that would presume that anyone on this show cares about the redshirts (who in this episode got to wear red life vests), and given how disinterested the main characters all were in getting anybody extra onto the chopper, I can't see Hurley beating himself up too much about that.
• I have to mention it again: Mr. Eko shout-out!!! God, I miss Mr. Eko.
• Another bit of full-circle, playing fair information-revealing: we now know, for the most part, how Ben wound up in the Tunisian desert sometime in 2005 wearing a bloody Dharma parka. Question: given how extreme that situation was, with him activating the Orchid, moving the frozen gears, etc., should we assume that, when he's gotten off the island previously (in the surveillance photos taken by Widmore's people), it was by other means?
• The entire sequence of Locke watching the Candle/Halliwax video (which was very differen from the "raw footage" version that team "Lost" screened at Comic-Con last summer) while Ben casually threw metal junk into the chamber was hysterical, topped of course by Ben's "If you mean time-traveling bunnies, then yes." I also liked that, given how most of the Dharma tech on the island seems to be circa the late '70s, the effect of putting that junk into the chamber reminded me of what happened when I didn't listen carefully to my dad's instructions and put food wrapped in tinfoil into our first microwave oven.
• I'm glad that Miles and Charlotte stayed on the island, and not only because Ken Leung's one of the best additions to the cast over the run of the show. I still want to find out what Abaddon's Plan A was that required him to assemble a team including a mercenary (Naomi), a mentally-ill physicist (Faraday), a medium (Miles) and an anthropologist who may or may not have been born on the island (Charlotte).
• I don't know if it was because this episode was rushed through production due to the strike, but some of the special effects work -- notably the green screen of the airport behind Jack in the opening scene, and the shots of the freighter wreckage below the chopper -- looked much shoddier than usual.
• On the other hand, I never tire of Michael Giacchino's score.

That's all I've got for now. A lot of you have weighed in already, but for tradition's sake, what did everybody else think?

Lost, "There's No Place Like Home": The man with the plan

"Lost" spoilers coming up just as soon as I grab the nearest Jesus figurine for protection against prowlers...

"There's No Place Like Home" is a bridge episode, the first hour of a three-hour finale (with the rest not airing for two weeks due to the "Grey's Anatomy" finale), and as such, it could have very easily contented itself with moving all the appropriate pieces into place. And, certainly, there was a lot of that -- though I'll be damned if I can figure out how Sun and Aaron are going to wind up with the rest of the Oceanic Six, who are all converging at The Orchid -- but the episode offered much more than that.

Last week, I was oddly unmoved by "Cabin Fever" because it offered lots of answers (or, at least, clues) without providing much of an emotional arc for Locke or anyone else. "There's No Place Like Home," on the other hand, was bursting with emotion, and with payoffs to character arcs dating back to season one. We had Sun taking out her righteous widowed(*) fury on her dad by buying out his company(**). We had Sayid reunited with his beloved Nadia (even though we know she'll be dead within a year). And, in maybe Matthew Fox's single best moment in the history of the show, we had Jack finally find out that Claire is his sister -- after he's already left her behind (and very possibly dead) on the island. For a long time, I was assuming that Ana-Lucia would give Jack the crucial bit of info, or Sawyer would somehow say the exact right thing in front of Claire about his time hanging out with Jack's dad, or Christian's reanimated corpse (or whatever the hell he is) would tell the two half-sibs himself. No matter the theory, I always felt certain that Jack and Claire would find out in each other's presence, and get to enjoy that wonderful discovery in the midst of all the horror that is life on Craphole Island. But to have Jack find out that way -- and after the Oceanic Six had, for reasons that I'm sure will be explained in two weeks, had agreed to a cover story that included Aaron being Kate's biological kid (which means no Aaron/grandma bonding, or the cover's blown) -- was a cruel, powerful twist on the part of the "Lost" writers, and Fox played Jack's anguish beautifully. Of all the members of the Six, he was the only one who seemed at peace with what had happened for most of the episode, and that just destroyed him. I knew Jack's "and you're not even related to him!" rant from "Something Nice Back Home" meant that Jack knew he was an uncle; I just didn't imagine it would come out this way.

(*) I'm still on board with the idea that Jin dies while the Six escape (which would make the season finale Daniel Dae Kim's last episode as a regular, unfortunately). Too many things about the way Sun carried herself both here and in "Ji Yeon" suggest a widow and not a woman separated from her husband by thousands of miles (and maybe years, depending on what The Orchid does), and there's no reason for her to tell her father that two people are responsible for Jin's death(***) if he's not dead. She's got plenty enough reason to hate the guy. Plus, I feel like there needs to be a payoff to Jin extracting the promise of Sun's safety from Charlotte, and we didn't get that here.

(**) Exactly how big could that Oceanic settlement be for Sun to buy a controlling interest in what's been portrayed as a huge conglomerate? Why do I have the feeling that Hurley took a lot of that unwanted lottery money and put it to good use here?

(***) The answer could turn out to be Ben or Widmore or Keamy or Michael or lots of other people, but I have a feeling the other person Sun blames is herself.

My point is, when "Lost" is at its best -- I'm talking "Walkabout" or "Through the Looking Glass" best -- it manages to balance revelations (shocking and otherwise) with great character moments. I don't know that I'd put this one in the pantheon (again, a lot of it was set-up for the finale, for which I have extremely high hopes), but it was definitely in the spirit of what I love about the show. We managed to flit around all these different locations and groups of people (including Richard and The Others coming back on the board and suddenly looking like they are, in fact, the good guys) without ever losing sight of them as people. The show is as much about Sun's relationship with her father as it's about the Numbers, as much about Sayid's globe-trotting quest for the woman of his dreams as about who's in the coffin, or as much Kate not having anybody to greet her on the tarmac as Jacob's true identity, etc.

There's already been quite a bit of clamoring over in "The Office" finale thread for me to get this thing posted already (whatever happened to all the "take your time, Alan! We want it right, not fast, Alan!" I was getting at the start of the season, anyway?), and since the episode left so much up in the air, I'm going to quickly look at some of the questions raised, open the floor for you all, and get some sleep.

• Again, how is Sun going to get from the explosives-laden freighter to the location of the rest of the Six? And while I wouldn't be surprised to see either or both of Michael and Jin die in an explosion (triggered by the dead man's switch that Omar strapped to Keamy last week), I'm not too worried for Desmond. They've made the Desmond/Penny love story such an important part of the show (both on its own and as part of the larger Ben/Widmore war) that I can't imagine Cuse and Lindelof killing the guy off just yet. (Then again, I also didn't see the Jack/Claire thing coming, so what do I know?)
• Unless Richard and The Others (sounds like a British Invasion band, no?) are really fast walkers in addition to being immortal, to whom exactly did Ben signal at the top of the mountain?
• How does Faraday know about The Orchid? And I still don't understand what specific roles Dan, Charlotte, Miles and Naomi (who, remember, was the key to Abaddon's plan for this mission) were supposed to play, either in concert with or in parallel to Keamy's bunch.
  
• Was that the raft from the freighter that the Six used to get to the nearby fishing island?
• What exactly would happen to a person who ate fifteen year old crackers?
• Does the return of The Numbers (on the odometer of Hurley's muscle car) mean that Lindelof and Cuse actually do have a plan to explain them, or was this just an easy way to set up Hurley's own mainland descent into madness?
• Does The Orchid come with a tutorial, or did Christian give Locke specific island-moving instructions when they were in the cabin together?

Lots to ponder, and lots to enjoy. Gonna be a rought two weeks, but not nearly as rough as the nine months or so until season five starts.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Cabin Fever": Break me off a piece of that Apollo bar

Spoilers for "Lost" coming up just as soon as I chop down the same tree three times...

Sorry I didn't get this post up last night, but two factors came into play. First, I was exhausted and struggling to keep my eyes open by 11:05. Second, I felt I needed to sleep on the episode to make up my mind about it and figure out why "Cabin Fever" left me feeling oddly unsatisfied.

On paper, I should have loved an episode where almost all of the island scenes feature the trio of Locke, Ben and Hurley, where we finally got back to the freighter, and where the flashbacks were so rich with details about the island's mythology. And yet it left me a little cold, and as I was drifting off to sleep, I started to figure out why.

First, while we find out a lot of things in the flashbacks (more on those revelations below), those scenes functioned primarily on the level of filling in the blanks, rather than telling any kind of emotional story about Locke. The best flashback/flashforward stories provide both emotion and information and build to a climax; this was just a chronological accounting of all the ways the island affected John's life well before he came to it.

Second, while I love any opportunity to watch Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson play off each other, with some Jorge Garcia thrown in as a bonus, very little happened for a very long time in the present-day island scenes. They can't find the cabin, Locke has a dream (without needing to do a sweat lodge this time), they wander around some more, and they eventually find it. The last few minutes had some important material -- Ben finally admits that Locke has usurped his place as the island's protector, Locke has that disturbing encounter with Christian and Claire and is told he has to move the island -- but very little of consequence, plot or character-wise, happened until then.

Finally, the number of characters, and the number of separate locations where they're hanging out, is starting to disrupt each story's momentum a little. It's been three episodes -- and nearly two months, thanks to the strike -- since we've been on the freighter, and so I had to spend a lot of the early scenes there refreshing my memory about people's loyalties, what they knew, etc. Even in the early days of "Lost," the cast was so big that characters and storylines would frequently shift between background and foreground, but the show was less plot-driven in those days.

Still, with all those caveats, "Cabin Fever" had a number of great moments, and enough food for thought to make a meal.

Start with the surprise(*) return of Nestor Carbonell as the ageless Richard Alpert, hovering outside Locke's hospital room while he was still a preemie, and with the appearance of Matthew Abaddon as the man who puts the walkabout idea in Locke's head. In both cases, the first glimpse of their faces in unexpected places/times was chilling. (Alpert moreso than Abaddon, both because Carbonell had been gone so long due to being on "Cane," and because Reddick's voice is so distinctive that any "Wire" fan could tell it was him before the camera panned up to his face.) We know that Richard is on the side of the Others/Hostiles/anti-Dharma forces, and we've assumed that Abaddon is working for Widmore, but the idea that both were trying to get Locke to the island long before he actually went is a mind-bender.

((*) At least, it was a surprise to me, since I didn't read the episode description on my DVR -- which listed Carbonell by name -- nor did I pay attention to the guest star credits, where I assume both Carbonell and Lance Reddick were mentioned.)

Locke's survival as an extreme preemie in the late '50s (Buddy Holly's "Everyday," playing in the first scene, was recorded in 1957) shows, just as the misfires of Keamy's gun did, that the island has the ability to keep alive the people that it needs, even if they're not on the island -- or, in the case of Baby Locke, even if they haven't been to the island yet. Locke's been right all along: being on the island is his destiny, and it always has been. The teacher/guidance counselor who wants Teen Locke to go to the Mittelos science camp (which I'm guessing isn't really in Portland) becomes yet another person who we've seen telling Locke what he can't do, and again that person turns out to be wrong. Locke is a superhero of sorts -- or, depending on the island's nature and whether you think Ben or Widmore is the good guy -- a supervillain. He has powers (the fast healing, the visions, the general bad-assery), and he has a mission. All he needs is a cool logo on one of those blank t-shirts he wears. (Maybe he could be known as Geronimo Jackson, whose sticker we saw inside Teen Locke's locker.)

So here's the question: when Richard gives Kid Locke the list of objects and tells him he already owns one of them, is he implying some kind of divine island birthright, or is there some kind of time-travel loop involved? A lot of people who studied the screen captures of Jacob from his first appearance suggested his profile looked an awful lot like Terry O'Quinn's, and speculated that John is one day going to become Jacob (and then maybe Jingleheimer and Schmidt); was Richard's test another clue for that theory? And what object was Kid Locke supposed to pick? The Mystery Tales comic, whose story about a "hidden land" suggests the island? The vial of the same dirt/sand/ash that rings the area around Jacob's cabin? The Book of Laws? (Whose laws?) And if this is all a time-travel thing, then is Richard actually immortal, or does he just bounce around to different eras? And when Christian tells Locke that he needs to move the island, do they mean in time or in space?

Also, do the same people who so thoroughly analyzed the meaning of Faraday's rocket experiment want to figure out how it correlates to the freighter's doctor being killed several days after his corpse washed up on the beach? It's been at least three days since the events of "The Shape of Things to Come" (when the corpse washed up), if that helps your calculations at all.

As for the other events on the freighter, I'm assuming Keamy has some kind of dead man's switch strapped to his arm; when he warned the captain against killing him, he implied that everyone else would die along with him. I liked the moment where Lapidus complained to Michael about not revealing his true identity as an 815 survivor, as well as Desmond's refusal to ever set foot on that island again (he was there a lot longer than Sayid and company), but virtually everything that happened in those scenes was setting up things for the season's final few episodes.

Some other random thoughts:

• Hurley sharing his candy bar with unlikely/unwanted ally Ben was a priceless bit of silent comedy. Emerson and Garcia both had a number of funny moments in this episode -- "Destiny, John? Is a fickle bitch?" being another highlight -- but the range of emotions playing over each man's face in that exchange was wonderful.
  
• For all the meta humor this season about how no one ever answers a question, we actually did get an answer to Hurley's query about why someone would build a cabin in the jungle: Horace Goodspeed (last seen in the Ben origin story episode "The Man Behind the Curtain") wanted a getaway spot for himself and his wife. (And I still doubt we've seen the last of either Horace or Mrs. Goodspeed; the producers cast Doug Hutchison and Samantha Mathis in those roles for a reason.)
  
• The "Lost" score, while always wonderful, has been fairly consistent in its themes over the years, but there were a few spots last night that sounded different from anything I remember hearing before. The first was the slasher movie-style sting right after the "What happened to them?" / "He did." exchange at the mass grave; the second was the '60s James Bond-style adventure theme playing as Sayid took the raft back towards the island.
  
• I liked Kid Locke's drawing of Smokey killing someone; even back then, John had certain psychic powers.
  
• Yet another in a long series of "Lost" shout-outs to "Star Wars": the merc killed by Smokey was named Mayhew; Peter Mayhew played Chewbacca.
  
• What exactly has Christian done to Claire to put her in that creepy, blissed-out state?
  
• What do you suppose the miracle was that Abaddon experienced? And if we're entertaining the idea that one character, through time-travel, could turn out to be another one, do we want to consider the possibility that Abaddon is really Taller Grown-Up Walt?
  

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Something Nice Back Home": Sister, Christian

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I buy my daughter a toy Millennium Falcon...

Yay! It's another hour of the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle, with added doses of Jack being a drunken, bullying idiot! Season three "Lost," how I've missed you!

Look, I recognize that Jack is the show's main character, and that there are fans out there somewhere who actually care about who Kate chooses (even though I've never met any of them), and that episodes like "Something Nice Back Home" are obligatory now and then. But I find him and his love life simultaneously boring and obnoxious. Every time the show does a Jack episode, I can tell that Lindelof, Cuse and company are going for some kind of tragically flawed hero riff, but Jack is so insufferable that it never works. I shouldn't be rooting for the hero to die on the table during his appendectomy, you know?

Thankfully, this one wasn't a straight-up Jack episode, as we spent a good amount of time with Sawyer and company trekking through the jungle, and with Jin taking the measure of Dan and Charlotte on the trip to and from the medical station. Without the subplots with the supporting cast, or the chilling scene in Hurley's hospital room, "Something Nice Back Home" would have been just as tiresome as Jack; with all those scenes, I was willing to suffer through Jack again not learning to leave well enough alone, knowing that eventually the POV would shift to someone I actually care about.

Since I don't much want to dissect the past, present and future state of the triangle (or quadrangle, if you factor in Juliet and he role as Jack's beard), let's move to the bullet points and talk about all the other Craphole Island hijinx this week:

• Christian's in Jacob's cabin (as Zapruder'ed by various fans in the season premiere), he's in the lobby of Jack's medical practice in the future, and now he's visiting with his grandson in the present. Jack's "You're not even related to him!" comment to Kate in the flash-forward implies that he'll find out that Claire is his sister, and Aaron his nephew, sometime between now and when they get off the island. While I have my issues with Jack, I like Christian enough that I'm looking forward to the inevitable Shephard family reunion. One question about Christian's appearance at the campfire: the fact that he could hold Aaron would suggest he's corporeal, but does Miles seeing him tell us anything? How do Miles' powers work? Can he automatically tell the difference between a ghost and a live person if he goes into a situation not knowing whom he'll be seeing?
• I'm going to miss Daniel Dae Kim after Jin is (presumably) killed off, but at least we get to watch him work until then. Jin's learned his leg-breaking lessons well from Sun's dad. However, just because he forced Charlotte to admit she spoke Korean doesn't mean he has any real power to force her to uphold the agreement. We know Sun gets off the island and Jin doesn't, but for all we know, Charlotte had nothing to do with it.
  
• How many commandos did Frank bring to the island in the first place? The chopper's not that big, and there were at least four guys still with Keamy (including the wounded one). How did any of them survive Smokey's rampage, let alone most (or maybe all) of them?
  
• Speaking of getting off the island, we did glean some useful fragments from Jack and Kate's climactic argument -- specifically, that Sawyer chose not to leave the island (and is presumably still alive in the future), and that Jack did something that allowed Kate to leave.
  
• I'll also give Matthew Fox this: he plays Jack's mania well, even if I'm tired with the ways the character tends to channel his craziness. The scene at Santa Rosa (which, for you timeline folks, obviously took place after the flashforwards in both the season premiere and "Eggtown," but before the original flashforward last season) was so nerve-wracking because Jorge Garcia did such a great job of showing how Hurley had already given up, but also because Fox did an equally good job showing the cracks starting to form in Jack that would lead him to the state he's in by "Through the Looking Glass."
  
• Hurley believes he and the rest of the Oceanic Six are all dead and trapped in some kind of purgatory. Has he been reading the "Lost" message boards? That was one of the earliest and most prevalent theories about the island itself.
• Rousseau's officially dead, for those of you holding out hope she might stagger out of the jungle seven or eight episodes from now so we could get the required Danielle/Alex flashback.
• Rose! And Rose getting in Charlotte's face! Lovely! At first, when she started proposing a conspiracy theory to Bernard, I thought she would suggest that the freighter people somehow poisoned Jack; the notion that the island made Jack sick to prevent their rescue hadn't occurred to me, but as soon as Rose said it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
• Will "CLAAIIRRRRRRE!!!!!!" become the new "WAAAAAALLLLLTTTTTT!!!!!"?

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "The Shape of Things To Come": Smokey and the bandits

Spoilers for "Lost" coming up just as soon as I get my dry cleaner to remove the blood and sand from my parka...

As the Jewish people are still in the middle of Passover, it's time to apply the concept of Dayenu to "Lost." Dayenu, for the gentiles among you, is a song sung around the Passover seder table listing all the things we have to be thankful for in the Exodus story: if God had only freed us from slavery, Dayenu (translate, "it would have been enough"); if God had freed us from slavery and taken us out of Egypt, Dayenu; if he had only taken us out of Egypt and fed us manna, Dayenu; etc.

With "The Shape of Things to Come," if Lindelof and Cuse had only given us the amazing, half-CGI, half-implied nighttime rampage of Smokey, Dayenu.

If they had only given us Smokey's rampage and clarified that Ben can teleport off the island and travel through time, Dayenu.

If they had only given us Smokey's rampage and the teleportation issue, while explaining why Sayid works for Ben in the future, Dayenu.

If they had only given us Smokey's rampage, teleportation, the Sayid explanation and Michael Emerson playing Ben's reaction to Alex's death, Dayenu.

If they had only given us Smokey, teleportation, Sayid, Ben's reaction, and Jack using Bernard to outsmart Faraday, Dayenu.

If they had only given us all of the above, plus tying Ben to Penny (and therefore Desmond), Dayenu.

Yup, "The Shape of Things to Come" was overflowing with manna from post-strike heaven: lots of action, lots of intrigue, the odd answer or three, and Michael Emerson again demonstrating why Lindelof and Cuse essentially turned the show over to a guy who was only supposed to be around for two episodes.

That isn't to say it was perfect. For starters, there's the matter of the redshirts among the Locke/Sawyer/Ben group. The matter of the lostaways who aren't regular castmembers (or at least recurring figures like Bernard and Rose) has always been a sticky one for the show. The producers tried to address the problem last year with Nikki and Paolo, but did it so clumsily that the entire audience cheered their deaths. The massacre in Other Town was the opposite extreme of that. Sawyer's really concerned about getting Claire into Ben's house as quickly as possible but doesn't have a plan for the other people who followed Locke in the premiere (for reasons unknown, because they hd no personalities) other than to tell them to get back in the house. And so, of course, the only people killed during the assault are the handful of non-regulars, while Claire survives a house blowing up around her. That sequence with Sawyer dodging bullets was supposed to be tense and frightening; instead, it was funny.

Meanwhile, between the last pre-strike episode and this one, I feel like the writers really dropped the ball with Alex and Rousseau. I understand the show has too many characters, and has enough trouble servicing the people in the main cast, but as I said six weeks ago, they spent the better part of three seasons with the matter of Rousseau's missing child hovering on the periphery of things, they finally had the two of them meet and learn each other's identity in the finale, and then they had no meaningful interaction with each other until Rousseau died, with Alex following quickly behind her. Between the flashbacks and the time travel and mysticism of the island, dead doesn't always mean dead on "Lost" (see Tom Friendly's recent re-appearance), but at this point in the story, I can't imagine them taking the time to go back to that relationship to fill in the scenes we should have seen between those two after their reunion in the season three finale. Seems like a waste.

But back to the good stuff. As said above, Smokey picking apart the mercenary unit was worth the price of admission. By now, we've seen enough of the monster to know what it can do and what it looks like doing it, and so having it go to town at night was a brilliant idea; not only did it no doubt save some money on the CGI budget, but it let our imaginations fill in the blanks on what it was doing to the bad guys. Lindelof likes to say, while trying to manage expectations for the eventual revelation of what the island is, that our imaginations are always going to come up with something better than what's in the actual show, and that sequence was a nice illustration of that. I don't think it would have been half as exciting or scary if it had been in broad daylight and we had seen every single thing Smokey did to those guys.

Meanwhile, we now know that Ben does have some control over the monster (and that it involves going into his Magic Box room to do it), that he can travel through time and space (and, based on him asking the hotel clerk for the date, doesn't always know where and when he'll be landing), and that he's a better hand-to-hand fighter than anybody left on the island save maybe Sayid and Desmond. We don't know any details beyond that, or what exactly the "rules" are between him and Widmore regarding who can be killed ownership of the island, etc., but the episode was exciting enough, and offered just enough information, that I continue to feel confident we'll find out more as we go.

(To be specific, I don't know that the writers are ever going to satisfactorily tie up every loose end from the early years, but I do believe that everything happening from now to the end is being done with a plan, and that all this stuff with time travel and the Oceanic Six and Ben's glove-trotting adventures will make sense, even if we never find out about the four-toed foot, or why Dharma keeps doing food drops, or how Mr. Eko's brother's plane wound up on the island, etc.)

While we didn't get any freighter time this week, and therefore can only guess who slit the doctor's throat and why the freighter people are playing dumb about it to Faraday (maybe the doctor gets killed in the future, and this is another time travel phenomenon?), we did get to fill in most of the blanks with Jarrah, Sayid Jarrah, as well as put a tragic bow on his search for Nadia, which was the running thread of nearly all his flashbacks in the early seasons. Poor guy finally finds her, and not long after, Widmore's people kill her for reasons unknown, and then Sayid lets Ben manipulate him into turning into an instrument of his vengeance. Nice. Might we reach a point where Sayid is trying to kill Penny (not knowing who she is), while Desmond (somehow back in the real world) has to stop him?

I could write more about Jack's sudden health issues, or Faraday not being bright enough to think that the guy who suggested the telegraph plan might know Morse code, but it's late and I have 70 other shows to watch and blog about tomorrow morning, so for now... Dayenu.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Meet Kevin Johnson": Ready to die

Spoilers for the "Lost" mid-season finale, "Meet Kevin Johnson," coming up just as soon as I go download Mama Cass' "It's Getting Better" from iTunes...

Well, I'm glad that the strike ended in time for there to be more episodes this season (starting on April 24), because Damon and Carlton were absolutely right: this would have been a terrible season finale. Lots of balls up in the air but no immediate peril for anyone but a minor character like Alex, and a cliffhanger ending that felt rushed and very un-"Lost"-like. (The shocker endings -- good or bad -- tend to focus more on characters doing something we don't expect of them, or us learning something we never would have suspected.)

That said, as an episode in a vacuum, "Meet Kevin Johnson" was quite good. While Michael was never my favorite character, his story was an important part of the show. His struggle to deal with the guilt from his Faustian bargain to save Walt was another moving example of how the writers this season are really trying to build on the emotional impact of everything that's happened before. We also got some intriguing hints about the big picture -- notably that the island's power can, in fact, extend to the mainland (which might explain a lot about Charlie visiting Hurley in the premiere) -- and a fine performance from Mr. Perrineau that was largely free (other than the "previously"s) of "WAAAAAALTTTTT!!!!!"

But it's clearly a show that was designed to be a middle chapter. I can deal with waiting a month to see the story continue, but if the strike had kept new episodes from being produced until next season, it would have been the most disappointing "Lost" finale since we didn't get to see what was in the hatch.

Because I fell asleep shortly after the episode ended and want to get discussion going quickly (for those of you near a computer on Good Friday), I'm going to go straight to bullet points:

• I'm trying to decide whether the timeframe of Michael's life back on the mainland is supposed to connote more time/space oddness or just the writers assuming that we wouldn't notice (or mind) that, in the span of a month (he was on the island for two and back by the time everyone else had been there for three), he had time to sneak back into America undetected (since he's still pretending to be dead), get to New York, alienate Walt by blabbing about the two murders, reach a suicidal level of depression, completely heal from an airbag-less car crash, and get all the way to Fiji. I'm not saying all of those things couldn't happen within four weeks (except maybe the healing, though you can attribute that to some weird island power), but it's an awfully tight squeeze.
  
• Also a chronology question: even if certain Others have the ability to get off the island quickly and go wherever they want, exactly when in the season three timeline would Tom's New York trip fit? He was with Jack for much of the season, and if we didn't see him during every episode while Locke was hanging with the Others, he was there for a lot of them, and then he died (after Naomi was on the island and therefore well after Michael had already gone to the freighter).
  
• One of the unfortunate casualties of the show's format, where most episodes are dominated by one character's story, is that other characters tend to get, well, lost for long stretches. Even if they're on camera, we don't really know what's going on with them. The Alex/Rousseau relationship definitely fell victim to that. After waiting most of last season for someone to put the two of them in the same room and explain their relationship, we got that exact moving moment in the finale (courtesy of Ben, of all people), but ever since, we've had to fill in the blanks on how they've been relating to each other. After spending her whole life thinking Ben was her dad and not knowing her mom, how was Alex responding to the knowledge that this strange, crazy woman was her real parent? During their time in Other-town, did the two of them bond? Did Rousseau struggle to pack away the crazy now that her daughter was back? Unfortunately -- but somewhat understandably, given the show's format and the fact that these two are really far down the character food chain -- there was never a chance to show any of that, so when Rousseau died (I'm guessing in a Ben-designed ambush), I felt like the show had wasted an opportunity to make that death far more powerful. Yes, it sucks that Danielle died shortly after finding her daughter, but I wish there was some way we could have gotten a glimpse of their relationship during their brief time together.
• Fisher Stevens got a bit more to do in these flashbacks, but no sign of Zoe Bell. I guess they really did just hire her to do the jumping off the boat stunt. Ah, well.
  
• I hope these appearances of Libby as a figment of Michael's guilt-ridden imagination aren't the only time we'll ever see Cynthia Watros again. It's not super-high on my list of Questions That Must Be Answered, but eventually I'd like to know the point of the "Libby was in the mental hospital with Hurley" reveal from "Dave."
• I've given up trying to guess (or, really, caring) whether Ben or Mr. Widmore is the real bad guy here, but I can't in any way fault Sayid's actions at the episode's end. The last time Michael was working for Ben, he murdered Libby and Ana-Lucia, and Sayid at this point in the chronology has no reason to trust Ben.
  
• The promo for the April 24 episode definitively identified Aaron as one of the Oceanic Six, so unless this is another case of the marketing people acting independently of Damon and Carlton -- and I don't believe they would allow that to happen with something this important -- then we have our answer, once and for all.
  

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Ji Yeon": Baby daddy

Spoilers for "Ji Yeon," the latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I get a squeegee bucket...

How did I miss that? How did I miss that Jin was in a flashback while Sun was in a flashforward? I took mental note of his bulkier cell phone (Jack's sleek phone was the first giveaway for me in "Through the Looking Glass") and I also noted that the comic tone of his scenes with the stuffed panda was wildly at odds with what was going on with Sun, and yet I still didn't put 2 and 2 together until Jin invoked his old job with Sun's father's car company and then told the nurse he'd only been married for two months.

Now, I can't decide whether to be pleased or annoyed with the narrative shenanigans. On the one hand, there was no way to save the news of Jin's death(*) until the end of the episode without it, because an episode where the off-island scenes only feature Sun would have been a giveaway.

((*) And, yes, I believe that Jin is dead. I know the date on the tombstone was 9/22/04, the date of the crash, but remember: according to "Eggtown, the cover story is that all but eight passengers died in the crash, and two more died later. I don't know the reasoning behind that lie, but it would certainly cover Jin dying at any point pre-rescue. Sun's grief seemed too real -- not just a "We're separated by an ocean and I don't know if I'll ever see you again," but real, honest mourning -- for me to think anything else.)

On the other hand, by structuring the episode the way they did, the writers made the news of Jin's death feel almost gimmicky. I know that many of the show's best episodes featured some kind of big twist at the tail end of the flashback (Locke is paralyzed! Sawyer's the little boy in the story, not the con man!), and I know I was suitably impressed by "Hi, Aaron" only a few weeks ago, but here the stagecraft got in the way of the emotions.

Part of that, I think, is because the present-day island material with Jin and Sun was so moving that it made the twist seem more gimmicky than it would have when paired with a more plot-driven island story. As with the Sayid episode much earlier in the season, "Ji Yeon" was a reminder of how underused these two great actors and characters have been. Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim may not appear much anymore -- and Daniel Dae may not be appearing much longer, period -- but they have superb chemistry together, and the characters have come so far that Jin's devotion to his wife had real power. These two have been through so much together, done terrible things to each other and for each other, but there can be no doubt that there love is back and very strong.

(And good on the writers for using fellow married guy Bernard to bring Jin around and make him realize this was karma for the man he used to be, not the man he is now. Bernard rules -- between the fishing expedition and the Hurley cannonball scene, he's got the golden touch of late for classic "Lost" moments.)

Also gimmicky -- and not offset by any tear-jerking declarations of eternal love and devotion -- was the long-awaited introduction of Michael (aka former Phoenix Suns point guard Kevin Johnson) as Ben's man on the boat. If there's a "Lost" fan who hadn't guessed that it would be Michael -- and hadn't guessed that three or four episodes ago -- I'd be stunned. Now, Cuse and Lindelof brought this on themselves by announcing Harold Perrineau's return back at Comic-Con, but they've also had him in the opening titles for every episode this season, allegedly for contractual reasons, so this may be an instance where they wanted to keep things a surprise but knew they couldn't. In that case, though, they should have structured things differently -- should have known that their fans are smart and obsessive and found a way to re-introduce Michael several episodes ago, even if it was just a glimpse of him on the freighter moments after Ben discussed having a spy there. Trying to turn his intro into a shocking, full string orchestra-worthy moment didn't work, because we all knew it was coming.

Still, the freighter scenes were far from a total loss, given our introduction to the "surprisingly forthcoming" (especially for this show!) freighter captain. Of course, the captain (and the show) could afford to be forthcoming with information we already knew (notably that it's Penny's father's boat), but now Sayid and Desmond are in the loop, and there are more signs that something besides time travel sickness is amiss with this crew. (At first, I was annoyed that they brought in Zoe Bell for her to talk on the phone for several episodes and then jump in the ocean minutes after we first saw her, but I have to think we'll see her again whenever we get the inevitable Michael flashback about what he's been up to.)

So, to sum up before the bullet points, not as brilliant an all-around episode as "The Constant" or some of the season's earliest episodes, but some great performances and moving moments for two of the show's underrated players, and enough hints about the bigger picture to satisfy me. Moving on:

• Hurley in a suit! Did not expect to see that. Very interesting that he would be the only one of the Six to show up to see the baby. Obviously, Kate can't leave the country, and we don't know how quickly post-rescue that Sayid became a globe-trotting assassin, but you would at least assume Jack could drag his annoying self across the Pacific to see the kid. Perhaps a rift between him and Sun?
  
• Does this definitively establish Aaron as the last of the Six? The ads said the episode would tell us who the rest of the six were -- another way we were set up to believe Jin survived -- so I'm assuming the group is Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Aaron?
  
• I loved how Sun refused to trust Juliet. We know that Juliet's absolutely telling the truth about this, but it's about time someone among the Lostaways finally got fed up with the constant obfuscation and half-truths coming from Jack's new squeeze.
  
• Was the TV show that Sun turned off before feeling her labor pains supposed to be a dubbed-into-Korean version of that thing Nikki was on?
  

What did everybody else think?

Lost: Goodwin some, lose some

Spoilers for "The Other Woman," the latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I fold my laundry...

Almost anything was bound to be a letdown after last week's time-bending love epic, and while "The Other Woman" wasn't the weakest episode of '08 (that remains Kate's episode), a number of season three-era problems crept in for the first time this season.

Start with the flashback story. I don't mind alternating Oceanic Six flashforwards with flashbacks for the newer characters who aren't so played-out that we're finding out the origins of their nose jobs. But they need to tell us something new about either the overall story arc or the character, preferably both, and Juliet's flashback told us neither. Outside the introduction of Goodwin's unpleasant wife Harper (played by Andrea Roth from "Rescue Me," who's in danger of being typecast as a shrew whose husband steps out on her), the flashback story offered us absolutely nothing we didn't already know about Juliet, Ben, or Goodwin and his death. Between the season three-opening flashback showing The Others' response to the Oceanic 815 crash, Ben and Juliet's strained relationship throughout that season (past and present) and the revelation in "One of Us" that Juliet and Goodwin were sleeping together, it was beyond obvious that Ben had sent Goodwin to the Tailies' side of the island in the hopes that he might get killed. Why did we need an entire episode on that detail when it's been clear from Juliet's first appearance that Ben is insanely crushing on her? If it was just to set up the big dramatic moment where Jack decides to defy Ben by kissing her, then yawn. The moment where I gave a toss about Jack Shephard's sex life passed a long, long time ago (if it existed at all).

(To go off on a tangent for a moment, one positive about the return of Goodwin and the visit to the site of his death was that it got me to reminisce on one of the few highlights' of Ana-Lucia's tenure on the show: the long, tense conversation she and Goodwin had on the top of the mountain before they had their battle to the death in "The Other 48 Days." I wish it was on YouTube; might have to crack open the season 2 DVD to watch that one again.)

Just as frustrating was how we're back to Jack and Kate being complete imbeciles -- Kate the alleged badass letting Charlotte get in position to cold cock her even though she knew these two were up to no good (Juliet the obstetrician continually makes her look like a wuss), and Jack again following someone blindly in a situation where answers are demanded and letting things go after being told he's better off not knowing. If you're going to devote an entire episode to The Others having an electrical station that doubles as a poison gas plant, the least you can do is explain what the purpose of it is within the Dharma/Others/pirates balance of power on the island.

And yet, in spite of all that, "The Other Woman" wasn't a total waste of time, because it wasn't a sole-focus hour. The problem with "Eggtown" was that if you didn't care about Kate, there wasn't much else there. (Most of the discussion about the episode, not surprisingly, was about the scraps of information we got about the Oceanic Six/Eight, plus the Aaron twist.) This one, on the other hand, gave us a rare B-story (or, if you consider the flashback to the B-story, then a C-story) with Ben once again getting over on Locke over at the bungalow colony. While John is also being an idiot in the grand scheme of things (and is being more destructive than whatever small idiocies Jack and Kate committed), there's at least a thematic consistency to it. Locke is obsessed with protecting the island, and on that his goal and Ben's are intertwined, so I can see how this makes sense in his cracked brain. Plus, any scene with Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn playing off each other is fun (as was the reaction of Sawyer and Hurley to seeing Ben out and about and being domestic). Last week made it plain that Mr. Widmore was behind the freighter, but that was info Locke didn't have yet, and the prospect of the two island zealots teaming up to make things bad for everyone else intrigues me, and I would like to subscribe to its newsletter.

Some other random thoughts on "The Other Woman":

-The opening of the flashback tried to fake us out with the implication that Juliet was one of the Oceanic Six (she feels like a celeb), but of course she couldn't be, because she wasn't on the plane.

-Interesting that Ben, even in captivity, can easily communicate with the rest of The Others, which suggests two things: 1)They're going to come back before the end of the season (preferably with Immortal Richard, now that Nestor Carbonell's commitments to "Cane" would appear to be over); and 2)Ben is, as usual, lying through his teeth when he tells Locke that his people don't want him.

-"You people had therapists?" "It's very stressful being an Other, Jack."

-The "Lost" score is usually impeccable, but I thought this one was overdone in a number of spots, notably when Goodwin stopped by to give Julia his "extra" sandwich. As with the entire flashback story, it was as if the producers didn't trust us to figure this out unless they underlined everything. "See? Ben's up to no good here! Can't you hear all the strings?"

-When Harper says to Juliet, "You look just like her," is she referring to Ben's mom or to Annie, his young friend from the flashbacks in "The Man Behind the Curtain" or to someone else altogether?

-Ben was just bursting with the great one-liners tonight, notably "This didn't have a number, did it?" and "I taped over the game."

What did everybody else think? As mentioned in the post below this one, I had to enable comment moderation for the whole site (it's an all or nothing thing) from now until when "The Wire" finale airs because the finale leaked and people are starting to go around to various sites and "guess" everything that happens in it. Sorry if it slows down the flow of the discussion. I'm going to bed shortly, but please comment, and I'll authorize everything as soon as I wake up in the morning. I know it's a pain.

Lost: The time-traveler's girlfriend

Spoilers for "The Constant," the time-bending latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I find a big battery and some alligator clips...

Time travel stories often make my head hurt, but either I've read/seen too many of them or Cuse and Lindelof did a masterful job of explaining it all, because I feel confident I picked up pretty much everything "Lost" was throwing down tonight.

Something about the combination of radiation (which Dan was exposed to in Oxford) and/or electro-magnetism (which Desmond was exposed to in the hatch) plus a trip on/off the island along the wrong bearing can trigger these Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time episodes. Remember, shortly before Desmond blew up the hatch and began having his time trips, he tried to escape the island in his sailboat and couldn't do it because he didn't have the right co-ordinates. So now he gets even further off the island, and the thunderhead forces Frank to not follow the exact right path, and so the episodes increase and get even worse: instead of 2004 Desmond's consciousness traveling back and forth through time with at least some sense of what the hell is going on, it's now 1996 Desmond in charge and he hasn't got a bloody clue, brother.

Conveniently, Desmond has sat phone access to a physicist with a specialty in time travel in our twitchy friend Faraday (and outstanding job by Jeremy Davies at playing the slightly saner, far more arrogant Oxford version of Dan). Dan '04 has already completed his time travel experiment and is able to use Desmond to help Dan '96 make it work. No doubt after Desmond left looking for Penny to be his "constant," Dan tried using the machine on himself, which is why he's been having all these memory problems of his own -- problems that should be going away now that he's remembered that, just as Penny is Desmond's constant, Desmond is Dan's own.

(God, I hope I explained that well. It made sense to me when I was watching and then writing. I expect this week's comments section to hit record levels.)

I honestly have no idea how much of this episode plays into the series' bigger picture -- I wonder whether the auction scene with Mr. Widmore buying the journal of The Black Rock's first mate is more important than any of the time travel stuff -- but I don't especially care. Remember my old mantra about wanting either a great story or big answers, but not always needing both at the same time? Even if this was just a narrative dead end to explain Desmond's previous time traveling and to put Dan in the proper frame of mind to do whatever terrible thing he's clearly on the island to do, I'm fine with it, because it was brilliantly executed, as both a brain-twister and as a love story.

You'd have to be made of stone to not feel the slightest bit moved by Desmond ('96 and '04 versions both) and Penny '04 declaring their love for each other over the dying satellite phone, played with hearts on sleeves by Henry Ian Cusick and Sonya Walger. (So what if Penny was practically quoting Daniel Day-Lewis' "No matter what occurs, I will find you!" lines from "The Last of the Mohicans"? If you're gonna steal, steal from the good stuff.)

I need to get to bed but want to open up the discussion ASAP, so some other points:

• Geez, so Fisher Stevens gets credited in a whole bunch of episodes and when he actually gets to provide more than a voice, he dies at the end of that show? At this rate, I have no idea when we're actually going to see Harold Perrineau again. And is there any way Michael isn't Ben's spy on the boat?
  
• While the boat may not be Penny's, I feel pretty confident that it's Mr. Widmore's. He's been looking for the island at least since '96 (the auction), he's the one who gets Desmond to sail on that race, and Minkowski has been ordered not to answer Penny's daily calls.
  
• Okay, so The Black Rock goes missing while on a voyage to Siam/Thailand, and somehow the first mate (or, at least, his journal) turns up seven years later in Madagascar? Why am I suddenly seeing visions of Tunisian polar bear skeletons? And how badly do you think Alvar and now Tovard Hanso got teased in elementary school?
  
• What does the freighter's calendar being roughly in sync with what the timeline on the island should be tell you about the results of Dan's rocket experiment with the out of sync watches?
  

What did everybody else think? Genius or gibberish?

Lost: Gone baby gone

Spoilers for "Eggtown," the latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I reorganize my Olivia Newton-John VHS collection...

Behold: the power of the cliffhanger.

Until its closing moments -- its closing seconds, really -- "Eggtown" was the closest thing we've had to a dud so far this season. Sure, certain details got revealed -- the broad outlines of the Oceanic Six lie, the matter of Kate's pregnancy (presumably, she's had her period since the polar bear cage), the wonkiness of the chopper flight out, some more clues that Faraday may not be all there mentally -- but not as many as in the previous episodes. And Kate, whether solo or as part of the love triangle, isn't nearly as compelling a central character as Sayid or Hurley (or some of the freighter people, for that matter). I would have been okay with a Kate spotlight that offered plenty of forward momentum/explanations, or with a spotlight on a richer character in which not a lot happened, but this episode offered neither.

But dammit... "Hi, Aaron." They've got me in their clutches, those manipulative bastards Lindelof and Cuse.

So let's think about this for a minute. If we assume all of Desmond's visions come true -- not a safe assumption, since he thought Naomi was Penny -- then we know Claire and Aaron will get on the helicopter at some point. Presumably, this means Claire dies, and part of the deal regarding the Oceanic Six and their cover story is that Kate got to take Aaron off the island and pretend he was her baby. And, presumably, the six of them (does Aaron count as one of the Six, or are they really the Oceanic Seven?) came up with a lie that made Kate into the hero of their survival to help her with whatever legal issues arose when they got back to the mainland. But I still have no idea how this particular collection of people -- including one who went with Locke (Hurley), the leader of the other side (Jack), the first person to go to the freighter (Sayid) and someone who kept bouncing between the two camps (Kate) -- wound up being the ones to go home, the motives for the lie, etc.

That's a lot to digest in just two words, and enough to make me forgive what had been a relatively dull episode until then.

As I'm off this week -- and as I wasn't that inspired by "Eggtown" -- I'm going to move straight to the bullet points and then open up the discussion to you all:

• "You just totally Scooby-Doo'ed me, didn't you?" Between that line, the clumsy wink and the "Xanadu" viewing, Hurley was a bundle of fun in this one.
  
• I was worrying that Kate would go to all that trouble and then Miles would admit that he had no idea who she was.
  
• While Ben continues to have Locke's number every minute of every day, I loved seeing Locke get over on somebody else with the hand grenade pacifier he gave Miles. I'm assuming it's a dud -- John couldn't risk blowing up a valuable asset -- but it was still damn funny. Also, did you catch that Locke says he's "responsible for the well-being of this island." Not "responsible for these people." "Responsible for the well-being of the island." Not that I trust the freighter people in the least, but Hurley, Sawyer, Claire and all the redshirts would be wise to run far away from the eggman.
  
• On the other hand, why is Locke sleeping in Ben's bed, cooking in his kitchen, etc? I thought he considered all that stuff "cheating." Couldn't he at least camp out in the backyard or something?
  
• Nice to see a return of the backgammon set, which we haven't really seen since early in season one.
  
• I'm told the pop-up video version of the season premiere referred to the woman in Faraday's flashback as his "caretaker," and the three-card monte scene with Charlotte implies he has some memory problems, if not more serious brain injury. If nothing else, it's a good explanation for Jeremy Davies' usual twitchiness.
  
• Who was that Korean couple studying a map on the beach? I feel like I should know them from somewhere, but where? Any ideas?
  

What did everybody else think?

Lost: Sayid agent man

Spoilers for "The Economist," the latest episode of "Lost," coming up just as soon as I get my tux altered...

You know, if this episode had featured nothing but the moment where Sayid pointed out that Jack trying to kill Locke wasn't "good diplomacy" -- the latest instance this season where a character is allowed to question Jack's idiotic leadership skills -- I would have been happy with it. But "The Economist" gave us so much more: a heavy focus on the underrated Sayid (featuring maybe Naveen Andrews' best "Lost" performance to date), Hurley reluctantly going over the cliff with Locke, Faraday's experiment providing more evidence to the "time on the island moves differently" theory, Sayid and Desmond actually getting off the island, and, trippiest of all, the revelation that Flashforward Sayid is working for Ben. The distinctiveness of Michael Emerson's voice meant that this last one was obvious well before we saw Ben's face, but the moment I heard him talk, a chill went down my spine.

Like every other original character, Sayid had run out of flashback-able material, but making him one of the Oceanic Six opens up a world of possibilities for him. Sayid Jarrah, globe-trotting reluctant assassin? Sweet. Sayid Jarrah, reluctant instrument of violence for Benjamin Linus? What what what? Sayid Jarrah, lovestruck sucker who's still badass enough to kill the woman who done him wrong even with a bullet in his shoulder? Splendid work by Mr. Andrews.

So who exactly is Sayid killing on behalf of Ben, and why? In the final scene, Ben suggests Sayid wound up working for him after "the last time you thought with your heart instead of your gun" and implies that Sayid is doing this to protect his friends. Are those friends the other members of the Oceanic Six, or the people left behind on the island? Are the people on the list working with Matthew Abaddon in trying to find the island? (And, if so, how did golf course guy not immediately recognize Sayid?) And how exactly does Ben get on and off the island all the time? The photo Miles had last week looked like it was taken in the real world, and the secret closet Sayid found, full of snazzy civilian clothes, foreign currency and phony passports, suggests he comes and goes to the real world as he pleases, submarine or no submarine. I can't imagine him being considered one of the Oceanic Six -- he wasn't on the flight, after all -- so I'm assuming he gets off the island without being rescued.

In the present-day island action, Sayid again provides evidence for why he'd be a much better leader than Jack. He comes up with a plan and executes it, even after getting captured and disarmed by Locke. I'm really hoping that we spend some significant time on the freighter with Sayid, Desmond (whose joy at seeing the helicopter with Juliet was one of the episode's nicest little grace notes) and the mysterious Regina and George.

I also love how Ben totally has Locke's number ("John's loking for somebody to tell him what to do next"), though the matter of why they don't just kill or, at least, torture Ben is still a problem. (Maybe Locke had a point about not wanting to carry the guy, but why couldn't they start removing fingers instead of toes? Or, for that matter, why not take advantage of Sayid's presence to try to get some answers? Or am I forgetting Sayid trying and failing to get anything useful out of Ben back in the Henry Gale days?)

And I'll admit that I totally fell for the Hurley bluff -- even though, in retrospect, Hurley probably needs to stick with Locke through much worse than we've seen so far before he'll have something to apologize to Jack about in the future. It helped that Hurley was overflowing with genius one-liners, whether it was "Oh, awesome. The ship sent us another Sawyer." or "Yeah, I saw you break that guy's neck with that breakdancing thing you do with your legs. I think I'll hang back here."

Hell, I'm feeling so favorably inclined towards the show these days that I even enjoyed the love triangle-y scenes. The problem with the polar bear cage arc wasn't that it dealt with the triangle; it was that it dealt with the triangle to the exclusion of everything else about the show. Evangeline Lily and Josh Holloway have real chemistry, and the "Now you know what it feels like to be me" scene with Jack and Kate was both an amusing moment and the latest callback to events from seasons past. The writers' eagerness to reference old events this season isn't just a wink to continuity nerds; it gives greater emotional weight to these people and their experience together, so that when they're separated, or fighting against each other, or -- in the case of Sayid and Desmond's long helicopter ride -- getting off the island, the impact is much greater.

So, bullet point-y questions:

• How is Ben getting on and off the island? Does it involve climbing into the (maybe not so metaphorical) magic box?
• What are the ramifications of Faraday's experiment? If time moves more slowly on the island, how would it ever be possible to have a real-time sat phone conversation with someone on the freighter?
  
• Was Jacob's cabin absent because it only appears at night, or because it wouldn't appear before that many people?
• Do you think The Economist is someone we already know? If so, what pre-existing character would be so attached to old technology that he would use a pager?
• Was Elsa's bracelet supposed to be the same as Naomi's? And do we think the "RG" on the inscription of Naomi's bracelet is someone we know?
• Now that Miles is a prisoner of the Locke group, will the inevitable Miles/Sawyer meeting create enough sarcasm to make Professor Frink's sarcasm detector go nuclear?

Finally, a couple of housekeeping notes. First, in case you missed the news, ABC has decided to condense this season from 16 episodes to 13 so that it doesn't run past May sweeps. (Never mind that the concept of sweeps, and even of a September-May TV season, is outdated.) Cuse and Lindelof have said that they still intend to provide all the answers in these 13 that they would have in the original 16 episode plan, and that the remaining three episodes (plus whatever material they feel they can safely cut from them) will be folded into the final two seasons somehow.

Second, I'm going on vacation next week, and while I don't intend to blog very much (primarily "The Wire"), I'll try my best to at least check in briefly on next week's "Lost" episode. With only 13 episodes this season -- and with the first three being this much fun -- I don't want to miss out on too much discussion.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Confirmed Dead": Who you gonna call? Miles!

Spoilers for the second episode of "Lost" season four coming up just as soon as I get an exact measurement on Taller Ghost Walt...

From the Department of You Can't Please Everybody, there were some complaints last week that "Beginning of the End" didn't offer as much in the way of forward advancement as I had promised in my review. Others have made the counter-argument better than I can in my hacking cough-addled state, but I would hope that "Confirmed Dead" would quiet some of those complaints. Because after an underwhelming pre-credits sequence (which I'll get back to), this sucker moved, and lots of things happened. We met our four new regulars, squeezed in useful flashbacks about three of them (and maybe four; again, we'll get to the Dan flashback shortly) and even found out the real reason they're on the island. "Lost" season three would have probably spent four episodes just introducing each freighter person, then a fifth (and possibly a sixth) on them getting Miles to say that they're after Ben.

(The flipside of all this business is that "Confirmed Dead" didn't have the same emotional resonance as "Beginning of the End" -- nothing was remotely as moving as the Hurley cannonball scene -- but you clearly can't have everything in every episode.)

Of our four newbies, Miles the dustbusting ghostbuster is easily my favorite, and not just because I thought actor Ken Leung was so good in his "Sopranos" episode as Junior's mental hospital sidekick. The show has long since abandoned any pretense that it might not be science fiction, so why not throw in a medium to go along with the time traveler, the smoke monster, the magic box, the invisible guy in the rocking chair, etc.? Plus, I love the sarcastic energy he brings. Sawyer and Ben can't be the only ones getting the good one-liners now.

As for the others, I'll always have a soft spot for Jeff Fahey as Frank the pilot, both for being in "Silverado" and for starring in the underrated '90s cop show "The Marshall." The surviving members of the freighter team are all damaged goods in some way (Lindelof the comic book fan borrowing, I'd guess, from The Losers, or maybe the '60s version of the Suicide Squad), and being the man who should've been flying Oceanic 815 on that fateful run makes Frank the most obviously damaged.

I'm reserving judgment on Charlotte, as I feel Rebecca Mader didn't get a ton to do but I've liked her in other things, and I really liked Jeremy Davies' nervous enthusiasm as Dan. I just wish they had come up with a more interesting way to show his flashbacks at the start of the episode. Other than the fact that news of the crash upset Dan for reasons he couldn't understand (or maybe was afraid to explain), we learned nothing there that we hadn't already figured out at the end of the previous episode. Usually, the final beat before the main titles is a lot more surprising than seeing last week's climactic moment from a different angle.

So should we start our rampant speculations about why they're there for Ben? Assuming Frank is really just there to fly the chopper, what kind of mission would require a medium, a physicist, an archaeologist (or anthropologist; I didn't catch exactly what Charlotte's specialty) and some kind of special forces bad ass to complete? And involving gas masks? Is this just Dharma Initiative revenge for their massacre at the hands of Ben and "the hostiles"? (That also involved gas.) If so, why not send in a team of killers? (Abaddon says that Naomi was the key to the whole mission, so how badly will things go with her dead?) Where the hell is Ben in that surveillance photo, and is anyone else surprised by the idea that he's left the island as an adult?

Meanwhile, who's Ben's man on the ship? Since the return of Michael was one of the producer-announced developments for this season, should we assume it's him? (Or are the publicity photos of Harold Perrineau on the island a feint, and we'll only see Michael in the flash forwards?) There's clearly something happening on that ship, based on Miles' inability to get George on the phone; has Ben's agent already started causing trouble?

The writers need to be really careful with Ben going forward. As Sawyer points out in this episode, they should have put a bullet between his eyes as soon as they took custody of him, because any information he can give them about the island is vastly outweighed by the many ways in which he can and will try to kill them all. (Remember the episode late last year where it looked like Locke had complete control of the situation only to get shot and dumped in a mass grave?) Ben knowing who the freighter people are will be useful to a point, but I worry about this turning into a middle-period Spike on "Buffy" situation, where the actor is so good and the character so popular that he's kept alive even though it makes all the heroes look like idiots.

Because the episode was so busy, I'm moving straight to the bullet points:

• Sayid and Juliet ambushing a cocky Miles was a nice homage to when Tom ordered the lighting of the torches to convince an overconfident Jack he was surrounded back in "The Hunting Party." (Side question: other than xenophobia, why isn't Sayid the leader? If there's a guy on the island other than Hurley I'd trust to make the smart move -- and, in combat situations, someone I'd trust much more -- it's Sayid.)
  
• Locke asking Ben what the monster is was a hilarious meta moment in the middle of an otherwise tense climactic scene. In that moment, Locke was every fan who has ever been frustrated with Cuse and Lindelof's refusal to answer the big questions, and Ben was one of the producers waving a shiny new mystery in our faces to distract us from the way he didn't answer the original one.
  
• Also amusingly meta -- and necessary -- was all the Sawyer/Locke back and forth about Taller Ghost Walt. One of those things where it was so blindingly obvious that the show had to address it in some way.
  
• Turns out the island's healing powers didn't have to do a whole lot for Locke, as he was conveniently shot right where the kidney the original Sawyer conned him out of.
• Now, did the polar bear skeleton with the Dharma collar mean that their people have also been working in Tunisia? Or is the fossilized nature of the thing another time travel clue?
• Was the spot where Miles' chute landed the same place where Desmond beat Clancy Brown to death?
• How many times now has Locke predicted, to the second, when an island rainstorm will end? Always a neat parlor trick.
  

I suspect ABC won't be sending out any other episodes in advance, and I'm still trying to figure out how to approach blogging the remaining six (or hopefully more) episodes of the season. Last year I was not into the show enough that most of my blog entries could be written quick and dirty and posted not long after the episodes ended. If this season continues to be this good -- and dense -- I want to be able to take my time, but I also know that people are gung ho to start commenting right away. I'm open to suggestions; would people prefer something fast or something slower but more elaborate?

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "The Beginning of the End": Cannonball!

Spoilers for the "Lost" season premiere coming up just as soon as I work on my jump shot...

"I don't think we did the right thing, Jack. I think it wants us to come back, and it's going to do everything it can..."

What. The. Hell. Is going on here? And why am I so happy right now?

Okay, well the second answer's obvious. I'm happy because that episode both rocked and rolled (and may have rapped at one point, too).

And the first question relates to the second. I'm also happy because, between "Through the Looking Glass" and now "Beginning of the End," I care again not only about the "Lost" characters, but about the mysteries. Lindelof and Cuse have sucked me back in. I'm racking my brain, trying to remember whether Dave ever seemed to touch Hurley or not (which applies to the appearance of "Charlie," about which I'll get back to). I genuinely care about the identities of the other half of the Oceanic Six. For cryin' out loud, I put my screener DVD into three different computers to try to make screen captures of a few shots in Jacob's cabin (a profile of Jacob in the rocking chair, and the face in the window) and got suitably freaked out when the disc would always freeze up at the exact moment Hurley arrived at the cabin, even though the scene played just fine in a standard DVD player. (It's like the disc didn't want me to properly analyze it! Okay. Now I'm just nuts.)

Considering the number of times over the years where I've called those producers con man playing a very expensive game of three-card monte, I suppose that makes me a sucker. But if so, I'm a very happy sucker, because the show was once again so bloody entertaining that I don't really care if I'm getting played once again. Make 'em this good, and I'd be okay with the final episode of the series revealing that the entire island was a dream that Hurley had while waiting for his onion rings at a Jersey ice cream parlor.

And speaking of Hurley, he's at the top of my list of reasons why the start of this season feels so much stronger than the same period last season. I got into a lot of this in today's column, but now I can expand on it with some episode-specific material.

Last year, we started off with bullying, obnoxious, stubborn to a lethal fault Jack, whose refusal to do the sensible thing at every single turn symbolized a season in which too little happened for far too long. Now we open with a spotlight on Hurley, the closest thing the show has to a fan surrogate. He's the guy who asks the right questions (even if he doesn't always get answers to them), cares about people's feelings, etc., etc. And not only was it a Hurley spotlight, it was an episode in which he and Jack are at cross-purposes, and in which Hurley, up until the final scene in the mental hospital gym (and maybe even there) is depicted as right about virtually everything while Jack keeps being wrong about everything.

Jack refuses to heed any warnings about the freighter, refuses to listen to Kate's concerns about where Naomi got to or the false blood trail, refuses to stray even one iota from the path he set for himself late last season. Hurley, meanwhile, believes Charlie's message (and is also the only guy on the beach who thinks to ask Desmond what happened to ol' Hoodie), throws the walkie-talkie in the ocean so everyone will stop bickering and start moving, recognizes that it's his place to tell Claire about Charlie, and convinces at least some people that Jack might be leading them to their death. (If he wasn't throwing in with Locke, he probably would have gotten even more converts, as Rose made clear when she refused to go with "that man.") And I don't think it's a coincidence that in the basketball scene, Hurley makes every shot while Jack keeps missing.

Now, Hurley's apology to Jack about going with Locke could undercut that, and maybe I'm being just as obstinate as Jack in refusing to acknowledge that. But I think there's a difference between being wrong about going with Locke (selfish, destructive island zealot) and being wrong about steering clear of the people on the freighter. It's very possible that what Hurley's saying is that he should have stayed with Jack and tried to convince him that the freighter people were bad. But I guess we'll find out down the road.

Before we get to analyzing the various questions raised by this episode, some other things that I felt "Beginning of the End" got so very, very right:

• The coincidences are used as more than coincidences. I got bored with playing that game where you try to figure out whether certain guest stars had appeared in previous characters' flashbacks, but when Ana-Lucia's ex-partner Mike turned up as Hurley's interrogator, it was to serve a bigger purpose. When he asks Hurley about Ana-Lucia and Hurley denies ever knowing her, that makes it clear just how much the Oceanic Six have been lying to the world about what happened on the island.
  
• They focused on the emotions of the moment. Hurley and Bernard's conversation on the beach about the lottery, bad luck and cannonballing goes high on my list of favorite "Lost" scenes ever. It was just a beautiful mixture of joy, wistfulness, humor and (because we know that Hurley's about to find out Charlie's dead, and that Hurley is going to be very unhappy after he's "rescued") ironic regret. They also didn't gloss over anybody's response to Charlie's death, and the return of the Oceanic 815 cockpit (is this the first time we've seen it since the pilot?) was a lovely reminder of how much everyone, including Charlie, has been through. Sawyer got to have a nice moment (for Sawyer) where he offered to hang back with Hurley on the walk, and they were even willing to take Jack to a place where he tried to shoot Locke in the face (and would have succeeded if the gun was still loaded).
  
• They got almost everyone involved. Some people got shorter shrift than others (notably, as usual, Jin and Sun), but everybody got a little bit of face time, as opposed to those early episodes last year that were about nothing but Jack, Kate, Sawyer and The Others. In addition, the episode did a good job of hitting or mentioning as many island landmarks as possible: the beach, the cockpit, the radio tower, Jacob's cabin and The Others' compound. It feels like everyone and everything are connected again, which, even if there still isn't a master plan, creates the illusion of one.
  
• The flashforwards are a vast improvement over the flashbacks. This was already obvious with "Through the Looking Glass," and it continues to be the case here. The flashbacks (save for characters when they're brand-new to the show) had long since stopped offering anything illuminating, and were all about adhering to a formula and slowing down the pace of the present-day storytelling. The flashforwards, on the other hand, add a whole new layer to the mysteries, and to the plotting, and I look forward to seeing how events on the island fulfill things we've seen in the future. The producers aren't completely done with flashbacks (we're going to get some backstory on some of the freighter people, and I imagine there's lots more to be told about Ben's time on the island), but now they'll be used when they're necessary, and not just as a stylistic crutch.
  

There's more I could talk about -- Jack's wink at Ben, Ben's hilarious "Tell them she's getting a really big bundle of firewood," Sayid calling out Locke for blowing up the sub -- but I think most of us can agree about the level of awesome and the reasons for it, so let's move on to some specific questions raised by the episode:

• Who the hell are the Oceanic Six? Other than Jack, Kate and Hurley, I mean. Unless the producers plan to do nothing but flashforwards for those three characters, we're eventually going to have to find out who the other three are. Based on Hurley's presence in the group, we can't even rule out the people who went with Locke -- or even Locke himself, for that matter, though I can't imagine him agreeing to leave the island, let alone going along with whatever lie the Six cooked up about themselves and the fates of those left behind. And why are they lying? (Also, while Jack's line about growing a beard establishes this flashforward as taking place before the one in "Looking Glass," I think we can rule out Hurley as the guy in the coffin. It was a very average-sized coffin, and people liked Hurley too much for his funeral to be unattended.)
  
• Who are "they" and what is "it"? I'm assuming that "they" (referenced by Charlie, Hurley and Matthew Abbadon, the alleged Oceanic representative played by Lance Reddick from "The Wire") are the surviving lostaways who for some reason couldn't/didn't join the Six in their return to civilization. Is "it" (see the quote at the top of this post) the island, the monster, or something else? Are we supposed to think that the island has sentience? And speaking of Mr. Abbadon...
  
• Who the hell is Matthew Abbadon? Wikipedia says that "Abadon" is "chief of the demons of the seventh hierarchy." If he doesn't represent Oceanic, who does he represent, and why does he care so much about the whereabouts of the other lostaways?
• Charlie: ghost, figment or something else? Again, can someone tell me whether Dave ever physically touched Hurley, either in the mental hospital or on the island? When you're dealing with a character with a history of hallucinations, on a show where characters either return from the dead or appear to, who's to say what's real and what isn't? Charlie could somehow actually be alive, making his getaway while Hurley had his eyes screwed shut (in much the way Abbadon bailed from the game room while Hurley was yelling for the orderlies), but I'm thinking he's gone on to his reward.
  
• Who's the other guy in Jacob's cabin? Like I said, I tried and failed to make screencaps of this scene. On my 42-inch TV, Jacob didn't look exactly like I remembered him from the captures that the Lost Easter Eggs blog did last season. And since Jacob was in his rocking chair the whole time, who the hell was looking out at Hurley? Easter Eggs also did a capture of a random close-up of someone's eye during that earlier scene, but the lighting makes it hard to tell if it's the same one in the window here. I don't think it's Locke, and we know the whereabouts of everyone else, so who?
  

One final note: for those who want to hear me talk even more about the premiere (and maybe hint at next week's episode), I'll be on NPR's "The Bryant Park Project" tomorrow morning at 7:50 a.m. Eastern. (If you're not up that early, each episode's available as a podcast.)

What did everybody else think?