Mad Men - "Person to Person" (7x14)

For the past five years or so, Mad Men has been by far my favorite show on TV, and a real inspiration for the kind of work I want to create. I love the casual surrealism of the world and the winding, almost short story quality of many of its episodes. It really picked up where The Sopranos left off in terms of telling riveting stories about quest for meaning in everyday life. And, for all the joy you can get from a densely plotted roller coaster ride of a show like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, it's ultimately the mysterious and philosophical wonder of this show that inspires me and lingers in my brain.

The finale was perhaps a bit too generous in giving the audience/characters what they wanted for really the first time in the show's run. It's great that Joan got to open her own company, but not necessarily true to the story we've seen over the past few years, which stacked on top of Peggy getting together with Stan and the great breaks for Pete felt a bit too fairy tale.

But, to me the heart of the show was always Don, and his impact on the two most important people in his life: Peggy and Sally. They could see him at his best and inspire him, and also suffer in the wake of his worst impulses. Sally was able to grow up and accept hardship and struggle at a young age whereas it took Don his entire life to reach that point. Both Sally and Peggy have taken the best of what Don had to offer and grown up and seem like, despite struggles ahead, they'll be okay. I actually like the Sally resolution much more than the other story lines because it shows her growth without feeling like a happy button on the story.

And just like The Sopranos, we're left with a final moment that leaves you a bit unsettled and full of mystery to ponder. Did Don return to advertising, and turn his experience on the road into grist for a new campaign? Or has Don found legitimate peace off in the wilderness, only by leaving an advertising machine that substitutes the desire for a product for genuine human experience?

Ultimately, the finale offers a fascinating portrait of the 60s counterculture becoming just as commodified and false as the 50s nuclear family that dominated advertising at the show's start. For all the changes that happened, advertising is still the vampire that turns something real into a way to make money.

It's a mix of cynicism and wonder like I've never seen before, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around what it all means. To me, the end of Mad Men marks the end of the TV revolution that The Sopranos started, when TV became a place for winding character-centric narratives that explored the world we live in and the human condition in a depth that no films had attempted. Shows like Mad Men, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos all pondered the meaning of life in a way that has been a massive inspiration.

And just as the movie business left behind the auteur driven experimental filmmaking of the 70s for the (frequently great) blockbusters of the 80s, so too is the TV business moving towards bigger and bigger storytelling and "13 hour movies." But, I think something is lost in trying to tell a "13 hour movie," and that's the amazing variety and unpredictability of Mad Men. Every episode offered something confounding and thought provoking, and I don't know that we'll ever see anything quite like it again.

Best of 2010: TV

10. Breaking Bad

Here's a show that is beyond a lot of others on the list in terms of visual artistry and narrative intensity, it's a show I feel like I should absolutely love, but still hasn't one hundred percent clicked for me. I always enjoy it when I'm watching it, but, despite having had the episodes on DVR since they aired, I still haven't finished the third season. I'm getting there, and I'm sure in the next couple of months I'll wrap it up, but I just didn't feel that need to see what happens next that you feel on a truly great series. So, Breaking Bad remains a show I really respect, but don't outright love.

9. Doctor Who

This year of Doctor Who got a lot of great press, but didn't hit me as hard as any of the Davies years. I think part of it is the feeling that, despite some continuity with the previous version, this is basically a reboot of the franchise, and I feel like it's too soon for a reboot that hits a lot of the same beats as Davies did over the course of his run. To me, it feels like Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run, perfectly solid on its own terms, but unable to shake the feeling that I didn't really need anything else after Grant Morrison finished his run. There's some really fun stories here, but it doesn't feel essential or 'real' to me in the way that Davies' run did. But, it's still a great show, and I'm excited to see where it goes next year.

8. Lost

A show that made more terrible creative choices than any other show on the list, but also the show that I was more engrossed in than anything else on here. Frustrating as it was, it was also really exciting to be part of the excitement surrounding the final season. As a standalone entity, this season was poorly plotted and not great, but as an experience, it was a lot of fun, and did have a few satisfying moments along the way.

7. Bored to Death

A bit more lightweight than most of the shows on the list, Bored to Death works thanks to the charm of its ensemble and the investment in the small scale mysteries that drive the show from week to week. It does a great job of telling small scale noir stories that intersect nicely with relatable plot arcs for the main group. Few shows were as outright fun as this one on a week to week basis.

6. Treme

Once you accept that this is not The Wire 2, you can appreciate Treme on its own terms as a slice of life verite journey through the world of post Katrina New Orleans. I'd be happy if we never heard another speech about how no outsiders can appreciate New Orleans, but once the show got past its preachy phrase, there was some really great character work and an enjoyable energy propelling the series. And, visually it's truly astonishing. Getting something to look like it's all just happening and being captured in the moment is not easy, and this show makes you feel like you're there and these are real people. I'm excited to see it develop and continue to come into its own.

5. Community

This year, the show maintained the easygoing humor and sweet natured ensemble interaction of the early episodes, and added huge visual scope (the paintball episode, the stop motion Christmas) and a more intense character focus (the Annie/Jeff stuff in the conspiracy episode, the bar episode), creating a show that somehow manages to soar into freeform flights of fancy one week and be intensely grounded the next. There were a few bumps in early season two, with one two many gimmick episodes in a row, but the last few episodes have been uniformly fantastic, and the ensemble continues to reveal new layers and chemistry in every single combination.

4. Parks and Recreation

The show has been unfortunately absent from TV since May, but looking back on the close of the second season, Parks was TV's funniest show, with one of the deepest comedy benches ever, and a commitment to expanding its universe and creating a world that was simultaneously surreal and consistent and believable. As with Community, the characters could occasionally move towards the absurd, while still maintaining consistency and believability.

3. Eastbound and Down

In it second season, Eastbound pulls off the nearly impossible task of making a comedy sequel that is even more satisfying than the original, pushing Kenny Powers to increasingly dark and disturbing areas, all in an absolutely gorgeous set of episodes. The production on the series was amazing, the Mexico setting providing the opportunity for a whole new level of visual flourish than the series used in its first season. It was extremely funny throughout, but the story worked just as strongly on a dramatic level, and the triumphant return home at the end of the season was a particular emotional highlight. It's simultaneously sophisticated and juvenile, a good place for a comedy to be.

2. Friday Night Lights

It's been amazing to watch Friday Night Lights come back from its second season slump and just get better and better. The fourth season's closing run was full of extremely intense moments, none more than Tim Riggins' increasing maturity, and the realization that he would have to go to prison to keep his brother with his family. The Thanksgiving scene at the end of that season still sticks with me, an amazing capper to the series' best season yet. Season five is still bringing the pieces together, but it looks every bit as strong as four. Still visually majestic, I'll be sad to see the show go.

1. Mad Men

I've been a Mad Men fan since the start, and always felt it was a great show, but this was the season that confirmed Mad Men's place as one of the all time best in TV history, a drama to stand with The Wire and The Sopranos when critics reflect on the golden age of TV. The fourth season broke down the mystique surrounding Don Draper that the show had spent three years reinforcing, while skillfully advancing the story of his two closest analogues, Peggy Olsen and Sally Draper. I love the structural experimentation of the season, the use of voiceover, or the two actor showcase “The Suitcase.” In totally upending the show's status quo, Weiner let the characters grow just as real people do, and offered myriad opportunities for drama and conflict. This is the most ambitious visual art being attempted in any medium, it's synthesizing the best of classical Hollywood, classic European art cinema and more contemporary verite to create something that, though set in the past, feels intensely modern.

An Update!

Sorry for the slacking on blogging. I've been busy wrapping up editing on the Grant film, which you can pre-order from Amazon now. Here's a couple of very quick rundowns of some stuff I've been reading/watching lately...

- Mad Men's current season is the best to date, and has me really excited to see where the show goes in the late 60s, when the culture becomes even more tumultuous. The series' look at identity and existential issues is like nothing else ever attempted on television.

- I've read the first couple of issues of Blackest Night and its Green Lantern tie-in after getting the two hardcovers. I'm really liking it so far, Johns has a lot of flaws, but reminds me of Tarantino to some extent in that he's clearly a huge fan of whatever he's writing about, but also brings some real emotion and life experience to it. I don't care much for the back from the dead gimmick, but it's used in interesting ways, and the story feels huge and epic and tied into the overall universe in a way that Final Crisis never quite did. I'd argue it's because of the close ties with Green Lantern, I always love seeing different pieces of a story wind their way between titles. It's making me wish I had gotten the Green Lantern Corps HC too. That said, the event itself is nowhere near as good as Final Crisis.

- I'm loving the new Arcade Fire album. It took a listen or two to really get into it, but it's definitely the year's best album to date.

- I'm almost through Breaking Bad season two. It took me a really long time to get totally into the show, but the appearance of Saul Goodman brought it all together for me, and I'm going to wrap the season tonight. I still think that it was a mistake to stack up so much misfortune on Walt from the start (i.e. not only does he have cancer, his wife is pregnant, etc.), but the show is definitely coming together and has me hooked in a way it never quite pulled off before. I've got season 3 still on the DVR from when it aired, so I'll be able to watch that straight through as well.

- I'm excited about a bunch of fall season shows, but not sure what's going to jump out. Boardwalk Empire is a definite must watch, I also might check out Nikita, Lone Star and a few others. I'll see what the critical consensus is, then decide which shows to watch.

Lost - 'The End' (6x17)

Let me start off by saying that just because the series finale was somewhere between weak and a total debacle, that doesn't invalidate the greatness of many moments throughout the history of Lost. I wrote up my ten favorite episodes, and the troubles in the finale, and the final season in general, don't invalidate the amazing things about those episodes. But, it also doesn't redeem the many mistakes that this episode makes, both in the final moments and throughout the hour. This is an episode that tries to use emotional moments from the show's past to mask the fact that it essentially abandons the narrative we've been following throughout the entire series.

I said in the first review of this season that the notion of going back to the supposedly 'character based' first season, and “bringing things full circle” doesn't appeal to me at all since the start of the circle was a pretty weak show. And yet, this episode hinges almost entirely on our fond memories of a show that was nowhere near as strong as it came to be. For me, Claire and Kate delivering the baby is an insignificant moment in the show's history, and Claire in general is a character who could walk off frame and not appear for a season without anyone caring. To just show us something we saw before, with flashbacks to remind us what was going on, is like a glorified clip show. Even if there was emotion in that moment, it's not that exciting to see it again.

That said, those reunions did work on an emotional level from time to time, mainly because of Giacchino's score and some canny editing. As you're mourning the loss of Lost the show, even the lamest couplings, like Sayid and Shanon, can gain a bit of emotion. When the characters actually did matter, as in the case of Charlie and Claire, it was great to see them come together again.

And, the episode's strongest scene was Sawyer and Juliet's reunion. That relationship was the emotional core of the series' final season and there was a cathartic pleasure in seeing them reunited. Juliet remains one of the series' strongest characters, and particularly in contrast to non-entity female characters like Kate and Claire, she's a strong, real person. It was a huge mistake to kill her since it took the show's heart away.

The problematic thing about those reunions is that even though they work on an immediate emotional level, they compromise the stakes of the concurrent island storyline. The problem this entire season has been how can people invest in two different versions of a character? When the prime-verse Sawyer has been going for five years, why should we care about alt-verse Sawyer? It's a question the show was never truly able to reconcile, most of the exciting moments in the alt-verse come from either powerhouse acting from the show's best cast members, or the thrill of seeing all the characters gradually coming together. It wasn't from me really caring about what would happen to alt-verse Jack or something like that. The only character who totally worked was Desmond, who was aware of the nature of the universe and acting with agency.

In this episode, the emotional stakes flip and I became more invested in what was going on in the alt-verse. That's partially because all the characters were remembering, tying the two universes together, but it's also because of what Desmond said, that they could all escape to the alt-verse by moving into the light. It implied that the alt-verse was 'real' and the island world was going to cease to exist. By doing that, it did a great job of making the alt-verse work emotionally, but it essentially short cut any emotional impact of the actual on island material. By choosing to reduce the on island story to just action with no emotional beats, it undercut the story that had been in the work for six years, and made for an utterly underwhelming conclusion to such an epic story.

One of the biggest problems with sci-fi stories is that they have no existing set of rules. In certain genre stories people can fly, sometimes people can read minds, sometimes bullets bounce off them. Part of creating a genre show is defining the rules, and though Lost mentioned the rules a lot, it never really established what was going on with the Smoke Monster. So, his death here ultimately feels arbitrary and the character we see here doesn't fit with the more sympathetic character from “Across the Sea.” The Titus Welliver Man in Black from “Ab Aeterno” and “Across the Sea” feelings like a totally different character with different motivations than the Locke version we've seen this year, and our lack of understanding of the island's rules means that his motivations throughout the season make no sense.

Based on this episode, it seems like Locke's plan was wait two thousand years for the right set of circumstances to come along so that he could kill Jacob, kill Jacob, then ask Sawyer to leave the island with him even though he can't leave the island, wait for Desmond to come to him then throw him in a well, decide to kill Desmond but not care enough to follow up, wait for the rest of candidates to come to him, trick them into leaving on a sub and kill them, reveal that killing them doesn't matter and that all he really needed was Desmond, also reveal that he doesn't want to leave the island but instead wants to destroy it, find Desmond again, destroy the island, and then leave on the same boat he had the whole time, irregardless of whether any candidates are alive.

Why didn't he just take Desmond to the cave when he first showed up? Did killing the candidates actually mean anything? Why couldn't he leave the island in the first place? Specifics of the rules, like why he was stuck in Locke's form, are nitpicky, but when your whole season hinges on the idea that Locke wants to kill the candidates so he could leave the island, why reveal at the end that that doesn't matter. This is basic storytelling, and it's a great example of the creators manipulating the “rules” of the island to serve whatever story they come up with, and extend the narrative in a way that doesn't actually add anything to the story. Smoke Locke's plan was so absurdly elaborate, it makes no sense, and we weren't given the understanding of the island's rules that we need to make sense of it.

Similarly, what kind of terrible plotting is it that the hero's big plan to defeat the villain is do exactly what the villain wants and hope that it works out good instead of bad. Maybe it's some kind of science vs. faith riff that evil and good will do the same thing, but good hopes that it will have a positive result and evil a negative, but typically stories benefit from conflict, and it's not too exciting for Jack and Locke to be talking about stuff while doing exactly what Locke wants. I liked the moment where Jack tells Locke that he doesn't deserve to wear Locke's face, but it doesn't make up for a failure on a very basic plotting level.

Similarly, why was Locke all of a sudden vulnerable at the end? Did it have something to do with the light of the island going out? Maybe, but it felt arbitrary and not earned. Why did he not turn into smoke form when fighting Jack? That fight was awesome, but you can't all of a sudden switch up the rules for no apparent reason and have it feel emotionally true. I liked that fight quite a bit on a visceral level, and visually it was epic and amazing, but it didn't feel appropriate to defeat this incarnation of epic evil by shooting him once then kicking him over a cliff.

Now, you may say, you can nitpick any story to death. There's similar plotting illogic in “The Incident,” but it's one of my favorite episodes. When an episode works in general, it's easier to elide weak plotting and focus on the positive. But, when the overall story isn't working, the flaws along the way stick out more and more.

And, the biggest flaw of this episode is abandoning the prime-verse as a space for emotional experience. There's no moment in the series where we mourn for the loss of the real John Locke. This is arguably the show's central character, but by bringing him back in Smoke Monster form, and then in the alt-verse, we never really miss him. The reason that death is emotional is because of its finality. You will never see this person again, their story is over and you have to move on. Normally, Jack's death would be an emotional moment, as would Jack and Kate's final parting, but any emotion felt by Jack and Kate parting on the island is killed by the fact that in the very next scene we see them together in the alt-verse.

The alt-verse seemed to be an attempt to give the viewers what they wanted, to bring back all the old characters who'd died and give us one last moment with them. The thing is, as Joss Whedon once said, you have to give people what they need, not what they want. We may want to see Juliet and Sawyer together again, but it kind of compromises the power of their parting to see them reunited. The same goes for Sun and Jin's death, if you want us to engage in the emotion of them dying, don't show them together and happy two episodes later. It removes any sense of consequence from the narrative if everybody gets a happy ending.

The end of the episode reveals that the entire alt-verse is about people coming to terms with their own death and rediscovering the people they were on the path to a higher plane. You could argue the entire alt-verse is a Mulholland Dr. like passage into death, with iconic moments from the various characters' lives presented in different, reconfigured ways.

My interpretation is that the characters we see in the church have a kind of pooled vision of the world, their own “table” in heaven so to speak, and that they're the only ones who “really exist” in the alt-verse. People like Miles, Charlotte, Pierre Chang, etc. are not really there, they just exist as the memories that people have of them. That makes the most sense to me, but it could also be that they have their own different “tables” in heaven, that's why Desmond tells Eloise that Daniel won't be coming with them.

I don't necessarily have a problem with this conceptually, but it doesn't do anything to redeem to explain the many terrible alt-verse stories we see over the course of the season. I feel like, if the point of these stories was supposed to be the characters coming to terms with and accepting death, you could have told some really powerful allegorical stories before revealing the true nature of the universe in the final episode and tying everything together.

But, in practice, the stories were all over the place, ranging from positive to tragic. You could read it as the characters having to go through the process of awakening and realizing that they're going to die, as in Donnie Darko, but the first ten episodes of the season did not deal with that at all. Technically, they brought the characters together and made them deal with certain traumas, but not in a way that feels any more than arbitrary for the final revelation. I don't think the idea of the alt-verse, in light of what's revealed here, is inherently flawed, but I think as executed, it was a total debacle and structured so as to provide cheap emotional punches in the finale after fifteen episodes of stuff that didn't really work.

And, I think centering so much of the emotion in the alt-verse really deprived the island story of a satisfying resolution. Yes, the people get to leave and that's fine, but we have no idea what really happened to the characters beyond dying. It felt like the mysteries of the island were back burnered, to the point that I wonder why they even developed the Jacob mythology at all. As I said after “Across the Sea,” there's nothing we learned about Jacob this season that really added to our understanding of his mission, it only muddied it. The scenario set up in “The Incident” was so simple and elegant, and this season has convoluted without complexifying it.

The story choices made with the Jacob character, or with Richard in “Ab Aeterno” just don't work. They take epic mysterious characters and reduce them to boring motivations of “my wife died” or “my mom doesn't love me.” And, the problem with Richard is that after that episode he did nothing. He could clearly leave the island when he wanted, so it wasn't a great satisfaction for him to depart here. I suppose there's the beat of him starting to age, but wanting to live. But, I think he's a character who would have been better left dead at the end of season five and remained something of an enigma.

Ben is another character ill served by this season, and his arc this year makes no sense. Last episode he killed Widmore in cold blood and said he was going to kill more people, but that wasn't touched on at all this episode. His arc makes sense if you remove last episode, it's just boring. But, the sudden swerve here doesn't make sense. You could argue that he wanted revenge on Widmore then gave up his killing ways, but that's not how it played last week. Maybe he was tricking Locke, who knows? Why did he wander into the castaways' camp to begin with and pretend to be Henry Gale? Unknown.

The creators love to talk about how the show is really “character centered,” but unfortunately this finale confirms their worst tendency in character creation, the notion that all we are is a product of past traumas/experiences, and we can't grow and change in the present. We watched fifteen episodes of alt-verse stuff just to find out that none of it mattered, it was all a path for people to remember who they really were, go to a church and disappear. That means that anything they do in the present doesn't matter, it's just about finding out who they were. That's all too often the case on the island as well, they assume that developing Richard is showing who he was, not turning him into who he will be. That was the flaw with the flashbacks from the beginning. It should be character development, not character excavation, and this finale is way too much about the latter.

We have no idea how people are resolved in the real world, no moment of reunion between Desmond and Penny, no catharsis for Kate losing Jack, who's apparently her true love. Presumably she lives for many years afterward, but what kind of life? Why would any of these people be happier now than they were before going to the island, or during the flash forward era? Maybe they weren't, maybe that's why they all go to the church and think back to the island years, since they were always unhappy otherwise, but I want to see that, I want to feel the desire to reconnect, I want to miss the characters and have the church be a great catharsis.

It didn't feel that way for me, and the frustrating thing is, I think it could have been amazing conceptually. The beauty of the fifth season for me is the fact that the characters finally seemed to realize that they belonged on the island, that being on the island was better, and the ending reinforces that, but it's a message that's obscured by the whole alt-verse storyline, which I will reiterate does nothing at all and is pointless because it's resolved by all the characters realizing that the world we've spent so much time in is NOT REAL!

I also think it's incredibly reductive to have almost every character be returned to a moment of romantic love, when relationships were never the center of the show. Were Sayid and Shanon soul mates? I don't think so, he wasn't begging the Smoke Monster to go to a world where he could with Shanon. Maybe the whole thing was just Jack's fantasy, who knows, but that detail didn't make much sense.

Ultimately, I wanted the finale to do something a bit more unexpected. There were no real twists until the final moments, everything played out as you'd expect. The Smoke Monster got killed, the characters in the alt-verse remembered who they were and everyone died happily ever after. I wanted to see something crazy and audacious and that just wasn't here. It was sappy at times, emotional at times, but never surprising or particularly exciting. I wanted more.

In the end, the show was always a mixed experience, with two amazing seasons, two seasons that ranged from amazing to terrible and two weak seasons. This was one of the weak ones, and to be honest, I think the show would have been better off with it never existing. But, what happened happened and at least we got the great moment of Jack being weirdly electrocuted in the island bathtub cave. That was one to remember.

Lost - 'The End' (6x17) Placeholder

It had a few moments, but on the whole, one of the weakest finales of a sometimes great show I've ever seen. Full review tomorrow!

Lost - 'What They Died For' (6x16)

Tonight's Lost was definitely one of the better episodes of the season, and particularly during the opening sequences with Ben and Widmore, I was reminded of the show at its peak, with all kinds of machinations and scheming from two of the show's most exciting characters. After that, it was a mix of mythology payoffs and frustratingly slow moving alt-verse stuff that made for a great episode, but one whose schizophrenic intensities made it hard to build momentum going into the finale.

Let me start off with what I felt didn't work, specifically, once again, the juxtaposition of the alt-verse story with the island stuff. In the season's most consistently exciting episode, “The Last Recruit,” there was a great sense of momentum as all the Oceanic survivors came together in chaotic situations, mirroring the intense island action. Here, even though the survivors were still coming together, the intensity wasn't there. The primary reason for that is that we still, one episode from the end of the series, don't understand the stakes of the alt-verse story.

It's clear that Desmond is bringing all the characters together for a reason, but nobody except for Desmond, and now Hurley, has any agency in the story. It's always exciting to see Desmond in the alt-verse because he's doing something. The others are just being manipulated into certain situations. For a show that is supposedly “character-centered,” it makes no sense to have all your characters having no agency whatsoever to keep a mystery alive. That's what the terribly misguided alt-verse structure has done, and it's not only made for weak scenes on its own, it totally undercuts the feeling that everything on the island is coming together to a close. Even if you're totally engaged with both stories, they don't compliment each other.

It's implied during most of the season that Smoke Locke leaving the island creates the alt-verse, so presumably the characters in the alt-verse must come together to defeat him. But, if him leaving the island is so bad, why is the alt-verse not that bad? The Desmond episode implies that the world there is false in some way, devoid of real love, but this episode has a lot of warm, sweet moments. So, how are we supposed to feel about that? If they're going to fight to destroy this world, are we seeing scenes like Ben's just to make us feel bittersweet about that world being destroyed, or perhaps sad at seeing who Ben could have been? But, in a world without love, why would Ben be a better person than in the main verse?

These are interesting questions, but they're ones that preclude being really engaged with the story. I did love a few of the alt-verse scenes this week. The Ben and Danielle scene is really powerful, particularly when juxtaposed with the killer Ben we see on the island. But, what does it mean in the overall context of things? That's key to adding that extra layer of meaning beyond just what is inherent in the scene itself.

The best scene in the alt-verse was Locke finally going to Jack to get “fixed.” We witness Locke going through the same journey he went through on island, going from a skeptic to believer and in the finale, we'll probably see him walk and become like the Locke we saw on the island at the beginning of the series.

Presuming that the alt-verse was created by Locke escaping the island, I feel like it would have been much better to play the first fifteen episodes of the season out without any alt-verse, have Locke escape, then do two full episodes of alt-verse and compress the stories we saw across the season into one episode. Generally speaking all those stories were based around surprise at seeing how things were different, so compressing them only makes them stronger. Then, we'd presumably return to the island proper in the final episode.

The big question then is how does the detonation of the nuke relate to the alt-verse. The whole nuke story has gone unmentioned for a long time, but it's still presumably related to the creation of the alt-verse. I had assumed that the alt-verse was a result of the island being destroyed in the 70s, leading to the different world we see, but if that's the case, then why did Ben Linus and Pierre Chang survive the detonation of a hydrogen bomb? Did the bomb ever actually go off? This is all hazy stuff that's a pretty big logical gap in the series, and hopefully it'll be addressed next week.

The island story has a bunch of interesting developments, including the return of a character who's been missing from the series for nearly two seasons, Ben Linus! After being neutered and sidelined for much of the past two years, he's back on the forefront, with the same ambitious scheming that made him the series' driving engine for much of its run. While I love some of the Ben material from last season, his character has generally been getting dragged around by various groups for two seasons. I always loved when he was on his own and had tricks up his sleeve, so it was great to see his mysterious closet back, and to see him in control.

The beauty of the character in season two was that he was always in control, even when he was imprisoned in the hatch. In season six, there was a briefly touched on redemption arc, but that never really went anywhere, so now we've got a Ben working to take control of the island again, or at least I'm guessing that's what's happening, it could be a double cross. Either way, there's not much island to take over considering everybody on it has seemingly been killed.

I love Widmore and Ben because they allude to a much larger world, a far reaching struggle that is different from the somewhat limited world that our main castaways inhabit. I love how they go on and off island, and I love the spy movie feel of their interactions. The big difference between them and the castaways is that Ben or Widmore always have agency, they always are after something and they actually do things. That makes for better drama than people being confused and not asking questions.

So, even though this side of the story doesn't really reveal anything. It's already implied that Desmond was a “last resort,” but the scenes work because of the wonderful shock and catharsis of Ben shooting Widmore, and taking control of his own destiny. The callback to Alex works, and resolves the cliffhanger from way back in “The Shape of Things to Come.” Why do the rules no longer apply? Who knows, but I don't really care since the scene works. The whole scene had me wishing that this had happened earlier to give the show's two best actors more chances to play off each other.

Who else does Ben want to kill? That's an unknown at this point. Is he going to try and kill Jack, who's tried to usurp his role as island protector? Perhaps he's going to kill Richard for withholding Jacob from him for all these years. Either possibility is interesting, and it's great to have Ben back in the mix.

Though Richard was taken out by the Smoke Monster, I'm assuming that he'll play a part in the finale, as will Miles who conspicuously ran wildly out into the woods. That's another character who finally got some good material and killed it. Claire is also out there, so there's a lot of last minute rescue possibilities. Perhaps she's already teamed up with Desmond?

The other big development is Jack accepting the role of Jacob. This is something I predicted a while back, and flows logically out of the character development we've seen for him this year. He's stepped into the role that Locke had claimed for himself and come around to believe in the power of the island. I like the callbacks to the wine ceremony from last episode, though this entire episode has me feeling like last week's episode didn't really add anything we didn't see explained here more concisely.

That said, I wouldn't be totally shocked to see a left field Jacob turn from Hurley who notably mentioned how relieved he was to not be Jacob. The stakes are in place for the final battle, the protectors of the island versus the Smoke Monster who's trying to destroy it. It's taken a while to get here, but it seems like a nice setup for the finale.

That said, there's still a lot of questions about the series in retrospect with the decision to make the Smoke Monster's motivation be leaving the island. I preferred the idea of him and Jacob as embodiments of good and evil, and Jacob using the island as an experiment to see if people could not destroy themselves and be good. If the light at the heart of the island is human goodness, wouldn't all these failed experiments indicate that we already live in a bad world?

It's a very Christian feel, as Jacob struggles to atone for an original sin that unleashed this great evil force. It pollutes the world, and now they're fighting to keep that sin bottled up so that the world is not corrupted. This is a logical thematic thing, and fits with what we've seen on the series to date. The idea is presumably that no love exists in the alt-verse because the Smoke Monster escaped the island and the light went out. That's why all the glimpses of the prime-verse are colored in that glowy yellow shade.

We also find out that the people were chosen to come to the island because they were alone before. That explains to some extent why the flashbacks were used in the earlier seasons, and why they were all so depressingly similar. That said, I don't think we needed to see that stuff to understand it, we could already see it from the way the people behaved on the island. It seems to be up to our characters now to end the cycle of violence and destroy the Smoke Monster, using Desmond's powers somehow.

The notion of this cycle existing far before Jacob pushed his brother into the cave complicates things a bit. Did the evil they're trying to stop begin in that moment, or was it always present in the island, along with the good? Is that why the temple water infects people, and why Jacob's adopted Mother killed his birth mother. That would make sense, that the source of darkness is the same as the source of the light. It's all hard to reconcile, and I feel like it makes a lot more sense if Jacob is even older than is alluded to here. Is Jack destined to destroy his “brother,” perhaps Sawyer, to keep the cycle going.

There's a lot of questions, and the alt-verse really complicates it all. Let's hope it all resolves itself in a satisfying way with the finale. This was a really strong episode in a lot of ways, and has me excited for the finale. I think a really strong end is within reach, but it's going to require a quicker pace and the creators to finally stop messing, and resolve this alt-verse stuff on an intellectual level so we can feel it on an emotional level. I'm eager to see it all come together at the concert and perhaps see the return of the Locke we once knew. And Juliet too! I'm feeling better about the finale than I did before the episode, but there's still a ton of stuff to do and not much time left.

Lost: The Ten Best Episodes

Since I've been pretty harsh on Lost this year, I wanted to go back and write about my ten favorite episodes of the series, going into the end. Since I watched it in a pretty compressed time frame, it can sometimes be tough to remember what happened in specific episodes, but I did my best to break them out and find my ten favorites.

10. Orientation (2x03) - This episode finally resolved the three episode long Mexican standoff that opened season two, but that's not why it's memorable. To this day, no moment on Lost has been as astonishing for me as the 16mm Dharma Orientation film, which raised so many new questions and ideas, ideas that took four seasons to fully pay off. That film was such an astonishing piece of world building, even after a season long flashback to the 70s, I still want more background on Dharma.

9. There's No Place Like Home (4x12-4x14) - Though less goundbreaking and game changing than any of the previous three season finales, this episode still has a bunch of killer moments. This is the end of the line for an era of the show in which Ben was the main character motivating the action and he goes out with the incredible high point of moving the island through the frozen wheel device. It's a moment of almost religious power, and ties in wonderfully with the emotional hit of Sawyer abandoning the helicopter and washing up with Juliet. The rest of the episode is filled with great moments, including a key Jack/Locke confrontation, but those two moments linger.

8. The Shape of Things to Come (4x09) - Alex's death was one of the most shocking moments in the series, and Ben unleashing the Smoke Monster one of its best action sequences. As I mentioned above, this was an era where Ben ran the show, and he was never better than here, his emotional attachment to Alex contrasted with his power hungry nature. It also featured a great off island story, with an exotic James Bond feel. This was an era where the show's world was expanding, and the island was just one piece of something larger.

7. Some Like it Hoth (5x13) - I really loved all the 70s era stuff, but this is one of the high points. It hits on a comedy level, with Hurley's attempts to write The Empire Strikes Back, but also has some of the most spot on emotional content of the entire series, as Miles finally comes to terms with the father who he believes abandoned him as a child. Science fiction devices can be used to literalize emotions in a way that isn't possible in reality, and the scene with Miles watching his father tending to a younger version of himself, and seeing that he did love him does that perfectly. And, unlike every other character on the show, Miles gets to confront his parental issues and come to terms with them. Miles was already a great character, but this made him even stronger and deeper. It's a shame they gave up on developing him this year.

6. Through the Looking Glass (3x22) - The end of an era for the show, this episode is best known for the shocking flashforward revelation at the end, which was great and integral to the series' evolution. But, it's also got a great fight with the Others, the chaotic promise of rescue from Naomi and the freighter, and the fantastic action setpiece in the Looking Glass Dharma station. The emotional high point is Charlie's death, and the classic “Not Penny's Boat” scene. A really fantastic, epic finale.

5. Greatest Hits (3x21) - But it's topped by its precursor, this incredibly sweet episode that goes a huge way to redeem Charlie from his season two “Darth Hoodie” era, and earn him serious fan affection that continues to this day. Charlie and Claire worked really well as a couple in late season three, and this episode solidifies that family. It's also the farewell to the beach camp era of the show, sending the flashbacks out on a high note. The emotional stakes of the finale are so high because of this episode laying the groundwork.

4. La Fleur (5x08) - The show's most ambitious gambit, sending all our characters to the 70s for half a season, begins here, and it opens up the show's most rewarding era. This episode gives us the series' most satisfying romantic relationship, Sawyer and Juliet's. Those two characters had both grown to be favorites before they got together, but together they're each matured and grow in really interesting ways. It's a great example of showing character change through action happening in the present, in a subtle, but revelatory way, rather than explaining it through pop psychology. I love the world they build here, I love the three year time jump and I love just seeing our characters happy and engaged in this world. To be totally honest, I'd rather have seen an entire show about the Dharma Initiative than the Lost that we got, and that's thanks to episodes like this.

3. The Incident (5x16) - This episode had some off elements to it, notably the fluctuating motivations of Juliet and Kate, but it's also perhaps the series' most successful fusion of its scientific and religious mythologies, all wrapped up in an emotionally intense, riveting hour. After three seasons of buildup, the episode finally introduces Jacob, and manages to make him live up to the hype. We get a better sense of his character and motivations here than in all of his season six appearances, and even the could have been out of left field idea of the Fake Locke fits perfectly with what we've seen before. Other highlights include the Rose/Bernard farewell scene, the Jack/Sawyer fight, and of course the series' single strongest emotional moment, Juliet's fall down the hole and Sawyer's raw emotion as he struggles to hold her. This one's a winner all the way through.

2. The Man Behind the Curtain (3x20) - Just as “Orientation” was a massive download of information that opened up infinite story possibilities, this episode gave us an entire world to explore through his flashbacks to Ben's experience with Dharma as a youth. I love the world they built here, and no episode contains the density of information we get here. In addition to our first glimpses of the Dharma world, we find out that Richard is immortal, and also see the massacre that wiped out the Dharma Initiative. It's one of the show's most shocking, brutal moments, and something that I'd have loved to return to before the series ended. Still, talking about answering questions, this one resolved a lot. It also featured one of my favorite scenes in the series, Locke and Ben's trip to the cabin to see Jacob. The scene is creepy and has a strange aura of mysterious power about it, going right to the subconscious. Ben's backstory is one of the greatest 'answers' the show ever gave.

1. Live Together, Die Alone (2x23) - While I obviously tend towards the later years of the show, no single episode has topped what this one did. I'm sure people are wondering why “The Constant” is on here, and I do really like that episode, but even more dazzling is how efficiently the Desmond/Penny love story is set up here. Desmond solidified his status as one of the show's best characters here, and the flashbacks in the Hatch are some of the strangest, most disturbing the series ever did. That stuff alone would make this a classic, but we also get the great confrontation between the Others and Jack/Kate/Sawyer and the first appearance of the mysterious statue. But, the high point is the incredible sequence in which Locke decides to not push the button and Desmond is forced to detonate the hatch. This is a sequence with a religious power, and watching it, I was just in it emotionally. It's the series' greatest moment, and the show has never quite matched the apocalyptic swirl of power this episode contained.

See, I don't hate the show! And, I'd love for one of the final two episode to join the list here. Other than the dreadful first season finale, which, while not the series' worst episode by any stretch, is its most disappointing and exemplary of what makes show frustrating, they've never failed to nail an ending. So, I'm keeping the faith and eager to see how it all plays out. Until then, these are the series' finest hours.

Lost - 'Across the Sea' (6x15)

I'm a bit late on this one, been traveling this week, but I just saw the episode and while it's quite interesting on its own terms, I think it's also symptomatic of a lot of the problems of the show throughout its entire run.

The discussion surrounding the show has often been consumed by questions and answers, the need for people to find out the answer to the various mysteries set up over the course of the series' run, and the creators' often frustrating refusal to resolve mysteries in a timely or satisfying way. For me personally, the mysteries don't really matter as an end to themselves. What has always frustrated me is that the show dwelled on mysteries for such a long time, at the expense of real narrative and character progress. And now that the series is winding down, it's clear that a lot of the questions that really interested me over the run of the series will never be answered.

So, it's frustrating to see an episode of the show that is ostensibly about providing answers, but doesn't really tell us anything new. Sure, it's nice to know that Jacob and the still unnamed Smoke Monster character were brothers, but it's a case where the relationship was so well sketched through actual character action on the island that it seems pointless to add in all this Oedipal trauma backstory, which begins by outright saying we're not going to answer any real questions because that only leads to more questions.

That notion is key to the series as a whole because it demonstrates the creators' basic misunderstanding of story structures. The notion back at season two or three was that there wasn't enough story to last for a lengthy run so they had to parse it out in small bits, but coming to the end of the series, I see countless stories that interest me that will never be addressed. I'd have loved to see more of Jacob's interaction with island inhabitants over the ages. I'd have loved to get a better understanding of his dual god and man nature, and also more of the Smoke Monster's motivations.

The decision to withhold this episode until the end of the series is frustrating because everything was already implied, and if this information was out in the open, we could have engaged with it more and actually used it to build new stories instead of as a retroactive explanation for stuff we already figured out. The genius of the opening scene of “The Incident” was that it was rich with portent and feeling, all the tension and drama of this episode played out in microcosm. It didn't frustrate me there to have these two characters come out of nowhere because they felt totally organic to the world and so important.

But, both this episode and “Ab Aeterno” feel redundant and turn what felt like an utterly epic and spiritual conflict into something more mundane. Would I rather not know who Jacob is? Probably not, but what I really wanted to know was how does Jacob, a god like figure, make decisions. How does he engage with the world and experience things? In “The Incident,” you had the sense of a being with a vision that transcended space and time as he weaved the various threads of the characters' lives together to prove the Smoke Monster wrong.

So, it's frustrating to take this omniscient, otherworldly character and bring him down to the same Freudian psychology that motivates every other character on the show. Not every single action in human history has been motivated by bad parenting, and to reduce Jacob to yet another victim of parental misguidance strips the character of so much of what made him special. You can either make Jacob a god beyond our understanding or a real human being. What we see here explains to some extent his actions later on, but not why he started this quest to prove that humans are good, or how he's able to leave the island to get Jack and co.

I feel like this episode suffered a bit from Phantom Menace syndrome, in that it ends at the point where things are starting to get interesting. I think it was interesting on its own terms, but there's so much more interesting Jacob stuff I'd have loved to see, and this didn't answer any of the really interesting questions, the ones that aren't about abstract concepts and ideas, but instead actually pertain to the characters and show we've been watching for the past six years. I don't think anyone really cares about who Adam and Eve are, since that's not a question that leads to more interesting stories, but finding out what the interaction between Jacob and Ben, through Richard, was like would at least give us a better context for the often convoluted and mysterious motivations of the Others in the early days of the series.

The same is actually true of “Ab Aeterno,” it took an entire episode to tell what should have been the first five minutes of the story. The reason this Jacob stuff feels disconnected from the series is that it is, but it doesn't have to be. “The Incident” worked so well because it put Jacob into the world of the series, and retroactively tied a lot of things together. This episode just tacks on a story that basically says these things happen because they happen and they'll continue to happen.

What about the episode itself? I admire the audacity of doing something so outside of the show's normal world, and barely even showing any of the regular characters, and I think the basic story worked, but felt emotionally simplistic.

Ultimately, I think this whole season would have been vastly improved if this Jacob material was threaded throughout the other episodes as the cutaway story, tracking from Jacob's origins to the plan that brought the characters to the island. That would remove the pointless alt-verse stories, and have given a chance to resolve a lot of confusing points from the past, while also reinforcing the notion of the island as an eternal struggle to protect this essential human goodness.

But, that was not to be. As it is, I'm still really excited for those final few episodes, but I'm increasingly feeling like the series peaked with years four and five, and this ending is not going to satisfy. And, that's not because of the answers issue, it's because this season has had no character development at all for anyone but Jack and Sawyer, so it'll be hard to make us care about whatever happens on anything but an intellectual level. Lindelof and Cuse say the show is about characters, not mysteries, but if that's the case why didn't anyone get real, meaningful development this year?

Lost - The Candidate (6x14)

After a fantastic episode a couple of weeks ago, which built a lot of forward momentum, an ill timed week off and a generally week hour has slowed everything back down. This episode will probably get some big reaction for the deaths and ending, but it's a pretty terrible episode, with perhaps the most pointless flash-sideways of the season, and a plodding island story that kills a couple of people, but drags along the way and doesn't feel in any way like a show in the last couple of episodes of its life span.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the episode is a kind of unfair one, and that's that it just isn't good enough to be this close to the end of the show. When you've got four hours of show left, the stakes are raised, and not only does the show have to be good at its own terms, it's got to compete against all the possible stories out there to tell. Was this the best way to spend one of the show's final hours? I don't think so, and unfair though it may be, that weighed on my perception of the episode.

But, the episode itself is deeply flawed. Let me start out with a reliable punching, the alt-verse stuff. After last week's great drawing threads together episode, we go to yet another Jack wants to fix something storyline, something that was played out back in season one, but rears its head once more. I'm sure you can read stuff into the storyline, and if this had been the third episode of the season I'd be ready to do that. But, once you've blown up the alt-verse conceit in the Desmond episodes, just having Locke mutter something about the button isn't enough any more. This story had no place in this chunk of the season, and at this point, there's no way that the alt-verse storyline can pay off in a way that justifies the many digressions and tangents it's taken. At this point, things need to be coming together, and this story didn't do that at all.

The whole thing was a debacle, and arguably even worse than the dire Sun/Jin sideways scenes. Why was this here? Who decided this was a good use of show time? It's a baffling call, hitting the same tired beats again and again. I don't think it's inherently a bad idea to take time out from the drama to tell a small story near the end, but it needed to hit harder emotionally.

And, that sequence dragged the whole episode down by pulling momentum from the show every time it was cut to. That said, the on island stuff wasn't helping. We've already seen our characters shuffled around to various locations for reasons outside their control and imprisoned by larger forces for the entire season, so why not do it one more time? There's a lot of sloppy bits in the first half, not the least of which is the worst casting choice of the series, the guy playing main Widmore goon. He looks like he should be working in an office IT department, not shooting people on an island, and that takes you out of the scene.

Things continued in a fairly perfunctory way until the bomb on the submarine. This was a great sequence in many ways, it looked fantastic, and was arty and beautiful and reminded me of a James Cameron film. The sequence itself worked great. The problems came in the way it resolved a lot of the long running arcs of the season.

The whole season has had this runner of Sayid being turned evil, only he never really did anything evil, and there was no real emotional conflict about what to do with him. He was just sort of there, which is okay if he's being kept on the shelf to do something later. Instead he gets a pointless sacrificial depth that I suppose was meant to redeem him, but wound up making me just wonder why they brought him back in the first place. Both him and Claire had the 'infection' idea going on, but it's unclear what that did to them, I'd rather have seen this play out in a more dramatic way, and now that the character is dead, it's unclear why he came back for this season at all. With so many characters around, why not just let him die last year?

Lapidus is another baffler. I figured they were keeping him around to fly the plane off the island, but apparently he wandered around for a season just to die. Why have him there at all? It makes no sense, I enjoyed the character, but he never really got to do anything. I have no problem with having extraneous characters who don't have a purpose in the show's endgame, but at least give him a unique role, as he had last year with Sun. Ultimately, I'm annoyed that such a great actor got wasted saying one jokey line an episode for two seasons before getting killed.

The Sun and Jin death worked well, and nicely echoed Charlie's death in season three. I loved the shot of Jin's hand floating away after his death. What does this mean for the two of them in the alt-verse? We'll see. That said, this is another set of characters who wandered around the whole season with no real purpose and then just get killed.

But, I guess you could say everyone wandered around with no real purpose. All the talk of fate and destiny can be cover for lazy writing, and that's what this episode felt like. I always hate when a convoluted series of events is explained by “That was his plan all along,” and this episode just never gelled. I loved the execution of the final sequence, but the writing throughout was sloppy and squandered much of the momentum of the previous episode. I hope things are righted for the push towards the series finale, but it feels like the writers got distracted by the alt-verse and the Jacob storyline and forgot to actually give the characters any agency or emotional arcs in the final season.

Lost - 'The Last Recruit' (6x13)

It's amazing to watch an episode like “The Last Recruit” and see the show all of a sudden jump from meandering hit and miss episodes to an urgent, action packed, but emotionally focused hour that serviced all the characters well and was wall to wall great scenes and excitement. It's great to see that the creators finally decided that things happening and people doing stuff can result in an interesting episode of the show!

A big part of what made the episode great was the show once again abandoning the extremely constrictive one person flashback structure that prevented the first three seasons and the first chunk of this season from achieving consistent greatness. The alt-verse scenes are converging in interesting ways, and cutting from story to story gives it all a lot more momentum than the drawn out vignettes from the early part of the season. Any alternate universe story is interesting not because of something inherent to what's going on, but in the difference between the expected norm and what we're seeing. Now, we get a lot of difference, and also the excitement of seeing Desmond's plan in motion and all the characters coming together.

In general, the episode benefitted greatly from cross cutting and the multiple fronts of action. There was a sense of events converging and colliding that gave each scene an added meaning. Cross cutting, when it's used best, makes each individual scene more than the sum of its parts. The big example for me is the end of Return of the Jedi, which is as perfectly structured a climax as anything out there, with each set piece building and informing what's next. Magnolia is another great example, where nine interesting stories become one riveting whole thanks to their combination. Ultimately, cross cutting should result in something more than the sum of its parts, and that's what this episode had.

On a visual level, it was a lot more exciting than the rather sedate season to date. The boat stuff looked great, and I particularly liked the image of Jack leaping off the boat, deciding to stick with the island and not return. That scene was great for a number of reasons, most notably for finally acknowledging the mistake that leaving the island would be for most of the characters. A lot of the season five going back to the island arc has been sort of muddied this year, as leaving the island again becomes a key motivation. Why would Hurley want to leave the island, when going back was so terrible for him? Why would Jack? So, it's nice to see the show address that.

Jack knows how bad things were, how without purpose or direction he felt. In that sense, it was similar to the alt-verse, where the characters live in a world without love, color or light. Only in this case, Jack knew what he was missing and suffered all the more because of it. Sawyer has never had the luxury of leaving the island, and for him, it's now the sight of so much pain. I like when he tells Kate he's done going back. He decided to stay twice before, once during his first day in the 70s, when he convinced Juliet to stay behind, and later in “The Incident,” where Juliet and Kate forced him to go after Jack. He doesn't want to do that anymore, he just wants to go, and is working to ensure that happens.

I prefer the idea that the show is about people finding their destiny and actualizing themselves through adventure and extraordinary events, not through retreating into domesticity. An ending where everyone goes home wouldn't satisfy me. I could understand it for characters like Sun and Jin, but not for everyone. This episode complicates the moral axis a bit, Jack has finally done something that made me like the character, but in the process he seems to have allied himself with Locke, who's clearly got malevolent intentions.

One of the big events of this week was the show finally bringing Claire seriously into the mix. The big problem with the dark/crazy Claire arc has been that the character was never that strong or compelling to begin with. She and Charlie were sweet together, but other than that, she just sort of sat around the whole series, and then wandered off into the woods with Christian Shephard. So, it's hard to emotionally engage with Claire, or be that shocked by the change in her. She's still a wild card, and it's unclear whether she's going with the group to turn on them, or if she's really betrayed Locke. I'm also not that interested in the whole Aaron arc, it's unfortunate that every single female character left alive on the show has become defined by having children or taking care of them. But that's always been a problem, Juliet was the only great female character the show ever produced.

And speaking of Juliet, she remains one of the great enigmas of the alternate universe. You've got to assume at this point that she's Jack's wife, and I'm curious to see what that means should she remember the prime-verse and her relationship with Sawyer. I hope that the teased relationship with Sawyer and Kate in the alt-verse isn't meant to imply that they're actually each others' 'soul mates.' At least the main-verse, Sawyer still seems driven by his rage at Juliet's death, but it's unclear if she or Kate is his true love. That was the issue that led to the nuke going off, and it looks to be central again as we move towards the end of the series.

It's actually smart writing in a genre series to combine a relationship base with an out there plot element. It gives things an emotional ground, and in the case of the nuke story, did tie a bizarre plot element to character stuff. The problem in that case was that the character motivations didn't seem to quite justify wiping out all of reality, so we'll have to see if it plays better here.

Also notable this week was the seeming confirmation of the alt-verse as a world where everyone gets their wishes granted, but in a twisty way through Desmond's conversation with Sayid. Sayid does indeed get Nadia back, but she's with his brother, and he'll be forced to do terrible things to protect her, just as he did in the prime-verse. The question of wish fulfillment is more complicated for the other characters. Some people have that sort of be careful what you wish for thing going on, but others just have a straight up good life. It seems to be mostly the candidates who had things go well, perhaps tempting them to go to the alt-verse, even though it deprives others of love. They would get a paradise, but the rest of the world would be in hell.

That interpretation would fit with what we've seen from Sun and Jin, Jack, Sawyer and Locke to some extent. It seems clear that alt-verse Locke will have to make some kind of choice and play a part in defeating Smoke Locke. In his own episode, he chose to accept 'what he can't do' and be happy in his domestic life. Will he have to make that choice again? There's still some mysteries surrounding the alt-verse, but things are becoming a bit clearer. My guess at this point is that everyone will have to make a choice between their lives on the island and their lives in the alt-verse, and that choice will determine whether the Smoke Monster escapes the island.

This episode was in some respects largely a moving the pieces episode, but it did a great job of giving all the characters interesting stuff to do, and thanks to effective cross cutting across multiple stories, it had a lot of momentum and was riveting throughout. This is how you build to the end of a story, and it's a shame it took twelve episodes of meandering to get here. But, if they keep up this momentum to the end of the show, it's going to be a great finale.

Doctor Who - "Victory of the Daleks" (5x03)

I'm a bit behind on this week's Doctor Who, thanks to my trip to C2E2, but I'm caught up on it now, and it was quite an enjoyable episode, but as with seemingly every TV review I've been writing recently, I've got a couple of overarching concerns.

My major concern has nothing to do with the quality of the episode itself, so much as the use of the daleks, who have always been positioned as the ultimate foe for the Doctor, and were treated perhaps a bit too casually in this episode. The big concern with any arch foe is that the more times you use them where neither side actually wins the less potent the relationship is. This is a big problem in comics, where it's tough to find a new spin for the latest Batman/Joker or X-Men/Magneto fight. But, it's equally a problem here.

In the Davies era, apart from the dire “Daleks in Manhattan,” the way to keep things fresh was to raise the stakes every time they appeared, starting with one Dalek in “Dalek” to the galaxy spanning battle in “Journey's End.” It generally worked, and unlike a lot of internet critics, those epic Dalek finales were among my favorite episodes of the series. “Parting of the Ways” in particular was absolutely dazzling, and “Journey's End” was the hardest hitting emotional moment of the series to date.

So, I was happy to see the Daleks, and I think this episode did a generally strong job of keeping them menacing and interesting. My concern is that once again it was about the Doctor trying to eliminate the Daleks forever, something we know is not going to happen. Why not do a story where he just accepts that the Daleks are there and fights them one battle at a time. No one out there thinks that the Doctor is going to win the final Dalek battle in a one parter that's the third episode of the season. Similarly, the whole blowing up the Tardis gambit didn't work, since we know that wouldn't happen. The episode ultimately was about setting up future Dalek stories, so I would have preferred an approach a bit closer to “Dalek,” where the menace is more in theory than in practice.

That said, my concerns here were primarily about the use of the Daleks themselves. The episode itself was pretty strong. The Daleks versus WWII era bombers space battle was my favorite moment of the new series to date, and captured that manic pulp excitement that the show does so well. The Star Wars parallel jumped out to me, and it worked there.

I also really liked the beats surrounding the scientist struggling to find his humanity, and the way that Amy helped him rediscover the person he was. It was a really satisfying moment in the story, and a great moment for her as a character. This Doctor seems harsher than Tennant, and Amy is bringing a softer approach. It's a dynamic reminiscent of the Eccleston era, when Rose was helping the Doctor find his heart again. But, this Doctor seems even more full of anger, and I'm curious to see how that's going to develop over the course of the season. So far, the emotions this series have been more hidden than in the Davies era, which is partially why I haven't responded to it as much, but I'm eager to see how they develop the character.

This was actually my favorite episode of the season to date. It was the most consistently strong and had some great character bits. I particularly liked the tease of the crack in spacetime at the end, and how that's been playing into the overall season arc. And, next week looks like it should be full of great stuff, as Moffat revisits two of his classic episodes on the series.

Lost - 'Everybody Loves Hugo' (6x12)

Tonight's Lost does a good job of keeping up the momentum and intrigue of last week's great Desmond episode, even as it raises some potentially troubling issues, both going forward and in retrospect about the direction of the season as a whole. But, the Desmond/Locke stuff alone was fantastic, and I'm eager to see where everything winds up going.

Let me start with what worked best about this episode, and that's Desmond's role as cross temporal angel of destiny, most notably the extended discussion with Smoke Locke that was full of subtle manuvering and gamesmanship as each one seemed to be testing what exactly the other knew. Smoke Locke seems fairly certain that Desmond is aware of his true nature, but Desmond seems unphased, as if it's all part of his plan. What exactly did Desmond and Widmore agree on doing last week? It's unclear, but Desmond seems to be a wild element, something Smoke Locke hadn't considered, hence his attempt to dispatch him into the electromagnetic hole.

Desmond's stuff in the alternate universe is, outside of last week, the first example of those sequences really working to enhance and inform the narrative. Desmond has a clear goal, and we're witnessing his action, which moves the plot forward, through the emotional arc of another character. It's an efficient way of doing things, and by the end of the episode, it's clear that the focus of the episode was not so much Hurley's reunion with Libby as it was a step of Desmond's mission being completed, hence the episode ending scene in which Desmond runs over Locke.

Why did he do this? It could be an attempt to mimic Locke's on island injuries and make him walk again. Or, it could simply be an attempt to put Locke through the same kind of near death trauma that made him and Charlie see into the alternate universe. Why do it in such a haphazard and dangerous way? Perhaps there's still a link between alternate universe Locke and his on island counterpart, so Desmond lets himself get pushed down the well knowing that he can get back at Smoke Locke from the alternate universe. Either way, it's an intriguing and dynamic scene that does a great job of building momentum going into the next episode.

The Hurley alt-verse story worked much better than previous ones because we actually had an idea of the stakes and purpose of what was going on. It was great to see Pierre Chang again, though I'd have preferred an hour of him recounting what happened to his life between the detonation of the bomb and the present, in either the alternate or present universe, but it's not my show! That said, did we ever find out if Chang is still alive in the present? Miles seems to have not known his dad, but we never saw him get killed in the Dharma massacre? I guess it remains an enigma.

But, the core of the story worked on an emotional level, and made sense as a demonstration of the principles first presented in last week's Desmond story. For the first time, it felt like we had two forward moving stories, not a digression taking time away from the main narrative. And, I think the character beats generally worked.

That said, I did have a couple of issues with the episode. The smaller one is the way that action on island is presented. I've already talked about the problematic fact that most of the characters have spent the entire season sitting around not doing much, and in most cases, waiting for some vague supernatural figure to tell them what to do. As Locke says, there's a difference between doing nothing and waiting, but when most of the characters are literally sitting there with no character arc or long term emotional issues, then that's doing nothing.

In the case of this episode, Michael fills the role of Jacob, telling Hurley what he needs to know to move the plot forward, but also taking away real character agency. I suppose the idea is that Hurley overcomes his own fears about begin a leader and takes control of things, but so much narrative information is conveyed by this omnipotent presence that it makes the story a bit boring. This is particularly frustrating since there's some cool potential stories to be had from a group scouting to find where Locke is, rather than just being told by a ghost.

Ilana getting blown up by dynamite was a surprising moment, but didn't do much for me emotionally, and the characters' lack of reaction to it reinforces that. I will say that it's nice to trim the cast down a bit, and I also like the decision to fork off some characters and have them do different things. Ben in particular has been totally wasted this season, and hopefully sending him, Richard and Miles off on this mission will give all those characters something interesting to do. Ben was such a brilliant character in seasons three and four, and it's a shame that he's being so ill served by this season.

My bigger issue with the episode is the reinforcement of this idea that everyone has to find their soul mate to get back in touch with life in the real world. The problem with this is that romantic relationships have never been a centerpiece of the show, and though Hurley and Libby had a couple of sweet moments, there's nothing in the show to suggest that they're soul mates. That idea works for Penny and Desmond because we're so invested in their relationship, but to assume that Hurley is Libby's soul mate just because they had some good banter once is a bit over the top. I understand the concept in universe that the island brings people together who need to be together, but from a storytelling point of view, it's giving a bit too much credit to a minor development from four seasons ago.

Love as the great universal connector just doesn't seem to fit with the themes of the series we've seen to date. Apart from Desmond, nobody in the show has really been defined by their relationships, and it seems odd to swerve now and make those so central to the endgame of the series, particularly when it doesn't seem that tied to the good/evil Jacob mythology in the main universe. The idea of the Man in Black creating a world without love is a great one, but I think that the notion of 'love' needs to be a bit more general than the romantic one presented here.

On that note, the developments in this episode only reinforce my complaints about the narrative structure and content of the alt-verse material in the early days of season six, right up through 'The Package.' I'd argue that you could take 'The Package' out of the series and lose virtually nothing. That's just not good storytelling, every episode should have something important to say, and develop the characters in some way. 'The Package' isn't an episode that laid groundwork to make the Desmond episode work, it was just sort of there and then 'Happily Ever After' came out and took us in a totally different direction. But, the alt-verse segment there, and indeed most of the previous alt-verse segments, don't particularly mesh well or gain added resonance by the revelations about love in this episode. In fact, they only serve to confuse what seems to now be a fairly clear message.

Maybe some other major twist will come along to put everything in perspective, but it seems increasingly unlikely, and to me, it feels like the creators just wanted to kill time and throw in some cameos before bringing us to the point where they could reveal the truth about the alt-verse.

So, even though this episode featured some riveting scenes, most of which involved Desmond, it also raises some concerns for the continued development of the series. I guess we'll have to wait and see how everything sorts out down the line, but I can say that the teaser for next week was fantastic, and has me very excited to see how it all develops.

Doctor Who - "The Beast Below" (5x02)

'The Beast Below' is a pretty solid episode of Doctor Who, but one that does raise some questions about what the show will be like under Moffat, and whether or not he'll ever match up to the heights of the Davies era. It's definitely too early to tell, but this episode definitely raises some warning signs about the future.

The biggest difficulty with this season so far versus the Davies era is the general shift in story format. The Davies era was a kind of hyperoperatic melodrama with personal soap opera style stories writ large against a backdrop of cosmic craziness. Moffat's stories, both in the Davies era, and in the first two episodes of this series, feel much more like fairy tales. There's always children present, and a focus on making ordinary things around us come alive with fear. The almost obsessive presence of child characters is the one that jumps out to me most, as the Mandy character in this episode had no point to the overall narrative.

I really enjoyed all of Moffat's episodes under Davies, but I never loved them in the way that a lot of people did. In fact, my favorite episode he's done is the Silence in the Library two parter, which was his most poorly received. That episode was absolutely amazing, but I've seen a lot more of 'Blink' or 'The Girl in the Fireplace' in the first two episodes of his solo run.

That's not to say that these episodes have been bad, it's more that it raises concerns for the future about how wide and varied the show could be. Davies definitely had certain themes and setups he returned to all the time, but I loved those themes and responded to them emotionally, and nothing in these episodes has gotten to me as much as even a small moment from a weak Davies episode, like Donna and her grandfather looking up at the stars, as she waits for the Doctor in 'Partners in Crime.'

Davies had this messianic view of the Doctor that was a bit much at times, but Moffat's version of the Doctor is still in formation, or at least a bit unclear at this point. In this episode, he's angry at humans, then ready to kill the space whale to save them. He's definitely more of an enigma than Tennant, and seemingly more prone to mood swings, but I don't feel like I totally understand him yet.

On this episode specifically, certain elements felt like Moffat by numbers, but some of it worked very well. The opening bit with Amy hanging outside the Tardis was great, and in general, her character is working well and doesn't feel like a retread of the emotional beats from Rose or Martha's time in the Tardis. The general sense of adventure was strong too, the show is always fun and exciting in a way that few other things out there are.

I also may be being a bit unfair since Davies seasons often started off pretty weak, and what lingers in my mind is the high points, not the clunker episodes. So, I'm eager to see how things keep developing, but this episode didn't wow me.

Lost - 'Happily Ever After' (6x11)

This week's Lost brought back perhaps the series' most beloved character, Desmond, and with him, the promise of some kind of major reveal about the time screwiness that's been going on in the alternate universe. As the episode ends, it seems like the nature of the alternate universe has finally been revealed, though questions certainly still linger. The final reveal is great, and fits with a lot of the ideas I've had about the series as a whole, but the episode itself doesn't quite make it to classic status thanks to it hitting a lot of the same beats we've already seen in the alt-verse throughout the season.

Let me start out with the big reveal, namely the nature of the alternate universe, and Desmond's purpose going forward in the season. It seems that the alternate universe is a world that shouldn't be, but was brought into existence through the detonation of the atom bomb on the island, which consequently uncorked the Man in Black and let him loose into the world. And, more specifically, it ensured that Jacob was not able to intercede in the lives of our main characters to bring them to the island. Without their destiny on the island, they have varying levels of success, but all seem to feel that something is missing in their lives, and they struggle to fill that hole in various ways.

The vague allusions of Jack looking in a mirror in the season premiere are expanded here to Charlie describing his vision of Claire, and Desmond experiencing a hallucinatory journey through his life in the core timeline. It seems that people who died in the main timeline are easier able to access their memories. Both Charlie and Faraday are aware that something is wrong in this world, that they're missing the love that gave them joy in the core timeline.

I'd argue that even more important than the specific love for Claire was the sense of purpose and feeling. The hallucinatory joy he talks about is what being on the island gave them all, it took them out of failed, troubled lives and gave them purpose and destiny. That's been one of my key readings of the show throughout, the idea that the island was not a curse, but a blessing because it let them all reinvent themselves and find a happiness that alluded them on the mainland.

That's why all the characters trying to leave the island baffled me, since things seemed so much worse on the mainland, that's why the entire atomic bomb plan made no sense, and now the results of the plan seem to reinforce the reading. At the core of the show was the conflict between Locke and Jack, between faith and reason. Locke had faith that they were on the island for a reason, and he exalted in the opportunities that it gave him. It took Jack a long time to come around to that viewpoint, but at this point in the run, he's taken up Locke's mantle and is advocating a surrender to destiny and service to the island.

So, the implication is that a life without going to the island is a colorless kind of hell where no one feels as vibrantly as they do in the main timeline, and the only way to tap back into that feeling is through love. The major question here is how does that fit with what we saw in the previous alt-verse stories. The early ones, Jack and Locke in particular, seemed to offer the alt-verse as an ideal world, where the characters are able to overcome the conflicts that defined them before the island and find happiness and peace.

However, perhaps that happiness comes at the price of greatness. You could admire Locke accepting his place in the world, but isn't that also a form of surrender? He's letting people tell him what he can't do and surrendering to an acceptable life, but one that's not all it could be. Would Locke rather have the adventure he had on the island or be happy with Helen? I'd argue that he'd probably be happier on the island. It would make sense that the two people who must wholeheartedly buy into Jacob's mission, Jack and Locke, would receive the greatest temptation from the Man in Black, the happy lives they never thought possible. If we get to the point where the characters have to choose between their alt-verse lives and their on island lives, it would make sense to give Jack the greatest temptation since he has the greatest faith.

One could argue that the island is there to let every character grow and be their best. Someone like Sawyer changed so much because of his experiences, and particularly his relationship with Juliet. All the characters who've stuck around and been at the heart of the show have become much more than they were at the beginning, they've felt more and opened up in a way we never saw them do in the flashbacks.

This episode goes on to posit love as the 'constant' for everyone, the thing they can hold on to to remain grounded as they drift further and further into the alt-verse. It's love that brings back Farraday's memories of who he used to be, and allows him to access the part of himself that was once alive on the island, the him that should have been. It's love that lets Charlie see his true self, and the same for Desmond.

At the end of the episode, it seems that thanks to meeting Penny, he has freed his consciousness to travel between the two worlds, and he will go on a mission in both worlds to warn everyone about how wrong the alt-verse is and try to save the main world. In the main universe, I'm guessing he's going to try to stop Smoke Locke from escaping, while in the alt-verse, he's going to try to make the characters remember the false nature of their universe. Ultimately, I'm guessing everybody will have to make some kind of choice between the alt-verse life and the main-verse life.

I think that this episode did do a great job of explaining and contextualizing the alt-verse. However, it didn't make up for a lot of weak stories getting here. Even in this episode, there's moments that seem meant to be surprising, like Desmond working for Widmore, that don't have much impact. The alt-verse only came alive when we saw its relationship to the main one, because that gives us a context for understanding how these stories matter. That's a lot more interesting than just seeing a bunch of characters who've died appear in random roles.

But, in general, this was easily the season's best episode, and if the rest of the series is centered around Desmond's mission, I won't be complaining. A lot of the Lost characters, even great ones like Ben and Farraday, are interesting on a conceptual level, Desmond is one of the few who engenders a really strong emotional connection, so he's a great 'constant' for the series itself, reminding us why we care even when the stories don't work so well.

The on island stuff this week was particularly fantastic. I love the return of the strange science experiments, the Watchmen evoking particle reactor and the strange Jurassic Park style setups. Widmore is killing it every week, and I'm eager to hear more about his overall mission, and perhaps get some more of his backstory.

So, the episode does answer a lot of questions, but much also remains unresolved. Particularly of interest to me is what will happen when we see Juliet in the alt-verse. She knows that the bomb worked to create the alt-verse, and was conscious of that in the main-verse, but will that transfer? And, will she be Sawyer's constant? Will he be tempted by her to accept the alt-verse, or will the producers play up the Kate/Sawyer thing again, as alluded to by the end of his solo episode.

We'll see I guess. I'm feeling a lot better about the show going forward. I think we could have gotten to this place in a much more efficient way, but at least things are looking good going forward.

Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour" (5x01)

After a while where I didn't have any shows I was really excited to watch week to week, it's getting to be an embarrasment of riches with Lost, Breaking Bad (which I'm still working on catching up on, but will be weekly soon), soon Treme and today the new season of Doctor Who, featuring a new Doctor and new producer. I didn't enjoy the first episode quite as much as the rest of the internet, but I think it's a strong introduction to the character, stronger than either of the new companion introductions from RTD's run. And, even if the main plot never quite came together, there's enough great moments along the way to make it a solid episode.

While it was frustrating to have the show take nearly two years off between series, I think it made it easier to transition to the new Doctor. Tennant's run was decidedly closed off by the epic “Journey's End,” and laid to a gentle sleep over the course of the five specials. I was still very sad to see him go at the end of “The End of Time,” but it felt appropriate and I was emotionally ready to move on. The closure those specials provided made it clear that we had reached the end of one story, and this series is the beginning of another.

And, I think Matt Smith did a great job of keeping consistent with the character we'd seen under Eccleston and Tennant (as well as the previous guys), but not feeling derivative. He seems a slight bit edgier than Tennant, a bit more prickly, but still with that same joy for life. After one episode, I accept and believe him as the Doctor, and that's perhaps the greatest thing this episode could achieve.

Similarly, I really like Amy Pond, and am curious to see how their relationship develops. I feel like Davies did all variations of the Doctor/companion in love, so I'm not sure where their relationship will go and how it will develop. The obvious set up is for some kind of love triangle, or at least emotion triangle, between the Doctor, Amy and Rory, but we'll see how that goes. I'm assuming that he will not return her to her wedding morning as promised and that will be a source of conflict.

In terms of specifics about the episode, I think the opening sequence worked really well, and had a great fairy tale quality. It brought us into the world of the new Doctor and set up Amy's personality and their chemistry. The thing that didn't work for me was the conceit of the door that you could only see out of the corner of your eye, it feels like a retread of previous Moffat ideas, like the statues from “Blink.”

And, the A story of the attacking aliens and coma people didn't do too much for me. It felt like things took a while to get rolling again after the opening, like we were one step ahead of the characters for most of it. There were some fun gags and character beats, but I never really felt the enormity of the threat. I know it's a season premiere and it's not time for an operatic epic conflict yet, but this one felt really flat for most of the episode.

Things picked up with the great moment of the Doctor slamming the fire engine ladder through the window and tricking the Multi-Form alien into exposing itself. And then the final scene on the roof was a fantastic declaration of purpose. As a viewer who's been through several doctors now, the montage of old doctors, punctuated by Eleven walking through and claiming his identity was the high point of the episode.

And, the final beats in the Tardis were really strong as well. The new design looks great, and it left me eager to see what happens next. So far, I didn't feel the same emotional charge as in the best of RTD's episodes, but it's early going, and the trailer for the rest of the season looks fantastic. I'm on board with the new Doctor and am looking forward to having the show finally back on a weekly basis.

Lost - 'The Package' (6x10)

Another week of Lost, another episode that exemplifies most of my issues with the previous season six episodes. There's some really great scenes in here, and the final reveal is very satisfying, but both the on island and particularly the alt-verse stuff is a lot of wheel spinning with not too much payoff.

First, let me deal with the downside of the episode. With any long running work, a looming end raises the stakes for what you've got to do. Not only must the episode be satisfying on its own terms, but with limited time, every story, every scene has to deal with being the best possible use of the time left. I don't like to judge a work based on what I want it to be rather than what it is, but I don't think anyone could consider this Sun/Jin story the best use of the series' remaining time.

More than any of the other flash-sideways, this one didn't even deal with the characters on an emotional level. Some of the beats in the hotel room were nice, particularly the shirt unbuttoning thing, but the characters were so far from their on island counterparts that they don't even resonate emotionally with what we've seen those people go through. That means that it's harder to emotionally engage with the characters and the whole thing doesn't work. I'd compare it to watching these two actors in another movie. You get that Sun/Jin resonance thanks to the performers, but it's not the same people. Even fan service allusions like Mikhail's return don't make for a satisfying story.

Most troubling is the realization that with only eight episodes left, there's no way that all these alt-verse stories will find a satisfactory resolution, nor is that were I want screentime expended. If alt-Sun/alt-Jin never do anything else, why did we spend this time with them in the first place? I'm increasingly unclear about the purpose of these stories in the overall narrative, and the decision to only tell us how Jin got in the fridge we saw him in several episodes ago doesn't help move things forward. That's characteristic of the worst of Lost, the idea that we'd really care about how Jin got in that fridge. Why not just pick up there and let us catch up on what happened.

On island, a lot of good stuff is happening. My biggest issue right now is that character motivations are very unclear, primarily due to the fact that so many of the characters who willingly came back to the island now only want to leave. I thought we'd moved towards the idea of the island as an end in and of itself, as the purpose these people have been seeking. Sun seemed eager to get away from her daughter and fuck around with Widmore in season five, so I don't buy her only wanting to find Jin and go back. I prefer the idea that these characters have become part of a larger world and the simple desire to go home will only prove as dissatisfying as it was to the Oceanic Six earlier. Jack is the only character who seems to realize the magic of what's happening, while everyone else is still in seasons one and two mode.

But, other than these issues, there was a lot of great stuff here. Things are mounting towards the eventual war, and the Widmore/Locke confrontation was as good a scene as we've had this season. Terry O'Quinn has been absolutely owning this season with his seemingly benevolent menace, and here he had an equally ambiguous force to reckon with. I also loved the scene with Richard getting his troops ready and making his plan.

Richard's speech makes me think that the eventual split at the end of the series might come down to people who believe in the higher purpose of the island battling people who want to leave it. Jack has come around to believe that this is where he's meant to be, and destroying the plane is the ultimate symbolic gesture to indicate that. By destroying the plane, he is reenacting again the opening of the series, and acquiescing to his fate. SmokeLocke, Kate, Claire and the others who want to leave have resisted the will of the island and seek to return to the world.

It would make sense to stage the final battle around the plane because of its resonance with the series opening, and clearly the creators have an interest in bringing stuff full circle. It would also make the stakes clearer in the war and give them a relatable hook. Throughout the series, we've seen the island function as a transformative engine, giving people what they want, and sometimes punishing them when they want to leave. You could argue that Juliet's death in “The Incident” was a consequence of her and Sawyer's decision to leave the island. Committing to stay on the island means it will protect you, trying to leave means it will fight against you. Locke is invulnerable on the island, but off island, he is killed by Ben.

But, I'm guessing things will all be shaken up next week by the return of Desmond, the man who may finally be able to hack the alt-verse/prime-verse divide, or at least shed some light on the larger purpose of things. Either way, it's great to finally have the character back, and I'm eager to see how he plays in the narrative.